> The Economist, together with the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, is one of the three leading house organs of English-speaking international capitalism. As Noam Chomsky observed in Class Warfare (1995) these media “have to tell the truth to their readers…to let their audience, an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world.”
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> An important new book by Alexander Zevin, an editor at New Left Review, sees the evolution of the most venerable of the three, The Economist, as both mirroring and helping to shape the trajectory of capitalism from the publication’s birth in 1843 to the present. I've linked to a review of the book, titled Liberalism At Large, by the US historian Patrick Iber.
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> The Economist has always been a consistent defender of free markets and of British and later US imperialism, which hasn’t precluded it from advocating for reform of the system during periods of capitalist crisis and mass political agitation - precisely in the interests of the system’s self-preservation.
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> In the early twentieth century, for example, when the paper promoted the expansion of state intervention in the economy and the creation of a social safety net, “it did so not out of charity but of necessity”, notes Iber. “Always eager to protect market economies, it saw that reform was essential to maintain popular support for the system it holds responsible for wealth creation…Liberalism at Large can be read as an extended account of liberalism suffering periodic crises and managing to muddle on.”
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> Iber interprets the relative lassitude of The Economist, “that great barometer of capitalist thinking” towards the current crisis as evidence that the dominant ruling elite does not feel particularly threatened. “If Zevin is correct to read the magazine as a window into the mind of global capital, its current stance is probably evidence that (it) believes liberalism is in a stronger position than ongoing discussions of the ‘crisis of liberalism’ would imply…it would seem that capitalism is not as imperilled as some might think. Liberalism may be in crisis, but with more than 150 years of experience, it is used to that.”
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> https://www.facebook.com/groups/1551377795181937/
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