Marching Towards a Police State

Welcome to the second edition of Creating Socialism. We have retained the two sections on politics and culture. That is not to say our politics should not be cultured as well. Just look at Trump as an example of a political leader completely lacking in culture as he trashes US democracy and takes it down the road to a police state. The UK is not immune. The authoritarianism that marked Starmer’s premiership looks set to continue under Burnham, as demonstrated by the continuing arrest of peaceful protesters outside the Labour Party Conference.

Lea Ypi grew up in Albania when it was a communist police state. She saw what this did to her family but also witnessed the transformation to free market capitalism and what that did to her family as well. Her memoir Free describes her transition from childhood to adulthood which coincided with this transformation. There will be a review in our next issue. Ypi became Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and tells the students enrolled upon her course on Marx that

many people think of socialism as a theory of material relations, class struggle or economic justice but that, in reality, something more fundamental animates it. Socialism, I tell them, is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them.

This sums up a lot of our thinking at Creating Socialism. Socialism plus humanism equals freedom. It is no accident that authoritarianism is on the rise to crush all three ideas at a time when they have never been more necessary for our survival.

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