No Values Left.

 

 It is often assumed that the conservative Right has the monopoly over social values, culture, tradition and the family. Like the liberal pretension to a monopoly on free-speech, democracy, human rights and civil liberties, it should not go unchallenged. This will come as a shock to Americans, the politics of whom may be described as an oscillation between liberal and conservative positions. On the battlefield of the culture wars it may seem curious to postulate that the Left can challenge the Right on its own turf. For it was none other than Leon Trotsky who put forward the claim that we leftists have always lived in tradition. It's just a difference of which traditions the Left values (such as the right to vote, honouring the struggles of the past) over right-wing fetishes for fox-hunting and the Queen. Broadly, the radical Left aim to challenge the economic forces which dominate and shape life in all sorts of ways. Conservatives aim to preserve tradition and culture in the midst of the very same economic forces, which they themselves defend.

 

 The culture wars are merely the externalisation of the conflict internal to conservatism: social control versus economic freedom. It's worth noting that the socialist movement, itself a tradition, was born out of Christianity as well as a conservative disposition towards the horrifying consequences of industrialisation. The Left was defined early on by its conflict with liberalism, in a way which conservatives have yet to really get over - mainly because it's fundamental to their constitution. Take note of Rousseau's scorn for the market society favoured by such classical liberals as John Locke. The leading fetish of liberals is for the market, whether it is embodied in the arenas of culture, ideas or economics. The nihilist writer Michel Houellebecq writes about the dating scene as a sexual marketplace where all sorts of pleasures and relations are readily available. It then follows that the primary exit from the precarity of the market is monogamy and marriage. Those who scorn marriage as a social construct forget that everyone except for John Zorn buys into social constructs.

 

 The founding fathers of Marxism contributed plentifully to left-wing criticism of the family as a social unit with its own structural tendencies towards oppression. Though it could be said that Karl Marx in his critique of capitalism really left feminism for Engels to engage. In his mammoth magnum opus Marx notes that the family as a social unit has the capacity to hold property in common. Though the wise dialectician notes this in the same breathe that he notes this characteristic can also be found in the primitive epoch of feudalism. It's worth noting that the dialectical current that runs through the Left from Hegel. In this sense socialism should be a more radical advance on the advancements of bourgeois society, its legacy of human rights and civil liberties. Capitalism is an obvious advance on feudalism and slavery, while socialism takes the best of capitalism - its material surplus and social freedom - as its origin. This is worth keeping in mind with the points we'll explore next.

 

 The late Christopher Hitchens articulated his own brand of left-wing humanist arguments for limiting the right to an abortion. It boils down to a pragmatic balance of conflicting values, life and choice. If we first accept that there is such a concept as an 'unborn child' then we can debate at which point a cluster of cells becomes a person. It then follows that that person has rights, specifically to its own bodily integrity. This is the point of the whole debate over how long the window should remain open for an abortion to remain optional. There used to be much more of a division on this question on the Left and among feminists than there is today. It's not so much anti-feminist as non-feminist. The Right definitely has no monopoly over this position, often cultural reactionaries undermine themselves in their opposition to contraception. The left-wing proponents of limited abortion rights are often much more consistent and thorough-going when it comes to women's liberation. By contrast, self-proclaimed 'pro-lifers' are seldom concerned with women's oppression.

 

 As for same-sex marriage it really comes down to the question of equality. If we're talking about an equality of 'sameness' then it follows that the homosexual couple should enjoy all the social possibilities as the heterosexual couple. The best argument against same-sex marriage, and by 'best' I mean non-homophobic, is that the 'difference' of homosexuality is worth preserving. It's a case that Philip Blond has caved out. Furthermore, the 'difference' of homosexuality can be defined insofar that the sexual identity of the individual opens up an array of cultural options for them. The gay community hardly has to worry about the less beautious side of marriage, its deathknell of joy and its fragility. Until recently the average gay man has always been free from divorce, child-rearing, shared bank accounts and alimony payments. There are obvious advantages for those who aren't partial to marriage (which doesn't equate to commitment) and adoption.

 

 It's certainly true that the reform of marriage laws to extend religious ceremonies to gay couples is conservative in that it will preserve the institution of marriage - itself something that the Left has criticised plenty. Notice this isn't an argument against homosexuality in terms of moral conduct and human rights. It doesn't even take a side on the rather absurd claims made against homosexuality on 'moral' and 'natural' grounds. Part of this comes out of the same attitude that can be found in the morose works of conservative John Gray when he writes "[Christian] Morality has hardly made us better people; but it has certainly enriched our vices." In this frame of mind the greatest aphrodisiac is moralism, in any case conservatives are the real perverts. You have only to listen to the rants of Rick Santorum to notice that he has been thinking about homosexual relations just a bit too much. Only a real deviant could see the male anus as a gateway to bestiality.

 

 I may not endorse these positions myself, but it can't be said that the Right has the monopoly over these arguments. It's always worth keeping in mind there are a great many overlaps between the Old Left and the conservative Right when it comes to cultural questions. That was well demonstrated in the debate last year between Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton.

Yelling 'Stop!'

 In the first issue of National Review William F Buckley, Jr. penned the mission statement of the conservative magazine as 'standing athwart history, yelling stop'. At the time, Buckley was in the sway of a stridently traditionalist conservatism that seems somewhat out of place in America, a Whig republic with no feudal past to draw upon. It's not like in Europe where there is a feudal past of hierarchical orders in the form of royal families, established churches and aristocracies. The preservation of this order has not simply been the agenda of all conservatives, for the politics of Reaction often amount to a rage against the status quo in its failures to confront the challenges of the modern world. When it came to defeating the Left then there wasn't any option that was out of the question. In Spain this led Buckley to lend his support to Franco to stomp out the 'nihilism' of the Left. The willingness to crush revolutionary movements by any means is not inseparate to the broader agenda of reactionnaires. Sometimes the most counter-revolutionary means are themselves appropriated forms of radicalism.

 No wonder a favourite ally and good friend of the Iron Lady was General Pinochet, the right-wing dictator who stopped Chile's democratic lurch towards socialism. The justification of military rule has always been in the past a dubious claim to 'order'. Many right-wing Catholics saw Franco as the bulwark against a destructive force which threatened to tear apart the traditional institutions of society. By contrast, the Pinochet regime suffocated Chile's democratic institutions and left-wing elements to re-order the whole of society and not to reinstate 'order'. Yet the same justification of 'order' remained, Pinochet was a necessary evil to make sure the wheels were well oiled and ensured that the people knew their place. Its radicalism was joined at the back of the head with authoritarian rule. It was a convenient agonism between individualism and authoritarianism that was held in perpetual tension in these years.

