The failure of Irish social partnership and ‘soft’ NGO advocacy - Village Magazine

VILLAGEAugust/September 

POLITICS REVOLUTION

I

RELAND is in dramatic transition. We

have witnessed the collapse of the Celtic

Tiger, economic recession, bailout and

austerity. Many people are scared by the

juggernaut of poverty, oppression, inequal-

ity, environmental destruction and climate

change.

Neo-Marxist thinkers like David Harvey,

Erik Olin Wright and Hardt and Negri show

that international capitalist globalisation

underpins such social catastrophes.

The neoliberalism of the Washington

Consensus – a political project of the elite,

theorised by free-marketeers, Friedman

and Hayek, pioneered in Pinochet’s Chile,

ﬁnessed by Reagan and Thatcher in the

US and the UK has belatedly been foisted

on Ireland under the PDs/FF and their

successors.

The Washington Consensus derives from

the crisis of capitalism manifest in declining

proﬁtability, in the s. A frightened elite

resolved to reduce the share of income and

wealth that went to workers, and to increase

the share returned to capital. Neoliberal pol-

icies included the de-regulation of Keynesian

welfare-state protections and the ﬁnan-

cial sector, privatisation of public services,

corporate fetishism, neocolonial wars for

resources in the likes of Iraq, and commod-

iﬁcation of the fruits of nature like water,

land, seeds and even genetics. Indeed at the

heart of this project of neoliberal capital-

ism is the commodiﬁcation of everything.

Everything is to be turned into something

that can be bought and sold. Everyone must

compete with everyone for everything.

But neoliberalism is also based on the

myth of freedom without solidarity. Where

is the freedom for low-paid workers forced

to work three jobs to survive? Yet, backed

by the propaganda of vested interests act-

ing through the media and parliamentary

politics it successfully dresses itself up as eﬃ-

ciency and common sense, masquerades as a

somehow unobjectionable ‘managerialism’

and attracts a gormless and unquestioning

‘post-political consensus’.

However, as with all variants of capi-

talism, it is also riven with contradictions

because of the anarchy of free, unregulated,

markets that continually engage in boom

and bust cycles and eﬀect uneven develop-

ment as one area expands at the expense of

another. Naomi Klein has used the term ‘dis-

aster capitalism’ to describe how the elites

use crises to create a blank slate on which

they can further inscribe their commodiﬁ-

cation and exploitation.

Ireland is a study in failure of the neolib-

eral ﬁnancial capitalist model. The Celtic

tiger was built on belief in the private market

and in complete integration with globalised

markets. McDowell and the PDs promoted

the ideology that inequality was good and

essential to motivate people, and that we

needed light-touch regulation to allow

private developers and bankers to release

their entrepreneurial ‘talent’ and risk-tak-

ing panache. They also built their kingdom

on reduced taxes for multinationals and the

wealthy. Corruption was characteristic, and

rife, within the political system.

Fight for a New Republic – by campaigning, studying better models and not

being afraid of radical change. By Rory Hearne

The failure of Irish social

partnership and ‘soft’ NGO

advocacy