Thatcher’s second term and the miners’ defeat concretised British capitalist realism

Evidence

For any British, left-wing person, remembering the mid-1980s is liable to provoke a sadness that is visceral, choking, wrenching. I still can’t recall without weeping the day when the miners returned to work in 1985 after a year on strike. What I have called capitalist realism — the deeply embedded belief that there is no alternative to capitalism — was definitively established in the UK during that period, in Margaret Thatcher’s second term in government. For a significant proportion of the population, the 1982 Falklands War had transformed Thatcher from a figure of loathing into a glorious war leader. This renewed popularity, together with the formation of the Social Democratic Party by Labour Party defectors, allowed the Tories to achieve a landslide victory in the 1983 general election. It proved to be a traumatic defeat for the British left in general, and for the Labour Party in particular. Labour began its long march towards Blairism and its eventual complete capitulation to neoliberalism and corporate tyranny. Meanwhile, the crushing of the miners’ strike, and the wave of privatisations that the Tories unleashed, created the conditions for the neoliberal Britain that is only now falling apart, thirty years later. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1362

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the book’s earlier chapters (ch13, ch32) on capitalist realism and the miners’ strike defeat being registered only later. — connects to: Blairism normalized the 1980s defeat rather than overcoming it; Capitalist realism is belief in capital’s invincibility, not belief in its merits — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2219; Capitalist realism restricts the horizon of what is politically possible — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 410 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Supports the historical-context claims of ‘On Sacrifice’ only tenuously — better as a follow-up candidate for the miners’ strike material in ch13.

Broader Connections

• Blairism normalized the 1980s defeat rather than overcoming it #expands (0.85)
• Capitalist realism restricts the horizon of what is politically possible #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 410
• Capitalist realism is belief in capital’s invincibility, not belief in its merits #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2219