Here is an excellent summary from a Socialist perspective of the significance of 2007 - written by the general secretary of the UK Socialist Party. I've been following the Socialist Party since my early 20's, but I still get a buzz from reading such clear expositions of political, economic and social developments. Not only do you get an explanation of how they affect the majority of people in the world, but you also get a clear direction for the way forward.
I was very sorry to read about the death of Andrew Glyn in December. He was a socialist economist at Oxford - not many of those around! His last book was (I think) "Capitalism Unleashed".
This is what the Financial Times had to say about him. The article is relatively friendly and fulsome, but it says that Glyn took an alternative, radical perspective on the "free market capitalism" even though he had a perfectly happy background! The implication seeming to be that only if you are in some way psychologically damaged could you possibly have anything other than a thoroughly orthodox view!
Getting things of me chest!
2 comments:
This ridiculous diatribe could have been written in 1908 and repeats once more the standard marxist mistake (capitalism is doomed etc etc) of taking today's situation and assuming that the trends are inevitable, thus ignoring economic cycles.
One further classic socialist error is to assume Xmas travellers are rich - let him explain to the his supposed working class comrades queueing at Heathrow why they should turn back to help the world's poor.
Capitalism isn't doomed. Nobody (least of all Marx, so far as I know) said it was. It will stumble on like an inebriated bull in a china shop until a better model for generating and distributing wealth is found. Fortunately, the fundamentals of a better model are not a secret. In my view the body of those fundamental economic are what comprise a socialist strategy.
In addition, nobody I know assumes that all travellers are rich. Clearly they are not. And it would be a very poor policy to suggest that if you give up your holiday, this will somehow help the poor. It won't.
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