Neoliberalism and the Battle of Ideas
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Title : Neoliberalism and the Battle of Ideas
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You are now reading the article Neoliberalism and the Battle of Ideas With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/10/neoliberalism-and-battle-of-ideas.html
Title : Neoliberalism and the Battle of Ideas
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If you want to see the problems of the Tory party encapsulated, watch Boris Johnson's conference speech. For the first and perhaps the only time, the faithful turned out in large numbers to listen to the man who would be king expend a great deal of words saying nothing in particular. But there is one thing our fatuous foreign secretary did touch on, which marked "Call me" Philip Hammond's speech yesterday, has cast a shadow over the depleted fringes and will haunt Theresa May's tomorrow, and that is the idea of loss. It's not just the election, it's the yawning realisation that insurgent Corbynism has not only brought left Labourism back to the fore, but there lurking in the background is the spectre of communism. What is worse, its rude return in the Russian Revolution's centennial year eschews tankie patina for the promise of a better future. It's a communism entirely in tune with the zeitgeist. Fully automated luxury communism is more than a semi-jokey meme, it's where the cutting edge of leftist thought is at and its elaboration is drawing in many thousands of radicalised brains.
Small wonder the Tories are nervous. As Hammond observed, debates they thought were settled in the 1980s are coming back. At an opening address away from the conference hall, the PM said it was necessary to make the case for free market capitalism all over again. Johnson went there too, and sundry commentators, including our intellectually-challenged friends at CapX, are panicking and turning out (what they think are) hit pieces demonstrating the superiority of neoliberal capitalism to its statist/social democratic variants and, naturally, North Korea. I'm certainly all for a clash of ideas, and if the thin gruel doled out by Tory politicians and ideologues seen thus far is the best they can do then they stand no hope of stymieing the intellectual advance of leftist ideas.
There is another thing hampering them as well. The Tories didn't win the battle of ideas in the 1980s by the force of argument, they secured their temporary victory on the basis of, well, force. Social democratic and socialist ideas weren't debated into a deep sleep, they were bludgeoned into a coma by mounted police at Orgreave and batons at Wapping. The defeat of the two pivotal labour movement struggles of that decade sapped the militancy and belief of hundreds of thousands of workers, some of which carried the pall of defeat with them as they ascended the trade union ranks. This helps explain the "new unionism" of the 1990s and after with its emphasis on service provision and partnership with the bosses. The trauma of loss demobilised masses of people and, unsurprisingly, the Labour Party reflected this with a collapse in confidence of the left and the rise of New Labour. Internationally, the demise of the Soviet Union and its client regimes cemented the triumph of bourgeois ideas. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history in, well, The End of History, as the contest between neoliberal capitalism and its adversaries went it didn't present as an entirely ludicrous argument.
The battle of ideas wasn't just about force. Thatcher, Reagan and co. exorcised the bourgeois imagination of its phantoms because, at least, enough people were doing well. While the miners suffered and were starved back to the pit heads, plenty of folks got along quite nicely. With the NUM broken, Thatcher could get on with privatising the utilities and letting council tenants buy their homes on the cheap. The result was the creation of a layer of working class people with a modest property holding and perhaps a few British Gas shares which, the Tories hoped, would be enough to nudge them towards voting Conservative. At the same time, credit exploded as real wages modestly rose and modestly fell, which lowered the bar of entry into the rapidly diversifying consumer markets. Meanwhile, the introduction of markets into public services and the fiddling with education policy started positioning service users as self-activating consumers and pupils and students as young Thatcherites who would, and could only get on by their own individual efforts. This was the marrying up of individualism with the entrepreneurial self, of the inculcation of neoliberal subjectivity against the backdrop of rising affluence powered by privatisation and debt.
As many people have observed of late, the problem with Thatcherism is you eventually run out of things to privatise. Free market ideas became the ruling orthodoxy because it appeared to work. If your argument is that capitalism minus regulation, a decent sized public sector and powerful trade unions leads to generalised prosperity, then it had better deliver otherwise people are going to get sceptical of such claims. And this is where we are now. Corbynism is popular and opening the gate to a certain pair of German gentlemen because capitalism isn't delivering for enough. As Chris has recently noted, the right are going out of their way to prove the Marxist contention that capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed. Even tweaking capitalism so young people can look forward, as David Willets puts it, "to own a place of their own, to have a decent funded pension and to have a reasonably secure job that's well paid" is entirely off the agenda. Instead all the government can offer is a £10bn boost to help to buy, which does nothing to address housing supply and does everything to force prices upwards, and freeze tuition fees after whacking them up to £9,250.
The problem the Tories now have is they are having to fight the ideas wars again without cops, without baubles and bribes, and against the backdrop of an obviously broken system seemingly incapable of offering a better future. It's a fight taking place on a more or less equal footing, and that is why they're terrified.
