Economic Realism and the Lie of “No Alternatives”
There Are Not Only Alternatives—We Already Lived Them
The idea that “there is no alternative”—a slogan usually associated with Margaret Thatcher—to the current economic order is one of the most powerful narratives in Western political discourse; perhaps the most powerful one. It is repeated so often that it rarely even needs defending anymore. It is taken for granted as the bedrock of realistic economic thinking—contrasted with dreamy idealism that supposedly led countless times to ruin, poverty, and worse.
“There is no alternative” has serious implications. First, our austerity societies not only make most of us poor but also underdevelop our huge individual economic potential. Second, we are unable to respond to crises, be it climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because, so the response goes, “who can pay for that?”
“There is no alternative” rests on many propagandistic lies, yet two stand out in particular: a variety of historical revisionism about Western economies and socialist parties, as well as the identification of alternative models with the USSR.
Historic Revisionism
The first is not so much a lie but rather the active suppression of recent history. Everyone familiar with the history of economics knows that every economically successful society today has been built by statecraft and industrial policy.
Indeed, the most prosperous period of economic development—the golden post-war years from the late 1940s to the 1970s—was the result of nationalizations, industrial policy, and planning, both conservative and socialist, and often inspired by Keynesianism. I have argued many times in detail for this claim, so I will not repeat it here. My most thorough article on the issue can be found here.
The USSR as a Strawman for “All” Alternatives
The second propaganda lie that maintains “there is no alternative” is the identification of the USSR and the countries it inspired with alternative, usually socialist, economies. That is a bizarre identification for two obvious reasons.
First, the best alternative to our current economic order is, as stated above, the golden post-war years, often led by socialist parties such as Germany’s SPD or the UK’s Labour Party. Of course, historical revisionism has contributed to making us believe that these parties were not socialist but merely social democratic. But this separation is itself an expression of historical revisionism because social democracy is one variety of socialism—and, in many countries, the most popular and historically established one.
Second, it is difficult to state whether the USSR and Bolshevism were even socialist. At best, they were what Marx called vulgar or primitive barracks communism, i.e., varieties of atavistic collectivist ideologies. Every student of Marx should know that at least Marxian socialism is about freedom and the good life—Bolshevism was about terror, tyranny, and collectivist primitivism.
Naturally, this is why it was propagandistically so attractive to identify the USSR with socialism and economic alternatives to our current neoliberal economic order—while at the same time transfiguring Europe’s socialist parties as non-socialist, merely social liberal.
There Are Not Only Alternatives—We Already Lived Them
There are many lies that keep the current order going. But the two above do a lot of work for neoliberals. Yet, it is not difficult to come up with alternatives. Just look at history, just look at the success of both conservative and socialist industrial policy and planning.
Of course, we are not bound to these past models. While we pride ourselves on our ability to think creatively and innovatively—at least when it comes to art and technology—we have seemingly given up thinking about alternative forms of society. That itself is the result of the lie that all alternative approaches to the current order failed, with “all” meaning the Soviet Union.
Whether we want to adapt old successful alternative models to current realities or develop new ones, ideally based on successful old ones, is up to us. But it cannot be overstated: alternatives are not only possible—many of them are and were better than the last four decades of neoliberal austerity and poverty generation.
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© 2025 Alexander Jeuk for the text. For the image see the caption.