 As Thatcherism represented the turning tide of politics in the West, the other side of its assault on civil society at home was the military junta abroad. The same Chilean agonism can be found in Thatcher's Britain. Individualism and authoritarianism sat in constant tension and made the best allies precisely because of that tension. Thatcher promised to sweep away post-war Anglo-socialism from the realm of the Possible to make way for the untrammeled powers of individual freedom. This was popular capitalism, it carried all the weight of classical liberalism and effused all the bluster of nationalism. The radicalism at the core of Thatcherism, its promise of a property-owning democracy based on a market individualism rather than a state collectivism. It meant the liberation of the individual from the mediocrity of the post-war settlement. Out of this understanding JG Ballaard celebrated home ownership in thoroughly Thatcherite terms in 1982:

 

I often think that the most radical thing one can do is to deliberately choose the bourgeois life - get that house in the suburbs, the job with the insurance company or the bank, wear a blue suit and a white shirt and a tie and have one's hair cut short, buy the right fabrics and furnishings, and pick one's friends according to the degree to which they fit into all the bourgeois standards. Actually go for the complete bourgeois life - do it without smiling; do it without ever winking.

 Even though the post-war settlement of a mixed economy complete with welfare provisions and a strong labour movement had been a highly successful model of development. It had become an obstacle that the system had to circumvent, an establishment in dire need of reorientation. To the ends of the accumulation and circulation of capital the Thatcherites represented a battering-ram on the institutional obstructions in the status quo. The liberation of the individual meant economic liberation, the negation of all constraint, the abolition of equity and bonds of solidarity. And yet the Thatcher years merely succeeded in the concentration of greater power in the state, whilst the market left the people more marginalised than liberated. Selling off council properties only left the ground clear for speculators to take hold. Meanwhile, the inner-city poor have been increasingly shoved into the veal flattening pens of the ghetto and the outskirt. Housing is unaffordable for a great many, while being highly profitable for an opulent few. 

 

 It was just the tip of the iceberg as an orgy of privatisation wiped out huge chunks of industry, leaving behind eviscerated communities and welfare wastelands. A financial colossus unconstrained by all the old red-tape became the heart and soul of the British economy. One of Thatcher's economic advisors, Alan Budd confessed to Adam Curtis that he sometimes feared that monetarism was, in effect, a policy of mass-unemployment - the goal of which was to smash the trade unions. The battles waged by the Right were hardly successful by the measures they claimed for themselves. All in all the rate of growth remained at 2.5%, on average, no more than it had been at the stale end of social democracy when Britain was the 'sick man of Europe'. What Thatcher had changed was where where the money ended up. It's clear where she belongs in history.

 In the past it was often the Anglican Tory gentry who sought to defend the lot of the poor from the enclosures fundamental to the establishment of capitalism. The Whig aristocracy were the primary force of the enclosure of common land and the dispossession of the people living on that land. It is no coincidence that one of the leading exponents was John Locke, nor is it coincidental that Locke was an apologist for the expropriation of the Native Americans. By the 19th Century it was Tories like John Ruskin who were most sceptical of the ongoing industrialisation of society, for it was the rise of competition in the market over tradition and custom. The enclosure of common lands had 'cleared' away vast swathes of people from a traditional agrarian existence to work for a subsistence in miserable mills and later factories. These people were left dispossessed in a pauperised state without any independence. Thatcherism was Whiggery par excellence, except it was the ransacking of the public good and not just the common good.

 It was men like William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin who understood and warned against the illth of the markets. The culture and hierarchy of society is always at risk in a rampant capitalist system, where the market functions as a mechanism not just in economic terms but in moral and cultural terms as well. Its tendency is relativist, not realist, as its expansionist pursuits can only swallow up entire chunks of society. The monarchy and church provided such legitimacy with notions of 'order' and 'morality', all the while presiding over an economy running towards greater plurality, freedom, choice, relativism and pragmatism. The standard conservatism has since been a manifestation of this contradiction, torn between socio-cultural traditionalism and economic liberalism. In this way the reactionnaires of today are far from 'standing athwart history, yelling stop'. Instead you can find the rightists at the side-road, in Ballardian spirit, carrying signs which read: dangerous bends up ahead, speed up.

 

The Refuge and its Scoundrels.

When Dr Johnson famously remarked that patriotism is the 'refuge of the scoundrel' he was actually referring to the Patriotic Party. Johnson was a Tory and wouldn't have written-off the love of one's country, and to some extent, he was right to do so. For patriotism can come in handy, in the war against Fascism it was the Churchillian vision of a determined island nation that held the people mesmerised. It's also worth noting that the great anti-colonial struggles of the last century involved revolutionary nationalism, especially in Vietnam and Cuba. The calls for Irish independence and reunification came primarily from nationalists. Of course, there is the darker side of nationalism, the jingoist harbinger of irredentism and nativism. And it's worth noting that the dark spirit of nationalism is much more common than the progressive and revolutionary possibilities of nationalism. Today we can see the reactionnaire appeals of nationalism against the European Union, while there are active pushes towards independence in Catalonia and Scotland where greater moves to regional autonomy have hardly failed.

It makes sense that the ultra-nationalist defenders of secession are crawling out of the woodwork in Europe at this time. Though this isn't simply the case where independence is concerned. If the referendum had secured Catalan independence recently it seems likely that the new nation would've been quickly subjected to a series of austerity measures. Because once a country of that size has broken-off it would need a new orbit and the European Union offers the strongest alternative. There are progressive arguments in favour of Catalan and Scottish independence. Yet it seems highly unlikely that a fledgling Celtic republic would escape the clutches of neoliberal globalisation either. There's some truth in Portillo's words that the country might easily be transformed into a land of low taxes and a shrunken state sector. In other words, Scotland could easily become a breeding ground for an even more merciless variation on the free-market ideal. At this point we need more unity, not less. This was most potently demonstrated by the demise of Yugoslavia - one of the great tragedies of the last century.

Yugoslavia was a federal socialist system of devolved republics and autonomous regions. It was free of Soviet domination and maintained a multi-ethnic society where Christianity and Islam were practiced side-by-side. All of it was held together under Marshall Tito who inculcated notions of 'brotherhood and unity' into the society as he fought to stamp out the remnants of nationalism in the masses. The state was maintained by a market socialist economy, which featured decentralised cooperatives and worker self-management as well as  a state planning apparatus. It combined the state as a primary mechanism for the organisation of the society and economy, while markets and cooperatives offered secondary mechanisms. The people enjoyed a guaranteed right to a job with a month's paid vacation, as well as free universal health-care and education as part of a comprehensive range of state services. There was never a Soviet-style collectivisation of Yugoslav society, for that may have torn apart the entire project of a country for Southern Slavs.

