In this talk from last year’s Revolution Festival, Ben Gliniecki looks at the current collapse of the liberal status quo, providing a Marxist analysis of liberalism’s rise and fall.
In November 2016, American voters dispatched “the electoral equivalent of a suicide bomber to Washington”, according to the Financial Times. Only months before, the British public had delivered a shocking blow to the European establishment by voting by a narrow majority to leave the European Union.
Today, nationalist parties across Europe are rising in the polls and a series of constitutional crises are opening up in Italy, Brazil and Britain (of course).
These are again highlighting the weakness of the liberal political and economic order that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, had been considered by many to be indestructible.
But what exactly is liberalism? What does it represent? And why is it now in crisis everywhere? Ben Gliniecki considers these questions and discusses the possibility of a new world order based on the power of the working class.
