The free-market model has been discredited and now its champions are panicking at what might emerge in its wake
Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Thursday October 23 2008
".....It's certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by "abuses of capitalism", rather than the "failure of capitalism itself" - only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%.
As Sarkozy has pronounced: "Laissez-faire is finished." It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. "Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense," the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand.....
But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we're talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism - or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism's stark failures....."
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