Goodbye Cruel Bird

the foulest legacy Born: October 13, 1925, Grantham Died: April 8, 2013, London t he solution After neoliberalism: analysing the present Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin The founding editors of Soundings set out the framing analysis for our online manifesto. W ith the banking crisis and the credit crunch of 2007-8, and their economic repercussions around the globe, the system of neoliberalism, or global free-market capitalism, that has come to dominate the world in the three decades since 1980, has imploded. As the scale of toxic debt became evident, credit and inter-bank lending dried up, spending slowed, output declined and unemployment rose. The system’s vastly inflated financial sectors, which speculate in assets largely unrelated to the real economy of goods and services, precipitated an economic crisis whose catastrophic consequences are still unfolding. We believe that mainstream political debate simply does not recognise the depth of this crisis, nor the consequent need for radical rethinking. The economic model that has underpinned the social and political settlement of the last three decades is unravelling, but the broader political and social consensus apparently remains in place. We therefore offer this analysis as a contribution to the debate, in the hope that it will help people on the left think more about how we can shift the parameters of the debate, from one concerning small palliative and restorative measures, to one which opens the way for moving towards a new political era and new understandings of what constitutes the good society. 1 For three decades, the neoliberal system has been generating vast profits 9 After neoliberalism: analysing the present for multi-nationals, investment institutions and venture capitalists, and huge accumulations of wealth for the new global super-rich, while grossly increasing the gap between rich and poor and deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world war. In North America and Western Europe - hitherto dynamos of the global economic system - rates of growth are now lower than during the early post-war decades, when there was a more even balance of power between the social classes. There has been a steep decline in manufacturing and a hot-house expansion of financial services and the service economy; and a massive shift of power and resources from public to private, from state to market. ‘The market’ has become the model of social relations, exchange value the only value. Western governments have shown themselves weak and indecisive in responding to the environmental crisis, climate change and the threat to sustainable life on the planet, and have refused to address the issues in other than their own - market - terms. Likewise, the financial crisis has been used by many Western governments as a means of further entrenching the neoliberal model. They have adopted swingeing ‘austerity measures’ which, they claim, is the only way of reducing the deficits