The vision thing

Chris Dillow writes about The vision thing.

One thing makes me hopeful — that this election was not a victory for austerity. The two main austerity parties — Tories and LibDems — saw their share of the vote fall by 14.4 percentage points whilst the two clearest anti-austerity parties (SNP and Greens) gained a combined 5.9 percentage points.  

On the other hand, though, I'm pessimistic. Ukip's success* shows that there is also public support for anti-market policies: Ukippers (and indeed many other voters) favour (pdf) controls on prices and rents as well as on immigration. And whilst a slogan "we'll put you in control" should in theory be a popular and coherent way of promoting worker democracy, I see very little public demand for it.

Emphasis Mine

I think the difference between austerity in Greece and the UK is that austerity in Greece was an existental crisis. Austerity there was threatening the idea of Greece. Whereas in the UK, austerity was a way of keeping the super-rich happy enough to stay there in order to spend enough to keep some of the people happy.

It is probably very early in the development of the workers' consciousness in places like the UK to talk about worker democracy. However, the workers in places like Venezuela can see the benefit of this through the nearness of Cuba and the effects in their daily lives. Thus, they are developing their consciousness at a faster pace.

This is probably due to that the effects of colonialism was never disguised in Venezuela as it was in the UK. Only a heavy hand of the military there kept things under control. Now that the military has aligned with the workers, there is an awakening of how society can be better organized.