EU-DIGEST: Inequality And Post-neoliberal Globalisation

5/30/14

Inequality And Post-neoliberal Globalisation - by Frank Hoffer

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

These are actually not my words but a quote from Milton Freedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, a book published in 1962 when he was a lonely Monetarist in a Keynesian World. Friedman, Hayek and their followers did not miss the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s, nor the crisis in Latin America in the 1980s nor the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s. They provided the intellectual ammunition for regime change by promising a more efficient and more dynamic economy.

Today, despite its failures, the free market narrative was not buried by the crisis. Until 2007 we could have had the illusion that it was not the lack of ideas but the lack of crisis that stopped the left to turn the tide against the rule of neoliberalism. But when the crisis hit, it turned out that the left had very little to say and, instead of decapitating neoliberalism, the Hydra raised its head in Greece, Spain and Portugal to swallow up the European welfare state.

Beheading this Hydra is indeed a Heraclean task. It requires new ideas, new methods, new techniques, new policies and new alliances to win public support for creative and liberating alternatives. And these alternatives cannot start with words like re-building

g, re-gaining or even re-vitalizing. The future does not start with re-animation.

Times have changed and the new labour movement cannot be the reincarnation of the old one. A movement with a great history, but also with a narrow male and macho tradition. To build a unifying movement in a complex and diverse world with a multifaceted civil society requires a plurality of initiatives identifying themselves autonomously with a common vision. Or in simpler language we need a rainbow coalition for a post-neoliberal globalisation. And this alternative or common agenda needs to be more specific than ‘another world is possible’ or ‘yes we can.’