Un chiaro esempio di tutto, o quasi quello di orribile c'è nel capitalismo moderno, di cui è stata senza dubbio balia fedele.
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 smoothness
: the
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.
