the foulest legacy

Born: October 13, 1925, Grantham

Died: April 8, 2013, London

t he solution

After neoliberalism:

analysing the present

Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey

and Michael Rustin

The founding editors of

Soundings

set out the framing

analysis for our online manifesto.

W

ith the banking crisis and the credit crunch of 2007-8, and their

economic repercussions around the globe, the system of neoliberalism,

or global free-market capitalism, that has come to dominate the world

in the three decades since 1980, has imploded. As the scale of toxic debt became

evident, credit and inter-bank lending dried up, spending slowed, output declined

and unemployment rose. The system’s vastly inflated financial sectors, which

speculate in assets largely unrelated to the real economy of goods and services,

precipitated an economic crisis whose catastrophic consequences are still unfolding.

We believe that mainstream political debate simply does not recognise the

depth of this crisis, nor the consequent need for radical rethinking. The economic

model that has underpinned the social and political settlement of the last three

decades is unravelling, but the broader political and social consensus apparently

remains in place. We therefore offer this analysis as a contribution to the debate,

in the hope that it will help people on the left think more about how we can shift

the parameters of the debate, from one concerning small palliative and restorative

measures, to one which opens the way for moving towards a new political era and

new understandings of what constitutes the good society.

1

For three decades, the neoliberal system has been generating vast profits

9

After neoliberalism: analysing the present

for multi-nationals, investment institutions and venture capitalists, and huge

accumulations of wealth for the new global super-rich, while grossly increasing

the gap between rich and poor and deepening inequalities of income, health and

life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the

second world war. In North America and Western Europe - hitherto dynamos of

the global economic system - rates of

growth are now lower than during the early

post-war decades, when there was a more even balance of power between the social

classes. There has been a steep decline in manufacturing and a hot-house expansion

of financial services and the service economy; and a massive shift of power and

resources from public to private, from state to market. ‘The market’ has become the

model of social relations, exchange value the only value. Western governments have

shown themselves weak and indecisive in responding to the environmental crisis,

climate change and the threat to sustainable life on the planet, and have refused to

address the issues in other than their own - market - terms.

Likewise, the financial crisis has been used by many Western governments as a

means of further entrenching the neoliberal model. They have adopted swingeing

‘austerity measures’ which, they claim, is the only way of reducing the deficits