The following is an excerpt from the new book Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the 20th Century West, which examines why voting systems have or have not changed in western industrialized countries over the past century.
Freedom Sailors defies conventional narrative and adherence to globalist media by aligning itself with a narrative resounding with internationalism. The book provides an account replete with contrasts, highlighting the many facets of history and identifying the differing dynamics between activism and foreign policy.
For a long time now, there has been a serious weakness on the part of progressive movements in the most over-developed countries of the world. The ability to recognize that so much of the privileges we enjoy, but that governments and corporations enjoy even more so, comes from years of exploitation, subjugation and extreme levels of violence towards countries of the Global South, but too often, our history and continued practice of imperialism is either forgotten or ignored. In The Ugly Canadian, Yves Engler sets out to provide "a small spark in lighting a fire of interest in Canadian foreign policy."
Anyone who has followed the current economic and financial crisis in Europe knows that social democratic governments and parties have consistently lined up on the side of the banks and the rich in the ongoing political conflict. The policies they have implemented while in government have been nearly identical to those advanced by the traditional right-wing parties and governments. In several counties, the social democrats have formed political alliances to govern with the right wing parties. What is going on here?
In his new book, Yves Engler sets to demolish the near saintly status of Lester Bowles ("Mike") Pearson in the public sphere, Canadian foreign policy circles and even on the social democratic left. And in the process, he takes on the much repeated slogan that "the world needs more of Canada."
Much like Noam Chomsky who provides a forward to Lester Pearson's Peacekeeping, the author relies mostly on the excellent but largely unread scholarship plus the former PM's own statements in Parliament and in memos to successfully establish a case.
Harperland: The politics of control
by Lawrence Martin (Viking Canada, 2010; $35.00)
As politics has shifted to the right since the early 1980s, the left remains sadly flat-footed as neo-liberal policies have proliferated around the western, democratic world. Where the right preached a gospel of smaller government, the left attempted to capture the political imagination by defending the role of the state. It was an important position to take, but as political strategy it has largely been a losing game. How can we deconstruct the neo-liberal rise to power and how do we rebuild a social democratic vision that inspires the country?
That is the central question of today's politics.
Michael Lebowitz is a professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University now living in Venezuela working with Centro International Miranda, a government-supported think tank. In The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, he contrasts Venezuelan policies with the top-down socialism of the 20th century. The latter had focused on rapid industrial development through state ownership and top-down command. In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez focuses on human development, on the cooperative meeting of human needs, on social ownership and on participation in community and workplace decisions.
Marx and Engels had no idea what they were setting loose in 1848 when they wrote The Communist Manifesto -- and they would be the first to admit it. That's the sense you get reading Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism a short book in the "What Was Communism" series. It is no longer 1991. The Soviet Union is gone. Rather than a communist utopia China resembles aspects of Dickens' England ... on methamphetamine. A few anomalies like Cuba and Korea remain, but the safe money is that they will not remain thus.
York University political economist Daniel Drache is a prolific writer and editor. It sometimes seems that he writes faster, the ideas gushing out, than the rest of us can read.
His latest book, Defiant Publics: The Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen, published by the prestigious Polity Press in 2008, may be his best yet. It is a thought provoking book about globalism to come from someone who was a leading nationalist writer, and activist, in the 1960s. It is prescient in describing global protest that, as a result of the global financial crisis, has sharply increased since he wrote this book. It is a work of impressive erudition that attempts to order and make sense of a vast literature.