The LSE European Institute was established in 1991 as a dedicated centre for the interdisciplinary study of processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.
Sounds like a great polemic, but I really think its a big stretch to equate the "utopianism" of the Soviet union with that of neo-liberalism; a quick google search for Soviet propaganda will show you the kinds of visions they had, whereas one of the founding fathers of neo-liberalism, Milton Friedman, made it clear in many of his speeches that utopia was not possible and there are no free lunches. If by utopia she means believing that a particular system is better than others, then you could lay that accusation at every political system. With regard to her claims about bureauracracy; does she have any empirical evidence that the level of bureauracracy under neo-liberal governments is closer to the Soviet union than other political systems? or is it just based on anecdotal evidence?
Muslims are here in Michigan chanting, "Death to America"....... On MIT campus they were singing in Arabic, "We wish to say it loud and clear: we don't want to see zionists here. From the water to water: Palestine Arab. From the water to water Israel Destroyed. Free Palestine, Israel get out, WE WILL SACRIFICE OUR BLOOD AND OUR SOULS FOR YOU PALESTINE. THE IRON GATES OF AL AQSA OPEN FOR THE MARTYR." that one can be hard to find so here, go to 15:20 ru-vid.comgzlpKoCN4zI?si=QvtSd8WWrFuliCTr. on that video to sing along. So is it any surprise that we are seeing this. Immigration is fine mass immigration is not.
Probably the finest demolition of an ideology (neoliberalism) I have ever read. It is not an easy read - but for those that want to understand what is going on in the Uk and, by extension, the EU (& USA) the book is superb. I am involved in supporting independent candidates in the forthcoming UK general election. I will be using this book as a way to help the candidates and supporters to understand what is going on & how to implement change. I take my hat off to Dr Innes, the book is a masterwork. Thank you very much..
Completely agree. It ought to become a seminal work. I particularly like the way neoliberalism is critiqued not from a narrowly moralistic standpoint, but philosophically. In painstaking detail Innes shows how hubristic utopian projects entirely fail to engage with the intrinsic nature of actual human reality - and therefore can never work. Good luck with your work. I left Labour because it’s still clinging grimly on to the neoliberal raft. The local elections, hopefully, showed the beginning of a change that Innes calls for.
This unfortunately evidences academic intelligent at a total dislocation of expectation (expectation = reality) when compared against emotional intelligence of the majority of UK people. This is a dribble of narratives to fit personal beliefs and agendas from the so called UK academia elites. What is soviet is this work is supported by UK Tax payers, paying for people as evidenced here who give absolutely nothing to society progression other than dribble. Thank you all for identifying that this is not a book to purchase which saves a little time and money. Note to oneself, do not let ones children go anywhere near the LSE European Institute.
This lady doesnt understand even the very basics of leninism. Marxism leninism is a process, a method, not a place. The contributions of Lenin, Mao and such is that of developing a method not reaching a deterministic place. Quite obviously they errered. The amount of ahistorical mental gymnastics She has to go through to justify her point of view is astounding.
Sounds like conceit and disalusion that modern day democracies think they are the answer self governance when they are supporting by arms and politically genocides and have spent decades in wars of aggression in the name of freedom and democracy
Wonderfully articulated by both speakers. Abby is clearly a blessing for the next revolutionary changes to come. And summed the situation up astutely with her conclusive response. Thank you.
Brexit was not a revolution &, because it changed so little, need not occur only once a generation: the same narrow elite rules the mass of scrappy serfs & the city of London & all its off-shore tax havens & black money churn on as before. The same conversion of the state as a clearing house for a few private piglet firms continues. The same comical deference to US geostrategic aims against both UK & EU interests dances on.
Neoliberal subjectivity under the maxim "may everyone be an entrepreneur of oneself," though exhibited either as continuous self-improvement or compulsive idiosyncrasy, is but the release valve & MASK of the majority's powerlessness & uniformity under the system's true magnates: the rich & their managerial puppets.
@@davidwestwater2219 Can't it be a reasonable middle ground? I agree with Thatcher on the shipbuilding privatisation but not on the others. I agree with her program of letting ppl buy their council houses but think the gov should have been more involved in building more flats for ppl to buy. A healthy middle ground, my friend.
