Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

One of the problems with the demise of neoliberalism is that it has left an intellectual vacuum in public and policy discussion on economics. Public discussion of economics has been dominated by mysticism founded on the belief that somehow markets are a form of social organisation separate from and distinct to social life.

Whenever I've encountered those who feel that there are too many people on the planet … I've issued them with a polite invitation to do themselves in as the only ethical approach. This is because those who feel that there are simply too many people inevitably feel that there are too many of somebody else’s family, class, ethnicity or nation. ... [T]he problem is constructed as “too many of them” rather than "one too many of me".

Kevin Rudd has certainly nailed his colours to the masthead with his article The Global Financial Crisis published in the February 2009 edition of The Monthly. As a plain language account of the dominance of neo-liberalism in Western political economy over the last thirty or so years it is exemplary.

What I am getting at is the impossibility of establishing democratic conditions by fiat or by force. There needs to be a will towards that end from within the history and culture of the country and the people themselves..

A capacity for imagining different conditions is the hallmark of a capacity for freedom, individual and collective agency, citizenship. The absence of that capacity signifies the existence of state or other forms of terror and oppression. Worse still it can signal the internalisation or naturalisation of inequality such that those whose interests lie in change do not seek change.