Arnout said:
Overall people living in capitalism are still vastly better off than during Thatcher's reign. In that sense, saying that she created enormous misery is misguided at best. What Thatcher did was prepare for the future. Societies needed a shake up. Looking at England in the 70s, we see outdated coal mines and a dysfunctional manufacturing sector, combined with a generous welfare state. This combination was unsustainable, and Thatcher tried to fix this. Maybe she was too brutal in doing some things, but in the end there was no choice.
When the costs of home production were too high to meet consumption demands based of course on the folly of eternal growth, capitalism found a way to compensate by exploiting more congenial labor markets abroad in the underdeveloped world, thus eviscerating local manufacturing and depressing entire segments of society. At the same time a service industry was invented to provide jobs to workers no longer in the labor market, while mass credit became a way for the banks to profit on interest repayments on the money that wasn't put into their salaries. Nice system.
Of course to make it all work the social state had to be literally dismantled along with the trade barriers, while the financial markets had to become deregulated for capital to obtain its final dominion over human beings, the big players to get exceedingly rich, while the middle class and poor increasingly struggled, stripped as they were of even the minimum of social net to cushion the fall - though at once were given promises of a better life if they just continued to be good consumers and have faith in the opportunities that the neoliberal regime with its "new economy" surely would promise.
Thatcher, who was really the last traditional States(wo)man, and Regan, who was really the first post-modern one in his conviction that sovereign debt really doesn’t matter, shared a common loathing for society and collective organization and had a policy guided by a market fundamentalism that has since demonstrated to have impoverished the West both materially and culturally, while at once signaling its decline. The general boom in the beginning, however, rested mostly upon rhetorical foundations and was geared to stirring up the most deplorable human instincts: greed, callousness, mendacity, materialism, baseness.
Communism was vigorously opposed even in supporting the most bloody dictators and regimes, while having tea with the torturers of Pinochet, for her Mendela was a terrorist, Mideast policy further fostered anti-Western Arab loathing, Britain moved further away from Europe, workers became destitute, the financial markets were all a buzz, etc.
When in 1979 she became Prime Minister, Britain was in a manner of speaking suspended between the failed attempt of the previous labor government to give life and stability to a social democracy and a new approach toward economic governance. The latter triumphed over the former, while Thatcher seminated more division than any political figure in modern history. Mass unemployment, closed factories, destroyed communities: that's what she left in her wake. She was a warrior and her foe was the working class. Her victories were facilitated in large part by a corrupt labor party and a majority of the union leaders. Thanks to her policy, which gave rise to neoliberal economics, Britain and the West finds itself in the current disaster.
Not what we call a decent track record, either in regards to the shape and form of the evolution of capitalism or in regards to policy.
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