For a time Yugoslavia prospered with an average rate of growth at 6% and remained a leading model of independent development. The literacy rate reached 90% and life expectancy rose to 72 years. To expand the productive base and increase consumer goods the Yugoslav government borrowed from Western governments throughout the 1960s and 70s. Given that Yugoslavia had achieved development along independent lines (from Russia and not just the US) its federalism came under attack in the 1980s. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia became a concerted US policy as the National Endowment for Democracy began to focus on Yugoslavia as to hasten its breakdown and implement a series of neoliberal reforms. The IMF then began to force an austerity programme on Belgrade as a condition for payments on the country's debt. The austerity measures did not just mean a reduced public expenditure, but huge job losses and wage-cuts for the working. Eventually it would amount to the abolition of workers' self-management in the Balkans.


In spite of the decline of economic conditions inside the country Yugoslavia remained the only socialist republic after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. The people didn't rise up to overthrow the Communist government despite widespread discontent and rising nationalist sentiment. By now the dream of a Yugoslavia free of the old ethnic strife was dead in the water, with the rise of nationalist demagogue Slobodan Milošević. The Serbian nationalists wanted to hollow out Yugoslavia to establish a Greater Serbia. But the other nationalist movements wanted to break-off from Yugoslavia completely. To hasten the burst of secessionism the US began to yank the chain. In 1990 the Bush administration saw to it that Congress cut-off aid to all Yugoslav republics unless they declared independence within six months. The US demanded elections in all republics and went on to stipulate that every election must meet standards set by the US State Department. Later Italy would try to bribe Montenegro with aid to leave Yugoslavia and join them in the new Europe.

Within two years the US delivered another blow to Yugoslavia in the form of international sanctions to put a halt to all trade to and from the country. The economy quickly dived further into the abyss, unemployment spiralled to 70% while the health-care system collapsed and inflation exploded. Michael Parenti sees this as part of an agenda to turn the Balkans into a Third World developing region and to reverse the achievements of the Communist era. It would be a fractured region of republics incapable of independent development. The economy would be shattered, its natural resources stripped open to exploitation by multinational corporations. The people of Yugoslavia would provide a skilled workforce vulnerable to suppressed wages, as well as a reserve army of labour to be deployed to sink the wages of workers in Western Europe. The designs of neoliberalism to break-up Yugoslavia - only for its people to be rinsed by the forces of globalisation - converged with the aims of nationalists.

On Moderation.

 

In the midst of the current economic slump it's worth keeping in mind that we've been here before. This recession is not all that different from that of the 1930s, which began with the stock market crash of 1929. The recovery was slow and painful because necessary steps such as financial regulation and government stimuli weren't taken earlier. This time around we bailed out the banks and had a go at stimulus by way of quantitative easing under Brown. Although, we're currently embarking upon a tough austerity, - that has taken us back into a recession from a very brief incursion into a recovery - it's worth noting that we did not enact serious measures to confront the depression head-on in the 30s either. David Lloyd George took the view that we would do better to emulate the model presented by the American government. It wouldn't be until after the war that the Keynesian model of a mixed economy would prevail in Britain and Europe. Today it remains a viable and modest alternative to the international austerity.

In the midst of the recession brought on by the collapse of global financial system in 1929 the Republican President Hoover resorted to the politics of austerity. The Democrats ran Franklin D Roosevelt. The incoming administration was welcomed by a veterans' march on Washington, President Roosevelt arranged to greet the protestors with his aides and coffee. Despite appearances and this gesture Roosevelt shared the same goals as the austerity junkies he had defeated, namely to safeguard American capitalism and prevent further violent outbursts in the street. The best way to do this, in the eyes of FDR, was to reform the system to constrain the destructive tendencies of the market and to address the grievances of people marching on Washington for a decent life. This was nothing radical, it was effectively a means of 'buying-off' socialism in a world where the Soviet Union posed the only standing alternative to a decaying capitalism. Early on Roosevelt sought to craft greater coordination over the economy, to this end he put together planning sessions between government, trade unions and private companies.

 

 

Later a trade union leader would sit down with Roosevelt to discuss the conditions endured by black people and white working-class. The President listened intently and then told the trade unionist "I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it." The point Roosevelt made is that the President can't simply enact whatever policy they like. Rather the conditions have to be so that the Congress has to acknowledge a problem and then change can be implemented. In the same way that the Russian Revolution scared the British government into give up the vote to working-class men, and to women a dozen years later. It was the acknowledgement of a hard-nosed realist. He understood that to achieve reform the country had to be shaken up. That might explain why Prohibition was the first act to be thrown out under FDR. But at a deeper level the conditions in the US demanded certain reformist measures be implemented. So in 1934 Roosevelt put together the Wagner act to secure workers' rights, to make way for higher wages and improved working conditions. It's no coincidence that there were huge marches and strikes in 1934.

 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there was a harsh police repression of strikers supposedly for fear of Communist subversion. Yet Roosevelt took a markedly different approach when the Flint sit-down came around in 1936. That was a strike where hundreds of workers occupied a General Motors factory for 44 days. As the police and hired thugs tried to violently break up the strike Roosevelt supported Governor Murphy and had the National Guard sent in to protect the workers. It was this battle that led to much improved living standards in Flint and ultimately the creation of a now non-existent middle-class. This is a famous instance of the liberal credentials of FDR. However, it wasn't the President who defeated the bosses at a Firestone rubber plant in Akron earlier that year in which the management caved to a sit-down strike in a matter of days. The same can be said of a following strike at Goodyear. These successes were not handed down from above, the pressure came from below and the major achievements were won in this way.

 

Typically the Democratic administration adjusted its policies to subdue the labour movement in areas where it was most active. Repression wasn't the best tactic to be undertaken in a situation of dire economic stagnancy. So it was logical for the US government to concede ground to particularly strong strikes. The strikers in Flint were privileged by comparison to other workers across the country. A fine demonsrtation of this came later, when the US government established the minimum wage, along with the forty-hour week, and a ban on child labour. The minimum wage was set at twenty-five cents an hour and excluded a great number of the workforce. Even still, it was enough to cool the tensions between workers and bosses. Similarly the housing programmes only provided abodes for a small percentage of the population. But the gesture of federally subsidising housing projects, playgrounds and the construction of clean apartments was not insignificant to the beneficiaries.

