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Arabica Robusta

Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary | Doreen Massey | Comment is free | guardian.... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...liberalism-hijacked-vocabulary

industries individualism extractive exploitation economic development neoclassical massey geography consumerism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.
  • Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy.
  • Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.
  • Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.
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