“The protesters realise our post-cold-war settlement is at stake – unlike a political class in thrall to a defunct market utopia” – Guardian:
“Anyone with a smattering of history could see that the hubristic capitalism of the past 20 years was programmed to self-destruct. The notion that the world’s disparate societies could be corralled into a worldwide free market was always a dangerous fantasy. Opening up economies throughout the world meant ordinary people were more directly exposed to the gyrations of market forces than they had been for generations. As it overthrew existing patterns of life and robbed large numbers of people of any security they might have achieved, global capitalism was bound to trigger a powerful blowback.
For as long as it was able to engineer an illusion of increasing prosperity, free-market globalisation was politically invulnerable. When the bubble burst, the actual condition of the majority was laid bare. In the US a plantation-style economy has come into being, with debt-servitude for the many coexisting with extremes of volatile wealth for the few. In Europe the muddled dream of a single currency has resulted in social devastation in Greece, mass unemployment in Spain and other countries, and even, for some, reversion to a life based on barter: sucking society into a vortex of debt deflation, austerity policies are driving a kind of reverse economic development. In many countries a settled bourgeois existence – supposedly the basis of popular capitalism – has become an impossible aspiration. Large numbers are edging closer to poverty and a life without hope.”
P.S. I didn’t realize there was a “post-cold-war settlement”?
Further reading:
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On another note, what do you think of very extreme hasidic groups, such as Toldos Aharon ?
I see them as a kind of ‘counter discourse’, in the Foucaultian sense.
Very funny.
The “post-cold war settlement” refers to the final disintegration of the Western left after the fall of Soviet Union, and an imagined (and in some circles, real) consensus that American-style capitalism would more or less become the norm for all societies as they industrialized, and that capitalism would be able to resolve its contradictions without collapse indefinitely. Seems silly now, but in the 1990s a lot of serious people took it very seriously, and it was certainly taught to me as a child by parents and teachers.