If you want to see the problems of the Tory party encapsulated, watch Boris Johnson's conference speech. For the first and perhaps the only time, the faithful turned out in large numbers to listen to the man who would be king expend a great deal of words saying nothing in particular. But there is one thing our fatuous foreign secretary did touch on, which marked "Call me" Philip Hammond's speech yesterday, has cast a shadow over the depleted fringes and will haunt Theresa May's tomorrow, and that is the idea of loss. It's not just the election, it's the yawning realisation that insurgent Corbynism has not only brought left Labourism back to the fore, but there lurking in the background is the spectre of communism. What is worse, its rude return in the Russian Revolution's centennial year eschews tankie patina for the promise of a better future. It's a communism entirely in tune with the zeitgeist. Fully automated luxury communism is more than a semi-jokey meme, it's where the cutting edge of leftist thought is at and its elaboration is drawing in many thousands of radicalised brains.
Small wonder the Tories are nervous. As Hammond observed, debates they thought were settled in the 1980s are coming back. At an opening address away from the conference hall, the PM said it was necessary to make the case for free market capitalism all over again. Johnson went there too, and sundry commentators, including our intellectually-challenged friends at CapX, are panicking and turning out (what they think are) hit pieces demonstrating the superiority of neoliberal capitalism to its statist/social democratic variants and, naturally, North Korea. I'm certainly all for a clash of ideas, and if the thin gruel doled out by Tory politicians and ideologues seen thus far is the best they can do then they stand no hope of stymieing the intellectual advance of leftist ideas.
There is another thing hampering them as well. The Tories didn't win the battle of ideas in the 1980s by the force of argument, they secured their temporary victory on the basis of, well, force. Social democratic and socialist ideas weren't debated into a deep sleep, they were bludgeoned into a coma by mounted police at Orgreave and batons at Wapping. The defeat of the two pivotal labour movement struggles of that decade sapped the militancy and belief of hundreds of thousands of workers, some of which carried the pall of defeat with them as they ascended the trade union ranks. This helps explain the "new unionism" of the 1990s and after with its emphasis on service provision and partnership with the bosses. The trauma of loss demobilised masses of people and, unsurprisingly, the Labour Party reflected this with a collapse in confidence of the left and the rise of New Labour. Internationally, the demise of the Soviet Union and its client regimes cemented the triumph of bourgeois ideas. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history in, well, The End of History, as the contest between neoliberal capitalism and its adversaries went it didn't present as an entirely ludicrous argument.
The battle of ideas wasn't just about force. Thatcher, Reagan and co. exorcised the bourgeois imagination of its phantoms because, at least, enough people were doing well. While the miners suffered and were starved back to the pit heads, plenty of folks got along quite nicely. With the NUM broken, Thatcher could get on with privatising the utilities and letting council tenants buy their homes on the cheap. The result was the creation of a layer of working class people with a modest property holding and perhaps a few British Gas shares which, the Tories hoped, would be enough to nudge them towards voting Conservative. At the same time, credit exploded as real wages modestly rose and modestly fell, which lowered the bar of entry into the rapidly diversifying consumer markets. Meanwhile, the introduction of markets into public services and the fiddling with education policy started positioning service users as self-activating consumers and pupils and students as young Thatcherites who would, and could only get on by their own individual efforts. This was the marrying up of individualism with the entrepreneurial self, of the inculcation of neoliberal subjectivity against the backdrop of rising affluence powered by privatisation and debt.
As many people have observed of late, the problem with Thatcherism is you eventually run out of things to privatise. Free market ideas became the ruling orthodoxy because it appeared to work. If your argument is that capitalism minus regulation, a decent sized public sector and powerful trade unions leads to generalised prosperity, then it had better deliver otherwise people are going to get sceptical of such claims. And this is where we are now. Corbynism is popular and opening the gate to a certain pair of German gentlemen because capitalism isn't delivering for enough. As Chris has recently noted, the right are going out of their way to prove the Marxist contention that capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed. Even tweaking capitalism so young people can look forward, as David Willets puts it, "to own a place of their own, to have a decent funded pension and to have a reasonably secure job that's well paid" is entirely off the agenda. Instead all the government can offer is a £10bn boost to help to buy, which does nothing to address housing supply and does everything to force prices upwards, and freeze tuition fees after whacking them up to £9,250.
The problem the Tories now have is they are having to fight the ideas wars again without cops, without baubles and bribes, and against the backdrop of an obviously broken system seemingly incapable of offering a better future. It's a fight taking place on a more or less equal footing, and that is why they're terrified.
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You are now reading the article Neoliberalism and the Battle of Ideas With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/10/neoliberalism-and-battle-of-ideas.html