Jayati Ghosh, "The Emerging Left in the 'Emerging' World" - 0 views
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For much of the twentieth century, it was easier to talk of an overarching socialist framework, a "grand vision" within which more specific debates were conducted. Of course there were many strands of socialism, however defined, and there were also fierce and occasionally violent struggles between them. Even so, they shared more than a common historical lineage -- they also shared a fundamental perception or basic vision. At the risk of crude simplification, this vision can be summarised in terms of perceiving the working class to be the most fundamental agent of positive change, capable (once organised) of transforming not only existing property and material relations but also wider society and culture through its own actions.
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But in recent times the very idea of a grand vision has been in retreat, battered not just by the complexities and limitations of "actually existing Socialism" in its various incarnations, but more recently and thoroughly by the ferocious triumphalism of its opposite. Indeed, it may be fair to say that, insofar as any grand vision has existed at all in recent times, the one that increasingly came to dominate public life almost everywhere in the world by the late 20th century was that of the market as a self-regulating and inherently efficient mechanism for organising economic life. This idea had already fallen by the wayside a century previously, before it was resurrected and dusted off for use in a slightly more "post-modern" format that became the theoretical underpinning for the vast explosion of global economic integration under the aegis of finance capital that has marked the period of globalisation.
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The association of the ideology of supposedly free markets with strong tendencies towards greater concentration of capital and the use of the state to further accentuate these tendencies and aggrandise capital has been laid bare for all to see. That the material processes unleashed by such a trajectory of unevenly shared burdens of crisis are no longer seen as socially acceptable is also becoming evident, in many parts of the developing world that have experienced quiet or not-so-quiet revolutions, as well as currently in the European continent.
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