Marooned on a traffic island in central London, Robert Maitland, the protagonist of JG Ballard's Concrete Island, comes to inhabit a world that he always, on some level, knew existed, but that he never really knew.
He drove past it everyday to and from the office, but its subaltern inhabitants were, until he too finds himself trapped there, as removed from his life as they are from 'civilisation'. He initially doesn't appreciate the gulf between these two worlds, but, unable to escape the traffic island, he comes to lose touch with the old world and is subsumed by the new one. 'I am an island,' he mutters to himself during a fit of delirium.
This inversion of John Donne's famous line could well suffice as a maxim for modernity: an increasingly atomised society, populated by alienated individuals who are beginning, like Maitland, to realise that all is not right, but are unable to conceive of any alternative.
As neoliberalism has emerged as the hegemonic worldview it's come to encompass far more than a market-centred economic theory — neoliberalism, for example, now shapes discourses about liberal rights, government bureaucracy and the rhetoric of choice.
So, when Paul Keating recently said it had 'run its course', he was articulating an economic reality that, for economists who've objectively analysed the post-GFC data, has long been self-evident.
Since 2008, Keating added, 'we have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money'. Over at the Guardian, the always-meticulous Greg Jericho ran the numbers and, passing judgement on Keating's comments, determined the correct response to be: 'well, duh'.
What is more significant, though, is the second part of Keating's statement: 'Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise.' That the dominant responses by western governments, particularly in Europe, to the neoliberal crisis has been a series of neoliberal 'solutions' (austerity, business tax cuts, public sector job cuts) speaks to its ideological dominance.
Even now, nearly ten years on, centre-Left political parties can only offer solutions that fall somewhere between looking back to old Keynesian solutions and tinkering around the edges of the already existing neoliberal framework.
"The Left's failure is not so much that neoliberalism has failed, but that when it did there existed no alternative that could challenge its dominance."
It's staggering that such a profound systemic failure hasn't fomented any serious systemic change. The contrast with the rise of neoliberalism