Then came the establishment of social security and unemployment insurance, state-funds were matched for mothers and dependent children. The reform excluded farmers, domestic workers and old people, it also offered no health insurance. Comparatively the social security system offered much more security to Big Business in terms of pacifying a portion of the workforce. Though it should be noted that the wealthiest Americans barely get anything out of social security, the benefits are insignificant to them and so they don't see why they should support it. It would be more valuable if it were privatised and handed over to the rapacious forces of financial capital. The social security system also undermines the individualist tenets of American ideology, in that the system potentially fosters a social consciousness that might seek justice and solidarity. Like the NHS in Britain the establishment of social security in the US has been extremely difficult for the wealthy to erode and destroy. Thus, it remains one of the few pillars of the New Deal left standing.

 

 

During the Second World War the Roosevelt administration centralised the economy and created millions of new jobs at higher wages, in doing so, the militancy of the labour movement was undermined significantly. The New Deal had only managed to cut unemployment from 13 million to 9 million, while the war economy had almost achieved full employment. At the same time, the country was overtaken by a patriotic fervour that instilled national unity over the apparent sectarianism of classes. The combination of the New Deal reforms and the war effort effectively saved American capitalism. There is an important lesson for social democrats to take from this. The liberals of Rooseveltian ilk acknowledge that the dream of a mixed economy complete with a far-reaching welfare state cannot be achieved without tremendous struggle. Furthermore, this is not a struggle fought by liberals, to the contrary, it is the radicals who fight against capitalism who provide the impetus for the system to be reformed.

 

In his vision of the post-war world Roosevelt articulated four essential kinds of freedom to underpin the new world order: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship, freedom from want and fear. The principles FDR articulated would influence the foundation of the United Nations after the war had ended. Later, Roosevelt would propose a second Bill of Rights to the US Constitution, it was a set of economic rights which would guarantee not only universal health-care and education, but a liveable income, a job and a home. Roosevelt argued these measures would guarantee security, well-being and prosperity for all, as well as lasting peace abroad. President Roosevelt was dead before the war was over and the Bill of Rights would not be implemented. The Marshall Plan would later help to rescuscitate European capitalism, which ultimately eventuated in a social democratic mode of economy, that would safeguard many of the economic rights Roosevelt wanted to implement. It was these post-war achievements that have been eroded in recent times.

 

See also:

Howard Zinn on the New Deal - http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnselhel15.html

The Untold History of the US -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-veAiYgAY

The Cult of Free-Choice.

Liberals have a lot of sacred cows worth taking to the abattoir. The fetish of free choice, the cult of progress and its place at the shrine to individualism. Fortunately not all of this has to be served for dinner after the slaughter. The battle for secularisation is the last mission of liberalism. This has taken the form of going after everything from 'In God we trust' on the dollar bill and the availability of funds for Christmas trees to Muslim headscarves and veils. The liberal values of secular pluralism, progress and freedom are often the lynchpin for these campaigns. Similarly the advent of political correctness and the collapse of competing political systems to liberal democracy (don't mention the c-word!) has led the old forces of reaction to try and undermine the few protections for minorities on the grounds of 'sameness'. There is only the liberal framework of rights and liberties, anything beyond that is illiberal. No one is special and no difference can be acknowledged.

Infamously the French have banned the Islamic veil, known as a 'burqa' though it's actually a niqab, out of the secular principles of republicanism. Out of the French Muslim population (estimated at 5 million people) only 2,000 women wear the veil. The opposition to the veil is supposedly derived from a concern for women's rights and the secular values of French society. Even though it could be argued that the bill is unconstitutional. There is no such legislation on the veils worn by nuns, but that could be because the majority of the masses are Catholic. It's not necessary for France to have a Christian state precisely because it is predominantly Catholic. This is the sales pitch of secularists in the Middle East incidentally. Thankfully the use of legislation against a religious minority to soak up the racist vote couldn't save the Rat Man from electoral oblivion. Yet the West remains enthusiastic with chatter of criminalising Muslim life.


The Swiss have banned any further construction of minarets. It would seem that the notion of secularism as conceived by St Augustine has been lost. There is no room at all for religious influence or institutions in a secular society under the new conception. It has gone further now to ban male circumcision in Cologne and there are now calls to impose the ban over the rest of Germany. The case was not made along the lines of secularism this time. Instead it was the rights of the child, who could not give their consent to be circumcised. These are not calls from brownshirts, but from the liberal guardians of the Enlightenment legacy. This particular ban has brought greater controversy (and rightly so) because it strikes at a fundamental tradition of Jews. Once the secular line to ban minarets and veils runs dry then the accusation of child abuse can be hurled at Muslims. Not content with limiting the choices open in society the Right can stress free choice opens a new front of persecution.


The target is not Judaism, but Islam. It is a slant against Jews too because it would be too crude to stipulate that Muslims be barred from practicing their religion. Giles Fraser has written a defence of circumcision in relation to Jewish identity. It was the Holocaust survivor and philosopher Emil Fackenheim who added the 614th commandment: thou must not grant Hitler posthumous victories. This mitzvah insists that the abandonment of one's Jewish identity was to do Hitler's work for him. Fraser adds "Jews are commanded to survive as Jews by the martyrs of the Holocaust." It's not really about the harm principle, the liberal framework only has room for an individual and not for an identity that reaches beyond its confines. The condition of consent functions to break apart a community into individuals who each must choose from a set of lifestyle options. The liberal society doesn't really know how to deal with categories beyond atomised individuals.

Similarly, there are calls from reactionaries to ban halal and kosher meat because it's cruel to animals. This agenda has led to French proto-fascists have been setting up soup kitchens that only sell pork-based slop to drive away homeless Muslims. As Mehdi Hasan has pointed out that 80-90% of halal meat sold in Britain comes from animals that were stunned before being slaughtered. So much for the claim that it's really about the harm inflicted on the animals. The gutter press continues to pursue this campaign against the savagery with which Muslim (and Jewish) customs are practiced. Of course, there isn't a word about animal rights in other spheres. The media loves to stir up moral panics about the "foreign" menace eating away at our society. Now they're looking to get people worried about the meat in their fridge. Throw out the cruelty argument and you're left with the free choice argument. The real point is that halal meat should be labeled so that an informed choice can be made.

