The New Serfdom by Angela Eagle

Author:Angela Eagle [Angela Eagle and Imran Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781785903144
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

THE FUTURE

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American political economist Francis Fukuyama wrote a hubristic essay entitled ‘The End of History?’, which he later turned into a bestselling book. In it, he claimed that the fall of Soviet Communism had ushered in the end of history, because Western liberal democracy had won the Cold War and was therefore the pinnacle of human sociocultural evolution. In its triumphalism, the book failed to acknowledge the problems that market fundamentalism itself had created or exacerbated in the remaining, now-dominant global economic system. Persistent poverty, inequality, unsustainable use of finite resources, the existential challenge of climate change, the tendency to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of fewer people: all of these flaws were overlooked. Following the global financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of political instability and unrest which has followed, we suspect that few people would be so sanguine about the perfection of the rampaging market fundamentalist version of ‘Western liberal democracy’ that has predominated since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Democracy and liberalism do not have to be accompanied by market fundamentalist beliefs. The economic liberalism of market fundamentalism is not the same as social liberalism. In fact, the two are in contradiction, because the social solidarity necessary to support an open, tolerant society needs greater economic equality if it is to be sustained. We suspect that such a society, which seeks to alleviate poverty, injustice and war – in other words, Western liberal democracy without market fundamentalism – might just catch on. For some political thinkers, the search for a new, non-socialist alternative to capitalism has resumed.

Before we explain over the coming chapters how we would approach applying the democratic socialist values we hold to the problems of tomorrow, we wish to address a few of the new theoretical approaches that are en vogue on the left and in the wider labour movement today: accelerationism in its left-wing iteration, post-capitalism and ‘fully automated luxury communism’. We also examine the ‘Blue Labour’ approach which emphasises the importance of family, faith and flag, and consider the case for introducing a universal basic income which springs from the view that the march of the robots will mean we are entering a post-work society.

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