A Future That Works

A Future That Works
NO2aTory/Liberal coalition - Vote with your feet for an alternative to a neo-liberal economy and neo-conservative state Yes2aLeftFront and a Red/Green Left Alliance

Saturday 16 July 2011

Left Alternative European plan by the economist and former Labour MP Stuart Holland

Says that the interest rate should be decided by eurozone ministers, rather than the market, the European Investment Fund should issue new tradeable bonds to pay for growth-boosting infrastructure projects across the single-currency zone which it is estimated would cost about €2tn.

Conservative EU policymakers will say this is to costly prefer to stick to the current austerity or an even deeper austerity plan, they are playing with a potential economic disaster that could trigger a second global financial crisis.

5 comments:

  1. At present the economic and political strategies are being set by neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology to promote the interests of global finance capital at the expense of the working class peoples of Europe and dismantle the Keynesian social-democratic compromise between capital and labour. This intellectual hegemony prevents any alternative to the interests of a capitalist oligarchy in Washington, IMF, World Bank, and European Central Bank.

    We may be seeing a second phase to the crisis of finance capitalism which started in 2008 which are opening up the historic possibilities for socialism. If the broad left respond correctly to the current crisis of global finance capitalism and what Marxists see as the third phase of capitalist imperialism as Lenin did in its first and second phase a between the first and second world wars. This could be he predicted the final and highest stage of capitalism.

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  2. Lenin argued that at that at the beginning of the 20th century capitalism had entered its imperialist phase, where the process of centralised capital produced a monopoly of finance capital controlled by an oligarchy of the banks, industrialists and capitalist state. Its first phase of imperialism lead to world war, depression and the rise of fascism and as a result revolution in Russia and China, as a result after the second world war the power of the financial oligarchies were weakened and the working classes of Europe who had fought in two world wars were then not willing to accept a return to the conditions of pre-war capitalism.

    The capitalist democratic states had to accept economic planning in order to beat the threat of fascist the fascist capitalist states. Also with the existence of the Soviet Union and the other East European socialist states there was an alternative model to pre-war free-market capitalism. It was under these circumstances that the British, European and Scandinavian capitalist bourgeois democratic states conceded the provision of public health care and welfare systems which are now threatened by the third phase of capitalist imperialism.

    For the broad left the question arises how best to defend the concrete gains made in the second phase of twentieth century capitalism that have been under threat since the 1980’s as a result of the crisis of class power that occurred in the 1970’s and the ideological fight back of international finance capital and the institutions of global capitalism which has accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s.

    The current crisis of global finance capitalism has hovered on the edge of a vortex since 2008, it could be tipped over the edge by the deflationary financial policies of the IMF, World Bank and European Central Bank in pursuit of the needs of global capital for investment opportunities from privatization of state assets and mass unemployment from redundancies imposed in former state utilities, health care, education and social welfare providers.

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  3. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both represented the neo-liberal economic and the neo-conservative political aspects of the third phase of capitalist imperialism. On the domestic level anti-union laws and a repressive use of the police and military were necessary to implement the economic changes required to change the balance of class power that had existed in the Keynesian period of welfare capitalism.

    The other aspect of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative fight back by the forces of global capital was the use of the institutions of global finance capital to impose economic and political restructuring on nation states in the developing world. Where nation states resisted this approach military intervention has been the method used such as Grenada and other Latin America states, the USA and Britain’s secrete services were at work destabilizing Yugoslavia in the 1990’s and under George Bush and Tony Blair Iraq and Afghanistan have been invaded to secure the privatization and access to oil and gas supplies.

    European armed forces have been part of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and are part of the forces in Libya. So there are similar features to what Lenin saw as the imperialist phase of finance capital and the use of military force to secure the needs of capital. It could be argued that whilst the Keynesian welfare state and demand management saved capitalism after the Second World War it was a temporary reprieve and that the imperialist final stage of capitalism has reasserted its authority since the early 1980’s. If this is the case we face a regressive return to the barbarism of pre-welfare capitalism and the far-right authoritarian state or the advance of socialism.

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  4. The current crisis of global finance capital threatens the lives of the people of Britain, Europe and the whole planet. This is when we need the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties to show both theoretical and political leadership. The social-democratic parties have failed to respond adequately to the neo-liberal/neo-conservative offensive against the Keynesian model of welfare capitalism and in many cases such as the British Labour Party led by Tony Blair fully embraced the neo-liberal/neo-conservative political ideology.

    This is why the British Marxist-Leninist Left has to be allied with Francis Wurtz and the European Left parties and provide a united opposition to the ideological offensive being mounted by the capitalist elite through the institutions of global finance capital such as the IMF, World Bank and the European Central Bank implementing privatization and marketization directives of the World Trade Organization and the Lisbon Treaty. The right-wing ideological assault of the capitalist classes are acting as a united front and can only be resisted by a left-wing united front of the working classes.

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  5. There is a ‘‘Left Alternative’’ to the austerity plans of the Troika (European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank). The €109bn bailout for Greece shows that when the people are effectively led by a ‘‘Left’’ party such as the Kommunistiko Komma Elladas (Communist Party of Greece) an alternative can be found that reduces the impact on the people, all be it by a small amount so far.

    If/when the broad left unite across Europe then there could be/is an alternative political and economic strategy to the one imposed by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, this is why the British, European and Scandinavian Socialist, Communist, Red/Green and Left Parties need to act as a united front against the capitalist classes and their institutions.

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