In his polemic against liberal individualism Giles Fraser writes "Informed consent lies at the heart of choice and choice lies at the heart of the liberal society. Without informed consent, circumcision is regarded as a form of violence and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child. Which is why I regard the liberal mindset as a diminished form of the moral imagination. There is more to right and wrong than mere choice." The idea of a cohesive community which is more than an arrangement of self-interest and bound by more than consent has no place in the liberal society. Fraser is correct in his assertion that the religious threatens liberalism because it suggests that it's not all about the individual. Any doctrine which makes such a suggestion could be a totalitarian in the liberal mind. And the moralists are just prudes clinging on in the permissive society, a clogged pipe to flushed clear.

Adam Smith's Nightmare.

The bourgeois media tends to see these people as either evil cynics or incompetent fools. It seems that there isn't necessarily a dichotomy, this lot can easily be both. We should stay away from the language of 'reality' because ideology and reality are really mixed up together. There is no non-ideological position, just an ideologically charged space where you are involved/excluded. It seems increasingly plausible that David Cameron believes that what he's doing is for the good of the country while at the same time adhering to a 'small government' liberalism and behaving as a cynical pragmatist to that end. The possibility of pumping money into the economy to create jobs is already closed from this worldview, exorcised from the realm of the possible. There is no major contradiction to be found here, not even a whiff of double-think. There is room for exceptions to the rule, but the rule holds firm in the minds of Cabinet ministers.

It will be heralded as a victory even though the average rate of growth under Thatcher - around 2% - was the same as it was in the 'mediocrity' of the 1970s. In the meantime we find that the anti-recovery has had strange effects on the commentariat who are meant to be its primary apologists. Charles Moore has written that the Left are basically right in their view that the free-market is a cover for the interests it serves, namely that of concentrated economic power. He goes on to write that "The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay." Moore doesn't then give up on right-wing politics but looks to recover the old principles. He is concerned that the system he seeks to defend seems as though it was created by a "Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works".

The case Charles Moore really makes is for the reaffirmation of the old principles of free-market capitalism. The economic system has become a parody of left-wing propaganda, in his view, so we must reinvigorate the free-market system in order to emancipate the many and not just to feather the nests of the few. Moore takes comfort knowing that "conservatism will be saved, as has so often been the case in the past, by the stupidity of the Left." He has reiterated and clarified this position more recently and it is a fundamentalist one in its continued faith in the free-market. Ron Paul comes to mind. Capitalism remains the revolutionary batter-ram with which the bourgeoisie can rid the world of obstacles. This was true of the aristocracy and the trade unions, now it's true of the system itself as it has been hijacked. Rhetorically he asks of the reader "Did Adam Smith’s invisible hand, far from making the public rich and free, simply pick their pockets?"

We all know that Adam Smith was taken to be arguing against state-intervention in the economy on the grounds that it could be harmful. The emergent order of capitalism - as distinguished by the advent of profit - was natural in Smith's eyes. If individuals were allowed to pursue their own interests freely this would bring about an economic equilibrium. Supply would equal demand and all resources in society would be used fully. The implied view is that the forces of supply and demand will balance out inevitably, which would establish a natural price for all goods. The natural rate in turn provides income for capitalists, workers and landowners in the form of profits, wages and rent. If we follow this view to its ultimate implication we find that the equilibrium produced will prevent all future crises. This is the old classical economic reading of Adam Smith. It loses sight of the important subtleties of Smith's Philosophy of Society, of which economics is not the main focus.

It's actually a myth that Adam Smith was an opponent of government intervention in the economy, in fact he doesn't rule it out, for he welcomed the Navigation act. Interestingly, that act was passed to give British capitalists a monopoly over colonial trade. Similarly fascinating is the way that the Founding Fathers of the US rejected Smith's free trade doctrine in favour of the unabashed economic nationalism advocated by Alexander Hamilton. The US is just another cliche in the history of economics, that the state can boost growth and development. But more importantly, Adam Smith saw the market as instrumental - he was an Aristotelian - to the realisation of human fulfillment in conditions which allow perfect liberty to tend towards perfect equality. Wealth is not only composed of products, for Smith the word 'wealth' referred to everything that contributes to the quality of life. This would include equality as well as poetry and music. Furthermore charity, the preferred conservative means of the elimination of poverty, is an insufficient tool in wiping out poverty in Smith's eyes.

It is somewhat ironic that the process we have endured over the last 40 years was actually anticipated by the classical economists including Adam Smith. The fear was that the merchants and manufacturers would conspire to shape public policy in their favour, that they would do business abroad - investing abroad and importing from abroad. It would rake in enormous profits, but England would have been ruined. Smith argued that the merchants and manufacturers would give priority to their own country, as if by an "invisible hand" England would be saved in this way. Since the 1970s we have witnessed deindustrialisation at home combined with off-shoring of production abroad and the shift to financial management over industrial production. The causes of the crisis are barely discussed, we just have to look forward to the way out. We're not far from the nightmare of classical economists. But it's been pretty awful for a lot of ordinary people and it could easily get worse before it gets better. There is no "invisible hand" in sight.

The recovering Thatcherite John Gray has pinned the preconditions of global capitalism as well as for communism on monotheism because of its universal claim to Truth. This claim was unthinkable until polytheism with its implied relativism in a plurality of gods could be left behind with the predominance of the Abrahamic religions. The laws of economic science replace the Ten Commandments. But what Gray overlooks is that the capitalist system is not simply universalist. On this point he has yet to shake-off the old illusions of Thatcherism. Capitalism is universalist in scope but particularist in its structural needs. This is the reason that the system can tend towards an unregulated banking sector and free trade treaties as it seeks to close its increasingly porous borders. The markets are forces of moral relativism, cultural pluralism and political pragmatism; yet there is the need for the state and other institutions as a lifeboat in crises. But it is market forces which are principally responsible for the subversion of these institutions.

It may be more accurate to say that the markets are the gods with a claim to Truth than to pin the blame on monotheism strictly. For this carries the whiff of Paganism. We accept that the markets will react with extreme disapproval of a shift in policy towards expansive fiscal measures to create jobs. The view that the market actually acts consciously in its exertion of power over the economy is a form of faith. This is the implicit position when George Osborne claimed that the economy isn't recovering because of bad weather. The definition of fundamentalism: the rot is just a disturbance, it's not the system itself. And this brings us back to Charles Moore. As Gray points out, the moral code of the Christian tradition hasn't made us better people but it has enriched our vices. The cultural conservatives aren't looking to reinstate the old superstructure just to reassert traditional moral values, the real point is to give meaning to our sins. In the same vein, the free-marketeers are only looking to rescue the old principles of the material base in order to give their violation meaning once more.

Crime Pays!