Who is pulling the strings? Who is inventing and funding all of these ridiculous ideologies that profit the few at the expense of the many whilst keeping the general population in a state of fear, ignorance and blind obedience? I mean they are predators and yet expertly cunning in their ability to hide behind the veil. So much so that academics generally discard this whole paradigm as conspiracy theory. Isn't it simply a deeper layer of truth than they have access to? And wouldn't everything fall into place if they could only solve this mystery?
While this is excellent, I hate the reference to Kuhn's dishonest and old book. Of course science approaches the truth. Does the speaker seriously doubt that electromagnetism and QM are true? How does she think all the electronic paraphernalia we use daily work? When men went to the moon, were they not correct in thinking that it was "true" that the moon was about 250,000 miles away? Kuhn was stupid, or more probably just on the make, so he did not write that relativity included Newtonian mechanics, in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is relativity at low speeds.
This is epistemology. Related, but not exactly philosophy of science. You can believe that we can manipulate electromagnetism without having to believe the "knowledge" we create is "true".
@@DMGrass-gb9kg And men went to to the moon with the knowledge that the moon is about 250,000 miles away, but they did not believe that knowledge was true? They thought it was false? They were not sure about it? Maybe the moon was 250 million miles away?
@johnnygate3399 its a form of skepticism. It's not wrong, its not right. Sounds absurd to some, reasonable to others. However, how could science exist without skepticism?
The author seems to suggest empiricism as a cure for the 'utopia' of neo-liberalism yet arguably the overuse and abuse of empiricism is a key feature of neo-liberalism and a key part of its utopianism. For example the public sector targets and fiscal rules of the New Labour years which linger to this day. The delusion of people living without hope and simply micro-managing their way in a better world is the utopia of neo-liberalism
Did you read the book? I suggest you do. You would see that the neo-libs don't use empiricism - they start from a set of daft assummptions and off they go - building their utopia. Read the book, you might learn summat.
The way she interprets Brexit is laughable. She says that the introduction of bureaucratic systems from Blair onwards are an indicator of neoliberal failure, yet in no way includes the bureaucratic regulatory frameworks imposed by the EU in that diagnosis. I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that neoliberalism is far too attached to an ideal system which cannot work in practice, but to willfully ignore the part which the EU plays throughout the entire neoliberal period is incredibly disingenuous.
Couldn't agree more. Excellent point. This airy exoneration of the anti-progressive, Neoliberal regulations of the EU, institutionalizing austerity, product & service dumping across borders, brain drain with no compensation, etc., is all too typical of the controlled center left in the UK.
Couldn't agree more. This airy exoneration of the anti-progressive, Neoliberal regulations of the EU, institutionalizing austerity, product & service dumping across borders, brain drain with no compensation, etc., is all too typical of the controlled center left in the UK.
Really, as she correctly pointed out, Brexit was a symptom of a late stage Neo-Liberal system that has failed. A failure currently supported and actively encouraged by both major parties. Bureaucratic over reach and cost centers, infected every aspect of the UK state, NHS, Education, Social services, Transport, Energy, under Thatcher thanks to her failed economic ideology. If any evidence of this disaster were required, look no further than the Infestation of the NHS by managers and administrators, which cost the NHS 35-40% more in administration charges & wages than it did before Thatcher came to power. And lets not get started on Privatisation of the NHS, which has trebled and quadrupled the cost of providing healthcare in the UK. The EU was a convenient scapegoat, a justification for Brexit. The Brexit project died, with LIz Truss & Kwasi Kwarteng and their attempt to double down on a Failed Neo-Liberal project...
The EU is very much neo-liberal and although I did vote remain I wasn't that arsed... we were always screwed either way. I think we would have done this to ourselves even without the EU. We are more technocratic and more neo-liberal than the EU. Leaving the EU has fixed nothing, if anything it's made us go even further in the wrong direction. Brexit and indeed the EU, in my opinion, has very little to do with our current state of decline.
You just have to read the brief associations listed above for each presenter to know that. If you disagree perhaps you won't listen, if you do there's no need to.
