Global financial crisis is the “end of the era” for capitalism
By Alastair Bruce, MSN Money UK Editor
November 03 2008
One of Britain's best known historians believes the global financial crisis is the "end of an era" for capitalism and a long overdue return to government intervention.
Eric Hobsbawm, the 91-year-old Marxist historian, author and academic, told MSN Money the past two decades of unfettered capitalism had been as damaging as Soviet economic totalitarianism.
Biography and further details on Eric Hobsbawm
In his responses to MSN Money's questions, Hobsbawm predicted that far from being a hiccup or correction of the markets, "the present crisis is certainly the end of the era in the development of the global capitalist economy."
Hobsbawm's views on the present crisis present a radical counterpoint to mainstream financial journalism and uncover potential causes and repercussions that have not received much coverage.
The media and economic analysts have given many explanations of why the crash happened and who is to blame. Few have blamed free market capitalism itself as the cause of its own inevitable demise. Many point instead to elements within the system that could have been controlled better.
The New York Times, for instance, argued that Alan Greenspan's support for derivatives while Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006 "helped enable an ambitious American experiment in letting market forces run free. Now, the nation is confronting the consequences." It said that if Greenspan had acted differently "the current crisis might have been averted or muted."
Hobsbawm in contrast told MSN Money that he believed a "free market theology," a sort of blind faith in capitalism, was the root cause.
In the e-mail interview, Hobsbawm said that running global economies on an "effectively unregulated basis" is as doomed to failure as "the project of a totally state-run planned economy in the Soviet systems." He said he welcomed state intervention as a "return to common sense".
What do you think of Eric Hobsbawm's views?
We might be entering a period when traditionally socialist principles hold sway, and if this means that the traditional aims of socialism - to create conditions for a good life for all people equally and to subordinate profit to human values - are adhered to, then so much the better for Hobsbawm.
What opponents of free markets have to consider though is whether regulation and prosperity can ever go hand-in-hand, whether if we want boom we always have to accept bust, a point Gordon Brown might have pondered more often since 1997.
How the electorate in an increasingly politically and economically marginalised US will react to an extended period of bust will work itself out over the next few years. After the 1929 depression Hobsbawm writes that there was a turn to the right of the political spectrum. No matter the result of the McCain/Obama election a further consequence of the crisis might well be a further strengthening of the influence of evangelical politics in the US.
End of an era for capitalism?
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Originally Posted by Viking Prince
