Reading Politics in a Time of Crisis – A view from the Left.
By Duane Campbell
As we know, the economic crisis of 2008-2012 disrupted the U.S. economy. The crisis was much worse in some of the peripheral countries of Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Italy among others), and even more destructive in under-developed regions of African and Asia.
Spanish political leader Pablo Iglesias Turrión has written Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of European Democracy, published in an English translation by Verso Books. Iglesias provides a critical summary of the crisis that began in the U.S., and spread to much of the world causing political upheavals and leaving misery, starvation, and massive migration in its wake.
We can learn much from reading Iglesias about this crisis in Spain and other countries and economies, including how the crisis led several social democratic political parties in Spain, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe to collaborate with right-wing movements to impose austerity on the people. This collaboration led to the collapse of many social democratic political parties, the rise of authoritarian right-wing parties, and now the rise of a new left. A similar process led to the collapse of social democratic parties in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Currently in Mexico the formerly left-wing Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD) is working with the right-wing National Action (PAN) party while a new left –the National Regeneration Movement (“MORENA”) may well win this summer’s presidential elections.
