B005x3sa74 Ebok

Like the neoliberals that preceded them, the ‘neocons’ had long been nurturing their particular views on the social order, in universities (Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago being particularly influential) and well-funded think-tanks, and through influential publications (such as Commentary).20 US neoconservatives favour corporate power, pri

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In the US in particular, the phrase ‘class warfare’ is now confined to the right-wing media (for example the Wall Street Journal) to denigrate all forms of criticism that threaten to undermine a supposedly unified and coherent national purpose (i.e. the restoration of upper-class power!). The first lesson we must learn, therefore, is that if it loo

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Human rights issues came to prominence after 1980 and positively boomed after the events in Tiananmen Square and the end of the Cold War in 1989. This corresponds exactly with the trajectory of neoliberalization, and the two movements are deeply implicated in each other. Undoubtedly, the neoliberal insistence upon the individual as the foundational

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For a shift of this magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization

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But ruling classes rarely, if ever, voluntarily surrender any of their power and I see no reason to believe they will do so this time. Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself. While this may sound a counter-revolutionary conc

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There was, however, one other concomitant shift that also impelled the movement towards neoliberalization during the 1970s. The OPEC oil price hike that came with the oil embargo of 1973 placed vast amounts of financial power at the disposal of the oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. We now know from British intelligen

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If ‘there is no such thing as society but only individuals’ as Thatcher initially put it, then the chaos of individual interests can easily end up prevailing over order. The anarchy of the market, of competition, and of unbridled individualism (individual hopes, desires, anxieties, and fears; choices of lifestyle and of sexual habits and orientatio

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There are, finally, some fundamental political problems within neoliberalism that need to be addressed. A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other. While individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not supposed to choose to c

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It is not above reasserting its imperial traditions in the region and beyond. When confronted by Argentina’s worries about cheap Chinese imports destroying the vestiges of its indigenous textile, shoe, and leather industries that began to revive in 2004, the Chinese advice was simply to let such industries die and concentrate on being a raw materia

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