Starry Aspirant

A comedy actor will be the next president of Ukraine, but he will have trouble following through on his anti-corruption promises (for The Chartist, April 2019) In Ukraine’s presidential election in April, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a politically inexperienced comic actor, easily beat the country’s incumbent leader with 73% of the vote. In the first round Zelenskiy had taken over 30% of the vote in a crowded field. His nearest rival, Petro Poroshenko, a veteran of the Ukrainian political scene, won just below 16% of the national vote. Third placed Yuliya Tymoshenko, receiving 13.4% of support in the first round, complained about manipulation of the vote, although most credible observers reckoned the mechanics of the election itself were broadly free and fair. In the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions not held by Russian-backed separatists, the “eastern” vote was split between Yuriy Boyko (with 11.6% of the national vote) and Oleksandr Vilkul (4.2%), both of the Opposition Bloc, the succ...

Review of Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future by Geoffrey M. Hodgson It’s not that surprising, with so many major Western economies in mothballs in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the Bank of England warning of Britain’s deepest recession in 300 years, that lockdown has begun to encourage a rethink of how we live, prompting a plethora articles in the press on how the virus is going to change the world. In this context, Geoffrey Hodgson’s new book, Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future , is timely. In it, he makes a renewed case for the mixed economy and for liberal (or social) democracy, as well as for cautious, experimental reform. Against the small state, laissez-faire liberalism resurgent from the 1970s, he attempts to develop a strand of politics from within the liberal tradition that is more socially conscious. At the same time, he musters a strong case against “big” socialism, or systems in which state ownership and central planning ar...