martedì 9 aprile 2013

Margaret Thatcher: il peggio del neoliberismo

di Nicola Melloni
da Liberazione

Dopo la morte di Bobby Sands, avvenuta a seguito dello sciopero della fame che i prigionieri dell’Ira stavano conducendo per rivendicare un trattamento decente in carcere, Margaret Thatcher ebbe a dire, senza tanti giri di parole:“Bobby Sands era un criminale”. Oggi, dopo la morte della Lady di Ferro, la onoriamo ricordandola nel suo stile: Mrs Thatcher era il peggio che la politica europea e, forse, occidentale, abbia prodotto dai tempi della Seconda Guerra Mondiale.
Sulla sua grandezza storica non ci sono dubbi. Lady Thatcher caratterizzò gli anni 80 come nessun altro in Europa e il suo lascito culturale, politico ed economico è ancora vivissimo oggi, non solo in Gran Bretagna ma in tutto il Vecchio Continente. La sua vita politica fu caratterizzata da una serie di guerre, da una lotta instancabile contro i suoi nemici: i sindacati, gli irlandesi, i comunisti, gli argentini. Vinse quasi sempre, anche se non sempre per meriti propri.
Ma questa sua forza politica non ha il benchè minimo connotato positivo. Il suo lascito politico è tremendo ed osceno: un primo ministro che affamò il suo popolo, che fece a brandelli l’idea di democrazia come luogo politico dove maggioranza e minoranza convivono civilmente. Trasformò la Gran Bretagna in un paese di vincitori e di vinti, schiacciando i secondi che non a caso definì il “nemico interno”. Sintetizzando, in maniera corretta, quello che successe in quegli anni: una guerra civile. Una guerra civile dei ricchi contro i poveri, dei padroni contro gli operai, dei privilegiati contro gli oppressi. Una guerra civile che fosse stato per la signora Thatcher avrebbe dovuto essere pure più cruenta: nel 1981, nel mezzo delle proteste a Liverpool, tentò di armare la polizia, minacciò di affamarne la popolazione tagliando tutti i fondi, neanche parlassimo di un assedio medievale, e prese addirittura in considerazione di evacuare parte della città.
Il decennio di governo della Thatcher fu caratterizzato da scioperi, licenziamenti, proteste, famiglie distrutte, scontri di piazza, tasse sui più poveri (basti ricordare la poll tax), intere comunità ridotte alla fame. Non può sorprendere, dunque, che ci siano milioni di britannici che hanno odiato la Lady di Ferro e non sono pochi quelli che, alla notizia della sua morte, hanno gioito. Ci sono grandi città come Liverpool dove i Tories non eleggono nemmeno un consigliere comunale – qualcosa di inimmaginabile in qualsiasi altra parte d’Europa. E parti del paese in cui essere conservatori è semplicemente inimmaginabile.
Per anni si è sostenuto, a destra ma anche in parte di una certa “sinistra”, che le sue “riforme”, per quanto cruente, modernizzarono la Gran Bretagna. Ora i suoi orfani sono lasciati anche senza questa consolazione. Il modello economico proposto dalla Thatcher mostra proprio ora tutti i suoi limiti, ineguaglianza alle stelle, una società divisa, la mobilità sociale più bassa d’Europa, una crisi finanziaria e poi economica che è figlia diretta delle politiche neoliberiste di quegli anni – poi vergognosamente continuate dal suo delfino laburista, Tony Blair.
In realtà si trattò di una politica ferocemente ideologica, come nello stile del personaggio. Da una parte la convinzione che la società non esistesse, che contassero solo gli individui, un darwinismo sociale che ha riportato le lancette della storia indietro di quasi un secolo. Dall’altra un gigantesco esempio di ingegneria sociale sintetizzato dall’idea che “l’economia sia solo un mezzo, lo scopo è cambiare il cuore e l’anima delle persone”, una frase che, ironicamente, sarebbe piaciuta a Stalin o a Mao. Un furore ideologico tanto sfrenato che portò la Thatcher a definire Mandela un terrorista e da farle invece difendere con forza la causa di Pinochet. Rivelandola, in fondo, per quel che era: una reazionaria feroce, senza pietà per cui ogni mezzo era lecito per far prevalere la sua agenda politica.
Non era un avversario. Era un nemico. E dei peggiori.

La Lady di ferro che rubava ai poveri per dare ai ricchi



Proponiamo qui di seguito qualche articolo dalla stampa estera che ricorda uno dei leader più odiati di sempre nella storia della democrazia, Margaret Thatcher. Quasi un unicum, e se ne può certo capire il motivo. Un leader senza pietà che impostò tutta la sua vita politica sul trovare nemici e sterminarli. Fossero argentini in fuga, attivisti dell'IRA in carcere affamati, o lavoratori in difesa della loro dignità - i cosiddetti enemy from within. Un grande politico, senza dubbio, la cui eredità è ben viva tutt'oggi, per altro rivendicata senza vergogna da quel Tony Blair che riportò il labour al governo negli anni 90. In una Gran Bretagna diversa, di lavoratori sconfitti, umiliati, con comunità distrutte, famiglie spezzate, vite in frantumi. Uno dei più grandi, riusciti, e vigliacchi esperimenti di ingegneria sociale.
Un chiaro esempio di tutto, o quasi quello di orribile c'è nel capitalismo moderno, di cui è stata senza dubbio balia fedele.

We Are All Thatcherites Now


di Maria Margaronis
da The Nation

Margaret Thatcher’s dead at last, and the pictures that crowd in speak of war and confrontation: riot police on horseback bringing their batons down on the heads of striking miners; cars in flames in Trafalgar Square during the poll tax riots; riots in Brixton and Toxteth against racist policing; US cruise missiles nestled behind the fence at Greenham Common; the infamous Sun headline—GOTCHA—from the Falklands war, when the Argentine cruiser Belgrano was torpedoed in retreat; the ten IRA hunger strikers for political status dead in the Maze prison; the IRA bomb that almost killed Thatcher herself in Brighton. Hard on their heels come images of polished domestic smoothnessthe handkerchief disapprovingly dropped on the tail of a model plane that bore no Union flag; the helmet of bright hair; the handbag, sign of female thrift and household management, of the grocer’s shop at Grantham gone terrifyingly global.
The slide shows are two sides of the same coin: it’s partly because Margaret Thatcher was a woman that she was able to drive through her relentless war on the unions, the working class, the welfare state, the left. Her eleven years as prime minister tore Britain apart, dead-ended lives, decimated industries and starved communities, made greed a virtue and indifference a mark of maturity. Her ruthlessness came coated in a lethal emollient: the soothing voice, the honeyed firmness of the nursery. She was the first British leader built for television, a masculine fantasy of forceful femininity.
She was also, in many ways, Britain’s first American leader (the second was Tony Blair), although she would have hated to be so described. When she became prime minister in 1979, Britain was a crumbling post-imperial power, battered by globalization and the oil crisis, stalled by waves of strikes as unions fought to hold their piece of a shrinking pie. Sweeping aside the post-war consensus for a mixed economy and a universal welfare state, she used the revenues from North Sea oil to shrink the government and fund a radical restructuring, lowering taxes, privatizing public assets from water to railways to council houses, tearing down protections (or, in her view, obstacles) against market forces. Unemployment rose to nearly 13 percent, the highest it had been since the 1930s. Deindustrialisation had already begun; she sped it up deliberately, without a care for the lives being ruined in the process, with the barely disguised intent of destroying the labor movement. “As you know,” she famously said, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.”
We are all Thatcher’s children now, in Britain and in Europe, where the austerity policies she road-tested in the eighties are being applied as if there were no alternative and no tomorrow; Germany’s Angela Merkel is the lady not for turning now. In the week of Thatcher’s death, Britain has seen deep welfare cuts—deeper than hers—with tax cuts for top earners. The language of “skivers versus strivers” in which the Tory party has framed this debate would have been political poison before the 1980s, when Thatcher and Ronald Reagan whipped up resentment of “welfare moms” and welfare dependency. New Labour, Thatcher’s greatest success, firmly hammered home her counter-revolution, chiselling at the principle of universal provision in health and education, reducing class mobility, cutting child poverty but widening the gap between the lowest and the highest earners. Privatization, discipline, austerity in a recession, kill-or-cure remedies: in so many ways, Thatcherism is now the new normal.

In the months before her death, “Lady Thatcher” enjoyed a rehabilitation. There was the Meryl Streep film Iron Lady, which framed her political career with a touching portrayal of her descent into dementia; there were the Cabinet papers from the time of the Falklands war, released a few weeks ago, which described her breaking down in tears at the thought of sending British boys to their deaths. Obviously to hate Thatcher (as so many of us do) is to succumb to a reverse cult of personality. But it isn’t only that. Like her friend Ronald Reagan (who can forget the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s poster of the two of them as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara before a mushroom cloud?) she was one of those politicians who sums up and seems to embody more than a set of policies: a shift of mood, a zeitgeist, a way of thinking and feeling about social life. Her megalomania knew no bounds. (With Reagan she took credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, as if it were a consequence of her crusade against the left.) She shifted the boundaries, rolled back decades of progress, moved British politics irrevocably to the right; now that she’s dead, we have to endure the spectacle of a “ceremonial funeral with military honours” in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as if she were some sort of saviour of the nation. The dead hand of tradition will heap blessings upon her head, along with no small number of her old enemies. The millions of us who dissent will remember that hypocrisy is essential to the British elite; that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

fonte: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173719/we-are-all-thatcherites-now#



Thatcherism: a much more vigorous form of class struggle

di Ralph Milliband
da Verso Books


Thatcherism’ is a much more vigorous form of class struggle from above than had been waged by Conservatism since World War II, with a much stronger anti-trade union bias, a much greater determination to reaffirm managerial authority, to cut wages, to reduce the cushioning effect of welfare benefits, to ‘recommodify’ health, education, transport, and other collective and welfare services, to strengthen the authority and power of the state (despite all ‘libertarian’ protestations), and to legitimate its policies and politics by a frenzied appeal to nationalism (notwithstanding continued British subservience to the United States), not to forget anti-communism. This is a quite formidable programme, and Mrs Thatcher herself is a sufficiently ambitious, determined and blinkered politician to push it, if allowed, a long way further than she has already done. Indeed, one thing which is really new about ‘Thatcherism’ is the fact that Mrs Thatcher is the first British Prime Minister to convey the very strong impression that she could, in suitably fraught circumstances, very comfortably play the role of a Pinochet, or at least of an Indira Gandhi in the infamous days of the Emergency, of course in the name of democracy, freedom, law and order, the struggle against subversion and the defence of the Constitution.

fonte: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1275-thatcherism-a-much-more-vigorous-form-of-class-struggle-by-ralph-miliband



Chavs: The Demonizaton of the Working Class

di Owen Jones
da Verso Book

The demonization of the working class cannot be understood without looking back at the Thatcherite experiment of the 1980s that forged the society we live in today […]
To understand Thatcherism’s attitude to working-class Britain, it is important to start by looking at Thatcher herself. Some of her warmest admirers have often been at pains to portray her—wrongly—as a person of humble origins. As the staunchly Thatcherite Tory MP David Davis told me: ‘Margaret was always a bit more middle class than she made out.’ It is almost a cliché to describe her as a grocer’s daughter, but it was this that coloured her entire political outlook.
Growing up in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham, her father had instilled in her a deep commitment to what could be called lowermiddle- class values: individual self-enrichment and enterprise, and an instinctive hostility to collective action. Her biographer, Hugo Young, noted that she had little if any contact with working-class people, let alone the trade union movement.
Her attitudes were undoubtedly cemented when in 1951 she married a wealthy businessman, Denis Thatcher, who believed that trade unions should be banned altogether. She surrounded herself with men from privileged backgrounds. In her first Cabinet, 88 per cent of ministers were former public school students, 71 per cent were company directors and 14 per cent were large landowners. No wonder, then, that one of her Cabinet ministers told a journalist just before the 1979 election: ‘She is still basically a Finchley lady…She regards the working class as idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody-minded.’
If Thatcher had one aim, it was to stop us thinking in terms of class. ‘Class is a Communist concept,’ she would later write. ‘It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another.’ She wanted to erase the idea that people could better their lives by collective action, rather than by individual self-improvement: that is, ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’. Just months after her election victory in 1979, she had intended to spell this out to the country in stark terms.
‘Morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom,’ she planned to argue. ‘To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.’ It was clearly too much for her speechwriters and did not make the final cut. However, they were not able to stop her infamous declaration several years later (in lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own, of all places): ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ […]
There has been no greater assault on working-class Britain than Thatcher’s two-pronged attack on industry and trade unions. It was not just that the systematic trashing of the country’s manufacturing industries devastated communities—though it certainly did, leaving them ravaged by unemployment, poverty and all the crippling social problems that accompany them, for which they would later be blamed. Working-class identity itself was under fire.
The old industries were the beating hearts of the communities they sustained. Most local people had worked in similar jobs and had done so for generations. And of course the unions, whatever their faults and limitations, had given the workers in these communities strength, solidarity and a sense of power. All of this had sustained a feeling of belonging, of pride in a shared working-class experience.
For those who, like myself, grew up in a country without strong unions, it is easy to understate the significance of Thatcherism’s war on the organized working class. […] Its goal was to crush the unions forever. New laws allowed employers to sack strikers, reduced dismissal compensation, forbade workers to strike in support of others, repealed protections preventing courts seizing union funds, and made unions liable for huge financial penalties. Changing the law was not, however, enough: examples had to be made. As industrial relations expert Professor Gregor Gall puts it, the government inflicted ‘a series of defeats on unions in set-piece battles with the public sector, and encouraged private sector employers to take on the unions’. The first to face Thatcher’s iron fist were the steelworkers in 1980, who lost a thirteen-week strike battle and would pay the price with thousands of jobs. […]
Thatcher’s attacks on unions and industry dealt body blows to the old, industrial working class. Well-paid, secure, skilled jobs that people were proud of, which had been a linchpin of working-class identity, were eradicated. All the things people associated with working-class Britain were disappearing. But even after Thatcher won again in 1983, Britain’s working class was not quite dead as a political and social force. The decisive battle was still to come.
The miners had been the vanguard of the union movement in Britain throughout the twentieth century. Britain’s only general strike had been called in support of the miners in 1926. They had the capacity to single-handedly bring the country to a standstill by cutting off its energy supply, as they had demonstrated in the 1970s. If you could see off the miners, what other group of workers could stop you? That’s why the defeat of the Miners’ Strike was the turning point in the history of modern working-class Britain.
‘Mining communities were vibrant communities, but they were built around the pit. The pit was the heart of the community, it was the pit that bound everyone together,’ recalls one National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader, Chris Kitchen. ‘The code of honour that existed underground was part of the fabric of the community as well. You didn’t get young lads going off the rails at the weekend. You wouldn’t upset an old guy because he would be the same one you’d rely on in the pit to protect your life at work, so why would you upset him at the weekend over a few pints?’ When Thatcher’s government unveiled its pits closure programme in 1984, many of these tightly knit communities faced oblivion. Strikes spontaneously broke out in the Yorkshire coalfields and spread across the country. NUM leader Arthur Scargill declared these strikes a national strike and called all miners out, a decision ratified by a national Conference in April that year. Of the major pits, only the Nottinghamshire miners—who wrongly, as it turned out, thought their jobs were safe— refused to strike, a cause of great bitterness among the wider mining community. […]
The Miners’ Strike collapsed on 3 March 1985, after a titanic yearlong struggle. Brass bands and union banners accompanied the miners as they marched defiantly back to work. […]  Unlike in 1974, the government had made detailed preparations. It had stuck by the Ridley Plan, a Conservative Party document leaked in 1978 which was a blueprint for taking on the unions, and the miners in particular, including the stockpiling of coal. Other unions and the Labour leadership refused to back the miners, because they had not held a national ballot. ‘It divided the labour movement from the Labour leadership really, because the Labour leadership was giving virtually no support to the miners,’ says Tony Benn. Whatever the reasons adduced to avoid backing the miners, the fate of the labour movement was bound up with the Strike. The defeat was a crippling blow from which it never recovered. The miners had been the strongest unionized force in the country: if they could be routed, what hope for anyone else?
On the eve of the Thatcherite crusade, half of all workers were trade unionists. By 1995, the number had fallen to a third. The old industries associated with working-class identity were being destroyed. There no longer seemed anything to celebrate about being working class. But Thatcherism promised an alternative. Leave the working class behind, it said, and come join the property-owning middle classes instead. Those who failed to do so would have no place in the new Britain.