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Regime Change in the West
Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures –...
Taboo-breaking as the measures to master the crisis looked, and in good part were, judged by neoclassical canons what they essentially amounted to was a mathematical squaring, or cubing, of the underlying dynamic of the neoliberal epoch, namely the continuous expansion of credit above any increase in production, in what the French call a fuite en avant – a flight forward. If a populist party or movement comes to power at present, to see the probable outcome we have only to look at the turncoat fate of Syriza in Greece on the left – in opposition a rebel against the diktats of the EU, in office a submissive instrument of it – or on the right, the overnight standardisation of Trump’s first presidency, as he breathed fire against establishment complacency and inequality on Inauguration Day, and did nothing about them once in the White House. The other, still more far-reaching, was the transformation after the death of Mao of the command economy in China in the Reform Era presided over by Deng Xiaoping, with the arrival of the household responsibility system in agriculture and the ignition by township and village enterprises of the most spectacular sustained burst of economic growth in recorded history – this too was improvised and experimental, without pre-existent theories of any kind.
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