Financialization and the Collapse of European Social Democracy – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (7/8)
The Real News Network has part 7 Financialization and the Collapse of European Social Democracy – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (7/8).
LAPAVITSAS: Yes, in Germany and so on, different traditions and so on. But nonetheless we find social democracy in many parts of the world. Social democracy has suffered terribly as a result of financialization, particularly the [incompr.] financialization now, because it basically accepted all that stuff about neoliberalism and so on, and it really believed that this was the future and free-market capitalism was a stable, wonderful system that was going to produce good results, and really went for it. And, obviously, now that it has become clear that financialization is a highly unstable, highly unequal, and deeply problematic system, social democracy hasn’t got a message to come up with.
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Now the strongest party is the left. Greece has always had a left presence, political presence, away from social democracy. And as the social democratic core has collapsed, then the voters of that party or government have migrated to parties of the left, which is why we have SYRIZA, the main party of the left now, you know, bidding for power. So we’ve had a complex movement whereby a large part of the electorate has gone to the left. But also a significant part of the electorate, mostly from the right, now has gone to the extreme right, because obviously the voters of the right have been disillusioned in governments of the right applying the neoliberal programs so viciously too. So we’ve had a polarization. We observe a polarization in Greece pretty naturally as part of this financialization
In the comments on YouTube, you can see that there is debate in Greece over some of what was said in this interview.
There was a promise that in part 8 there will be some talk about what are the solutions. My experience is that this is usually the weakest part of such a discussion. It takes a lot more imagination and creativity to talk about a new social system that does not exist that will solve the problems than it does to talk about the current system and what is wrong with it. So, we should not expect that there will be as many people who can say profound things in this domain as there are people who can be profound about what already exists.