Jonathan Ford reviews "Kicking Off" in the Financial Times
Once again reviewer (as with Ian Birrell in Observer) claims Bouazizi was “just an entrepreneur” and even claims large masses on streets of Greece and Spain “not anticapitalist”. I think this is an emerging genre of reviews. What you have to ask is why modern capitalism is making the perfectly normal entrepreneurial desires of slum dwellers and urban poor across the world unachievable: that is what they are asking.
What is also interesting about this genre of reviews is that this is the explanation being pushed by the neoliberal free market think tank right.
For example, micro-credit pioneer (micro-debt more like) and think tanker Hernando de Soto has been pushing this line hard in the traditional Hayek-inflected networks of power and influence, writing on this for the elite press. Business schools have already begun circling like vultures around this explanation of the Arab Spring, and venture capitalists have begun considering that ‘Entrepreneurship is the next phase of the Arab Spring’ (read further neoliberal restructuring of the kind Mason details causing rising bread prices and the Arab Spring).
The problem with this approach, I hope, is the specifically elite directed Mont Pelerin model of spreading ideas - running think tanks to talk to policy makers and elites - no longer functions as effectively in an era of mass networked protest. This is not to say we should not have think tanks - after all, they were an idea borrowed from the left in the first place. But that our think tanks must describe a new mass public space of ideas, not an elite to elite mode of “policy transfer” or the influence of the ruling powers. Where the old model might be a bit more useful is in the media defence of ideas and platforms, but only this.
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What is also interesting about this genre of reviews is that this is the explanation being pushed by the neoliberal free...
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