By the 1970s, the cons�nsus around Keynesianism was unraveling, in part in reaction to the "structural crisis" in the world economy. Dumenil and Levy note the main aspects of the crisis: "diminished growth rates, a wave of unemployment and cumulative inflation:'11 Elsewhere they identify the crisis as a decline in the rate of profit; unemployment, then, was not a cause of the crisis but an efect, a way for employers to control costs. 12 Other scholars draw attention to additional blows against the Keynesian economic orthodoxy: the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1973, the dramatic increases in the price of oil ("oil shocks") brought about by OPEC in 1973 and 1979, and the failure of K.eynesianism "to develop public understandings of the economy which could compete with the neoliberal rhetoric of 'free markets: "13 The previous chapter attributes this failure not to Keynesians but to leftists who joined the attack on the state and collective approaches to the economy. The left's failure to ·defend core IZeynesian commitments to collectivizing risk, diminishing the impact of contingenc;ies on al concerned (such as ilness, natural disaster, economic crisis), and redistributing some portion of the economic surplus to ensure a min�al standard of living contributed to the hegemonic position of neoliberal ideology. 14 Indeed, this failure is the fundamental political trauma affecting the contemporary left. Absent an adequate defense of collective approaches to common problems and in the face of seeming acceptance of the fiction that there is no alternative, the left knows neither who or that it is, nor what it would advocate if it existed at al.
Thatcher and Reagan responded to rising unemployment and inflation in the UK and United States by tightening the money supply (already undertaken by Jimy Carter in the United States), reducing the power and influence of the unions (Thatcher infamously breaking the coal :miners union and Reagan firing the air-trafic controlers who refused to return to work), deregulating the economy (eliminating or loosening regulatory oversight in a slew of areas, including banking, communications, utilities, trading, airlines, and the railways so as to foster competition), and pursuing privatization strategies (involving both the subcontracting out of public services and their complete selling of to the private sector) .15 Reagan, and to an extent his predecessor, Jimy Carter, specifically defended privatization in terms of neoliberal ideology, that is, as a means of forcing government to ctembrace private marketplace models" and "respect capitalist measures of success:'16 Bill Clinton and AI Gore further extended neoliberal ideology. As became ever clearer during Clinton's first term, government was like any purchased good, a product offered to satisfy customers even as its production and provision demanded a mindful eye toward the constraints of the market.
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