Thu 18 Oct 2018, 05:09 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER By Mick Craig, Labour Party Northern Ireland
It just would be too good to be true that a main stream journo would reveal the truth about ‘neoliberalism’. “A neoliberal con trick”, says the sycophant, while with slight of hand, he slips some more camouflage over the enemy:
“Some of the loudest critics of the ideology have completely misidentified it. Academics will daub the term ‘neoliberal’ on any passing phenomenon”, he writes, while continuing to ‘misidentify’ it.
It’s all very well listing all of the symptoms of the illness, but unless you correctly identify it, you can’t begin to cure it. You can’t cure syphilis with skin cream. The problem is that ‘ the loudest critics’, those who imply that it is possible to get back to the good old days if only we could get rid of the rash – abandon neoliberalism, are the only critics you will be allowed to hear. Those who have actually diagnosed the illness have been silenced.
The illness is capitalism and just as with syphilis, it goes through stages and neoliberalism is its rash. The next stage is death.
The greatest ‘con trick’ of all is being played by those who pretend that we can be saved if we go back to Keynesian economics. Keynes had one role in history – to save capitalism. That this entailed, for a short time, expanding the social wage, was a necessary part of this goal.
After his mission was accomplished, he reverted back to classical economics, and in fact praised those who succeeded him – the very people who began the neoliberal project.
