Monthly Review have published an interview with John Bellamy Foster on the rise of neofascism and the strategies of neo-liberal capitalism:
In one paragraph he paraphrases E P Thompson’s phrase that have failed to overthrow capitalism(with Chartism) the working-class(from the 1860s) began to warren it from end to end.
A classic social democratic strategy that has in some periods been able to defend working class conditions, as Foster notes, the issue now is whether it can withstand a neo-liberal onslaught
Here, capital is faced with the entrenched institutional gains made by workers in the past, which stand in the way of this intensified bleeding process. As E. P. Thompson wrote in “The Peculiarities of the English,” the working class, failing to overthrow capitalism, had in various ways constructed intricate economic, political, and cultural warrens in areas such as basic working conditions; housing, economic, and environmental regulations; welfare; pensions; public education; public transportation; health; community and cultural institutions; and political/legal/human rights—a whole labyrinthine existence at the material and cultural roots of the system, operating independently of the logic of capital. These entrenched positions and customary rights of the populace, the result of hard-won gains, constitute obstacles that capital in a period of crisis has sought to overcome, and indeed have become the primary target of its avarice. In the United States and Britain, the system is undermining the ability of workers to own their homes, to have adequate health coverage or pensions. Public schools are being marketized if not completely privatized. All of this has fed the coffers of monopoly-finance capital.
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