Since Thatcherism in the United Kingdom was one of the original formulations of the new economic doxa of neoliberalism, it is worthwhile recounting its history here. The neoliberal reformers in Britain identified the source of the economic crisis of the 1970s as “‘thirty years of socialistic fashions’ and ‘statism’—three decades of looking to government to solve problems and run the economy” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 99). The new objective for the government, they asserted, should be the creation of wealth, even at the cost of creating inequality and mass unemployment (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 101–2). In Britain, this mostly took the form of privatization, a measure that not only had immediate policy consequences but also was part of a larger political and ideological project of transforming Fordist society and its political culture. Privatization—the transfer of industries and services from state ownership and management to the market—was seen as a means of “changing the balance in society” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 115). It represented a critique of the notion that centralized “government knowledge” is superior to decentralized “business (or market) knowledge.” Moreover, privatization was seen as contributing to an ideology of individualism aimed at “overturning the previous collectivist consensus and replacing it with free-market economics and rigorous individualism” (Frith 1994, 1). Assessing the legacy of Thatcherism, Yergin and Stanislaw conclude that “Thatcherism shifted the emphasis from state responsibility to individual responsibility, and sough to give first priority to initiative, incentives, and wealth generation rather than redistribution and equality. It celebrated entrepreneurship . . . By the end of 1990s, it would turn out that Margaret Thatcher had established the new economic agenda around the world” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 123).
This new economic agenda—neoliberalism—not only has become the dominant economic policy in Western capitalist societies (and increasingly a global doxa) but also has helped shape a new political culture in these societies. As an academic and popular discourse, neoliberalism gave a legitimation for the new, post-Fordist constellation of power between capital, labor, and the state and, especially, reasserted the need to liberate the market from political oversight and integrate social life as much as possible into markets. In this transformation, the role of the digital discourse was paramount.
Network Market
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