We live in fictitious times where Thatcher and Reagan are a lot like Gods for the present-day conservatives of Britain and America. It was demonstrated well when Reagan gave up the ghost in 2004 and we could see that the Republicans had succeeded in their efforts to elevate Ronald Reagan to almost deified heights. Of course, the death was just what George Bush needed to take the heat off the administration as the horrors of Abu Ghraib shook the world. The Reagan administration had some great tacticians, who had the sense to wage war on Grenada just as the US Marine Barracks in Beirut had been bombed. But the timing of Reagan's demise was a masterstroke that not even the Reaganite tacticians could have pulled off. It came at just the right moment. As if the funeral had not demonstrated just how far the deification had gone - how deeply the termites had feasted - Obama marked the 100th year since Reagan's birth with the words "President Reagan helped as much as any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country."

Perhaps it was the moment when Reagan added Nelson Mandela to the terrorist list (where he would remain until 2008) that restored so much optimism in America. The South African government only murdered 1.5 million people in their African neighbour-states. No wonder the Hoover Institution noted that Ronald Reagan is revered as a colossus whose "spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost." It can barely be muttered today that Reagan was perched as ornament to a criminal government. You might be called a conspiracy theorist for recalling that they gave the CIA permission to deal in guns and drugs in the funding of terrorist groups in Latin America. And if not then you will be called an extremist for recognising Reaganomics for what it was - a monumental disaster. For the reactionaries on both sides of the pond the post-war period was the real disaster, with its steady rates of growth, development and productivity. The crises of the 1960s and 70s opened up a space for the life to be snuffed out of this model.


The post-Thatcher period in which we are currently held captive holds that the time before the Iron Lady was a time of stagnant mediocrity. There were plenty of problems in Britain that had been a product of the post-war settlement. But we can't seem to see the mediocrity of what we're currently living in. The average growth rate of the 1980s was 2.4% which is what it was in the 1970s and even less than it was in the 60s. Supposedly Thatcherism rejuvenated sickly Britain and restored Greatness to its shores. Even though the same pathetic worries lingered around such topics as European integration, immigration, anti-social behaviour and crime alike. The English mind was still obsessed with the decline of status it had endured since the Empire fell. And in many ways, we the British are still in the fits that inevitably come with a disordered understanding of the past. It was actually decades of steady growth and significant development which were brought to a close in the 1980s. The golden age of capitalism was no more.

We now endure the society that the Thatcherites have laid waste to and the people who have done so well out of the devastation now tell us that the real problem are the immigrants and the dole queue. The old aim of full employment was dumped and the government effectively acted to increase unemployment in order to smash the trade unions and pacify the working-class. Before there had been a time when we were close to full employment and the wealthy paid a rate of tax which was relatively progressive. Incomes for workers had tended to rise alongside productivity which was partly driven by a strong labour movement. The bedrock of institutional power for the working-class could be found in a variety of industrial sectors and the extraction of natural resources. The Thatcherites embarked upon a savage deflation which destroyed a fifth of the industrial base in two years and oversaw a 30% decline in employment in manufacturing. The unions were blown away one by one, most famously with the mines shut because it was cheaper to import.

Since the Thatcher government smashed the unions the workers' share of national income has either stagnated or declined. With the defeats of trade unions in the 1980s the right-wing mutation of the Labour Party easily picked up pace. The socialist codger Michael Foot was soon replaced with the Welsh windbag Neil Kinnock, under whom the Labour Party served as an incompetent and hopelessly complicit opposition to Thatcherism. There was no serious opposition to take over the government, just as there wasn't in the Blair years and today under the Coalition. And yet these governments have each played the populist game, the Thatcherite mantra was "power to the people" as British Telecom was sold-off for £3.7 billion. In that decade the government transferred £14 billion from the tax-payer to the investors and paid banks £3 billion to handle these transactions. The programme consisted of giving away state assets to private companies at a reduced price to ensure maximum profits and to safeguard the interests of the private sector.

The Tories handed over a lot of public money to banks from 1992 onwards as part of the Public-Private Partnership, which sold-off public aid and gave greater power to bankers. As Michael Hudson wrote "The financial giveaway had the effect of increasing prices for basic infrastructure services by building in heavy financial fees – guaranteed for the banks, who lent the money that banks and property owners used to pay in taxes in more progressive times." The theory goes that the banks will create jobs as they invest the funds in British infrastructure, specifically public transport, but it was really a way for real estate speculators to get even richer. The extension of the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf cost £3.5 billion as it raised property values along the route by £13 billion. The public investment in transport could pay for itself simply with a tax on the higher rent-of-location and the site value. But the government would rather the banks rake in the cash.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out when politicians prefer to talk about 'jobs' than even utter the filthy word 'profits'. The allies of the super-rich then moved to sell-off British Rail and saw to it that the railways carry an over-flowing gravy train for the wealthy. It is standard practice in a privatisation for the state to make sure the buyers are well served with comfy pillows stuffed with the taxes of working-class people. Last year Richard Branson gobbled up £18 million of tax-payer's money as the system underwent a multi-billion state upgrade. The privatisation opened up a space for private ownership safeguarded by public investment and, even as standards of service have slipped, there has been no attempt to re-nationalise the railways. The government contributes £4.6 billion to the railways as the private sector pays just £459 million into the set-up, most of which goes towards stock rather than anything in the real world.

Looking back on it all, its clear that it was just the beginning. We shouldn't forget the real content of such policies when David Cameron talks the same way about hospitals and schools. The same goes for the talk of selling off the woods and the exposed plans to sell bits of the police even. The first decision of New Labour was to abandon the last lever of the state to the markets, the Bank of England became 'independent' of the government. It was clear that there would be no dramatic shift from the post-Thatcherite line that has been safely established to stand its ground. The pillaging and the pig-out for the rich has yet to cease, the same can be said for the pains of the poor. We may live to see the state reduced to a slither of what it once was before we see a change in paradigm. It isn't clear just how far this model can be pushed before something has to give, but it can be said that this is not the final crisis of neoliberalism.

Invisible Handjobs.

Mirrors without Economics.

The chorus of "I told you so!" cannot fall on enough ears right now, not just in Whitehall but in the rest of the country. As the ears of the charlatans behind this doomed experiment - they call austerity - are notably deaf, only from below can the opposition emerge to this vandalism. It's only austerity for the people who rely on the NHS, state-schools and a benefits system to fall back should they lose their jobs. There was just word of a double-dip recession when the oik first set about on his 'slash and burn' approach to the economy. Since then we've seen growth dip, flat-line and then dip further, it doesn't seem as though the artful oik knows what he's doing. Or perhaps this is part of a fiendish plan. It remains to be seen, but what we know is that this man lacks any formal education in economics (that's not unsual) and he's surrounded by a coterie of advisers who are devoid of theory. He's far too comfortable taking risks which he won't have to suffer for and ordinary people will - the so-called 'difficult decisions'.