The ultimate irony is that both major parties in Britain remain steadfastly committed to this failed model. There was a brief period 2015-19 where Labour was exploring different models but the establishment reacted to that with unusually intense hostility and engaged in a campaign of lies, smears, and sabotage from outside of and within the Labour Party to ensure it was defeated. At the end of this year, there will be an election, and it's almost certain that the party in power will change. It is also increasingly clear that very little else will. Things will get much worse for Britain before they get better, mark my words. Also, I would argue that people give Britain far, far too much credit for having an open, non-repressive society. It wasn't Soviet but there was a lot of nefarious interference by police and intelligence services. Social and political movements, especially those related to racism, environmentalism, and above all trade unionism, were spied on and suppressed, oftentimes by violent means. Resistance to the coming neoliberal order was very real, and so was the overt oppression the state, media(it's not an accident that all this coincided with the rise of the Murdoch press empire), and other forces in society.
in the late 90s I was reading a history of the communism and most importantly, the early history of application of Marxism in Soviet Union before the rise of Stalin, and I had the same feeling as the speaker, these guys from Wall Street and Ayn Rand crowd look just like the early Soviet Union experiment, when they destroyed the capitalism to eliminate the state, and when it did not work, they built the state to enforce state-run economy as a proxy for communism.
Margaret Thatcher was obsessed with something called “Wagner’s Law”, which predicted an inherent, inertial tendency for the state’s share of GDP to grow inexorably if not checked. It took her 10 years to lower it from 40% to 35%, but two years after she left office it was back up to 40% again. It’s currently at over 45%, the highest it’s ever been in peacetime. The UK is not a small-state economy by comparison with other OECD countries. Our neighbour Ireland really is a small-state economy. There the government accounts for just 25% of GDP, there’s no single-payer health system like the NHS, and corporate taxes are half what they are in the UK. I’m not advocating the Irish approach for the UK. But if the word “neoliberalism” has any stable meaning, Ireland is a far better example of it than the UK is.
What Thatcher probably misunderstood is that Wagner’s Law is not a cynical complaint about a political failure, but rather describes a necessity within successful capitalism. Due to industrial progress (machines, automation, rationalization), production of goods is continuously getting cheaper and requires less human work. But work is the major source of income, so naturally we shift focus to human services, which on the other hand become increasingly expensive because they don’t benefit that much from industrial progress. It’s only natural that this has to be organized by the society as a whole. The state organizing, ordering and purchasing services for us all is a way to redistribute value to the people, and as such also a way to actually realize the profit of growth for the society as a whole. It would otherwise become unstable. As industrial progress goes on, we are increasingly dependent on the state organizing the distribution of value since markets alone would fail. It’s important to distinguish capitalism and free markets. That’s the mistake of Neoliberal. Capitalism goes well with strong state. Free markets alone and capitalism ruin each other in the end. That the biggest fans of capitalism don’t understand this system at all, is a huge tragedy.
@@LiebeGruesse Thank you for your comment. I don’t think I agree with you completely (or with Margaret Thatcher), though you make some good points. Just to make clear, I’m not a small-state ideologue, but nor do I think having a large state sector is automatically awesome. 1) Wagner died in 1917, so he never experienced the Stalinist or Maoist command economy, which aimed at the state handling 100% of all economic activity. Even Stalin and Mao never achieved this total Orwellian state, because they could never completely eliminate the black market. But it was understandable if someone of Margaret Thatcher’s generation viewed the possible slow-motion transition to such an economy with dread. 2) Margaret Thatcher’s determined attempt to shrink the state was a temporary blip lasting no more than ten years. It took her Conservative successor just two years to undo her work. The post-2010 Conservative governments haven’t tried to revive it. The Cameron government imposed austerity for a time, but I don’t think this was out of an ideological imperative to permanently shrink the state; they just thought - incorrectly - that it was a necessary temporary response to the 2007 crash. During the Covid crisis, the Johnson government instigated a temporary version of Leninist War Communism. I don’t think they were actually Leninists. 3) Somehow the UK today has wound up with the worst of both worlds. There are small state economies which are dynamic and high growth (e.g. Ireland, Singapore, South Korea). And there are economies like the USA where state programs promote business success (Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program funded much of the research which makes the US tech sector so dominant today, for instance). We’ve would up with our largest ever state sector in peacetime. But it’s not producing any of those US-style Keynesian multipliers, and people feel state provision is inadequate.
