A Market State: 24 ("Soundings")

by Michael Rustin (Editor), StuartHall (Editor), Doreen Massey (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $6.95

  Soundings 24 looks at New Labour's moves towards creating a market state in Britain. In a new and path-breaking analysis, Stuart Hall describes what he calls New Labour's double-shuffle - a move whereby it pursues a dual strategy of on the one hand keeping traditional constituencies on line through a certain level of redistribution and community rhetoric, whilst on the other it pursues its dominant agenda of proceeding to a market state via the royal road of the new 'social democratic' version of neoliberalism. Alan Finlayson analyses how public choice theory helps to import the market into the public sphere, while Jonathan Rutherford looks at the specific case of education and the PFI, documenting the concerted effort to create market infrastructures in an area formerly seen as part of the public sphere. Richard Minns shows how the diversion of social pension funds into private financial institutions is yet another area in which the market, backed by successive governments, is making inroads into collective welfare provision. Other articles include an interview with Renzio Imbeni; George Irvin on the Euro; Adaj Kay on Gaza City; Nora Rathzel on identity and marginalised young people; Michael Saward on the legacy of John Rawls; Nora Carlin on Christopher Hill; and Michael Rustin on Edward Thompson and William Cobbett.