Challenging the Market: Phillip Pullman and the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Phillip Pullman and the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism

"there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about.. things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight" Phillip Pullman

This speech by the British novelist and writer Philip Pullman describes the 'greedy ghost of market fundamentalism' that haunts the offices, meeting rooms and conference rooms of Governments all over the world.

Pullman describes how everything that sustains the fabric of a decent society and of communities is destroyed by the onslaught of the market fundamentalists and their acolytes. He is right. A great speech.

"And it always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It’s set up to do that. It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market.
Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.”
Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Quotes and Reflections

"The power of the dominant order is not just economic but intellectual-lying in the realm of beliefs"
Pierre Bourdieu

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose".
Tony Judt

"No lasting change has been successful without large numbers of people acting consciously and collectively around human values of solidarity and social justice, not market values. Markets are great ways to do some things, but not to fashion communities of caring and compassion"
Michael Edwards

"The markets have ruled for a third of a century but it has all ended in tears... Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crises is a great failure of the market system"
Robert Skidelsky

"To concede the authority of the market is to affirm the legitimacy of the hierarchies that markets produce..... The market system is not open to fundamental reform; power relations cannot be changed"
James K Galbraith The Predator State

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.": Howard Zinn, Historian and Author

"The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world"
Raj Patel

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion"
John Berger

" The capacity of the state for effective political action has been severely limited. As a result, quite a few of the modern-orthodox state functions have escaped or been shifted sideways to the markets, increasingly emancipated from political supervision (let alone direction) or have fallen or been dropped to the area of individually conducted "life politics"- by definition the sacrosanct realm of privacy"
Zygmunt Bauman

"The age of neo-liberalism is still with us despite everything.... no major figure of the neo-liberal cause, anywhere in the world, has recanted or acknowledged the disastrous consequences of their failed revolution.
The citadels of power, status and wealth across the globe still hum to the dynamics, logics and cliches of neo-liberalism despite the devastation they have wrought both recently, and across the whole of the last thirty years".
Gerry Hassan

Challenging the Market