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there is nothing more reductive than a "belief in free enterprise with minimum government interference" in this context because it separates the economic and the social--which is a hallmark of neoliberal thinking. if these zones of activity are separated, then what happens in the economic can be understood in terms of capitalist hydraulic fictions, and the social consequences of that hydraulics understood as a necessary evil. within that, as a palliative, you can move to utilitarian "ethics" which, as i said above, simply repeats the consequences and justifies them in the process--because utilitarianism is a direct function of what you include in the set that constitutes "the greatest number" and if you've already adopted the correlate of the market hydraulic model--that there is some natural selection at play in it that the state distorts by acting---then you're already moving down the path of arguing that the excluded are excluded by virtue of some inward deficiency on their part, nothing to be done.
since this lunacy is the dominant ideology, there seemed to me to be no need to repeat it in the framing of the who report. problem for neoliberals with the report is that it is a direct rejection of the basis for the framework--the separation of economic activity from other types of social being.
this was not framed as a left/right issue--this is an ideological matter, a question of premises, of how you understand the social, and of the consequences that follow from one or another choice in this regard.
if you want, i could frame it as a more directly political (left-right) question, but i think that'd limit things.
my assumption is that folk wedded to a neoliberal outlook have no way of addressing the problems raised in this report. so far, that assumption has been confirmed. btu prove me wrong: read the report, reconcile the two....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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