Financial meltdown,environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?Imagine whether the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, and no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even whether your listeners gain heard the term before,they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: effect you know what it is?Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, and of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse,the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, and the epidemic of loneliness,the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as whether they emerge in isolation, and apparently unaware that they gain all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to function namelessly?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com