The young protesters' demands are modest. They want more citizen involvement, a reform of voting rights and curbs on the power of banks.

One of the protest signs reads: "We are not against the system. The system is against us."

That system consists of the banks, which are secretly counting on government support, and the governments, which have gone into debt to rescue the banks ...

To put things harshly, today's EU, in the perception of the majority of citizens, from Estonia to Portugal and from Finland to Greece, can be likened to Franz Kafka's "Castle."

Perhaps not as sinister but every bit as secretive; somehow omnipresent, but physically elusive; a domineering, faceless power that decides who becomes rich or poor ...

The real paradox is that it is precisely those young Europeans in Lisbon, Barcelona, Lyon, Dublin and Athens who need a strong European Union.

They need a union that redistributes work in Europe; that monitors the banks and speculators in different ways than national governments can; that regulates the handling of nuclear power, nuclear waste and energy policies on a European level; and that coordinates climate protection for the countries.

In short, they need a union that exists not because political romantics from the postwar generation want to keep it alive.

They need a union that exists because the Europeans of tomorrow see it as their greatest opportunity ...   [DS]

"The real paradox is that ... those young Europeans ... need a strong European Union."

But do they need a neoliberal European Union?

The current EU - the Lisbon Treaty EU - is the flexicurity EU, the precariat EU; not at all what its founders envisaged.

Victims of flexicurity find a variety of escape routes from a reality which offers them a new form of serfdom, formerly ameliorated by a now bankrupt credit card consumerism.

Just as full employment has become a thing of the past, so has the social state.

What the EU requires of its, er, 'citizens' is something quite different:

... the European Union is navigating towards what can best be described as a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ citizenship model.

‘Neoliberal communitarianism’ ... implies a fusion of neoliberalism with a communitarian element that attempts to countervail the most harmful effects of neoliberal restructuring not by reinvigorating the Keynesian welfare state but through attempting to ‘activate the state’ in strengthening (private) community networks ...   [CC]

Which sounds uncommonly like David Cameron's 'Big Society' ... a camouflage for the end of welfare, since it hampers 'competitiveness' ...

As a model of citizenship, neoliberal communitarianism signifies a movement away from the social rights of citizenship (considered to hamper global competitiveness), towards an emphasis on providing opportunities for skill upgrading and life-long learning so that citizens will be ‘willing to accept more public duties and social responsibilities’.

The citizens’ role is thus contained within the mantra of ‘no rights without responsibilities’ forming the basis of its citizenship conception, as opposed to '"unconditional" social citizenship entitlements' of social democracy which advocate 'positive welfare' intervention by a ‘social investment state’...   [CC]

For 'global competitiveness' read low wages and low job security.

It therefore becomes the function of government to instill, through 'education', what Patrick Fitzsimons calls the "autonomous chooser" ...

... a neoliberal culture ... has no internal spaces within which to contest values ...

It is also a contention of this paper that continuous reform to the economy, society, education, and hence the self, exudes a false notion of progress.

Under conditions of (re)form, the self itself becomes unstable as part of this (re)forming world.

The instability stems from the requirement of the self to (re)form, (re)form [and (re)form ad infinitum], to meet the challenges of neoliberal enterprise culture.

Under this force, whatever form the self arrives at is merely an interactive moment in a process of (re)form ... [RP]

The neoliberal 'movers and shakers' - the IMF, the EU Commission, the US neocons, the Davos elite - require nothing less than a type of new human being.

The new human being re-forms his/her persona with every change of job, living under the challenges posed by the latest 'interactive moment' to the individual's sense of self.

Thus the permanent instability, to which Fitzsimmons refers, almost certainly accounts for the increasing incidence of mental illness in the UK even before the credit crunch started.   [LSE]

A much more recent report also confirms that provision for the treatment of mental illness continues to lag way behind need.   [Gdn]

Thus there is already a clash between aims and outcomes: the 'autonomous chooser' leads to breakdown, an outcome for which the small state is unprepared.

