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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Blair's Ghosts « Previous | |Next »
April 3, 2007

Well might he be haunted by the past. Blair's war on terrorism represents authoritarian measures being implemented within a political structure that is democratic. In the War on Terror the normalisation of crisis produces a situation in which democratic rights and freedoms (habeas corpus, free speech and assembly) are being suspended while democracy is being proclaimed.

Blair'sGhosts.jpg
Martin Rowson

Too harsh a judgment?

Though neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism are two distinct political rationalities that are inconsistent, if not directly contradictory, they are converging in contemporary society. How they are converging is what needs to be sorted out. It's what puzzles me. For they are sutured together in odd sorts of ways that I cannot put my finger on.

Neo-liberalism is about deregulated markets. It has a business ontology in which politics is like a firm. Hence it is statist. It requires the big state to turn society into a market. Neo-conservatism hates the other, has a horror of intellectuals and artists, and is about religion. Its ontology is the church. It is authoritarian and populist.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:31 PM |