New Labour succeeded Thatcherism by accommodating globalization while attending to the excluded

Evidence

So it’s a missed opportunity only because it would have had to do something just as dramatic as Thatcherism to have found a counterpolitics. And that’s what those of us on the Left kept saying—you aren’t going back to the nationalization of everything in sight; you aren’t going back to the old-style labor movement. 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. And the surprise to me is, of course, that social democracy in its New Labour form has been more successful than Thatcherism was because, in addition to the fact that it attends to the poor, it attends to those who are residually left out. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1149

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding of postcolonial and neocolonial critique—Hardt/Negri’s ‘multitude’ and the question of whether the state can still counter global capital, which the Islamophobia readings inherit.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘no alternative’ logic of Third Way social democracy and its accommodationist mechanism.

Related

• New Labour’s accommodation to globalization replaced radical left politics with market adaptation (similarity 0.85)
• Thatcherism was a local response to global economic pressures (similarity 0.78)