The message was posted and it was received with the Conservatives getting smashed at the local elections. It didn't seem to remind them they never had a mandate to begin with, they only succeeded in raising their vote by 3% against one of the most unpopular periods for the Labour Party. That says a lot that the political class don't want to hear. The last Conservative leader to win 40% of the vote was John Major and Thatcher was never as popular as the Party itself. All that really mattered to the Party was to keep hold of the London City-State, if that was lost then the whole thing could be lost. It was also a key opportunity to snuff out any sign that Galloway's victory in Bradford would have impact outside of Yorkshire. And yet the Tories entertained the delusion that Boris won because he embodies a solidly conservative set of virtues. The gap between Ken and Boris now closer than ever at 3% rather than the 6% gap in 2008. There was some truth to Ken's suggestion that he was just "hated more" than Boris.

In the midst of this the BBC seem incapable of acknowledging that the ongoing attempts to reduce the deficit will shrink the economy. They can't even articulate that the cuts to the amount of money flowing into the economy will not boost demand and growth. We're just told that the cuts to the salaries and pensions of public sector workers are a necessity. It's even assumed that there's just 'waste' to be cut and growth can still emerge from this process. Oh yes, the new mantra is deficit reduction and growth - an oxymoron of the highest order. Even if the aims of the cuts go as far as deficit reduction, it would seem that the cuts are insufficient in this aim and may actually increase the deficit as unemployment remains high. The Right will naturally prescribe another round of cuts. For a long time it seemed that the possible had become impossible, yet today most of us can see cuts aren't the way out of this recession and no one dares to reach for the alternatives.

On the Tumbril.

The pretensions of travail, famille, patrie were done away with swiftly on May 6th. The French voter took the Rat Man to the tumbril and placed the Flanby in the Élysée Palace. Well, Hollande will take office tomorrow to be exact. He won 55% of the vote on a platform calling for an end to austerity, though Hollande may have defined himself as the successor to Mitterand he had plenty of words in the right tone as he spoke about a great change across Europe. This is the first time in France for 30 years that an incumbent lost a second term - a testament to the strange times we live in. Sarkozy now joins the ranks of Berlusconi as just another establishment right-winger to be knocked out of power in the midst of the Eurocrisis. The appalling attempts to grab the frothing racist vote shocked many, it was ultimately too much for the supposed pragmatism of French politics. The major point is that the tough-love programme of tax-cuts for the rich and public service cuts for the rest of society has been rejected.

As Mark Hanna would remind us "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember the second." Word has it that £40 million of funds in the Rat Man's campaign chest came from the dearly missed Colonel Gaddafi. There has since been talk of $65 million and another despot Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that the actual amount was $100 million. Whatever the case it has long been clear that Sarkozy is a creep, a wannabe de Gaulle with that trope of French chauvinism - the suspicion of the Anglo-Saxons. That went as far as claiming the economic crisis is an 'Anglo-Saxon disease' even though Sarkozy had posed as a French Thatcherite. He suggested taking a Kärcher to the neighbourhoods affected in the riots of 2005. Supposedly it was Bernard-Henri Levy persuaded him to wage war on Libya. Really, it was probably the rebel's promise to respect old oil arrangements that made it clear Gaddafi was no longer a necessity in North Africa.

On May Day Sarkozy demanded of trade unions "Put down your red flag, and serve France instead." It was an impotent call, he had to have people brought into town to be filmed in front of the Eiffel Tower. Nonetheless, this dwarf embodied the spirit of reaction in French politics coming at the end of a long line from the Thermidoreans through Pétain to d'Estaing. This may be another instance of the Europeans taking out the incumbent for the other guy, but this time it is a guy who was calling for a stop to cuts. Hollande may retreat from this to some extent, if not all together. We have yet to see. The German elections are coming up and if we see a swing to the centre-Left there could be a shift in policy which might lead to a domino effect across Europe. Naturally the European ruling-class has already seen this coming and they're prepared for a fight. Not everything is going to plan, but it'll take a bit more from the people of Europe to derail this out-of-control train.

Business as Usual.

The process we have endured over the last 40 years was the nightmare of classical economists. The fear was that the merchants and manufacturers would conspire to shape public policy in their favour, that they would do business abroad - investing abroad and importing from abroad. It would rake in enormous profits, but England would have been ruined. Adam Smith argued that the merchants and manufacturers would give priority to their own country, as if by an "invisible hand" England would be saved in this way. Since the 1970s we have witnessed de-industrialisation at home combined with off-shoring of production abroad and shifting to finance over industry. The causes of the crisis are barely discussed, we just have to look forward to the way out. We're no far from the nightmare of classical economists. But it's been pretty awful for a lot of ordinary people and it could get worse. There is no "invisible hand" in sight.

We the British tend to love business as usual. That was evident in the 1930s when we lined up to vote for Conservatives who wanted to sell-off chunks of Europe to Hitler. We don't like to recall just how compromised the Establishment really was. It may have gone as far as the Royal Family, the House of Lords and the proprietors of major newspapers. Even Churchill said in 1937 "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism." When it went wrong and no amount of appeasement could hold-off the inevitable there wasn't much else to do but stand still under the bombs. The people with any means available to them would escape to the countryside. For the lot left behind there was plenty of time to rob bombed out houses and even steal from the dying. Even firemen were caught looting buildings, the fires of which they had just put out. People were crushed to death in the panics to rush into the underground for safety.

David Cameron might be more Chamberlain than Churchill, but for the most part we've managed to stir clear of the spirit of the Blitz with the exception of the riots last summer. Still, it's not really a fair comparison. Between September 1940 and May 1941 there were over 4,500 known cases of looting and juvenile crime made up almost 50% of all arrests. And yet huge gains were won for the working-class movement after the war. The only moves we're seeing to secure those gains have been the odd strike. Officially 400,000 people marched this week in London over pensions, the crowd included 20,000 coppers, and London Occupy has sprung up once again. This is the ongoing resistance to the cuts that hasn't been going on in the US. The courageous protests across the pond in Wisconsin and on Wall Street (which shouldn't be sneered at) have been blips on that vast land-mass. There are huge differences, in Europe we're seeking to protect the social democratic accomplishments of the last century while in America these victories have yet to be won.

Freedom or Death.

