For materialists, ideas, ‘culture’, etc, are derived from, or, at the very least, have a basis in social and economic relations.
We know that relations socials and economic have changed greatly over the couple of decades, and nowhere more so than in those states formerly behind the Iron Curtain. The push toward what Australia’s PM calls ‘neoliberalism’ – namely, the alliance between government and capital against workers – has occurred everywhere, but has arguably been most ruthlessly pursued in many of the ex-communist states.
Maggie Thatcher, one of the leading practitioners of neoliberalism, famously quipped that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Perhaps she is being proven correct, in that societies have teetered on the brink of collapse directly in proportion to what geographer David Harvey calls ‘the commodification of everything’. Harvey argues that ‘the destruction of forms of social solidarity … leaves a gaping hole in the social order’, for which the ‘inevitable response is to reconstruct social solidarities’ leads to a revival of nationalism, fascism, and ‘authoritarian populism’. This blowback is the corollary of universal freedom of enterprise.
It is apropos of economic turmoil and social collapse that I bring you this story from Bulgaria, concerning a 23-year old Sydney man named Jock Palfreeman. The media has given Palfreeman’s situation little coverage, but The Daily Telegraph had this story: