The new leveller
The Occupy movement has succeeded in putting issues of inequality back into political consciousness. Importantly, the movement has stressed how the rules of the economic game are unfairly rigged to favor the wealthy, and not just on the outcomes. This means that we need to go well beyond taxation-and-redistribution schemes to look more closely at the underlying rules. Financial deregulation, the weakness of corporate governance, destruction of labor unions, closure of the courts to class action lawsuits by aggrieved workers and consumers, regulatory capture by private interests, weak protection of workers’ pensions, excessive protection of intellectual property monopolies, and public disinvestment in higher education all play significant roles in the growth of inequality.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Elizabeth Anderson.
His bleak interregnum
The new book has a different sort of mood. Something unshapely has crossed a tipping point. A kind of loathing dread inhabits the places we’re asked to look at. To make a thread that runs through its whole we grasp just a thick borderline of commuted, scummy substances, along which we walk, stalking the phenomenological whole and the scientific incision, bemused and lost, struggling to find a signpost. Hatherley is engaged with understanding the scenes. His point is simple. There is now neither conscience nor even consciousness in what the new administration is doing. Austerity is just a way of saying ‘Fuck off, I can’t be bothered with you.’
Richard Marshall reviews Owen Hatherley‘s A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain.