La gauche face à la crise

Having acceded to power on a program of économie recovery, the French left, in less than two years, found itself forced to practice the polity of austerity which most of the Western countries had adopted. Failure of « keynesianism of the left », absence of bold ideas from the socialists government which did not dare carry its logic to the end, failure of a « statism » incompatible with the dynamic of modem societies : there is no lack of thèses and books which hâve tried to prove, sometimes by neglecting the facts, that there existed a miracle solution to the crisis. This book sheds a more serene, subtle and useful light on the longest French expérience of a left-wing government. It combines a theoretical analysis of the crisis with a quantitative description of world économie évolution since the beginning of the 1970s. After a review of the recovery program, the dévaluations, the external constraints, and the fight against unemployment, the authors analyze the results of the austerity program and outline the conditions which would lead to world growth, indispensable to the réduction of the massive unemployment brought about by ten years of crisis.