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my theory has long been that there's more to conservative deregulation than merely accelerating class warfare. at least in its earlier, thatcherite phase(s) the new right was influenced by systems-theoretical critiques of the welfare state, which are different from the more simple-minded critiques you get from other quarters (in this thread, dogzilla's posts are consistently on this)...for that line of thinking, bureaucratic action generates crisis. it creates it (the general explanation is as a function of a system-imperative to reduce complexity) and then reacts in an ad-hoc manner to address crisis--so it's a continuous cycle of action unintended consequences action to address those followed by unintended consequences and so on. because the state is involved, each aspect of this cycle is political. and there's really no way out of it. a steady self-defeating grinding away of the legitimacy of the state as a function of the nature of bureaucratic organization itself coupled with the particular complexity of state action.
so i've thought that the idea was, initially anyway, to roll the state out of areas as a form of damage control---with the idea that over the longer run persistent social problems would require that the state move back into those areas again. so it looked for a while like a way of limiting damage, of protecting the state from itself, and this by way of a conservative appropriation of a hard left critique of the social-democratic state.
over time in the states, the right has become more rigid/ossified ideologically and less pragmatic politically as it lost legitimacy because of the way it exercised power and found itself running toward neo-fascism.
plus the world has changed. thatcherism of this stripe was very much a mid-to-late 70s affair, so in that space the regulation school called "flexible accumulation" during which some of the more basic aspects of what became neo-liberalism or "globalization" were starting to take shape. the fragmentation of labor processes for example and the beginnings of an accelerated remaking of the geography of capitalist organization that erased nation-state borders. but that mutated with the arrival of a telecommunications "revolution" of sorts with the net and its infrastructure and its various superstructures.
now things are different. i don't think the right has fuck all to say of any interest about where we are. but i think people are freaked out---alot of people are freaked out---because basically they've been sold a bill of goods over a very long time. horseshit like supply-side "trickle-down" economics and the mythologies of american exceptionalism that they sit on...but i digress....
still, it is curious the extent to which petit bourgeois conservatives mobilize politically against their own material interests. this gives the lie to any notion of "rational actor" theory in both its markety and marxist forms. they don't make sense from any conventional economics-based behavioral model.
but i digress.
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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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