I think maybe people on the liberal left, social democrats and the like, need to take a deep breath and realise their ideology is bankrupt, the only thing giving them successes in the past being the pressure from real existing socialism in state form and the fear that put into Capital.

I'm not generally a fan of permitting effect to precede cause in my models of reality, and by the time the first world war rolled around the Danish social democrats had had the power to affect a months-long general strike for fifteen years. And had used that power to gain substantial concessions in terms of the right to strike and organize.

I think a more serious problem for the social democrats is that they need an active, credible domestic communist threat, or they go off script. And after the communist parties wedded themselves to what was even then quite obviously the losing side in the Great Game, it was all over bar the shouting.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.