@@georgesdelatour Very inspiring insights. Thank you! I have to reply, cause it all seems to make sense together taken. I’m German with no insight into UK, so my knowledge is based on foreign reading and pure theory :) Examples like Ireland are like as if you would draw a border around Frankfurt or City of London. They successfully exploit global specialization. Those economies seem to occupy a large share of certain global service markets. Of course, while oversimplifying I missed that redistribution of profits happens with numerous mechanisms - not all need the state. The famous “trickling down” effect does exist. But it’s so insufficient at large scales that it’s keeps sounding cynical to glorify its impact: the suit-wearing banker takes the money from the rich for making them richer and when he smokes a cigar, the money is trickling down to a tobacco farmer in Honduras, to avoid mentioning his house cleaning staff. Most “trickling down” needs to be supported with big splashes by the state’s ladle to reach everyone’s glass. And while the state as such is small in Ireland, the state is kinda paying a lot for attracting a fair share of global or European wealth - by not taxing. Same in Switzerland - where I live. And attracting global “paper” capital also creates an environment for extremely shareholder-dependent, cause investment-heavy, businesses like Pharma or Software (huge Google Campus in Zürich). South Korea is a very interesting case though, cause it initiated its growth with massive protectionist policies by a strong interventionist state. I would expect that South Korea needs a larger state share in the long run as well. State share statistics might also be misleading: what if private companies or even financial institutions are actually owned by the state? Strong regulations and directives are also much cheaper than just using Keynesian methods of tax, loans and expenditure. The book “Kicking away the ladder” by Ha-Joon Chang is probably providing some answers.
@@georgesdelatour Needless to say, I agree on the overall failure of total state controlled economies in Soviet style states. Though it’s actually rarely acknowledged that they did grow and did industrialize, alone following the state’s planning - of course, inspired by the capitalist neighborhood’s innovations. Considering the planetary boundaries to growth though, I guess, we should better learn how to organize prosperity without the capitalism-specific cycle of loan, investments, productivity and growth. There is so far no empirical nor theoretical evidence that self-contained unlimited Green Growth can exist. Lots of people forget that occasionally decreasing environmental impact is completely different from having Zero Net Impact forever.
@@LiebeGruesse Concerning state redistribution verses trickle down economics: In the UK, Ed Miliband’s political career was a failure. But while he was leader of the Labour Party, he actually toyed with a good idea which needs to be revived. It’s called “predistribution”. Left wing governments typically think of reducing inequality via redistribution through the tax and benefit system. But there are problems with this. For one thing, you need the rich to stay rich (and stay in your country) for you to be able to tax them and transfer some of their wealth to the poor year after year. For another, you’re not actually raising the earning capacity of the poor this way. They’re completely dependent on you for their income. And as soon as you hit some financial crisis, you’ll wind up being forced to cut back on benefit spending, with disastrous consequences for the poor. Predistribution starts by noticing that there are some countries where pre-tax, pre-redistribution inequality is very low: Iceland and Slovenia, for instance. Both those countries redistribute through the tax system as well. But even if they didn’t, they’d still be less unequal than, say, France. No doubt there are many specific factors making these two countries relatively equal which we can’t copy. They’re both very small and very ethnically homogenous for one thing. But a big one is that their economies ensure that their poorer citizens have a higher pre-tax earning capacity.
I've been calling Airstrip One (UK) Soviet Union 2.0 (or Soviet Britain) for decades, since I lived for a while in the first Soviet Union 🤔 I'm glad people are catching up now 😅
How about telling the truth! Russia’s ongoing war against NATO via its own proxies in Eastern Ukraine such as annexed DNR and LNR separatists, Belarus, China, Iran, North Korea and all other “global south” actors such as South Africa!
