What reads as progressive change can consolidate the very order it promised to end

Evidence

1992 was the year when change was supposed to come – the end of Tory rule was widely expected, not least by the Conservative Party itself, yet John Major was re-elected. 1997 saw the long–anticipated change finally arrive, but it turned out to be no kind of change at all. Far from ending the neoliberal culture that Keiller anatomised, Tony Blair’s government would consolidate it. Robinson in Space, largely assembled in the dying days of the Major government, was made too early for it to properly register this. Yet its focus on the banal, Ballardian infrastructure of British post–Fordist capitalism made it a deeply prophetic film. The England of Robinson in Space was still the England presided over by Gordon Brown a decade later. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 544

Categorization

• XREF: ‘1997 was no kind of change at all’ connects with the earlier claim that ‘Since 1979 Britain has seen the remorseless destruction of the concept of the public’ (ch18) and with the 1968-without-bourgeois-revolution pattern noted in the Frankfurt material. — connects to: Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; Neoliberalism decomposed political collectivities through privatising the mind. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; Proclaiming history’s end functions ideologically by eternalizing the present moment — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 720 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Reform can be stolen through procedural speed and surprise rather than force #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1042
• Proclaiming history’s end functions ideologically by eternalizing the present moment #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 720