Neo-liberalism on Infertile Grounds
Andrew Dawson, School of Social and Environmental Enquiry, University of Melbourne
Way back in 1983 Stuart Hall presented the strength of new neo-liberal ideological projects as involving taking prevailing ‘philosophies’, dismantling them and reconstituting them into a new logic. Revisiting Hall’s explicitly Gramscian thesis, this ethnography of British coal-mining communities – widely regarded by both left and right as exemplars of the working-class community par excellence – shows how iconic Socialist images of proletarian masculinity and femininity were reworked through ‘Thatcherism’ and, subsequently, ‘Communitarianism’ as critical ideological devices in the dismantling of the welfare state. However, and in contrast to the implicit vanguardism in Hall’s thesis, I illuminate the central role of the working-class itself in a process of ‘active acquiescence’.
