NM's blog

In our time all politics is about real estate; and this from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of the issue of Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land which is at stake. The land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them. —Fredric Jameson, The Aesthetics of Singularity, New Left Review, N° 92, 2015

My introduction: To understand the crisis of the National Health Service, the bad handling of the pandemic*, stagnant economy, weak productivity, a state struggling to invest adequately in the green economy, inability to build enough and affordable houses, expensive rent, decades of poor investment in infrastructure by OECD measures, consumption, and consumerism, driven by debt, Labour/Conservatives capitalist values, one has to look at the economic model of the British economy. In reviewing Brett Christophers’s work, Cédric Durant has provided a good overview of such an economic model of accumulation and its ramifications as well as some criticism of Christophers’s take on capitalism in general and what might replace it. ——— *I doubt it that the recently publish report will ever mention the economic model pursued by Britain for more than four decades and how it played a major role in the infrastructure of health and the well-being of the Brits. ***** Few today will need convincing th...

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