That many - and especially older - workers fail to meet the demands of this constant re-ivention of the self which neoliberalism demands, is also confirmed by research carried out with incapacity benefit claimants in those areas of Britain hit by the de-industrialisation of the post-1979 era.   [GW]

Looked at in this context, Der Spiegel's assessment of the felt needs of the victims of the sovereign debt crisis is a highly superficial analysis, and one which fails to understand the line of travel delineated by, not only the Lisbon Treaty, but also by the neoliberal policies pursued by governments in the UK since May 1979, in the US since the Reagan era, and in Chile since 9/11/1973.

Those who recall the years of full employment and rising living standards will now be over 55 years of age and, for obvious reasons, a slowly diminishing group.

Younger people will know nothing else, which in itself may account for the 'victory' of Thatcherism in the minds of the British people.   [Gdn]

If you have succeeded - so far - in becoming an 'autonomous chooser' you will naturally have your success reiforced by the constant denigration in the media of those unfortunate enough to have fallen by the wayside.

This is confirmed by the following emblematic blog which appeared in The Guardian on 23 June 2011 ...

JamesGaunt
23 June 2011 8:44AM

1) No welfare unless you take up part time work helping the local community.

2) Total welfare benefits capped at the national average pay

3) No welfare for any more than 2 children

4) Welfare immediately withdrawn if a job offer is refused

5) All cash welfare payments issued via debit cards that cannot be accepted as payment for alcohol   Gdn

The new social Darwinism

Anger with benefits claimants is - by design - whipped up by the Murdoch Press and other organs of the corporate media, who, oddly enough, are also anti-European.

It's done so as to ensure that the victims of the precariat - whether in work or unemployed - fall out among themselves - or blame migrants - for conditions which have been created by a very small elite who decided that the cause of profit would best be served by destroying the post-war social consensus.   [Gdn]

Under the terms of the post-1979 settlement full employment is not coming back, and the social state is winding down. It's 'unsustainable'.

Seen from this perspective, David Cameron's 'big society' is not some flight-of-fancy from a confused little man, since the idea is actually quite precise: 'society' - Edmund Burke's 'little platoons' - must take over the caring roles previous carried out by the state.

But the very nature of neoliberalism has in itself destroyed concepts like society, community, citizenship, and the altruism that was part of the fabric ...

... the weakening of former national identities and the emergence of new identities - especially the dissolution of a kind of membership known as 'citizenship', in the abstract meaning of membership in a territorially defined and state-governed society, and its replacement by an identity based on 'primordial loyalties', ethnicity, 'race', local community, language and other culturally concrete forms.

[Jonathan Friedman, 1994, quoted in 'Vulnerability and Violence' - Paedar Kirby, page 121, pbk ed 2006]

Neoliberal governmentality does not envisage atavistic responses.

The wiki page gives the example - going to the gym - as a metaphor for what neoliberal governmentality should be about.

The new human being is a competitor, and being a competitor s/he knows - with John Forbes Nash - that other people are not to be relied on ...

These three qualities: freedom, enterprise and autonomy are embodied in the practice of going to the gym.

It is our choice to go the gym, our choice which gym to go to.

By going to the gym we are working on ourselves, on our body shape and our physical fitness.

We are giving ourselves qualities to help us perform better than others in life, whether to attract a better mate than others, or to be able to work more efficiently, more effectively and for longer without running out of steam to give us an advantage over our competitors.

When we go to the gym, we go through our own discipline, on our own timetable, to reach our own goals. We design and act out our routine by ourselves.

We do not need the ideas or support of a team, it is our self that makes it possible. The practice of going to the gym, of being free, enterprising, autonomous, is imbued with particular technologies of power. [Gov]

This Nietzschean view of humanity confirms the social Darwinist line of travel - the movement of resources from the poor to the rich - the belief that the Greeks need to go to the metaphorical gym if they are not to become a social Darwinist blind alley.

But, as I have written elsewhere, the stock market is an example of the Freudian Id in action, itself evidence of the wider atavism driving corporate social Darwinism: it swings between those two primordial emotions, fear and greed.

Yesterday it was greed; next week ... who knows?

If the Greeks look like reneging, fear will return.

Rational behaviour? Forget it!

This is primeval behaviour in the 21st century global jungle.

Governmentality

How European Elites Lost a Generation

No such thing as society

Radical Pedagogy