On a purely reformist basis, they can’t or won’t tax the superwealthy on a global basis (much less put it to public vote globally). They certainly can’t address capital flight issues at a national level (beyond cheap “Tobin taxes”).

Localism is also dangerous politics. The SPD sold out eventually because it already started engaging in coalitionist politics at the local and regional levels before WWI. Hello, Die Linke!

[I don't have anything against local autonomy, so-called "participatory budgeting," and local currency alternatives to government money, though.]

Perhaps globalized trade unions can aid in the development of transnational class struggle.

Looking back at my point it made it seem like I was deriding social democratic efforts. I actually wasn’t. My main point though is that if the goal is simply to reform capitalism and try to spread a sustainable, just development across the world — a hard task and a noble goal indeed — then why shy away from using the current institutions and instruments of global capitalism?

I don’t have time to write much more now, but I would direct your attention to this excellent Washington Post article on the matter by DSA [vice]-chair Harold Meyerson:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/09/AR2009060902597.html

The left and the right. Maybe this was a mis-perception on my part.

If the goal was just the expansion of global order of more humane capitalism, electoral efforts at the nation state would be important so would taking over institutions like the IMF/World Bank and EU parliament. People forget that the original goal of some of these institutions was a global “new deal” and they operated from broadly keynesian basises for much of their history. If that’s the goal then people like Krugman, Stiglitz, the left-wing of labour, the right-wing of Die Linke would be promising scenes of this struggle.

Rebuilding a labor movement, a socialist movement and militant campaigns based in class-struggle for structural change is a different task.

At work, no time to elaborate (or proofread).

I completely agree that nationalist sentiment is a threat, but the left have often been stoking these flames.

I think that leftists should reject protectionism, and in general attempts to reassert the sovereignty of the nation-state in the face of global capital and integration. I also think that attempts by some in the anti-globalization left to create self-sufficient localities is utopian, and actually dangerously utopian. Now the EU’s expansion of hyper-capitalism is something that labor and left parties will naturally oppose, but the long-term question is whether the left will speak in the language of reaction or project a progressive vision that I guess would still be described as “proletarian internationalist.”

I realize this is kind of apropos of nothing, but it’s something that I’ve been wondering about the last few days. I think that there’s definitely a danger of localist/nationalist sentiment overwhelming and diluting transnational class solidarity, and subsequently the socialist movement, within a continent-wide, multinational and multiethnic parliament. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the left didn’t do very well in the recent elections.

In France the radical left and the greens got a far bigger share of the left vote than the Socialists too, another place where the mainstream center-left have been made the minority within the left.

In Greece and Portugal the left did really well too. There is definitely room for a left alternative throughout Europe, let’s see what materializes from it, will it just be a renewed social democracy or something that finds a way to at least push for more structural change.

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I share your feelings about localization as well.