There is no question that Chile’s workers and poor are better positioned today than they were just ten, to say nothing of twenty, years ago. Indeed, popular forces enjoy the most auspicious balance of power since the 1973 coup that stamped out Chile’s democratic road to socialism. And Bachelet did shepherd through a series of reforms in her first year, including higher education legislation that attracted international attention.
But obtaining a firmer grasp on the prospects for emancipatory politics in Chile calls for examining both the electoral results and first-year reforms in relation to elite interests and movement strategies. Such scrutiny reveals an unequivocal preservation of bipartisan oligarchic neoliberalism, along with continued extra-institutional opposition from merging movements.....Why is it so difficult to shake neoliberalism even after elections? Neoliberalism — the political theory based on the market state and market fundamentalism — has been institutionalized globally over the last several decades and it will take broad and deep reform to change it. This, too, will take decades unless there is global revolution, which seems unlikely. A lot of time and money went into a building a powerful neoliberal consensus. It's won't be easy to reverse it when the interest of the powerful and wealth is to preserve and extend it.
Jacobin » Blogs
Insurgency and Orthodoxy
René Rojas, doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University
2 comments:
Neoliberalism was a political movement that was brought to fruition by politics, and can be undone by politics.
The problem is the contemporary left seems incapable of putting on its big boy pants and developing serious and realistic alternatives that it can sell to the voting publics across the developed world. The recent events in Greece show just how deeply the left is still lost in amateur hour politics and mental fuzziness.
Most modern "progressive" thought is a dog's breakfast of juvenile anarchist romanticism, green countercultural escapism, crackpot economic theories, cold and useless Marxist leftovers, and an overabundance of poetry, rhetoric and sophomoric intellectual theorizing.
The left seems to be inherently frightened and intimidated by political power, and doesn't really want to wield it. They seem content to bang tom-toms in the park and write meaningless articles for one another.
@ Dan.
Agree.
TINA rules — until there is an alternative worldview comp;let with vision, narrative, and rationale, that can compete with the prevailing neoliberal one.
We ain't there yet. The Left is either looking backwards, which never works historically, or else is looking to neoliberalism lite and the real thing will always win in the showdown.
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