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John Hinkson on the curse of the market.

Article Excerpt
Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish

Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003

Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform

Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003

It is now a quarter of a century since an invigorated market institution began its long march through social structures. The reconstitution of other social institutions to ensure they accommodated market logic was the name of the game. While more vigorous in certain Western societies in the first instance, the market has nevertheless gained a momentum that has left no society on earth untouched. Most societies have been reconstructed and ravaged. The scale of this impact is almost beyond measure. For example, it is arguable that this same market and, critically, the culture it carries, has also stirred and disturbed muslim societies--beginning, amongst other things, a process of modernisation--to the point where they have spawned forms of resistance that compose one side of the War on Terror.

This aggressive transformation of our institutions has, as we all know in one way or another, been accompanied by a new politics. Can we ever forget the shocks of the Thatcher years, where the heart of one public institution after another, as well as the labour movement, was broken? And this by an Iron Maiden who, so deluded by her own power, believed she was the true cause of the birth of the new individual. But, whatever the delusions, what history has revealed is that the Thatcher assumptions have become the new baseline for all the major parties. Certainly the Australian Labor Party, led by Hawke and then Keating, was on the bandwagon of this market long before its Liberal opposition. And it is hard to deny the overlap between Thatcher and Blair in the UK.

While these shifts are arguably larger than the market, it is the market that has the attention of most commentators. This is hardly surprising, because no matter what institution one may turn to today, the logic of the practices of the market is never far offstage. This has not always been so....