What caused the right-wing recapturing of the global sphere in the 80's/90's?

[Catmatic Leftist]

What caused the right-wing recapturing of the global sphere in the 80's/90's?

I know the Red Scare propaganda had a bit to do with it, and the natural flow of capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie allowed them to consolidate their power, but what other factors caused this rise in neoliberalism?

[Nox]

The Red Scare had a major factor, and also I guess the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990's gave people confidence in right wing economies.

[DarkPast]

One thing that should be mentioned is the number of organisations and political parties that dropped communism from their names and/or programmes in 1990-1992 (usually shifting to nationalism or "democratic socialism"). Makes one wonder how committed to communism they really were, as opposed to merely taking advantage of Soviet support.

[azlea]

the right wing has been dominating the political stage throughout the world ever since the end of world war 2. in america, the fbi has been beating up, intimidating, surveilance, harasing, arresting, killing left wingers since at least the 1940s. theyve also been busting up unions. they also send provocateurs such as bill ayers to infiltrate left wing groups, ultimately crushing them. around the world, the u.s, and europe has been overthrowing left wing governments, using various tactics since the 1950s. i think the whole right wing capture was a gradual process. perhaps they got really good at starting colour revolutions by the 1980s and were able to get rid of the ussr. if you want to look even further back, capitalist countries such as britain have always been good at playing countries against each other. when britain and france gave up their african colonies, they drew up national borders, specifically engineered to create conflicts amongst tribes. since the africans were too busy fighting against each other, they could easily be controlled and dominated, thus continuing the colonialism, only now, they installed pupet governments instead of directly colonising. japan is also a good example of a country that is a pupet government of the usa and can be played against China, russia, north korea, etc. capitalists have even used taiwan and hong kong to play against China itself. the capitalists have also been playing the sunis against the shiites. theyve played iran against iraq. india against pakistan. pretty much the same tactics throughout the world. they have sepratist movements going throughout the world including the tamil tigers of sri lanka. thats why you hear so much propaganda coming from the establishment about "helping" darfur. the main reason south sudan even became a country is because they have oil. the capitalists sponsored terrorists to take over the southern half, the same way the capitalists are sponsoring al qaeda in Libya to exploit their country. i guess the left wing governments dont have enough money to play these games, or counter them, because it is primarily the right wing countries who exploit the resources, and guard them with brute force

[MarxSchmarx]

Two things - reaction to / resignation after the failures of the liberalizing tendencies of the 1960s and its degeneration into petty-bourgeois cultural hedonism, and the oil shock.

The former took many forms, each in their own countries. In the US it led to a massive backlash of white voters against the full enfranchisement of blacks. In Latin America it took the form of a repudiation of the large-scale infrastructure/ public works programmes instituted by technocrats and entailed a broader embrace of neoliberalism.

But none of this would have been possible without the the oil shock that really exposed the fragility of the western industrial economic base. It prompted a move to globalization, service economy, and automation, all of which destroyed the traditional stronghold of the left, the industrial working class. It took the left nearly 60 years from the 1860s or thereabout to learn how to effectively organize factory workers, and it may take just as long before we figure out how to base a vibrant movement on part-time service workers.

[Jimmie Higgins]

But none of this would have been possible without the the oil shock that really exposed the fragility of the western industrial economic base. ^I think this stuff is really the decisive factor.

I'll use some examples from the US since it's been that ruling class which has been sort of the leader in pushing a lot of this ideology and neoliberalist policies.

In the US in the 1950s there was willingness on the part of the US ruling class to grant the US population some reforms in exchange for social peace and stability. Similar things happened in other countries as the destruction of the war and reorganization of the global imperialist balance of power changed. The ruling class didn't want a return to the pre-war workers struggles and in the US there was a strike wave at the end of WWII. They were willing to give reforms and steady wage increases at home while offering post-colonial counties some deals in exchange for siding one way or another - and the post-colonial countries that didn't play ball would have to face the increase post-war military power of the US and Russia.

So in the 1960s in the US there was "guns and butter" policies and a long economic boom, but the boom began to slow down by the end of the decade. The return of economic crisis convinced the ruling class that Kensianism was no security for their system and so they began to try and figure out how to restore profits through lowering working class living standards.

But after a generation of reforms and a decade of increasing radicalism makes that project difficult. So they had to figure out a sort of social-base for passing the anti-worker and pro-business policies that they wanted/needed. Business interests and Chambers of Commerce funded and set up think-tanks and institutes to find ideological justifications for a more aggressive class war against workers; they picked up the broken pieces of southern rural racism and organized a new kind of urban racist system to attack both New Deal reforms and gains of the civil rights and black power movements; they organized among the evangelical churches and gun-rights and other groups so that pro-business policies could have their own foot-soldiers to counter the community-based power of unions and grassroots social activists.

The effect of this has been a generation-long one-sided class war. Well-meaning liberals and progressives were unprepared for this because they don't have a class view of society and more directly because they are tied to the Democratic party who by the mid-80s had already been pretty much won to the new aggressive phase of the class war - DLC supported Clinton sealed the deal and since then the Dems really haven't even given lip-service to the sort of liberal politics of the 60s and 70s. (the Debate within the Dems and Republicans - remember Bush I called trickle-down voodoo economics - over the one sided class war was never "should we or shouldn't we?" it was really over "can we actually get away this without a shitstorm of push-back?"). But even the radical left was unprepared for this class war because through most of the period of radicalism, they expected a revolution would happen. The left was also inexperienced and without a real social forces because there wasn't much of a worker's struggle in the economic sphere until the 1970s. So they were largely not organizing workers and many people on the left didn't even see the point and looked to Maoist ideas or romantic insurrectionist ideas or to students or to the counter-culture or to lumpen-prols.

The ruling class was going to attack us no matter what because the loss of profitability meant that the post-war boom model was no longer possible. The subjective thing is how people responded and unfortunately in most places they workers were caught flat-footed and ultimately lost.

But right now we are still in that class war and the ruling class is trying even harder to squeeze blood from us to restore their declining profits - the only difference is that people are starting to fight back more.