The Great Regression by Heinrich Geiselberger

Author:Heinrich Geiselberger [Geiselberger, Heinrich]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

The narrative struggle ahead

It has been clear since 2008 that, unless we abandon neoliberalism, globalization will fall apart. With Brexit and the election of Donald Trump that process has now begun.

The fatal attraction neoliberalism exerted on the elite, and on two generations of professional economists, was rooted in its apparent perfection. In its economic content it confirmed the notion that capitalism is essentially the market, survival of the fittest, and the small state. In its political form it fitted perfectly the core liberal-democratic assumption: that we are all merely citizens, not workers or bosses, and that all our rights are primarily individual, not collective. Even now – with Renzi fallen, Hollande stumbling to the end of his presidency, Schäuble demanding yet more austerity in Greece – the social and political elite of neoliberalism has barely begun to question this essentialist mindset. Instead a break has begun in the opposite direction. The authoritarian populism that is mobilizing a minority of working-class voters across Europe is, essentially, a demand for de-globalization. Its reactionary nature lies not only in its preference for racism, Islamophobia and social conservatism but in its complete ignorance of the complexity of the task.

In contrast to the 1930s, economic nationalism today has to dismantle a complex, organic and resilient system. It may shatter easily – through a currency war or a series of massive debt write-offs – but if so it will make cities in the countries on the losing side look like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Fortunately, the mass political demographics point in a completely different direction than in the 1930s. The individualist and liberated behaviours and beliefs detested by the xenophobic ultra-right are firmly embedded into an entire generation. According to YouGov, in the UK, though around 19 per cent of people hold strong right-wing and 29 per cent hold centrist ‘authoritarian populist’ beliefs, the biggest group – at 37 per cent – is the ‘pro-EU, internationalist liberal left’.3

Modern society is no Weimar Republic, where tolerance and multiculturalism existed as a thin skin covering reactionary, hierarchical and nationalist mindsets. The new behaviours, beliefs, levels of tolerance, attachment to human rights and their universality, are the product of both technological change and education. They would have to be torn by force out of the minds, bodies and microstructures of most people under the age of thirty-five.

I have argued elsewhere4 that the industrial proletariat not only failed in its resistance to neoliberalism in the 1980s but has, as a result of the technological revolution, been supplanted as the agent of social change by a more amorphous group described by sociologists like Manuel Castells as consisting of ‘networked individuals’. These include not only the lower strata of the professional class and students but large parts of the ordinary workforce: the nurse, the barista, the software geek. Even what is left of the securely employed industrial workforce is, by virtue of the norms of the hi-tech manufacturing workplace, largely plugged in to this globalist culture.

In this sense, the networked individual is ‘the working class sublated’.

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