|
February 24, 2004
More from John Ralston Saul on the neo-liberal turn to free markets in the 1970s. The following passage captures the rhetoric of the neo-liberal globalization at the time. He says:
"As for the new force or ideology that came forward to fill the vacuum [of the 1970s] it involved an all-inclusive strategy called Globalisation - an approach that contained the answer to every one of our problems. It was delightfully seductive. It contained simple, sweeping solutions and... it lodged ultimate responsibility in invisible untouchable hands. Thus Globalisation required no one to take responsibility for anything.This transcendent vision quickly filled the vacuum...[it held that]....great global, indeed inevitable, forces were at work. There was therefore little that [one] could do. Nation states were powerless.
This was the beginning of the mania for public declarations of impotence by democratically elected leaders. Globalisation became their excuse for not dealing with difficult issues, for not using their levers of power and larger budgets to effect. They made the force of inevitability credible."
Behind the rhetoric of inevitability---there is no other way---stood a particular philosophy about method. Saul says:
"Globalisation had brilliant proponents .....And their basic theory was - is - that modern methodology is universal. What's more, these methods are preferable to the untidy business of democratic argument and personal will, whether that is a matter of personal opinion or personal choice. In other words, they were engaged in the classic struggle to promote method over opinion; that is, form over content."
Saul does not say what the partuicular form was. I've previously identified it as free market economics---in a mathematical axiomatic style. Platonism if you like.
Christopher Sheil takes a broader approach. He says that form over content means that:
"...government has abdicated from an interest in content in favour of governing according to formula. Instead of governing according to content, government has been reduced to method. What this means is that, instead of a democracy, we have a technocracy; instead of a government that really knows what things it's doing, we have one that only knows how to do things."
He gives national competition policy as an example. It is with this policy that Australian citizens are finding that governments are not at all engaged in the content that concerns them. Governments at the federal and state levels are primarily concerned with the form.
The effects of National Competition Policy are still with us today. Saul briefly refers to it in the followign passage:
"The sin of public debt was then broadened by attributing it to public utilities. Running well or not, they had to be privatised and deregulated into a global marketplace to cleanse them of public sector inefficiencies. This led in turn to the large utility-style private businesses, such as airlines, being freed of regulatory restraints to satisfy a moral version of individualism that promised, for example, the right to travel, cheaper fares, greater choice, more destinations."
In Australia the public utilities were primarily water, electricity and forestry. If they were not privatised, they became corporations whose primary goal was to make a profit and return a dividend to the government. No thought was given to ecological sustainability.
|
