EcoLogics

Last updated July 7, 2009

EcoLogics’ raison d’etre can be found in its first post, ‘Speaking Out’, which intertwines two stories: the story of BAA/Ferrovial’s efforts to use anti-terror legislation to stop peaceful protest at Heathrow in the summer of 2007; and the story of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem or ‘anthem’ which he wrote after WWII, and which described how he remained silent when the Nazi’s came for different social groups until, in his own translated words, ‘they came for me [but] there was no one left to speak out’.

One of the points that I wished to illustrate via that post was the temporal dimension of authoritarianism. As Niemöller’s biography, and as the events before, during and after the protest at Heathrow reveal, in the beginning a creeping authoritarianism may only appear to affect ‘others’. However, its logic is such that, eventually, it ends up affecting ‘you and me’. What begins as a seemingly simple and common sense distinction or opposition between ’self’ and ‘other’ eventually collapses. For example, authoritarian laws that apparently target illegal aliens, terrorists, benefit cheats, etc. one day become the laws that are applied to anyone who dares to oppose the party in power. This blog seeks to reveal the workings of this process as it is developing in the UK, with a focus on what might be described as the nocturnal connections between the emergence of contemporary forms of authoritarianism in the UK, and what is arguably their most important motivation: neoliberalism or the economic fundamentalism that has taken over much of the world since the 1980s.

Originally, the blog was meant to focus on the implications of such connections for the environmental(ist) field (hence the name EcoLogics). However, in time the blog has come to research, and critique the relation between authoritarianism and neoliberalism wherever this blogger comes across it: in New Labour’s back door imposition of a ‘universal’ DNA database, in the use of torture by the U.S. and U.K. governments, and more recently in the rise of what I describe as New Labour’s Amazonia.

As the reader will find, special attention has been devoted to what initially seemed like no more (and no less) than a heavy–handed management technique for the vocationalisation of one of the UK’s universities. In time, it has become apparent that the vocationalisation is part and parcel of an aggressively neoliberalising dynamic that was initiated by 11 Downing Street and which involves the current prime minister’s links to the highest (and now disgraced) circles of finance. As the Leitch Review of Skills articles show, this is not a matter of conjecture or conspiracy theorising, but of actual policies, and of named policy makers. Anyone who takes the time to read the different policy statements and press releases will become aware of the extent to which higher education in the UK has become the target not just of a process of skillification (my term for a new kind of vocationalisation), but of a planned and even ‘theorised’ neoliberalisation via a process which is described by one of its high priests as ‘knowledge exchange’. One of the consequences of knowledge exchange, as some lecturers and students at the University of Liverpool are now discovering in the most painful of ways, is that critical voices such as might be found in philosophy, politics and media studies may be silenced if and when a manager can claim that the knowledge they produce has no exchange value.

The efforts to privatise the Royal Mail, and the recent elimination of the UK’s Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), as coupled to the decision to transfer DIUS’ obligations to the Department of Business—led by the unelected, and arch-neoliberal Peter Mandelson—is the strongest evidence that the lurch to an increasingly corrupt right continues unabated despite Gordon Brown’s protestations to the contrary.

EcoLogics also seeks to offer a critical historical perspective on the nocturnal connections. Milton Friedman’s first great experiment with neoliberal policies took place in Pinochet’s Chile; few people know that it was in that same Chile that there was the first neoliberal banking crisis. The writing was, in this sense, on the walls of the Palacio de la Moneda, the presidential palace (and ironically, the former national mint) that Pinochet bombed in order to remove the democratically-elected Salvador Allende. Chile’s reluctant generals would not have agreed to do the dirty work had it not been for Friedman, or rather, his infamous Chicago Boys, who convinced the Chilean military that they had a magical plan with which to restore Chile’s shattered economy. The nefarious Chilean experiment may seem far removed from British realities in the early 2000s until it is realised that Margaret Thatcher sent her trusted Cecil Parkinson to Chile to look and learn in the early 1980s. The UK became, in this sense, Friedman’s second great experiment, with consequences that are now all too apparent.

Anyone who reads or rereads Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom will find clues in the book to much of what has happened in the US and the UK over the last decade. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and perhaps now Pakistan, together with the creeping loss of civil liberties in the U.S. and Britain may all be linked to what is the most famous, and now most paradoxical passage in Friedman’s biblical text: ‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

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Given the recent economic, political and moral bankruptcy of neoliberalism, the time may have come to start addressing a new set of challenges. As suggested in a new series of posts about Obama’s presidency, we may face a return to what is, in some respects at least, an older and more hegemonic modus operandi, in Gramsci’s sense of the term.

At the same time, dynamics generated by a sharpening climate change crisis may throw spanners into the most carefully conceived political strategies, and of course, into the subtlest of critical analyses. While the flagellum of neoliberalism is by no means dead (though we may yet discover that it is dying), in the coming months and years we may witness the emergence of forms of governance which may well require new forms of interpretation and critique. I hope to make a contribution by way of EcoLogics’ articles and short essays. I also hope to make a contribution by way of occasional satirical pieces such as ‘Roy Anderson and the Privatisation of Higher Education in the UK’, which you will find in the Satire at EcoLogics page.

Please note that while I very much welcome feedback via the comments function, the blog only publishes comments in exceptional circumstances.