Guardian UK: The zombie of neoliberalism can be beaten – through mass direct action

[marmar]

The zombie of neoliberalism can be beaten – through mass direct action
Phone hacking and police corruption represent neoliberalism's undead status, even as it marches on. Yet change is possible

David Harvie and Keir Milburn
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011


Just days after the deal that was supposed to banish it, the eurozone crisis is back. Poor growth figures put a "new" financial collapse back on the cards. The response from politicians, bankers and business leaders is more of the same – more of the same neoliberal policies that got us into this situation in the first place.

Neoliberalism no longer "makes sense", but its logic keeps stumbling on, without conscious direction, like a zombie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. Such is the "unlife" of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. It can only act habitually as it pursues a monomaniacal hunger. Unless there is a dramatic recomposition of society, we face the prospect of decades of drift as the crises we face – economic, social, environmental – remain unresolved. But where will that recomposition come from when we are living in the world of zombie-liberalism?

In the midst of such hopelessness the phone-hacking scandal seemed to offer a moment of redemption, but as the news cycle moves on we are left wondering what effect it will really have.

Hackgate cannot be treated in isolation. Since the financial "meltdown" of 2007-08 we have witnessed similar scenes, and similar outrage, around MPs' expenses and bankers' bonuses. We have witnessed not one but two media feeding frenzies around the repression of protest. The first followed the police attack on the G20 protests in 2009 and the death of Ian Tomlinson, with the second erupting around the outing of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, leading to the unprecedented unmasking of another five undercover police officers acting within the environmental and anti-capitalist movements. The refusal of the Metropolitan police to investigate the full extent of phone hacking is, then, the third scandal revealing the political character of contemporary policing. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/04/neoliberalism-zombie-action-phone-hacking

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[geckosfeet]

2. The use of the word 'liberal' in neoliberalism seems to me to be misplaced.

My understanding of neoliberal economics would place it more directly as nationalism or corporatism. See a short history of the evolution of neoliberal economics here ( Wikipedia entry for neoliberalism).

I am not sure how complete privatization of the state can ever lead to anything good. This is essentially what the founding fathers of the United States warned against, and wrote a constitution and declaration of independence to defend the country against. The difference between now and then, is that corporate factions now exercise the oppressions once practiced by monarchies and dictatorships. The dangers and hazards to free citizens once presented by oppressing monarchies still exist and seem to be growing at an alarming, uncontrolled rate because government is too weak, corrupt and influenced to legislate legal controls over nationalist corporations.