Social and Economic Policy

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation? There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”. This approach is based on the concept of...

On 29 March, Theresa May will trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, starting the clock on the UK leaving the EU. Unless the UK and all the EU states agree to a special extension on negotiations, the UK will quit the EU in or before March 2019. Already, the Brexit vote is leading to stresses on migrant workers, and an increase in nationalism and xenophobia in the UK; and strengthens the worst, most right-wing elements in the ruling class and their political party, the Tories. The labour movement needs to carve out a pro-worker, pro-migrant vision of the future, with ties as close...

When twenty governments met for the G20 summit in late 2008, at the worst of the global credit crash, their agreed joint statement included just one hard commitment: to resist protectionism, to avoid new trade barriers. Not perfectly, but on the whole, that commitment held, and helped the slump level out in late 2009 rather than continuing downwards for three or four years as in the 1930s, when states spiralled into competitive tariff-raising and world trade collapsed. On 18 March, the statement from a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors deleted the now-traditional...

The House of Lords has voted by a large margin of 102 in favour of guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens in the UK after Brexit. With 358 in favour to 256 against, the Lords backed an amendment to the Article 50 bill, the bill giving the Prime Minister the power to trigger the Brexit process. The amendment said that when the UK leaves the EU, EU citizens should keep all the rights they currently have, regardless of what happens during the Brexit negotiations. The debate on 1 March came down on the correct side, but we can’t and shouldn’t pin our hopes on the unelected second chamber. The...

“Neoliberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history”, declared the left-wing historian Perry Anderson in 2000. With Trump, we see both a strand of neoliberalism, pushed on a scale which threatens to break up neoliberalism “from the inside”, but in a reactionary way; and a strand of real revolt against neoliberalism, expressed again in a reactionary way. Large sections of the neoliberal bourgeoisie are genuinely alarmed by Trump. Yet we have already seen many orthodox neoliberals adapt to Trump’s power. Theresa May is only one...

Is the right-wing surge represented by Trump, Brexit, and various right-wing movements across Europe part of a trend? It’s usual to presume that the young are to the left of their elders, and in some ways this is still true. But recent studies of social attitudes appear to show that those who came of age during the period that Tony Blair was in power (people now aged between 27-40) are more right-wing than those who came of age under Thatcher (now aged between 41-58), who themselves are further to the right than the preceding generation. A recent overview of data from social attitudes surveys...

On 5 February, Npower, one of the Big Six energy suppliers, hiked their electricity price by 15% for electricity and 4.8% for gas for customers on their variable rates. This is the largest single hike by any of the Big Six since at least 2013. If past experience is anything to go by, the rest of the Six will put their prices up too in the next few months. Npower bosses argued this price rise was forced on them by the wholesale price of energy and “regulatory costs”. However this has even been questioned by government regulator Ofgen, who last month said there was “no justification” for a price...

Perhaps it’s foolish to take anything Donald Trump says as an articulation of core principles or beliefs. But this passage from his inaugural address hit many like a bolt of lightning: From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great...

Arun Gupta (from Jacobin magazine) interviewed Marxist academic Leo Panitch about Trump’s economic agenda, his relationship to transnational elites, and how neoliberalism’s crisis could mean revitalization for the left. AG: Are there positive outcomes from this election? LP: Certainly the Trans-Pacific Partnership is over, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is too. That said, I don’t think this spells the end of neoliberal international trade arrangements that allow for the free flow of capital and the protection of that capital when it lands in another state, which is the...

Organise, on the streets and in the labour movement! Argue for socialist, democratic, internationalist ideas which offer a real answer both to Trump’s rancid, right-wing, regression, and to the discredited status quo. That is how we can block Trump.