Thatchers legacy

antrim | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Thursday February 01, 2007 12:23 by Ireland plc

Mrs Thatcher once said 'there was no such thing as society or community', and she dedicated her years in power to destroying many working class communities, through privatisation and closure of industries, and the depletion of council public housing stock by promoting private property ownership.

In Thatchers tiny insulated world of isolated inward looking, nuclear family units, living in detached or semi detached private properties, whose only opportunity for socialising is through the workplace, and only allegiance is to their isolated families, and making money. Hence the abundance of programmes on tv promoting buying houses, selling us the capitalist dream.

For Thatcher who grew up in an insulated middle class world, her whole life revolved around the mechanisms of monetary transactions. The exchange of money, buying and selling, was her way of social interaction, there really was no such thing as community/society in the cold world of hard cash.

We are conditioned through the media, to make the exchange and acquisition of money our focus in life.

Somehow if we make enough money we can escape from poverty and our working class communities, have the detached house in the countryside, holidays in exotic places, lots of hi-tech gadgets and designer clothes and then we will be happy, in our empty, clean, well organised, efficient lives.

We are encouraged to break the bonds of community, to sacrifice our allegiance to our neighbours and to interacting with other humans as human beings, and to enter the workplace, to work within the capitalist system, and hook up to the multinational banking system, through our paychecks and credit cards, we become entangled within the coporate machine itself.

We no longer socialise with other humans as equals, but now interact with other humans in terms of our employment roles/status, our only contact/socialisation with others is now at the workplace, where there is a hierarchy of status, where employees must interact according to the rules of the hierarchy of employment.

Hence you meet people such as jobsworth bosses, who have no time for anyone, who have only been socialised through the employment apparatus, who only know how to interact with others in terms of their employment status. People whose social lives revolve solely around the work place as a result we have an increase in workplace bullying, as socially disassociated dog eat dog capitalist bosses/manager, take the frustration and boredom of their empty, futile, drudging capitalist lives out on their subordinates and those who are unemployed.

Thatcher who specialised in buisness psychology which promotes buisness techniques for manipulation, persuasion and instilling group conformity, discovered that selling off public housing was one way of promoting capitalism, neighbourhood competition and at the same time destroyed working class communities.

Encouraging working class people living in council housing to buy their public housing, depleted the availability of cheap housing for the poor, it also encouraged house buyers/future property owners, to become house proud, neighboorhood watch types, after buying the council house, you then had to market and sell the house, encouraging you to see your surrounding neighbours in a new light as rivals/competitors, in the housing market.

It order to sell your house at the profit, you then had to alter the whole surrounding working class community, to market the area as desirable to live in. In ireland we are now living through Thatchers capitalist nightmare, as whole areas are being transformed into sterile yuppie hell holes, filled with suited capitalist robots and money grabbers whose only desire is to make a profit and move on to their next property speculation, untill they've made enough money to migrate or buy their isolated country bolthole.