Friday 12 June 2009

Marquand on Gamble

The New Statesman has what is the dream team match-up - for us here at Next Left at least - on Andrew Gamble's must read new book 'The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession'.

For Marquand, "the best starting point for the long road to reconstruction that the left now has to take is Gamble’s new book".

Read the review here

Marquand's take:


As Gamble points out, no one has yet offered a compelling alternative to the busted flush of neoliberalism. “Back to Keynes”, the new mantra of most social democrats, is less an alternative than a piece of escapist nostalgia ... The left has no hope of winning the battle of ideas if it has nothing better to offer than a spruced-up Keynesianism. To win, it will have to jump out of the Keynesian box in which it has been trapped for too long, admit that there was substance to the neoliberal critique of the postwar Keynesian order, and think new thoughts in new ways.

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