EcoLogics

This blog rarely uses photographic images. But in some of the past posts about David Cameron, EcoLogics has invoked the image of a two-faced politician, a ‘Janus Cameron’ who one day jets off to a hushed-up meeting to establish a European Parliament pact with the homophobic Kaczyński twins (the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party), and another day grandly announces that the New Conservative Party is recanting its hatefully anti-gay stance.

Yesterday and today we’ve seen the two-faced Tories in action again. One moment Daniel Hannan, an MEP of  Britain’s newly self-styled progressive party (perhaps we should re-baptise the Conservative Party as the PPP—the People’s Progressive Party) is slagging off the NHS on Murdoch’s nefarious Fox Television, and the next David Cameron is sending an email to PPP activists, reminding them that the official line is that the NHS is great. Anyone in doubt as to what true-blue Tories think needs to read no further than Damian Thompson’s piece in the Telegraph, aptly titled ‘We Need Daniel Hannan at Westminister, not in Brussels‘.

But now there is an even more ominous sign of what we can expect from the Tories. After three members of the PPP were caught out whining about the tightening of the rules over MP perks, Cameron is making headlines saying that his cabinet members will have to take 25% cuts in their pay. By the Guardian’s account, combined allowances and salary will actually go down from £144,520 to £124,581.50. Ouch.

It’s probably wise to try to ensure that MPs and Cabinet ministers are sufficiently well-paid so that it costs more for companies like BAE to bribe them. Then again, given the three- to four-million jobless figures that are anticipated in the next year or two, this reduction is something akin to a postmodern sacrifice, i.e. it ‘quotes’ sacrificiality.

The true meaning of Cameron’s cuts is anything but postmodern: it is a portent of the savagery with which Cameron will wield his privatising machete to slash and burn the UK’s public services once he becomes the prime minister. Far from wishing to set the British economy on the road to recovery, Cameron’s main motivation will be premised on what we might describe as the Hannan Principle of Politics, in honour of the eponymous Tory MEP. To paraphrase (with a good dose of irony) that old Murdochian line, ‘will the last to leave Britain please turn out the lights’…

‘It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the New Labour Party conference, October 2001

‘So winning the battle against international terrorism is to win for the economy too.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the Confederation of British Industry, November 2001

Note: this is the fifth in a series of posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law

Gustavo Leigh claimed personal responsibility for having ordered the air attacks on September 11.  General Leigh was reportedly the first man in the junta-to-be to sign up for the coup that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger hatched in Washington. Faced with an unexpectedly tenacious resistance from Allende and his supporters, Leigh commanded the Fuerza Aerea Chilena (FAC) to bombard Allende’s personal home, as well as the Palacio de la Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace and former mint.  Apparently, it took quite some time to muster and then fly FAC fighter-bombers to Santiago, so it was not until after midday that two British-made Hawker Hunters from the No. 7 squadron bombarded the presidential palace, Allende’s home, and government radio stations with their Hispano Sura R80 rockets.

To any Chilean not under the spell of a far right-wing ideology, the attack would have been the equivalent of hearing that the Air Chief Marshal of the RAF had ordered Typhoon F2’s to bomb 10 Downing Street, the BBC’s Bush House, and Tony Blair’s property on Connaught Square. Images of the Hawker Hunters diving at the Palacio de la Moneda went on to become the symbol of the new junta’s brutality—or if one was sufficiently to the right, the opening act of a new Chile.

In this, the penultimate post in the present series, EcoLogics makes the case that September 11, 1973—the ‘other 9/11’—is a better inaugural date for New Labour’s spiral of terror than is the 9/11 that Tony Blair described as a ‘turning point in history’. The idea is not to deny the historical significance of September 11, 2001—an event whose horrific death toll rightly provoked global outrage, and then also provided the Bush and Blair administrations with pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  No, the point is to suggest that, given everything that we now know, the original ‘9/11’ was the more important date in so far as September 11, 1973 marked a foundational moment in the emergence of a fundamentalism that haunts us to this day: not Islamist fundamentalism, but the kind of economic fundamentalism that goes by the name of neoliberalism.

*   *   *

Earlier, it was noted that the Chilean coup was hatched by Richard Nixon’s republican government. This is no longer a matter of speculation, and can no longer be dismissed as myth-making by left-wing activists. Documents released by the U.S. government over the last decade have confirmed what the Chileans themselves always knew: that even if there was considerable unhappiness amongst right and centre-right groups with Allende’s policies (how could there not be?!), it took the bullying might of the U.S. government to institute a de facto economic blockade on Chile. It also took the C.I.A. to provide the logistics and the ideological shove necessary to get Chile’s famously professional army to take up arms against its own people. (If in doubt, have a look at the documents provided by the George Washington University’s National Security Archive).

A story that has been told less often is that many of the generals would have refused to join the coup had it not been for the fact that leading figures in Chile’s upper class persuaded them that a plan was at hand that would rescue the ravaged economy. Key members of the group in question came to be known as the Chicago Boys. This was a reference to the fact that they were disciples of two economists at the University of Chicago: Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. The Wikipedia entry on the Chicago Boys provides the official account of how it is that a single foreign university, and indeed a single department within that university acquired so much influence in Chile, and eventually, in many other Latin American countries. What the entry does not explain is that the collaboration between Chile’s Catholic University and the economics department at U Chicago (which enabled the export of Friedman’s discourse) was part of a much broader ideological project—one which allowed powerful cultural institutions in the U.S. to become an integral aspect of the American ‘national security doctrine’ for Latin America. One such institution was the Rockefeller Foundation, which made multi-million dollar donations to the University of Chicago.  From this perspective, the collaboration between the Catholic University and the University of Chicago must be regarded as a form of ideological militancy, as opposed to a purely academic exchange about matters economical.

