Aufhebunga Bunga
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/276/ Broken Promises ft. Fritz Bartel
🕑 Added 2022-07-26 06:00:03 +0000 UTCOn the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism.
Fritz Bartel talks to us about his new book in which the 1970s crisis and its aftermath takes centre-stage. How did the response to this global crisis differ in Western democratic capitalism versus Eastern state socialism? And why did this determine which side won the Cold War? How did the twin factors of global finance and energy emerge then, to the extent they still seem so determining today?
We discuss Bartel's striking claim that democracies, rather than authoritarian systems, were better able to 'break promises' – that is, impose economic discipline. And we conclude by discussing whether it could have been otherwise, whether neoliberalism and the collapse of the 'really existing socialism' were inevitable.
Readings:
- The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism, Fritz Bartel, Harvard UP
- Democracy and Discipline: Review Essay, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs
Comments
Paul Brewer
As far as this specific episode goes, Alex says something like 'It's almost hard to imagine an [economic] world before the 1970s.' I think 'almost' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, as people of my vintage are at least dimly aware of the economic world prior to 1973. And, in fact, I would say that that world persisted, in a fashion, up to the middle 1980s. My first payslip, working in England in 1982, deducted some 30 per cent of my income. Prior to that, after I finished university (where most of my coevals had free tuition and a means-tested maintenance grant) in 1981, I had been signing on every couple of weeks down at a little church hall in South Croydon. There's no way I would have got that money under the current regime, and it made a big difference to my life experience. In a couple of years' time, we had 10p bus fares on Sundays in London, until the borough of Bromley (IIRC) kicked up a fuss. Also, local government rates were based on a value of the house as a rental property (or something like that), and paid for by the owner, so we didn't have to find the poll tax on top of the rent. 'Bliss it was, to be alive in that dawn', or something like that. That 30 per cent income tax underpinned a lot of that, and oh how people complained. There's more fact to 'You never had it so good' than we appreciated at the time, perhaps.
Steve Bowbrick
I am here for Marxist-Herbalism.
