with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized
It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it's as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century.
The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher's doctine that 'there is no alternative'--as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for--became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy.
Capitalism foments divisions between people to facilitate the concentration of wealth, but it can also permit individuals economic mobility in ways that protect its intrinsic inequalities.
the real meaning of meritocracy!
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank can force "structural adjustment programs" on so-called developing nations in return for loans precisely because these countries have been exploited for so long.
