Gulick...
>>"neo-liberalism" (sic, I'm not
>>sure I find that a useful concept anymore)
Henwood...
>It's a useful concept if your problem is with a kind of capitalism
>rather than capitalism itself. Then you can be critical without sounding
>too radical.
Gulick...
Yeah, I saw that agonizing performance of Naomi Klein's on Charlie Rose, where she was tightly wound, he was obnoxiously petulant... and in the end all she was doing was arguing in favor of a socially responsible KWS, not going too far beyond the Paul Krugman of the post-Clinton epoch.
But a bigger reason I find the concept increasingly shopworn is because there is such a massive gap between neo-liberalism as ideological construct and neo-liberalism as policy practice (a point that Klein does make if not entirely consistently and entirely well)... and this is all the moreso true in the rising crucibles of capital accumulation (where sometimes the ideology is out in front of the practice, and sometimes the reverse, but never the twain shall meet).
More than anything else, though, I don't like the concept anymore because it symbolizes intellectual laziness on the left (and I won't exempt myself from that charge). For example, I tremendously admire Tariq Ali, and relish his written commentary and public speaking, eating it up wherever I can find it... but unfailingly, when contrasting Venezuela-Bolivia-Ecuador to what's going on elsewhere, that elsewhere is always the same old recipe of privatization, deregulation, IMF-World Bank structural adjustment, blah blah blah. It is the kind of simplistic tripe that I trot out in front of my students whenever I'm too unmotivated to update lectures from 1996.
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