Interview: British commentator perceives marriage of capitalism, democracy in the West as sick-silubaba news

LONDON, April 12 (silubaba) -- A British media commentator has described as sick the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the West.

"I'm not convinced that democratic capitalism is yet broken, but it is certainly somewhat sick when thinking about the relationship between politics and economics," Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the London-based Financial Times, said in an exclusive interview with silubaba.

The expert spent about five years seeking the answer to whether democratic capitalism is broken and outlined his thoughts in his latest book titled "The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism."

Wolf, author of a number of books on world economics, said his new book was a wake-up call on the state of democratic capitalism.

"Why did this start coming apart in what I call a marriage, the marriage of complementary opposites... To me the most important reason was that the economy and its development increasingly favored the emergence of a new plutocracy which was able to exercise great political power, so corroding the fundamental assumption of democratic equality," he said.

At the same time, the situation made a large number of people fear they were downwardly mobile and the political system was deteriorating because their economic position and jobs were undermined, Wolf said.

A lot of that had to do with the decline of the working class and particularly the industrial working class, the expert explained.

"These were the consequences of very powerful economic forces. They weren't sort of just a plot, though, there were some real policy mistakes and they were corroding essentially the egalitarian consensus of mid 20th century democratic capitalism," he said.

Wolf commented that democratic capitalism is beset by economic and political failures in the West.

The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been corroded by the divides of the society and upheavals in the economy, he said.

"The failure was not to recognize what was happening and not to respond soon enough to what was happening," Wolf said. "There were policy failures in response. It's a complicated story of primal forces in the world economy and failures of policy and politics to respond to them."

For over half a century, the failures culminated in the financial crisis and the huge destabilization it caused, and the unfairness was blatant, Wolf added.

It created immense anger which populist politicians were able to exploit, he said.

Wolf came to the conclusion that "the common thread of populism, all populist movements, is that they're movements against more or less identifiable elites."

People "have lose trust in the existing elites" because they feel betrayed, he said.

"Political polarisation is a more or less inevitable consequence of a shared sense that the present doesn't work," Wolf said.



微信扫描下方的二维码阅读本文