Van Badham: Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse
The pressing need is
not to pray for intercession; Varoufakis’s call is right – “collective,
democratic political action” is the genuine alternative, and it’s broader
democratic investment in the institutions of parties, movements, academies and
media that always builds the world to come. That is, after all, what the
neoliberals did. And look – just look – how far they got.
For 40 years, the
ideology popularly known as “neoliberalism” has dominated political
decision-making in the English-speaking west. People
hate it. Neoliberalism’s sale of state assets, offshored jobs, stripped
services, poorly-invested infrastructure and armies of the forcibly unemployed
have delivered, not promised “efficiency” and “flexibility” to communities, but
discomfort and misery.
The wealth of a few has now swelled to a level of
conspicuousness that must politely be considered vulgar yet
the philosophy’s entrenched itself so deeply in how governments make decisions
and allocate resources that one of its megaphones once declared its triumph
“the end of history”. It wasn’t, as even
he admitted later. And given some of the events of the contemporary
political moment, it’s possible to conclude from auguries like smoke rising
from a garbage fire and patterns of political blood upon the floor that history
may be hastening neoliberalism towards an end that its advocates did not
forecast.
Three years ago, I
remarked that comedian Russell Brand may have stumbled onto a stirring
spirit of the times when his “capitalism sucks” contemplations drew
stadium-sized crowds. Beyond Brand – politically and materially – the crowds
have only been growing. Is the political
zeitgeist an
old spectre up for some new haunting? Or are the times more like a
strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “the combination of inequality and
low wage growth is fuelling discontent. Time to sing a new song.” In days gone past,
they used to slice open an animal’s belly and study the shape of its spilled
entrails to find out. But we could just keep an eye on the news.
Here are my seven
signs of the neoliberal apocalypse... read more:
