[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Stiglitz is not the Answer

[Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net>]

On Sunday 07 July 2002 11:12 am, Soenke Zehle wrote:
> The glue of anti-neoliberalism will not hold much longer.

You may be right.  But there are still a lot of people who don't even know 
what `neoliberalism' means.

In Europe, I think we're in danger of seeing the `movement' become something 
like literary criticism, with public meetings and social forums playing the 
role of academic symposiums: opportunities to chat with people who have read 
the same books that you've read, and can talk using the same jargon.  I 
really do think that Pierre Bourdieu's political analyses are better than 
those of the tabloid newspapers, just as I think that the novels of Proust 
are better than those of John Grisham.  But (in the UK at least) most 
people's political horizons are limited to what they read in the tabloids, 
just as most people's experience of fiction is confined to the work of 
Grisham and the like.

I'd bet that most of the people who sit next to me on London public transport 
don't even have the conceptual tools needed to understand the problems of 
this movement, because the concepts used in this movement haven't reached 
them at all.  And that's a pity, because it's not the case in other parts of 
the world.  The Landless Peoples' Movement in Brazil seems to be very 
well-integrated with its constituency, the rural poor 
(http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24904.shtml).

It would be a pity if the European political avant-garde fragmented without 
leaving any useful impression on the majority of people.

Ben


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