![]() The traditional notion of full employment, focused on full-time jobs for male breadwinners, is no longer adequate This is obvious in the United States, but the same patterns are emerging in market economies throughout the world. Neoliberalism has massively enriched the 1%, and particularly the financial sector, while delivering nothing but economic insecurity and stagnant living standards to the great majority of the population. Most obviously, socialism implies an unqualified rejection of the system of financial capitalism (variously called neoliberalism, market liberalism or, in Australia, economic rationalism) that emerged from the economic chaos of the 70s. This has been taken to a ludicrous extent recently, the studiously moderate Bill Shorten being described by senior government ministers as a “ red socialist” who will turn Australia into the next Cuba.īut what do today’s resurgent socialists mean by socialism? It’s easier to see what they dislike than to describe a socialist policy agenda. The dominant advocates of free markets have long derided any kind of government intervention as “socialism”. The disastrous mess being made by Donald Trump’s Republicans and Theresa May’s Tories is the inevitable result of a politics based on what academic Lionel Trilling described, in the foreword to his essay collection The Liberal Imagination (1950), as “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”. Some have turned to the tribalist politics of nostalgia (Make America Great Again, We Want Our Country Back), exemplified in Australia by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.īut it is already evident that this is a dead end. Unsurprisingly, people are looking for an alternative, and many are looking back at the postwar decades of widely shared prosperity. ![]()
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