SOCIALIST ideas are enjoying something of a revival. Here too. The prospect of a Labour government — even with the party in the midst of intensely destabilising struggle with a sizeable section of its MPs and party establishment — has the ruling elites, big business and the banks intensely anxious. But in the United States socialist ideas are also challenging the official consensus.

The US party system is crafted precisely to prevent the emergence of a political vehicle that might challenge the dominant corporate power which has, in the Democratic and Republican parties, two powerful political machines.

A Soviet leader once quipped — in response to criticism that political power in the USSR was exercised in a one party state — that the United States too was a one party state but, with typical American extravagance, it had two such parties.

Today, the Fourth of July, is Independence Day when people in the US celebrate the date in 1776 when their young union ceased to be a collection of British colonies.

No longer a colony the US is today the world’s most powerful imperial power with a military capacity greater than all its allies and rivals combined.

But military full spectrum dominance is not enough and the USA is not what it was. Neither is the dollar almighty.

The gold standard, which underpinned the credibility of transactions in dollars, went in 1971. Today the value of the dollar rests on its power as an international reserve currency — essentially on the confidence other countries have in it expressed as a willingness to hold much or part of their foreign exchange reserves in dollars and give and take it in international transactions.

US anxiety about the continuing credibility of the dollar is what underpins its foreign policy and a military posture which is deployed, among its wider aims, to maintain the dollar as the currency upon which most international transactions are denominated.

Perhaps US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s one virtue is his willingness to speak openly about the economic drivers of US aggression. Capturing Venezuela’s oil reserves — the largest in the world — would go a long way to reduce a challenge to dollar supremacy and it is no coincidence that Trump can affect to reach an accommodation with People’s Korea, which is not an oil exporter, while both Iran and Libya remain in his bombsights.

If the dollar ceases to be the number one traded currency the ability of the US to finance its gigantic and runaway government deficit — up from $666 billion in 2017 to $779 billion in 2018 — is greatly weakened.

The nascent US economic crisis has an inevitable political effect in that confidence in capitalism is weakening in key sections of its deeply divided society.

Foreign visitors to the US are often shocked at the contrast between the lifestyle of the rich and famous (and of a substantial section of the middle class) with the way in which millions of Americans live on the edge of insecurity.

That millions without adequate health insurance, affordable housing, job security and burdened with crushing debt do not buy into the value system of the society is not surprising.

One consequence is that the two major US parties resemble each other less and less. Not at the leadership level, of course. The imperialist bi-partisanship which underpins most US domestic and foreign policy barely allows for any difference of substance.

Something is moving. According to the reputable US polling organisation Pew Research Centre most Americans have a positive impression of capitalism. But while 65 per cent said they did, 42 per cent said they viewed socialism positively.

More than four out of 10 people in the US think a system which has been pilloried for decades, and whose firmest adherents have been jailed, witch hunted and lynched, is preferable to the one they live in.

The party difference is expressed as large variations in views with nearly eight in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (78 per cent) somewhat or very positive about capitalism, while just over half of Democrats and Democratic supporters (55 per cent) share this opinion. This binary division does not encompass all US opinion.

Nearly two-thirds of Democrats (65 per cent) view socialism positively with 14 per cent holding a very positive view. This is a big problem for the corporate types who “own” the Democratic Party machine.

Women are much more positive about socialism than men but even so 38 per cent of men lean to the left.

Nearly two-thirds of black Americans (65 per cent) and 52 per cent of Hispanics have positive impressions of the term socialism, compared with just 35 per cent of whites

No-one should be surprised that people on incomes of less than $30,000 are more positive about socialism than those who earn more.

And 46 per cent of Democrats under 30 favour socialism with a surprising one in four young Republicans sharing their views.

On this side of the Atlantic 

But what are the prospects for socialism on our continent where socialist ideas have a wider currency and where millions of people have lived in socialist societies and been governed by parties that have a claim to a socialist heritage?

The latest Labour figure to venture an opinion on this subject is the ever innovative Tom Watson.

You might imagine that the deputy leader of the Labour Party, situated firmly in the centre right of organised social democracy, with extensive connections across the trade union movement and the political heir to an intellectual tradition that is rooted in decades of theorising about the relationship between social reform and government might be the ideal person to sketch out a rough outline of how socialist goals might be realised in the present era.

Fat chance. Tom Watson’s principal instrument for bringing about his political goals is Britain’s membership of the European Union. He told the corporate-funded Centre for European Reform: “I’m a European democratic socialist. I don’t go along with the EU despite being a socialist, I embrace the EU because I am a socialist.”

Watson’s assertion is that for decades the European Union has been defined by the right as anti-democratic, bureaucratic and anti-British.

“None of these things are true, yet the British left has not countered this narrative,” he argues.

But his framing of the question is plain wrong and profoundly dishonest.

Labour’s conception of socialism had undergone many transformations but a strong and persistent trend has always asserted that socialism, sovereignty and democracy are fused in an opposition to membership of the Common Market and its successor organisations.

In 1975, on the eve of the referendum to decide whether Britain should remain in the Common Market — into which the Tories had taken us without a vote — the Labour Party conference voted by almost 2-1 to leave.

Working-class opposition to membership was overwhelming and was reflected when just seven out of 46 affiliated unions supported membership.

The 1983 Labour election manifesto included withdrawal from the EC and one Tony Blair was elected staunchly defending this policy. Opposition to membership of the Common Market encompassed a wide spectrum of opinion including powerful figures from both left and right of the party.

It is a sign of the desperate ideological poverty of today’s right-wing social democrats that Watson, who must be considered its foremost representative, cannot bring himself to pay even lip service to the serious minded attempts by the Labour figures in the past to frame a serious government policy in terms which made sense to socialists of all kinds even when they were likely to disagree about it.

Of course, when Anthony Crosland — arguably the most impressive of British social democratic thinkers — wrote that the most characteristic features of capitalism had disappeared he could not have imagined the neoliberal orthodoxy which characterises the European Union.

Crosland, writing in 1956 at the turning point in the cold war when Keynesian economic policies were underpinned by massive inflows of US capital and the post-war reconstruction boom, thought that the era of “the absolute rule of private property, the subjection of all life to market influences, the domination of the profit motive, the neutrality of government, typical laissez-faire division of income and the ideology of individual rights” was over.

Since 1975 Britain has been bound by a series of EU treaties from Rome, through Maastricht to Lisbon which successively entrenched marketisation, the return of public goods to private ownership and the primacy of corporate profits over the decision of supposedly sovereign states.

No present day Labour politician addressing an audience of working people — whose political imagination is framed by long years of austerity, privatisation, sharply widening inequalities and a steady assault on individual and collective rights — would dare suggest that the absolute rule of private property has ended.

Instead Watson affects to believe that the Labour tradition is one of unbroken fidelity to the European federalist project rather than to a serious debate about a socialist concept of sovereignty.

At a critical 1971 meeting of the shadow cabinet and Labour’s NEC Crosland said West Germany’s action in floating the mark demonstrated that Common Market membership allowed for independent action.

Common Market critic Michael Foot thought it a strange point of view to argue that the fact that the Germans had broken the rules made the Treaty of Rome more acceptable.

In the chair at this meeting Labour leader Harold Wilson remarked that it had no authority to make a decision on how members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should vote.

True then and true today. But today Labour MPs face reselection.