The Role of Foreign Exchange Speculation in the Demise of the Workers’ State and the Genesis of the Bourgeois Left
Meghnad Desai with Bill Clinton There is a growing consciousness among nationalists and even conservatives that the “Left” – those parties or cultural elements that previously defended the interests of the working class – have largely abandoned the proletariat in favor of “woke”, identity-oriented platforms that not only do not serve workers’ interests, but actually further capital’s ends. Neoliberal economist and propagandist Meghnad Desai, formerly of the London School of Economics, provides a useful summary of a major contributing factor to this decades-long trend in his largely boring but occasionally interesting 2002 book Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism . The key to the dismantling of the workers’ state, as he explains, was the abolition of the gold-based monetary system established by the Bretton Woods Agreement: This was a historic moment. Just as the British government was rejecting Keynesian reflationary polic...