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After neoliberalism? Introduction to the Kilburn Manifesto
The Killburn Manifesto is a statement being made in twelve monthly instalments, issued free on-line, about the nature of the neoliberal system which now dominates Britain and most of the Western world, and about the need to develop coherent alternatives to it. Its principal authors, Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin have had a long association with the New Left, since its first days in 1956, and have been significant figures in its various initiatives, such as the founding of Universities and Left Review and New Left Review, the May Day Manifesto (just reissued) and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone. They are the founding editors of the journal Soundings, which is responsible for the Kilburn Manifesto, and which has reissued the 1968 May Day Manifesto in the context of this initiative.
Our Kingdom will publish a discussion of each instalment of the Manifesto. This is the first of these.
I kept up with the goings-on around the funeral of Margaret Thatcher with horror, but also fascination. What fascinated was the attempt to turn Thatcher into an a-political figure; to take what she stood for as given; to raise her above political contestation. It was an attempt to depoliticise an utterly political figure – one of the originators of ‘neoliberalism’. It was precisely the attempt to depoliticise that was so very political.
Of course it may not work. There was dissent. There is hope. But it was a very interesting moment.
And it’s absolutely emblematic of what we are on about in The Kilburn Manifesto: that while there is an economic crisis (the neoliberal system of financialisation, privatisation, deregulation, has experienced an implosion), there is very little disruption of the political and ideological consensus that supports and surrounds that economic model. Indeed the very crisis has been used to reinforce that consensus and its practice.