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Why the left is afraid of itself : Comments
By Aidan Anderson, published 10/9/2015The very real possibility that a politician from the left will assume leadership of a mainstream political party has sent British commentators into hysterics.
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I appreciate your arguments and those of Tristan's, but to diminish the ideological basis of the opposing sides is not very helpful.
Yes, there were factors other than the OPEC demand for oil price justice that started the momentum towards the crises that plagued the Western economies during the 1970s (the build-up of fiscal liquidity post-WWII, the rebuilding of the war-devastated European and Japanese economies; excessive and wasteful Cold War military spending; regional wars to destroy the spread of communism in Asia, socialism in Latin America and pan-Arab nationalism in the Middle East; the release of the US dollar from the gold standard; and a vast expansion of affluence-driven consumer spending throughout the West).
However, the ideological framework to 'explain' the crises of 1974-5 by putting much of the blame on profligate social spending by left-wing ‘Keynsian’ economic ideology endures to this day. For example, much of the narrative surrounding the fall of the Whitlam government still stubbornly refuses to attribute its demise to global economic factors that were well and truly outside of its control.
Clashing economic theories aside (which I don’t altogether discount), the history of the last 200 years shows a fairly common 30-year cycle of left-right control of the narrative. The current cycle, dominated by what is often referred to as ‘neo-liberalism’ (which is just the latest label attached to the right-wing worldview), is not only coming to an end, but has left the global economy in what can charitably be called a ‘crisis’, but less than charitably called ‘a mess’.
Jeremy Corbyn may or may not win on Saturday (and the anti-Corbyn political-media establishment is doing everything in its power to ensure he doesn’t), but his meteoric rise in the Labour leadership contest is only a symptom of a rising tide against the excesses of 30 years of right-wing neo-liberalism. Gravity is pulling the pendulum back to a centre ground of social justice-based global economics.
Watch this space.