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Social Futures: Trump discussion
December 1, 2016 @ 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm GMT
Donald Trump started as an outsider candidate for the USA Presidency. In being elected he appears to signal a breakpoint in political life. As he himself stressed he was not the continuity candidate. Indeed, it is argued that the weakest point of Clinton’s campaign was her link to an establishment that Trump felt he could freely attack. Indeed in terms of policy the nearest candidate to Trump was Bernie Sanders on the left, himself a break within the Democratic party. The question though is what significance these apparent breaks or discontinuities have. How important is the possible influence of a supposed disenfranchised group of voters that have been identified as working class and how does this phenomenon relate to the stage of capitalism we are now in. There has not just been de-industrialisation in terms of geography but also where new industries have arisen in western countries they have not produced decisive replacement increases in employment. Rather there has been a rise of service industry jobs that seem to be either too precarious or too low paid, or both, to sustain the expected life of a worker. Has this phenomenon, if it is such, been expressed in a demand for radical intervention in the economy or are seeing a move to an increasingly emboldened far right politics? Please join us for discussion on these issues.