Mitterand at the G-7 summit in 1983, fourth from left. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.When Francois Mitterrand's Socialists assumed power in France in 1981 with a Keynesian programme in hand, he and his coalition partners, the Communists, were forced to backtrack. The French currency could not defend its exchange rate and as inflation spiralled out of control, Mitterrand began introducing neo-liberal reforms - the famous U-turn of 1983. Andreas G. Papandreou's Pasok in Greece put up more of a resistance to neo-liberal globalisation, but its programme was far more radical than Mitterrand's. Several discontinuities before and after it assumed office occurred and a transmogrified type of socialism took shape in Greece in the 1980s, the most peculiar aspect of which was the introduction of a national health system and other welfare reforms, financed via domestic and external borrowing, rather than taxation as is the norm in the west.
Obviously, this worsened the country's public debt situation, bringing it up to 100% of GDP. Let us dig a little further. Before they conquered power in 1917, Lenin's Bolsheviks advocated a direct passage to socialism (equivalent to those years of the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat"); confiscation and nationalisation of all land and property and all power to the workers' and peasants' councils (the Soviets). Lenin, in particular, despised Taylorism, which in a series of articles in 1913-14, he characterised as the most inhuman capitalist way of organising industrial relations.
What did he do after 1917? He introduced the famous ‘New Economic Policy’ and ‘tax in kind’, advocating co-existence between the public and private sectors of the economy; began praising Taylorism as the advanced method Soviet Russia most needed in order to increase its productivity, and invited English capitalists to invest in his country through diplomatic channels and various interviews he gave in the then Manchester Guardian. Interestingly, Lenin then praised Plekhanov as the best Russian Marxist philosopher that its youth should study (before 1917, Plekhanov and other Marxists of the Second International were dubbed ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors of socialism’).
