In the aftermath of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there has been a lot of discussion about her legacy. I commented on Thatcher’s legacy in a piece of my own the day after her death. After doing some more reading on Thatcher, one interesting piece I came across was this piece from Rjurik Davidson, and in particular this quote:
“On the Left there has been more than the usual triumphalism at Thatcher’s passing. My own Facebook feed is filled with crowing that ‘The Witch is Dead’, the modern version it seems to me of medieval dancing in the streets. I must admit, I find it all a bit grisly, not because I have any sympathy for Thatcher – God knows, she was an awful woman – but that it individualises a figure who was much more than simply an individual. In a sense, this crowing is a descent into the very individualism that Thatcher herself championed.”
For me, this is a striking statement of one of Thatcher’s ‘greatest’ legacies.
If you were to pinpoint Thatcher’s belief system with one word it is hard to go past ‘individualism’. Thatcher was a believer in the individual, and a strong opponent of collectivism. It is interesting therefore that in her passing so much has focused on her as an individual. We have, whether from the left or the right, put her up as a leading figure in neoliberalism – almost to the point where it could be thought that neoliberalism wouldn’t be around without her.
What’s interesting to me about this is that it links directly to a lot of the thinking around the rise of individual leadership at the same time. This is again something I posted on last week. As I said in that post, we have seen a rise in an alienating myth of leadership – a rise that has occurred at the same time as neoliberalism. This myth is based on the idea of great leaders who have specific ‘traits’ that need to be celebrated. In doing so it pushes down people who don’t have those traits, leaving them without any opportunity become leaders. As I quoted in that piece:
“Leadership theories espousing “traits” or “great person” explanations reinforce and reflect the widespread tendency of people to deskill themselves and idealise leaders by implying that only a select few are good enough to exercise initiative.”
It’s important to note that this sort of leadership myth excludes the idea of collective leadership – directly in the line with the individualistic approach of Thatcher. The point therefore is that in ideolising Thatcher, the left has almost given her exactly what she would want in death. We have reinforced the idea of a great individual, and a great individual leader, almost ignoring the collective responsibility of neoliberalism.
As Davidson points out though, although Thatcher was a chief agent of it, neoliberalism was about a lot more than individualism:
The political point is that Thatcher was one of the chief representatives of an entire political project now known as neoliberalism. There’s something misleading about the way the term is understood, for it is more than an economic doctrine of the free market, but includes an entire political project founded in virulent nationalism and consolidated by the destruction of democratic liberties and working class institutions. The Falklands war, the destruction of the miners and their unions, support for the nastiest dictatorships across the globe (Chile, Indonesia, South Africa), the destruction of the Eastern Bloc and its opening up to market relations – these are the things which Thatcher championed. They are all part of the neoliberal project, each a precondition and complement to the other.
We would do well to remember that this very project still lies in the center of power, in the US, in Britain and in Australia, we’re about to face a new wave of Thatcherite attacks by an incoming Liberal government, right in the heels of the neoliberalism kindly meted out by the Gillard government.
Neoliberalism isn’t about in individual – it is a collective ‘project’. What this says to me is that we need to move beyond the individual focus of our attack on neoliberalism. If we want to turn back to a collective focus we must not idealise individual agents of neoliberalism, as that only reinforces their ideology. Instead it seems to make more sense to focus on neoliberalism as a collective project, and therefore find collective alternatives to it.