State Socialism for the Rich, Market Liberalism for the Poor
This is what’s happening in the EU and the US. Where’s the left? Socialists sold out to Blair and the Third Way a decade ago. With the exception of Zapatero (actually fairly orthodox on the economic front, although now he has fired Almunia), there hasn’t been anything new on the rosé side. As for reds, the descendants of the communist left are saying their time has come back again because of the crisis of capitalism, but they are mostly nostalgics of the working class, aging 68ers and trozkyite no-gooders. They have nothing to say about the informational society and, more damningly, they don’t have a strategy to organize service and immigrant labor in the slump. Because this is the utmost imperative, especially for radical lefties: to organize new forms of labor so that people can claim back what capital has stolen from them over the last two decades. There will be no way out of the Great Recession without huge social transfers and generalized wage rises, in short, without redistribution. In the meantime, let’s fight for the right of eating a tuna sandwich out of the bin while at work:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/fired-over-a-tuna-sandwich-and-fighting-back/?emc=eta1
One could define the entire neoliberal project as Socialism for the Rich, the Market for everyone else. Chomsky has been using this phrase at least for the last 12 years. As for the right to food being thrown a way, a guy went on a quest to wash dishes in all 50 US states. On a university campus he was reprimanded for eating discarded food. He goes to see his union rep who comes down and yells his boss and reminds him it’s in there contract that dishwashers are entitled to all discarded food.
disagree, because neoliberalism was explicitly against all forms of nationalization. Companies were happy with subsidies, but didn’t want government interference, in those happy days of the 90s.
But Neoliberalism goes back farther than the 90s and while it may have been in word against all formations of nationalization, indeed it was fine doing it whenever it had to be done. Such as the nationalization of Continental Illinois National Bank in 1984 under Reagan. Reagan.