Summary

Ronald Reagan had been elected US president in 1981, and began the long unwinding of post-war progressive economic and social policy awaited by the American ruling class, but which had produced social welfare and full employment for the 50’s and into the 60’s when a combination of the cost of the Vietnam war and the Arab oil shock produced an economic crash. Initiating a program of de-regulation of industry, and of finance capital, and an aggressive anti-union assault, he began the process of offshoring, globalised production and finance, and the beginnings of the financialisation of capital and its oligarchisation that we now face. At the time we were unaware of the extent to which this would polarise and destroy and feudalise the society we were in but we could see the beginnings of the rollback and the destruction.