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63 pages, Paperback
First published April 16, 2019
We know the economy has to be de-financialized and de-carbonized, that there needs to be planning and a big rise in the share of income that goes to the working classes and so on.…The word “socialism” is avoided in the book (heck, Bernie the US presidential candidate uses the S-word more!), in favor of “postcapitalist society”.
What we don’t know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives—or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else.
Today neoliberal capitalism governs virtually the entire world. It’s constantly morphing and it has been able to absorb crises—even the ones that seem terminal, like the recession in 2008. Where or why do you identify a crisis of hegemony— especially since you also see continuities in certain aspects of the economic agenda of the Trumps and the Obamas and the Clintons of the world?…And Fraser’s response [bold emphasis added]:
Just consider the explosion of antineoliberal movements throughout the world. We are usually focused on the right-wing populist variants, such as the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom; the rise of racist, anti-immigrant parties in northern and east-central Europe, Latin America, and Asia; and of course the victory of Trump in the United States. But that is only part of the story. We should not overlook left-wing antineoliberal forces, including the Corbyn surge in Britain, which has moved the Labour Party well to the left, the forces that have coalesced around Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, Podemos in Spain, the early days of Syriza in Greece, and the Bernie Sanders campaign in the United States. Whether right or left, these are all cases in which people are saying that they don’t believe the reigning neoliberal narratives anymore. They don’t have faith in the established political parties in the center-left or center-right that promoted them. They want to try something completely different.Ah, there we go… global “left-wing antineoliberal forces” have all congregated in Europe and the US. I mean, isn’t that where all the trendy leftist theory come from? Paraphrasing Vijay once again, globalization of theory is one-way, with theory coming from the Global North and the Global South only presumed to produce guerilla manuals.