Beyond the crisis of liberalism

There is a groundswell of popular resistance to the forces of reaction, but the left must break out of its defensive posture

The problem of liberalism is that in the US – and this is true of all advanced industrial societies – there has been no significant reform of the existing of economic system for decades. In the United States, since the great era of reform in the 1930s, with the New Deal, the last major reform was the establishment of Medicare in 1966. In the UK and other countries, the main period of reform followed the second world war, with the consolidation of the welfare state.

In the US, Medicare was the last serious political advance; there has been nothing significant since. On education and the environment – which have both been more recent targets of liberal reform – we have gone nowhere, or even regressed. So, given the current configuration of world capitalism, it is apparent that what I define as the liberal reform – that is, reform within the capitalist system – has reached a dead end.