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The culture of resistance to capital has, for some, mutated into a culture of revolt against globalization, migration and human rights. How we got here is not just a story of neoliberalism's economic failure, but the collapse of a narrative. In turn, the paralysis of the left lies not in its failure to advance economic criticisms of free market economics, but in its failure to engage properly in the narrative battle the ultra-right is waging. [...]
If life for working-class people felt better in the 1990s than the 1980s, it was because both credit and cheap Chinese goods offset the primary problem: stagnating wages. That globalization and financial deregulation are essentially positive for working people became the overt message of social democracy.
Neoliberalism unleashed numerous structural transformations. The principal ones were: the offshoring of productive industries; the restructuring of corporations into a 'value chain' of smaller companies; cutting taxes to shrink the state; the privatization of public services; and the financialization of everyday life. [...]
good summary
[...] Blair and Gordon Brown staked everything on financialization. Deregulation of the credit market would allow even the poor to take part in the asset-price bubble. The booming finance industry would generate high tax revenues, which would be redistributed to the working class through welfare payments, in-work tax credits, revived spending on the NHS, and mass access to university education. On the eve of the financial crash up to seven million people, one third of all households, were receiving some form of payment from the state.
When the finance system collapsed, so did this finance-based ameliorative project of social democracy. In its place came austerity. [...] And as the safety net broke, so did consent for inward migration.
[...] Even if trade and deregulation may produce benefits for a nation 'in the aggregate', these benefits are unfairly distributed, which is why there are always winners and losers. And those who are not among the winners know full well after twenty-fie years that competition is increasing, social and financial stress is on the rise, and that the formulae contained in the Sunday sermons of the preachers of globalization are nothing but hot air.
[...] it is by no means true that these sectors of the population are furious because the 'cultural left' is calling for a third toilet for transgender persons. They are furious because they have the feeling that such demands are getting lots of attention, while their own economic and social situation is not being given any attention at all.
[...] Anyone who comes forward with the implicit promise 'Vote for us because we shall make sure that things will only get worse slowly!' may just as well hand over the keys of office to the leader of the nearest right-wing populist party. What we need, finally, is what Barack Obama has called 'the audacity of hope'.
funny cus that's what ultimately Obama ended up doing but I see his point
[...] the left was not established so as to have things easy but in order to bring about the impossible. It was created to improve the world and the condition of human beings in the teeth of adversity and apparent hopelessness, to fight for human rights and democracy and to flood the societies of the world with democracy.
[...] The market remains the reference point for all aspects of life. Pierre Bourdieu has called such mechanisms symbolic violence. We have now internalized the market and regard it as self-evident; we assent to its logic, partly willingly, partly against our will. In neoliberalism the burden of self-restraint, of permanent sublimation, is great. We have always to be happy to compete, to compare to measure ourselves against others and to optimize. Unreasonable demands, setbacks, humiliations and failures have to be chalked up to oneself--and then we just have to wait cheerfully for new opportunities. [...]
The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother’s generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet Club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton ’29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him—some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. [...]