[lbo-talk] Forwarded without comment ...

[Bhaskar Sunkara]

Let's not forget the entire historical context then.  The welfare state
existed in a very specific historical period.  The neoliberalism wasn't just
an artificially created class offensive against a militant working class (it
was that too), but rather there were some fundamental structural problems
with welfare capitalism.  Tight money and deregulation solved stagflation
and restored profitability, right?  There is no happy social democratic
alternative to fall back into.  There's just different shades of
neoliberalism.  If Die Linke, the NPA, the Left Bloc, and SYRIZA focus their
politics around building an oppositional movement and fighting for reforms
out of government and austerity, I'll say that the left in Europe is on the
right track for the first time in decades. I just don't think these very
real "social achievements" can be sustained within the capitalist framework.

 What was Rosa's dichotomy again?

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:12 PM, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:


> On Tue, February 16, 2010 3:58 pm, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>
> > If shit hits the
> > fan and the center-left can't impose austerity and there aren't forces
> > strong enough to the left to really rock the boat and the country enters
> > into another prolong period of chaos.... what happens?  Chaos until the
> > right wins a mandate in the next elections?
>
> It's not "chaos", it's the refusal of the people of Greece to be the next
> Latvia, and sacrifice decades of social achievements on the blood-drenched
> altar of Euroliberalism.
>
> Let's remember the history here: for the past 20 years, Greece, like
> Ireland, Spain and Portugal, were the model pupils of the Eurolib agenda
> of slashing the welfare state, privatizing everything in sight, and
> forcing the euro to be a one-austerity-to-rule-them-all currency. They got
> away with by buying off voters with speculative bubbles in real estate and
> housing. The whole thing was a smaller, localized version of the Wall
> Street mortgage bubble.
>
> Now their lovely experiment has blown up in the Eurolibs' face. Greece
> *should* resist the insanity of slashing the budget deficit during a
> contraction, which will trigger a deflationary collapse, and then proceed
> to wreck the few remaining Eurobanks not already taken over by the EU
> governments.
>
> -- DRR
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>