Social Capitalism: The End of Neo-liberalism and Where We Go Next by Andrew Blackwood

Author:Andrew Blackwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781398453715
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2022-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

So it is imperative that our view of the market and its relationship with society changes to embrace the commons, the community, the communal. Not only is our joint common inheritance threatened by the extension of market forces, but so is our capacity to tackle common global issues which are no longer confined within national borders. The latter is easily understood, only limited in its implications by myopic greed. But remedying the former comes up against the barrier of capitalist ideology, centred on the individual, which continually thwarts progressive policy. To return to ideas set out in the early pages of this work, we see society through the veil of cost-effectiveness, demand and supply, profit and loss. This is the frame which conditions our perspective, regardless of facts or evidence. And as George Lakoff maintains, once a frame is set, … if the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.109 Thus the force of market philosophy appears to make it immune to modification. As regards the commons, … the idea of a common inheritance and of using it for the public good is not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day.110 But one way or another it will eventually have to be so, and this is not a matter of ideology. For the demand of commonality will increase; in an interdependent world of instantaneous news, and in which our lives carry such immediate transparency, individualistic solutions will become increasingly obsolete.

Part of the major conceptual and ideological adjustment required will involve expanding the notion of res communis. A category of commonality will have to be laid out – a terrain which takes in not only our common patrimony, material and other, but also our joint, communal requirements, those which are not satisfied by narrow individualistic solutions. Health services, basic housing, local buses, urban as well as national parks, a universal postal service, a full network of libraries,dn and access to the internet are just some of the categories of need which occupy this common ground, over which no-one individually should have rights, especially the right to profit. Everyone has a stake in the proper functioning of these areas, all of which – as well as others – should be sacrosanct, beyond market forces. James Meek has called these universal networks; in Private Island he identified a range of them – health, energy, education, transport, etc. – which form the basis of the modern state, and all of which originated with a security network: the defence of the nation against a hostile world, transcending separate, individual concerns.112 Lakoff has a similar take on the commons, which he says covers the electromagnetic spectrum (bandwidths) as much as it does the earth’s atmosphere.113 In a rich modern polity like the United Kingdom, expectation demands equal qualification for everyday services, which as such takes precedence over the right to make profit or enrich oneself.

It is only with parity of access to the accepted

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.