PROVOCATION - MARKET VERSUS PLANNING - THE CASE FOR TRANSFORMATIVE LEFT ECONOMICS

For example, in the Global Financial Crisis 2007-8, the primary focus was on the role of finance; in the pandemic, we have perhaps a handful of different focuses, the role of the global value chain, the role of the publicly funded health system, the role of state among others. [...] In a truly global economic crisis, there is a need to look beyond the most immediate problems and seemingly obvious causes, taking in the provision of work, industrial and housing policies, changes in the labour market, and the implications of globalisation: in short, the whole spectrum of potential economic failure that neoliberalism, the governing ideology of the last few decades, would tend to. [...] It is possible to track back with evidence how the belief in market primacy lies behind much of the weakening of the state that occurred in Europe and the US in the 1980s, which led in turn to increased participation of the private sector in health care, education, and housing. [...] The first is the vilification of the state alongside a celebration of market efficiency, which has resulted in a lack of resilience in the organisation of social provisioning, from healthcare to social security. [...] They should not drive the need and the conceptualisation of a welfare state and social provisioning within a mode of organising society that has over and over shown itself full of contradictions and crisis – the need for a welfare state should be the starting point, rather than a reactive conclusion.