We have seen large-scale demonstrations across Europe, including general strikes in Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. The most heroic of resistances has been fought in Greece, which has been hit badly by the crisis to say the least. Of course, there is a lack of coordination on a continental scale, so the bursts of rage are sporadic and unpredictable. Europe still has something of an organised Left, which America barely has anymore. Perhaps history only ended, as Fukuyama suggested, in the US. The emergent SYRIZA, a coalition of leftist parties, which has been making significant gains in the recent Greek elections. The coalition is only 2% behind New Democracy, the conservatives who are closest to taking power. Even the Communist have won 8% of the vote and the Democratic Left got 6%, while PASOK has fallen to 13%. It looks unlikely that the Greek Left will be able to form a coalition government due to differences over austerity and the usual sectarianism that plagues the Left wherever it can be sniffed.

It's possible that New Democracy and PASOK will form a government, - the equivalent of Labour cutting a deal with the Tories - a capitalist bulwark to push through austerity and wait until the socialist storm passes. In retrospect, the victory in France for the established Left holds greater significance with the gains of the radical Left in Greece taken into account. The ruling-class is determined to reconstitute the status quo and get its way. The fight isn't over, though some would prefer to turn our attention to the presence of the Golden Dawn in the Hellenic Parliament. This seems to overestimate the possibilities of a return to Metaxism in Greece, given the gains that the neo-fascists have made are still dwarfed by those of the Left. We shouldn't fool ourselves that these herds could put together the Fourth Reich. The Greek Left needs to push further and be on guard against any possible attacks Golden Dawn might launch on immigrants.

The rape of Greece has opened up all kinds of possibilities, it is an unstable situation. We're told not to sympathise with this profligate nation of wasters and yet this is where some of the longest hours in the world are worked. This is the birthplace of democracy which the Germans and the French have shown nothing but disdain. The Greeks remain remarkably in favour of European integration in spite of the garbage the Franco-German reactionaries have been trying to feed them. The country has been trashed for the sake of a right-wing experiment that was rushed into after Germany reunified. There are some profiteers in this crisis, Greek workers aren't being paid and are being fired across the board. SYRIZA are sticking to their guns, calling for the nationalisation of the banks, paying of the debts owed to pensioners and an end to "structural adjustments" in the jobs market. The Greeks are right to resist of the attempt to destroy the living standards of huge swathes of the population. Recall the old slogan: freedom or death.

The Politics of Euroscepticism.

The strange history of Euroscepticism in Britain goes back decades, it was ironically the Conservatives who were much more keen on European integration and the Labour Party were opposed to the project insofar as it could potentially hold-back socialism. In fact, the labour movement was opposed to economic integration out of a staunch protectionist attitude towards British industry and a general fear of foreign competition. In this respect Bob Crow is a throw-back to a bygone politics. The opposition to integration within the Conservative Party first took the form of a campaign (which was led by the Earl of Sandwich) to prevent Britain from entering the Common Market in the early 1960s. It was based on a superstitious nationalism which elevated the British above the "frogs and huns" of the continent. So we find that the opposition to European integration included Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, it united the opposing elements of the Left and the Right.

 

The anti-Politics of the Market.

The specific tendency of right-wing opposition to the European Union goes back to the roots of think-tanks and Thatcherism in Britain. It was none other than Friedrich von Hayek who convinced Antony Fisher that the only way to bring about political change is to form think-tanks, which will propagate "second-hand ideas" and shape the discourse in doing so. Fisher went on to found the Institute of Economic Affairs and about 150 other think-tanks in his lifetime. For years Antony Fisher and Oliver Smedley had sought to undermine state-planning in Britain. Fisher and Smedley were convinced that the state-planning apparatus would lead Britain down the road to totalitarianism by its very nature. For them even the Milk Marketing Board and Egg Marketing Board were innately opposed to freedom. The Common Market was just a bigger state-system of economic planning, as Smedley and Fisher had introduced battery farming to Britain they were naturally sceptical of any government policy on agriculture.

The state-planning apparatus  had a scientific guise complete with a technocratic system, the ideals of classical liberalism looked out of date by comparison. The appeal of Hayek was that he had developed a technocratic theory of the market, so the old ideals were torn out of their original context and revamped for the modern age. So Adam Smith's invisible hand becomes a metaphor for a cybernetic flow of information exchange, whereby the abstract signals sent out by millions of people forms the price mechanism; and the key to order without central planning. It would be an automatic system of signalling which would be self-directed. This is the only alternative because it is not possible to hold all information in one central system. Major Smedley went further than just help found think-tanks and actually pioneered pirate radio in order to "liberate" information from state-control. The nostalgic look back on it now as the epitome of the cultural revolution which obliterated traditionalism in the 60s. In reality the first pirate radio-station was the beginning of the counter-revolution.

Smedley ran his radio-station with great success, but he was intolerant of competition and wanted a monopoly on his new venture. So when Reg Calvert popped up it was not unbelievable just how fast the situation deteriorated into violence. The rival station was raided by thugs-for-hire and Calvert was shot dead as he tried to confront Smedley, who went on to be acquitted of murder. Even though Reg Calvert represented the kind of individualist that the think-tanks, set up by Fisher, should have praised. The truth was Smedley represented the old aristocracy, which felt entitled to manage the system through the private sector. There was no room for people who genuinely wanted to act as free individuals regardless of the power-structure. To those with the upper-class sense of entitlement the doctrines of classical liberalism remain a useful tool in corroding the welfare state. As Adam Curtis has pointed out, the neoliberal aim was never to shake the established power-structure to its core and re-order it. Even for Hayek the state has its' role in a managerial capacity, to maintain a competitive order, which is not much different from economic planning in a sense. Of course, people like Antony Fisher and Oliver Smedley detest any kind of bureaucracy except when they are the managerial aristocracy.

It was in the midst of the economic stagnation of the 1970s that the "second-hand" ideas of the Institute of Economic Affairs were welcomed into mainstream politics, along with the doctrines of monetarism developed at the Chicago School of Economics by Milton Friedman. It was not until the 1980s that the welfare state was "rolled back" to make way for the market. It was then that the ideas of Hayek and Friedman supplanted Keynes as the economic orthodoxy. Thatcher blended these ideas with rational expectations and Goodhart's Law. The economy could not be managed by the state and there was no way to achieve full employment, so it was tossed aside as a goal that should even be considered. The post-war settlement of social democracy was torn apart bit by bit. The social planners had failed and so all other alternatives could be dismissed even as options in the new era of "popular capitalism". The promised dynamism of the free-market could be unlocked through the politics of 'commonsense' rather than ideology. The irony is that this is the ideology of the free-market, it becomes even more evident when the mission runs up against serious obstacles.