9. Neoliberal Hegemony and the Organization of Consent William K. Carroll and Matthew Greeno
In December of 1972, three astronauts were locked in a capsule barreling toward the moon. The crew captured a picture of Earth in its full illumination, which came to be known as “The Blue Marble.” It was not the first picture of our planet, but it is the most significant, showing Earth in full view contrasted against the vast darkness of space. Released during a period of widespread environmental protests, the image provided significant meaning to a social movement that, at its boldest, called for radical departures from the status quo of the era. By the 1980s, the discourse had shifted substantially to ‘sustainable development’ as the mainstream environmental movement embraced the free market. Today’s carbon taxes and carbon trading schemes are the legacy of the notion of sustainable development and an explicitly capitalist environmentalism. Environmentalism has been co-opted; indeed, mainstream corporate environmentalism helps disable more radical ideas. But it is by no means the only movement that has suffered this fate; another is the labour movement. A major force for social transformation in the 19th and early 20th centuries, labour (specifically in the global North) traded its radicalism for membership in the consumer-capitalist ‘affluent society’ of the second half of the 20th century, and has been hobbled in recent decades by the internationalization of labour markets, among other factors. Each of these movements have largely accepted capitalist
This article is based on a previous article by William K. Carroll: W. K. Carroll, ‘Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony’, Socialist Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2, (2006), pp. 9-42.