Today I was prompted by Nic to look at an article in The Correspondent
It is a 20 minute read, and I enjoyed it. At the start it says,
"In a crisis, what was once unthinkable can suddenly become inevitable. We're in the middle of the biggest societal shakeup since the second world war. And neoliberalism is gasping its last breath. So from higher taxes for the wealthy to more robust government, the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago." The title of the piece being:
The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?
An enjoyable historical romp, but I don't share the optimism about the threat to neoliberalism. The purpose of the article is to reassure people that the Giant is seriously wounded, and may well never recover - Hooray! However, at the core, the <1% beneficiaries of the old neoliberal order know very clearly what the limitations are of their dogma, and they have been anticipating and preparing for challenges for many decades. "Limits to Growth" was written in the early '70s. Its forecasts for the millennium proved to be spot on, but neoliberal capitalism was ready when 2008 came, and is rapidly responding now in 2020. Last year, the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed Exxon execs graphs made in the 1980s, forecasting a lot of the gloom about continuing oil extraction and the implication for the climate. She said, 'do you recognise these?' 'Yes' he said - 'we commissioned that work'.
They Know. That is the problem. There have been no surprises. They have been prepared.
In the words of Dad's Army, "We are all Doomed", that is our starting point, if we look to make the World a better place.
I'm still going to press on until I drop, but the challenge is quite massive. In my infancy, I read all the stuff about threats to our future and carried on with having kids, paying mortgages having a "career" etc, thinking that our global destiny would sort itself out benignly. Fool that I was.
Now that I think differently, there is ground to make up, which is where XR etc comes in.
