TA

Two points need to be made here. The attack on the extreme center has come from both the Left and the Right. Behind Corbyn, for example, is the political insurrection of the youth who have taken over the Labour Party and made it what it is. To give you one example of the change they have brought: there is a constituency on the outskirts of London called Chingford, which used to be a very right-wing seat. Margaret Thatcher’s close colleague Norman Tebbit was elected there, and the seat is now occupied by Iain Duncan Smith, the far-right Conservative member who comes up with appalling ideas on social welfare and so on.

With the groundswell of support at the last election, Labour came close to winning Chingford, though it narrowly missed. Now, with a new candidate, a young Bengali woman named Faiza Shaheen, Labour are really targeting it. Last weekend — the first weekend of the election campaign — five hundred Labour members were out in that constituency campaigning, knocking on doors.

Labour now has a well-organized, well-trained team of — largely young — campaigners who are targeting marginal seats. In contrast, the Tories, whose average membership age is now above sixty, have hardly any young people in their ranks and have had to hire a firm to run their campaign. They’ve privatized the election. Some PR company will be trained like robots to go and slander Corbyn and attack the Labour Party. A single intelligent challenge to these outsourced idiots going around the country and they won’t be able to give any answers. It’s largely because of this key contrast between the two parties that Corbyn is going up and up in the polls, even in the first week of the campaign.

But to return to your point, beyond Corbyn and Sanders, it has largely been the Right who have been leveling attacks on the center: Salvini in Italy, Le Pen in France, the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland] in Germany. This is disturbing, and no one can suggest that this development has been provoked by the Left — it has been provoked by the policies of the extreme center.

So it’s not all good news, but it does prove Stiglitz’s point that neoliberalism has failed, and that the last forty years have been in many ways a disaster. Many of us were saying this since the system’s inception.

[There was] the complete failure of [Michelle] Bachelet, the former president of Chile from the socialist party and extreme-center politician par excellence. She had two terms in office, and she completely failed to alter the social and political infrastructure left in place by Pinochet, who, apart from being a fascist, was also a firm supporter of neoliberalism, and Chile was the first country they decided to use as a guinea-pig country.