Monday, October 20, 2008

Neo-Liberalism

Unfortunately for the liberals, they have been trapped by the demands of renewal between two conservative ideologies, one, neo-liberalism, which never was liberal, but was applied to the faux libertarian corporate agenda of Reagan and co, and which is actually neo-corporatism, which is the second, ie the revival of corporate socialism, in which the state surrenders most of its power to big business. Even the concept of re-branding belies the difficulties of renewal Liberalism, since branding is a marketing term that has nothing to do with intelligent discourse on political philosophy and everything to do with thinking like Big Business. The reality is that the business that government most resembles is a credit union. The NDP cannot escape it's own shadow corporatism because the only reason for labour unions is the corporate economy. Otherwise, the concept of cooperative commonwealth is the place to which they would go. My guess is only the Greens can philosophically go where corporatism isn't, which would be to free enterprise from the corporate economy, by supporting cooperative commonwealth. The tragic flaw in the corporate thought is that as legal entities they have "no conscience to bind them." which is why they can't sign affidavits in court. They should be chartered-challenged out of existence. The corporate economy cannot be liberalized. despite all the efforts of liberals since the New Deal. It can't be done. Capitalism requires exploitation, winners and losers, just like Harper said in the middle of the economic collapse, there are great deals to be had in disintegrating stock market. Unfortunately the deals aren't available to anyone but the rapacious. Capitalism has led inevitably to corporate socialism, and the answer isn't state socialism, the answer is enterprise freed from entities falsely known as corporate citizens, and government that treats its citizens, not like clients, but like member owners. Until then we go living in a Dilbert cartoon, where management has no answers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good post! Definitely preaching to the converted here.

Maybe the most practical and healthiest solution would be to rewrite the charter of corporations. Until they are constrained in terms of power and unaccountability this mess isn't going to get any better.

Jerry Prager said...

It certainly has something to do with either rewriting their charter or dumping them out of charter rights all together, which of course is a lot easier said than done.