Upping the anti.

AuthorHolmes, Lawrie
PositionEconomic aspects of financial market in Europe

Books challenging capitalism are proving hugely popular, reflecting concern that the global economic system is simply failing to deliver. Is this a flash in the pan, or does it point to deeper discontentment? Lawrie Holmes investigates

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a wave of euphoria engulfed the millions of people who had been on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Repressive communist regimes that had been endured in eastern Europe for almost half a century were revealed as bankrupt, both financially and morally.

Despite the triumph of capitalism, which was soon in full flow in post-Soviet Russia and Ending its own compromise with post-Mao communism in China, doubts have set in. Recently, a number of influential authors have questioned some of capitalism's fundamental principles. Last year Thomas Piketty struck a chord with Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Parisian professor sought to debunk what he saw as the myths surrounding the free market's ability to generate and distribute wealth effectively. And last year Naomi Klein launched an attack on what she believes is the business world's determination to destroy the planet in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate.

While both books are bestsellers, they don't seem to be addressing a clearly identifiable mass movement. In the US in the 1930s, for example, there was vast popular support for those prepared to stand up to the business interests and all-powerful financiers who were revealed to have profited from the first world war and to have played a part in the depression brought on by the Wall Street crash of 1929. But, as details of state-backed atrocities emerged from the Soviet Union, the lack of a credible competing ideology to capitalism eventually dissolved much cultural opposition.

Soon the commercial clout of America, embodied in Fordism (the system of mass production named after car magnate Henry Ford), started a period of prosperity in the US and western Europe, where the economic miracle of West Germany became a beacon of capitalist values. Throughout that time, the counter-cultural elements of society focused on protesting against commercial interests that were benefiting from conflicts such as the Vietnam war, but the improvement in living standards, fuelled by rampant consumerism, ensured that most people remained supportive of the capitalist system.

Nevertheless, a growing alliance of interests began to challenge the values of the western...

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