Sparks of anti-Semitism signal the end of Western civilization / must be confronted now. Read my viral post: Islamic Militants + Extremist Leftists: How Radical Islamists Puppeteer Their "Useful Idiots" - - - - The harrowing terrorist attack, which resulted in the death of 1,400 civilians, has exposed an alliance between two unlikely groups: Extremist Leftists, many of whom have been churned out on an assembly line by university campuses now roundly accused of being Marxist 'indoctrination camps,' and Islamic militants, who harbor a profound hatred of the Western liberal order and aim to establish an Islamic Caliphate that spans every nation, including the US, UK, and Germany. These protests have given rise to chants that are hypocritically genocidal: 'Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.' For Islamic militants, this serves as a call for the eradication of the Jewish state and the Israeli people, and a step toward regional, global, and religious hegemony. Conversely, for the Marxist activists, it symbolizes a struggle against perceived imperialism and colonialism-an expression of solidarity with those they have been conditioned to see as oppressed peoples. This view, often simplistic and binary, aligns with a wider agenda aimed at decolonizing the West itself, and implicitly, the dismantling of the United States, which they also regard as a colonizer. Such views are seldom overtly expressed, likely due to concern that doing so could provoke widespread backlash or attacks against them. From this, we draw the obvious conclusion: both groups, Radical Leftists and Radical Islamists, are united in their shared goal of destroying the West. The issue is the 'soft sciences' (Sociology, Gender Studies, etc.) that indoctrinate students in Marxist ideologies and the DEI/administrative class that has been brought up in such majors. They see the world in bizarrely reductive Oppressed/Oppressor binaries, and then apply this label to Israel; these ultra-Leftists have been co-opted by Islamic Militants who want Israel/Jews eradicated-'useful idiots' to the Islamist cause. The biggest Red Pill is that Islamic Militants are a problem. Insulated Muslim enclaves, where extremist Imams radicalize regular Muslims, are a problem. An unwillingness to assimilate into the West is a problem. And their puppeteering of naive Extremist Leftists is a problem. We are witnessing nothing short of an assault on Western civilization, aided by China polarizing the West via TikTok, and Russia/Iran attempting to psyop the public via fake bots. Israel stands as the canary in the coal mine; its fall would signal a greater threat to Western civilization, emboldening Islamists and Leftist Extremists to next target the US, the UK, and the West more broadly. This is fundamentally a battle for Western civilization. -- Reviews: - "This is absolutely brilliant analysis..." - " I am humbled by your thoughtful, insightful and educational post.." - "Wow. Best read of the day by far, thanks..." +++++++++++++++++
Or If you ignore the very youngest band. Which isn't as wide as the others anyway. All the others aren't 2/3rds one way or the other. Same way Scotland wasn't 2/rds remain. Nor was London. Conservative voters weren't 2/3rds leave. Was clearly a close issue with many pros and cons.
It's painful to watch a man sailing so close to the truth while unaware of its presence! The period of uncertainty between the referendum and eventually leaving the EU did have a serious negative effect on the UK economy. However, since leaving, all the signs point to rapid, impressive growth. You really should know this!
So basically, the banking sector will try to substitute one set of rules defined by foreign powers, with another set of rules defined by other foriegn powers, while losing 10% of buisness at the hope of possibly regaining that 10% elsewhere, in an as yet undefined manner. Ah! So that is what Brexit means brexit actually means.
I used to shop online from the UK getting my goods in about 3-4 days.. until about March when i waited about 1 month and was struck with a customs bill higher than my purchase. That was my last purchase from the UK. I am sorry for the UK people that they were not educated enough to understand the benefits were way superior to the downside of being a member of the EU.
Only three major strategic errors? - starting the Cold War - starting the Falklands War - Thatcherism socially & economically - failure to join the Euro - failure to join the EEC from the start - failure to complete election reform - failure to modernize the economy
i dont mean to be off topic but does anybody know of a trick to get back into an Instagram account? I stupidly forgot the account password. I would love any help you can offer me!
@Kai Kairo thanks so much for your reply. I got to the site through google and im in the hacking process now. Seems to take a while so I will get back to you later with my results.
What this lecture demonstrates is that the closer you were to the EU propaganda (universities and civil service) the more likely you were to vote Remain.
Or the closer one was to institutions that were exposed to EU support and their work environment included transactions with the EU and Europeans respectively increased their understanding of how the EU works in terms of directing support for areas not related to wealth / stock market etc ( health, education, innovation/ commerce/ entrepreneurship, infrastructure etc)
@@MC-cg2rr ah - trying to rerun the referendum are you - by throwing insults around. The world has moved on - smart people are accepting to permanent reality that we are one again a sovereign nation state.
Is interesting that income wasn't a factor, according to her, but "has degree" was. Clearly because "has degree" isn't as good an indicator as it used to be to "of value to the world, hence you earn money". Would be interested in the split of "has degree" between "in something useful" and "in a non STEM subject from an ex poly".
