PRAGOTI

Staid expert opinion coming from outside the ranks of neoliberal zealots on the economic crisis has concentrated on the feasibility of a 'New Deal' to rescue capitalism from the crisis. While opposition to war and militarism has only mounted around the world, the connect of these with the 'real economy' has not always been very central to the concern of even Left liberals.

The 'New Deal' was not the product of expert opinion, it was the outcome of a political process in which the mass rise of working people inspired by socialist and syndicalist leaders made some of the 'radical' components of the New Deal a reality. But it was only World War II that rescued the US. Europe's post-war social democracy was a product of the Marshall Plan as much as it was a response to the socialist threat from within and without. 

In the present structure of monopoly finance  when economic crisis, war, environmental destruction are locked together in a vicious cycle, expert opinion often misses a very basic proposition that a person called Lenin had stated very simply: "Everything is connected". John Bellamy Foster in this interview with WIN Magazine is a welcome departure from the disconnect of expertise.

He  argues: "If today there seems to be an increasing trend towards war it is only because capitalism as a whole has lost its former creative role and is tending toward exterminism in every sense: economic, ecological, and military/imperial".

In a Marxist critique, he argues why a New Deal today even if it were to materialize, would not eliminate the deep contradictions of capitalist society or create a more egalitarian order. The question of 'transcending capitalism' or rescuing it is at the heart of the unbridgeable political divide in any Left enquiry that addresses the 'burning house of capitalism'.