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Saturday 26 May 2012

Status Anxiety

If the greens have their way, this recession will get worse. We should spend, spend, spend

It may be that the hard-left activists and middle-class greens who are united under the anti-capitalist banner actually do want the recession to turn into an unmanageable depression. Revolutionary socialists often talk in millenarian terms about the imminent demise of the global financial system and I suspect that a majority of greens would welcome a return to an agrarian, pre-industrial way of life. It’s the secular equivalent of the evangelical Christian belief in End Times. The fact that the collapse of the world economy would result in mass unemployment, a global health crisis and tens of millions of people dying of starvation is neither here nor there.

With a bit of luck, the G20 protest will turn out to be a damp squib. I cannot help taking some comfort from the fact that one of the leaders of the anti-capitalist movement is Marina Pepper, a former Playboy centrefold who used to work on the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your clothes.

More articles from: Toby Young | this section

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