New Labour’s accommodation to globalization replaced radical left politics with market adaptation

Evidence

It has been decentered and distributed around the world by global capitalism. The way is not to go back; the way is to go forward. And it is to try to redefine what your hopes were of that forward movement and of that kind of equality in the new conditions. That requires a lot of hard thought, not sentimentality. And the thinking never happened. The thought was, since there is no alternative, how do we accommodate to it? That’s what Anthony Giddens taught them. Globalization is irreversible—what we can do is accommodate to it, improve the supply side, build up the entrepreneurial skills, make Britain more competitive, marketize society, open the doorway to trade, lower the barriers, deregulate and privatize, make globalization work. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1149

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the ‘third way’ accommodationist response from genuinely transformative left politics — a mechanism relevant to how conjunctural analysis identifies political closures.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s notion of ‘passive revolution’ and to the concept of ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) as a hegemonic closure — key tools for the Islamophobia field’s reading of consensus. — connects to: Left-wing radicalization, not right-wing opposition, made Labour unelectable for two decades — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 424