Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
Imagine
if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology
that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in
conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have
heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do 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, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse,
the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of
ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these
crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have 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
operate namelessly?
Inequality
is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
So
pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an
ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian
faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory
of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human
life and shift the locus of power.
Read more at
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_fb
Comments
Post a Comment