We will return to this point below. The plan that the Chicago Boys developed eventually came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Chile’, and became a template for similar developments in most other countries across the world. Under Pinochet and his Chicago Boy ministers, Chile abandoned the socialist model begun by Allende and introduced instead a string policies involving the deregulation of markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and the stabilisation of inflation via monetarist instruments. The second story that is not frequently told is that the Chilean Miracle was no more miraculous than New Labour’s more recent ‘miracle’; as noted by this blog in another post, leading economists such as Ricardo Ffrench-Davis have shown that, in fact, the policies eventually led to the collapse and nationalisation of leading Chilean banks by the early 1980s. One passage from Ffrench-Davis’ book almost reads like a description of what has happened this year to the U.S. and the U.K. economies:

‘The problems developing in the productive apparatus were closely linked to the functioning of the financial system and the indiscriminate trade opening. The model conceded a leading role to the financial reform. In fact, the financial system was transformed into the dominant decision-making center in the Chilean economy. In 1982, it became clear that indebtedness of firms and individuals was strangling economic activity and was growing rapidly owing to the prevailing high interest rates, while the revenue of enterprises was declining as a result of the domestic recession. The financial reform and the opening to capital flows constituted at first a determinant factor in the concentration of wealth and in crowing out of productive investment (Agosin 1998). Then, towards the end of the period, it revealed additional vulnerability that it had introduced into the national economy and the distortion of economic development created by the unbridled financierism to which it gave rise.’(1)

These issues did not stop Margaret Thatcher from seeking to emulate neoliberal policies in Britain. In 1980, she sent her trustworthy Cecil Parkinson, then Minister of Trade, to look at and learn from the ‘Chilean experience’. In an interview published in El Mercurio, the leading newspaper in Chile, Parkinson famously noted that the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’ (2).

*   *   *

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Margaret Thatcher’s government went on to impose neoliberal ‘reform’ on the UK, and New Labour completed the process. The UK, like Chile in the 1980s, has now entered what many regard not as an economic recession, but an economic depression: the result here, as in Pinochet’s Chile, of the catastrophic blind spots of Friedman’s neoliberal discourse and ideology, and of the corruption that went, and still goes with it.

The question we must now answer is, how is this process tied to New Labour’s spiral of terror?

The first point that needs to be made is that Friedman’s shock therapy was never a purely economic therapy. Of course, no economic policy ever is: any form of economic policy-making is always social and political in so far as it entails a dynamic of prioritisation (some aspects of a market are valued over others), and in so far as it is always a social group, or a set of social groups’ economic priorities that end up being imposed on other groups. What is clear, however, is that Friedman’s recipe was particularly vitiated in that it was a product of a cold war ideology. In keeping with this ideology, it was first ‘applied’ in a country which was regarded as a test case in the U.S.’s  ‘total war’ against Marxism and socialism. Friedman’s neoliberal model was to be a prophylactic against the ‘contagion’ of Marxism, and of socialism more generally. The model was thus, from the start, at once an economic model, and a model with which to engage in ideological warfare of the kind that is now associated with Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’. (By way of an aside, let us not forget that even if in 1973 Blair was only just starting his undergraduate degree at Oxford [a degree in jurisprudence, for which he earned a second class mark], key members of the second Bush administration were junior members of the Nixon administration—and one of them was, of course, Dick Cheney.)

The second point is a somewhat more complex one in so far as it involves not a direct discursive challenge to one or another social order, but a kind of indirect consequence of Friedman’s discourse, and the broader neoliberal ideology. In the introduction of Friedman’s famous book, Capitalism and Freedom (a title that makes clear the political nature of his economic proposals), Friedman famously suggested that

‘…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.’

What is striking about this passage is the way in which it seemingly effortlessly establishes a link between neoliberalism and policing. Indeed, and as noted by this blog in earlier posts, interpreted in the way that they were by Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, and now Gordon Brown, these words help to explain not only the war-mongering character of the mentioned governments, but also, why these selfsame governments have fostered the kind of surveillance society we now have: if ‘our freedom’ must be protected from ‘enemies’ ‘outside’, it must also be protected from ‘our fellow citizens’.

A government that is conceived mainly as ‘fostering a competitive economy’—arguably, a codeword for the kind of intervention engaged by Peter Mandelson’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—and of waging war against enemies ‘within’ and ‘without’, can only ever really end up being a government that is caught in the kind of spiral of terror described in these posts: beyond promoting certain groups’ access to economic wealth, the only social policy is one of policing. Policing in the literal sense of the word, but also, in the broader sense that is commonly described as New Labour’s ‘control freakery’, itself an expression of what EcoLogics has compared to the practices of Amazon.com in the post New Labour’s Amazonia.

Of course, the policing must be justified by repeated invocations of threats ‘outside’ and ‘within’ ‘our gates’. Linked as it is to New Labour’s Hobbesian instincts, and to the kind of actual or virtual corruption symbolised by David Blunkett’s work for Entrust, or Peter Mandelson’s favours to E.ON, this process must result in authoritarianism of the kind that has been promoted in the UK since Mrs Thatcher came to power 30 years ago, and which has worsened since Tony Blair was elected in 1997. Viewed from this perspective, the second 9/11 was not the beginning of the spiral of terror, but something like a perfect pretext for the process analysed in this series of posts.

In next week’s final post, some thoughts on what it would take to stop New Labour’s spiral of terror.

Notes

1) Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 51-52.

2) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.