by YANIS VAROUFAKIS
When Margaret Thatcher coined “Tina” – her 1980s dictum that “There is no alternative” – I was incensed because, deep down, I felt she had a point: the left had neither a credible nor a desirable alternative to capitalism.
Leftists excel at pinpointing what is wrong with capitalism. We wax lyrical about the possibility of some “other” world in which one contributes according to one’s capacities and obtains according to one’s needs. But, when pushed to describe a fully fledged alternative to contemporary capitalism, for many decades we have oscillated between the ugly (a Soviet-like barracks socialism) and the tired (a social democracy that financialised globalisation has rendered infeasible).
During the 1980s, I participated in many debates in pubs, universities and town halls whose stated purpose was to organise resistance to Thatcherism. I remember my guilty thought every time I heard Maggie speak: “If only we had a leader like her!” I was, of course, under no illusion: Thatcher’s programme was despotic, antisocial and an economic cul-de-sac. But, unlike our side, she understood that we lived in a revolutionary moment. The postwar class war armistice was over. If we wanted to defend the weak, we could not afford to be defensive. We needed to advocate as she did: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopian one, but a brand new one nevertheless.
Alas, our lot had no vision of a new system. Instead, we were in the business of bandaging corpses while Thatcher was digging graves to clear the way for her spanking new spiv capitalism. Even when we were putting up a splendid fight in defence of communities that deserved defending, our causes screamed “anachronism” – fighting to preserve dirty coal-fired power stations or the right of male rightwing trade unionists to reach sordid deals behind closed doors with the likes of Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
Just as when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we on the left – social democrats, Keynesians and Marxists alike – had the sense we would live the rest of our days as history’s losers, so in 2008, with Lehman’s collapse, those living the ideology of neoliberalism saw history erupt with similar soul-destroying force. Some years later, surveillance capitalism forced tech-evangelists, who thought they had seen in the internet an irresistible global democratic force, also to shed their illusions.
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