Well, I Don’t Think ‘Marxism’ Is Going To Be The Answer Either…

Peter Wilby on the inevitable fall of capitalism (again):

Western Europeans and Americans are about to suffer a profound shock.

Gosh, Peter, that might just put a smile on your got-a-bad-smell-under-my-nose face, eh?

For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards.

Governments haven’t ‘explained’ that. It isn’t some universal wisdom that they have imparted to their citizens.

They’ve promoted it, certainly…

But the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent squeeze on incomes is slowly revealing an awful truth. As figures out last week from the Office for National Statistics show, real UK wages have not risen since 2005, the longest sustained freeze in living standards since the 1920s.

Because that’s when the house of cards fell over, isn’t it?

While it has not hit the elite in banking, the freeze affects most of the middle class as much as the working class. This is not a blip, nor the result of educational shortcomings.

Oh? So, what is it?

The neoliberals forgot to read (or re-read) Marx. "As capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."

Ah. Right.

A lack of Marxism, clearly…

We shall see, in all probability, a permanent reduction in British living standards that can't be arrested by educational reform. Neoliberalism, already badly dented by the financial meltdown, will be almost entirely discredited. Governments will then need to rethink their attitudes to education, inequality and the state's economic role.

And then it’ll be your turn, eh?