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We are not short of alternatives and strategies |
April 03, 2009 By Robin Hahnel Source: Times Online/UK
Robin Hahnel's ZSpace Page
In The Times last week Hugo Rifkind threw down the gauntlet to demonstrators protesting at the G20 summit to "formulate a coherent argument" and "propose some sort of feasible alternative to the world economy instead of just bitching about it and blowing your bloody whistles".
Humorous disciples of neo-liberalism too often delight in ridiculing critics through caricature. So I welcome this opportunity to point out that we not only offered cogent reasons why capital and trade liberalization aggravate global inequality, but predicted that they would prove destabilizing as well. We not only argued that stock market and property bubbles were no substitutes for productive investment, but predicted that these bubbles would pop, leaving wreckage in their wake. And we predicted that, whatever one might say about markets in general, free-market finance and free-market environmentalism were accidents waiting to happen.
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Communism: a viable alternative? |
As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
Comment by Bernard Keenan
guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009
Article history
Let's get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama's claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the "end of history", the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.
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Reimagining Socialism: A Nation Forum |
By Dan La Botz
Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the USSA. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis?
Jack London wrote more than 100 years ago: "We are all tied to the same machine--only some of us are tied to the top." And that, of course, makes all the difference.
The crisis of capitalism that we are experiencing unfolds as two parallel crises. One crisis for them, the corporate elite, the CEOs and CFOs and the Boards, their lobbyists and politicians, and all those who make up the upper echelons of American economic, social and political life. And another crisis for us, often called "the middle class," but better described as our country's working people and, of course, the poor.
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