Left in the Wilderness by N Thompson (9781902683539)
Left in the Wilderness by N Thompson (9781902683539)
Left in the Wilderness (Book)
N Thompson Release Date: January 2008 Format: Hardback Pages: 320 ISBN: 9781902683539 ISBN-10: 1902683536
The two decades following 1979 saw unprecedented challenges to socialism, which have threatened to strip it of its social constituency, destroy its ideological foundations and render it defunct. In this assessment of the socialist project, Noel Thompson examines the state of socialist political economy in Britain and parts of Europe and charts how its constituent strands have been shaped between 1979 and the beginning of the 21st century. Some of the most salient developments covered include: the ascendancy of the New Right and its capacity to win substantial support from the working class; the fundamental change in the nature, composition and aspirations of that class; the persistence of mass unemployment and the collapse of the Keynesian consensus; and globalization, regionalization and the consequent circumscription of national economic management. The author analyzes how the socialist project has reacted to, and evolved in the light of, these challenges and what its future might be. His conclusions are pessimistic.
He argues that the political economy of democratic socialism is theoretically exhausted and that the Left in Britain has entered an ideological wilderness from which there seems little prospect of return. Radical stakeholderism in its Huttonian rendition was its last serious fling of the ideological dice and the capitalism it now confronts, or in the case of New Labour seeks to accommodate, leaves little theoretical or prescriptive room for socialist advance or manoeuvre.
