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"Face the facts...existence hurts existence in the famine asylum"

My favorite quote from this week is from "The Great Moving Nowhere Show:"
"In Fact, it's impossible to know how radical and innovative a concrete proposal is until you know which strategy it is attempting to put in place and the criteria against which its 'radicalism' is being assesed."
Like a few of the posts I've read so far for this week, I see obvious parallels between Hall's assessment of post-Thatcher, Blairite, "Third Way" neoliberalism and the current state of affairs here on the other side of the pond. I think it's interesting that (at least ca. 1998) Hall was so confronted by existing social problems that he considered it necessary to "broker a new relationship between markets and the public good." I suppose that's the voice of a pragmatist who had been watching the British Left struggle for over fifty years at that point. That said, even in 1998, I was beginning to see the cracks in the neoliberal agenda, both in theory (what truly was the moral/ethical base of those that fashioned themselves "liberals" when their champions were a serial sexual harasser in Clinton and a Religious Right stealth plant in Al Gore) and in practice (the "third way democrat" need to appeal to corporate greed, made manifest through truly evil people like Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden, paving the way for the Patriot Act's surveillance state, the Affordable Care Act's windfall of public money to private insurers, and the Democratic National Committee's manipulation of media contacts to make sure billions of free media attention was given to someone too stupid to be a fascist with any sense of nuance). My first question for the week: Are we part of a Fukuyama-esque linear endpoint to society and culture? Are the 'great moves' analyzed by Hall--Right, Nowhere--inevitable, as every effort to push the Global North to the left, politely or otherwise, is met with resistance at every turn? I continue to be amused by Hall's method of delivery--he's a master of conveying sarcasm and cynicism without the benefit of tone-of-voice or facial expression. His caustic (borrowed) description of the 1955 British General Election in "The new Conservatism and the Old" gets me, because it seems to sum up every ostensible "democracy" in the Global North since at the very least WWII: "the result would depend on how many working-class [voters], looking into their mirrors, saw middle-class faces." I guess my second question ties to the first: Is any revolution that occurs within the paradigmatic framework of a capitalist society doomed to forever be 'limited'?

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