This episode of the Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

and by Descent Magazine. Desents fall issue, out now features a special section on the promises

and limitations of socialism today. The issue features many writers you've heard on the Dig,

including Sam Adler-Bell, Aziz Rana, Nikhil Palsing, Gabriel Wynett, Alissa Badestone,

Kienga Yamada Taylor, and more. It's a really great issue filled with the most pressing

questions about where the left goes from here. You do not want to miss it.

Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting

from Providence, Rhode Island. For a long time, Europe seemed like a model of what sort of

social democratic society worker power could win. Countries with large socialist and even communist

parties, where labor could flex its muscle in the streets in a way hard to imagine in the United

States. These were countries, however short of utopia, that boasted, depending on the place,

government run healthcare, lengthy paid parental leave, social housing, and long leisurely vacations.

European social democracy showed that the state could in fact make people's lives

significantly better, however deeply complicit in colonialism and the post-colonial world

system that order might have been. Indeed, as I discussed with Kojo Kharam recently,

the neoliberal overturning of progressive gains in Europe has its roots in the first worlds,

neo-colonial preemption of social democracy, let alone socialism in the third world.

Today, capital rains unchecked across the globe, pillaging third world and first alike.

European politics now evokes a persistently rising anti-migrant far right, a struggling left,

into decade plus of severe political and economic crisis, a crisis that has provoked intense criticism

from left and right alike of the EU, an elusive and slippery institution that's rather difficult

to define. The European Union has without a doubt been a force for neoliberal discipline,

...