Zombie-Liberalism the meme that wouldn’t die

August 4, 2011

Me and Dave have re-hashed a version of the previous blogpost for the Guardian. It seems to have stirred up a whole nest of the undead on Comment is Free but Financial Crash Two (this time it’s personal) might have something to do with it. It must be really pushing the sense-making limits of that particular undead ideology. I do believe in fairies, I do, I do.

4 Comments

Alistair Livingston August 5, 2011 at 3:36 pm

Well done for getting the article into the Guardian. And thanks for noting my vampire (Marx) comment…
Keir August 7, 2011 at 2:17 pm

Thanks Alistair. I actually thought my reply to your comment was quite witty. If I do say so myself. Not that it made any difference of course, lost as it was amidst a tidal wave of neoliberal hysteria below the line. I thought the right-wing comments on our article were interesting though, symptomatically speaking. With a market meltdown occurring in the background you could really make out the inability of neoliberal ideologues to cope with a world that no longer makes sense to them. The response was a fallback to fundamentalist dogma, which was repeated over and over in an attempt to shore up some stable territory in a disorientating world. Anything that threatened to cause difficulty for that process was just ignored. In particular the question: Why is all this happening now?
It’s the question that cannot be acknowledged. Deleuze once said that the role of the left is to pose the questions that the right want to avoid at any cost. Why Now? does seem to be the question that interrupts the neoliberal world view at the moment.
Grant August 7, 2011 at 7:39 pm

I really enjoyed your article in the Guardian and think it’s one of a few which articulate the need for urgent change compared to the “business as usual” orthodoxy.

I’m interested in what you guys so please direct me to further blogs/articles on similar themes.
We are all over the place August 23, 2011 at 7:32 pm

Is it excess though? Is it not more a completion, a filling out a lack? We experience collective action as euphoric and sparkly, but it is immediately understood, a revealed already possible way of relating- a filling out the emptiness, a flooding the desert of ourselves we’d mistakenly identified with as the everything, experiencing re-growth rather than over-growth. Austerity is nothing new, kicking the glass just an appropriate instance of completion desired by enough to make it current.

Zombie Liberalism. Great metaphor. Only problem-its a metaphor and we need to break out of metaphor because it chains us to the contingent real. We all like a metaphoric description because it feels like we break that chain. But do we? Do we not make that chain more secure? Are we Zombie prey? last standing fighters against the zombie mass? Are we the audience willingly suspending disbelief watching the prey get eaten because we know that a good character (us really) will overcome the horror and survive?

Is there any more chance the audience will rise up out of their seats, stop the projector and replace the reel with one they made earlier, than the UK population taking to the town hall squares until parliament falls? Or if a few of us get a different film together and overcome the cinema staff and replace the ree(a)l, will we be able to switch the projector back on before the rest of the audience rises up to demand the old film back? What will the new film be? Sorry, I’m removing the seats, I’m moving in a sound system, I’ve already facebooked the party. A sparkly party- no zombies!

Their cracks are theirs. The best was Hugh Orde’s, calling the Thursday Recall of Parliament an “irrelevance”. Nice one Hugh, welcome to the movement!
But we can’t wait for the neo-liberal edifice to crumble. We have to get a better movie out Now! Where is the left? Have the Zombies eaten them? Are they waiting for a happy ending only to come out of the cinema to find the street under new management? and not us, the pretty ones!

When is the next Height Gate Gathering and can I propose item 1? We establish The National Transitional Council of these islands currently known as the uk. That this national council is actually a hub of federated communities mobilised in assemblies we put a call out for. This Council is for Transitional purposes only and serves only to Nationalise every private enterprise and redistribute their capital holdings to their relevant communities whether workers or local residents for approproate disposal. We produce a document at the next gathering, outlining the steps to free assembly of a mobilised opposition. And if this is all too whacky we at least propose the nationalisation of every corporation with a PFI contract and all banks, and a recall of parliament for recieving their redundancy notice? If not us… pint of bitter then?