For fellow Socialists/Social Democrats in the world

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UK Labour Party: Needs to loose the Blairites, which will be a long, drawn-out process.  Since they appear to have embraced austerity, they'll need a major revolt at the next party conference against the leadership's policies.

Because that sort of behavior ended so very well when it was tried in the past (and on more than one occasion as well), right?

Anyways, the leadership doesn't support the government's economic policies; the furthest its gone in that general direction has been to say that they won't be able to reverse everything this government has done, which is obviously true (though when that was said, it was said in a rather less than entirely clear way).

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Labour's voters quite clearly don't.

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I'm not entirely sure what a 'Blairite' even is these days, but Reeves certainly isn't one of them. She's a fairly traditional Labour right-winger, of the sort that often end up as Leeds MPs.

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Another very important one is that many left parties believe that adopting left-wing policy planks would make them unelectable, and thus tend to base their campaign on the "triangulation" principle. This is, however, an awfully counterproductive strategy, since it makes the entire political landscape shift toward the right, making right-wing parties more and more extremist

Cart before horse, unfortunately.

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I always love it when people playing factional games accuse factional enemies of factionalism. I wonder whether there will be similar calls to censure (say) the Grassroots Alliance.

I suspect it's to the extent where leftists will get screened out and never make it to MPs (ensuring the few remaining from a bygone era won't get enough nominations to stand), whether it's the will of the party bosses (undoubtedly) or whether it's that leftists don't bother with Labour anymore, coupled with the decreasing party membership gives the right-wingers overwhelming power...either way, they amount to the same thing - right hegemony, and even when there's an upset (see Ed beating Dave) there's nothing much to worry about and very little change in direction.

You mean it will be a return to the 1950s?

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And yes, it's bad to have the party look inwards at a time like this, but it's the only way for it to reconnect with the values that once defined it.

This is a strangely familiar argument. Anyways, what are these values and when did they define Labour? The Right, however defined, has almost always been in charge to one extent or other; hey, Miliband is the first leader not to be clearly part of it since Kinnock.

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Progress is more of an organised faction of the career-minded than anything with an especially clear ideological mission statement (other than being on the right-wing of the Party, but then comes with the 'career-minded' remark) even if that was probably the original intent. Which, of course, is why it's controversial.

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Urgh, not this sh!t again. I can't be bothered to write anything new, so I'll just use a search function to find some old posts on the subject:

Given what happend to actual Socialists under the Nazi regime (here's a random example), I do find the interwebs-tendency to scream that Hitler-Was-A-Socialist to be in astonishingly bad taste.

Oh for God's sake. No.

This issue seems to be raised on the forum a couple of times every year and I'm now tired of bothering to refute it in any detail, so I'll just note a couple of points:

1. No credible historian of the twentieth century believes that the Nazi regime in general or Hitler in particular were 'left-wing' in any respect. This includes some rather right-wing economic historians who specialise in aspects of Nazi economic policy, so this is not an example of a notoriously lefty profession closing ranks.

2. Nazi economic policy was geared entirely towards rearmament (which was achieved via an extraordinarily complicated form of fraud) and not towards any remotely left-wing (however defined) objective. Contrary to what is frequently asserted, the standard of living for the working class in Germany actually declined during the pre-war Nazi period as wages were kept under tight control by means of... well... authoritarian rule.

3. German industrialists (most of them) did remarkably well out of the Nazi regime and this was intentional (more so, in some ways, than in contemporary economies). The examples of Krupp and IG Farben are well known, but they were merely extreme examples of a more general pattern. The close relationship between capital and the regime was good for both of them; as profits soared, so did corporate contributions to the Nazi Party (why, yes. This was a rather corrupt regime).

4. A Trade Union controlled by the government is not a Trade Union.

Fundamentally, you can only argue that 'Hitler was economically left wing' if you define 'economically left wing' as 'prepared to intervene in the economy in order to make it grow'. Which is absurd.

Nazi underlying ideology = virulent nationalism/militarism, an especially nasty take on popular racial theories, anti-semitism (part of the former but enough of an issue, obviously, to deserve a mention on its own) and anti-socialism, combined with weird fetishes regarding leaders, action, and so on. Everything else was window dressing or a cynical attempt to win support (both electorally and in terms of powerful individuals and interest groups). If you think Hitler or any other leading Nazi gave a sh!t about whatever drivel the party adopted as its platform in its early years, then you should probably avoid further comment on the issue. Because there is just a little bit of a consensus over this.

Arguing that state intervention in the economy = Socialism isn't very clever. It means that you have to (for example) count all mainstream political parties and institutions in Europe between about 1945 (1940 or so in the case of Britain) and about 1973 or so as Socialist. Even more absurdly, it means that you have to count all European states before the rise of laissez faire as Socialist. And I think that would be a step into lunacy too far even for you.

Now, the sad thing about the internets is that these arguments are so common that you can just...

And it's worth noting how pro-business the Nazi regime was in reality. Somewhere, deep within my pile of box files, I've a little chart comparing donations to the NSDAP from IG Farben (a company critical to the implementation of the Final Solution, as it happens) with IG Farben's profits. I will eventually find it and post it here - makes for interesting reading.

Because the Nazis = Socialist canard isn't worth wasting much time dismissing. No one (no one honest anyway) with a basic knowledge of early 20th century German history takes it seriously.

(for the record, IG Farben was a German chemical giant, the largest company in Europe (some of the time), a major financial donor to the Nazi regime (and as the companies profits went up, so did donations), a major user of slave labour and the manufacturer of Zyklon B. It was broken up (more or less) by the Allies at the end of the War. Krupp is another well-known example of a big company doing well out of the Nazis).

I mean, there's more but I can't be bothered to dig it up right now.

But I repeat my comment about bad taste.

Conclusion: fyck off and read a few books on the subject.

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Pet hates, you know.

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Blood.