The link between neoliberal capitalism and the rise of fascism that Theresa May never mentioned

Last Updated: October 1, 2017By

Cartoonist (and friend of Vox Political) Gary Barker produced this cartoon, explaining prime minister May’s policies in a few brief words.

Beastrabban has been expanding on This Writer’s article about Theresa May and the disaster that is neoliberal capitalism, over on his Weblog.

He makes another link – with the return of Fascism across Europe, of which support for the far-right AfD in the recent German elections is a part.

Here is an extract. You can read the full article using the link below.

The Korean economist, Ha-Joon Chang, makes pretty much the same case in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Chang is also an admirer of capitalism, but his book is a sustained attack on Thatcherite neoliberalism. He shows that every country in the world has begun its rise to economic prosperity through protectionism, and that the countries with the most flexible labour markets and stable, prosperous industries are those with a mixed economy of socialized and private industries and a welfare state. And this includes those countries, where the industries may not be nationalized, but the workers have a share in the management, such as in Germany and Austria.

As Stephen Gowans writes in his recent essay “We Lived Better Then”: ‘Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed as a great victory for humanity, not least by leftist intellectuals in the United States, two decades later there’s little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well. Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them — and from humanity as a whole: “We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security.” And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better — once.’

We … need to recognize the role of neoliberalism in creating the poverty and insecurity, which leads to so many traditional White Europeans fearing for their future, and the way Conservatives and Fascists across Europe and America are exploiting this to keep themselves in power by misdirecting these fears onto immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, Roma and Jews.

Read more: The Rise of Fascism and the Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism


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2 Comments

  1. alan dransfield October 1, 2017 at 2:39 am - Reply

    What a cock-up at the Grenfell Tower since day one.And the Bull**** continues today . Wouldn’t you think the Oversight Authorities would ensure that an Interim Fire Report (IFR) would have been provisioned to BOTH the Police for their Criminal Investigation and to the Public Inquiry Panel (PIP).
    In the absence of an Interim Fire Report BOTH the Public Inquiry and Criminal Inquiry CRASH ON TAKE OFF. Quelle surprise.
    The Court of Appeal Judge in charge of the PI is called Sir Martin Moore Bick. Maybe it should be DICK??!!
    It smacks of another Hillsborough COVER-UP to me.

  2. rotzeichen October 1, 2017 at 11:48 am - Reply

    The Grand Neo-Liberal plan has been over forty years in the making, which is why people have not seen it coming and only since the great financial crash have felt the real impact of the dogma termed sound economics. A misnomer if ever there was one.
    Reality it appears is stranger than fiction, The Tories tell us that Britain, our country, must live within it’s means. They said the country is broke and can’t afford our public services, only to be contradicted by the very institution it set up to provide detailed facts and figures on the real economy.
    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/12/obr-head-rebukes-osborne-uk-was-never-risk-bankruptcy
    The reality is that unlike other European countries we have our own currency, that means we can meet any obligation that our country faces. The Bank of England produced this document that explains in detail how money is created and how it enters the economy.
    http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdfCurrently our money is issued as debt, but as we have witnessed, the Tories tell us “our country is broke and we can’t afford our public services”. A favourite expression of theirs is, “there is no magic money tree” until the Tories want to get out trouble and suddenly money is no object, such as finding £1 billion to bribe right wing northern Ireland politicians.

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