The Last Socialist: Ken Loach

On what basis are you claiming there are no other socialists anymore?

Other than that, thanks for posting!

Well, I see him as a hero.

In Italy, as Diego Bianchi says, we [the leftists] always say we've lost, we've been defeated, instead Ken Loach argues that we've not lost yet, that we can still win the battle against capital... what a hero!

Greg, please, watch the interview! I'd like to know your point of view about it.

He makes some good points, such as how cross-country cooperation is a prerequisite for fighting back against neoliberalism and inequality, and how racism and other types of paranoid fear are cynically employed and propagated by right-wing politicians and people with vested interests in preserving the capitalist structure to divide the working class. I think his explanation of left-wing parties losing elections because they are social-democrats and not socialists is way too easy though: that certainly wasn't the case with Corbyn in 2019, and if it were the whole story in countries such as Italy and the Netherlands then the social-democratic parties that have lost so much support there should have been trumped by parties that lean further left, not the far-right populists we see everywhere now. I would have liked to see him acknowledge that the racist and reactionary narratives of these swindlers is winning out over traditional class-based narratives and what socialists need to do combat this development without resorting to the same kind of dirty exclusionism. It also baffles me how his comment about cross-country workers' cooperation happens within the same breath of his dismissive comments on the European Union, which historically has been used as a tool to force austerity measures on certain countries but in the end is just that: a tool to be used by whichever political force is in control of it. Without it we Europeans would just be back to meaningless competition and trade wars with each other without being able to make a collective fist against the giant corporations that pillage our planet.

His comments on the Ukrainian war I find the most disagreeable and frankly a little offensive in their dismissal of agency on the part of the people of Ukraine and other West-facing nations on Russia's frontier. To say that these were convinced to join NATO by some outside power who wanted access to their markets while saying nothing of the security concerns (proven very legitimate by now) of these countries, traumatized as they are after at least a half-century of Russian imperialist domination, is way too narrow, as is the assertion that Ukrainians are pushed forward to fight the West's battles for us without mentioning Ukrainians' willingness to defend their country or the fact that the war crimes committed by Russia's army behind the front lines don't exactly paint a rosy picture of post-war life in any Ukrainian territory left in Russian control.

As an aside... I really hate this video editing style where conversations or even individual sentences aren't allowed to flow naturally and every small moment of silence is cut out. It's pretty sad how people apparently have to resort to that in order to keep their audience's attention.