Paul Mason

But the long-term prospects for capitalism are bleak. According to the OECD, growth in the developed world will be ‘weak’ for the next fifty years. Inequality will rise by 40 per cent. Even in the developing countries, the current dynamism will be exhausted by 2060.

Ditching neoliberalism is the easy part. There’s a growing consensus among protest movements, radical economists and radical political parties in Europe as to how you do it: suppress high finance, reverse austerity, invest in green energy and promote high-waged work.
But then what?
As the Greek experience demonstrates, any government that defies austerity will instantly clash with the global institutions that protect the 1 per cent. After the radical left party Syriza won the election in January 2015, the European Central Bank, whose job was to promote the stability of Greek banks, pulled the plug on those banks, triggering a €20 billion run on deposits. That forced the left-wing government to choose between bankruptcy and submission. You will find no minutes, no voting records, no explanation for what the ECB did. It was left to the right-wing German newspaper Stern to explain: they had ‘smashed’ Greece.3 It was done, symbolically, to reinforce the central message of neoliberalism that there is no alternative; that all routes away from capitalism end in the kind of disaster that befell the Soviet Union; and that a revolt against capitalism is a revolt against a natural and timeless order.

To replace neoliberalism we need something just as powerful and effective; not just a bright idea about how the world could work but a new, holistic model that can run itself and tangibly deliver a better outcome. It has to be based on micro-mechanisms, not diktats or policies; it has to work spontaneously.