Thatcher Dead, But the Unregulated Market Still Reigns Supreme

Even if we humans manage to live for another thousand years, I’m pretty certain that the dialectic between the individual and the collective, between cooperation and competition, between a long term plan and short term gratification, and between the local and the international, will go on unimpeded. It just seems to be hard-wired into our DNA. But I would suspect that as the years roll by, the pendulum will swing radically in favour of cooperation and the collective good, because I doubt we can survive in an increasingly integrated and crowded planet if egoistic individualism and tribal competition hold sway.

And as the need for cooperation becomes ever more obvious, it is equally obvious that unregulated markets and private profit must give way to tightly regulated, socially orientated production, social ownership, and a fair and equitable distribution of wealth. All this is the antithesis of what Margaret Thatcher and her political successors stand for.

In this week of Thatcher’s funeral we here much talk of Thatcherism but there is really no such thing as Thatcherism, just the dehumanising ideology that the market is always right. You can’t buck the market preached Thatcher, merely echoing the philosophy of Frederick Von Hayek, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. The market should decide everything and the state should play an increasingly minimal role, is the mantra of these high priests of capitalism. But all three of them have proved to be false prophets. Every aspect of modern day capitalism is a hybrid of unregulated markets buoyed up by massive state subsidies. Sometimes those subsidies are direct as in the case of Britain’s privatised railways, airlines and utilities. Mostly they are indirect, as in the way modern corporations rely on the state to provide modern infrastructure, health and education, all the better for capitalism to more fully exploit labour. Ha-Joon Chang in his book, ’23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’, spells out in great detail how capitalist profit is continuously supported by the tax payer and how the state steps in to bail out the corporate sector every time it goes pear shaped. The global financial collapse of 2008 is perhaps the most spectacular example, but it is going on behind the scenes day in day out.

By their friends shall we know them. Very apposite in the case of Lady Thatcher and here monetarist chums in America . The moral underpinning of Thatcher’s world view is that there is no morality, or in her own words, there is no such thing as society. This moral outlook led her to admire and support Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile and to turn a blind eye to the fascist murder of the dictatorships socialist opponents. It was this same monetarist morality that led her to describe Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as terrorists. Apartheid was ok for Thatcher because it upheld the primacy of the market. The near slave labour of South Africa’s blacks was just the market playing itself out. Closer to home, the destruction of organised labour and their communities, using the jack boot of the capitalist state, was her idea of allowing the market to function unimpeded. No doubt about it, if Thatcherism has any meaning it is that it is shorthand for naked class war capital versus organised labour. And in a cruel twist of history, the British Labour Party, a party originally formed to represent organised labour, lined up directly behind capital with barely a crumb tossed to its original constituency.

So that was then and this is now. The Coalition government is still, with a few nuances, in favour of an unregulated market and a diminished state. And the Labour Party under Milliband and Ed Balls cannot bring itself to come out unequivocally in favour of a sharply regulated market (even though I seriously doubt such a thing is even possible in this age of global capitalism). Even now, the wealthiest one per cent control over fifty percent of the world’s wealth and that concentration of capital is gathering pace. Two hundred giant corporations will soon control the majority of the world’s industrial and agricultural production, and the control of knowledge also seems to be inexorably falling under transnational corporate control. All this could be excused if there was a genuine trickle down of wealth but the statistics point the opposite way. The gap between the one percent and the rest is getting larger not smaller. Wealth distribution is just a fading dream. Thatcher and her Chicago School of economics promised us this trickle-down effect but it never materialised. The rich just keep getting richer and the rest of us teeter on the edge of destitution. Millions continue to fall off the edge and simply starve to death.

In the week of Thatcher’s death, everything panned out in a predictable way. The Tory press, with the Daily Mail in the lead, went into overdrive in their praise of Thatcher. They would do her monetarist policies chimed nicely with their corporatist agendas. Cameron, Clegg and the Tory right whipped themselves into an orgasmic frenzy of adulation for this most viscous of free-marketeers. Milliband and Co predictably muttered a few mealy-mouthed platitudes, not wanting to upset the Tory press barons or lose any votes in conservative middle England. But there was a bright spark. The internet generation cleverly by-passed the rabid Tory gutter press and created a groundswell of popular protest by downloading copies of a seemingly harmless 1930’s musical classic. But we should not celebrate too early. The Wicked Witch may be dead but the economic philosophy that she so heartily embraced is still very much alive both in the Tory and Labour parties. Ralph Milliband knew the score but his two sons, Ed and David appear to have been fatally contaminated by Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement- Tony Blair and his ‘light touch’ New Labour.

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