Soundings a journal of politics and culture

Editorial: Private lives

As Jonathan Rutherford argues in his essay in this issue, since the 1970s we have seen big changes in the patterns of world politics, economics and culture. Manufacturing has massively shifted from the north to the south, while the workforce in rich countries has divided between the highly paid in the knowledge and finance sectors and the low paid in caring and service industries (not to mention the large numbers of people who are marginal to the mainstream economy). These class trends, along with the increasing dominance of finance capital, have led to increasing inequality both between and within countries. In the meantime cultural industries have become ever more important, and a privatised consumer culture seems to be colonising the globe. Contributors to this issue engage with these and other major changes of the last four decades, in an attempt to make sense of them, and to find ways of challenging the 'common sense' of neo-liberal ideology and market capitalism.

Zygmunt Bauman looks at the some of ideological underpinnings of our privatised culture. He argues that, contrary to widespread claims of the end of ideology, and of a non-ideological politics, what we have witnessed is a major - ideological - change whereby it is asserted that thinking about any kind of social totality, or composing visions of a good society, is a waste of time; and that looking to society for solutions for individual problems is equally pointless. Winning social recognition as a successful competitor is seen as the main path to happiness, and those who fail in this competition can be seen simply to have made the wrong choices. Zygmunt's essay goes on to look at some of the social and political consequences of this ideology of privatisation.

Andrew Cooper and Michael Rustin, in separate essays, look at what has happened in the welfare state during this period. Andrew argues that the transformations that have taken place can be understood as part of the nation state's shift to become a market state. The market's logic has gradually pervaded what was once seen as a separate sphere, outside commercial values; its organising imperative has become the shaping of our behaviour to produce efficient and competitive workers - and consumers - to assist in the national competitive enterprise. Michael argues that, though we do now inhabit a system in which there is no longer an explicit conflict of values between a capitalist ethos of competition and an opposed ethos of equality and social solidarity, differences of value do continue to exist inside the institutions. Commitment to the idea of a welfare state remains strong, and it is possible to pursue arguments within this hegemonic system, including an engagement with the redefinition of welfare goals in terms of enhanced opportunities and capacities.

Michael Fielding argues that the government's personalisation agenda in education - promoted as a way of allaying anxiety about the subordination of other educational priorities in the utilitarian drive to produce better workers - should in fact be understood as simply another way of managing learners. Personalisation raises the question of what kind of people - and hence what kind of education - we are seeking to nourish. Education policy is currently produced as if such questions are already settled, and in an overall framework in which the needs of the economy are dominant.

George Shire looks at the ways in which discourses of racialisation have been changing in the era of neoliberalism. He argues that notions of structural inequality have been sidelined, and an emphasis placed on a legalistic notion of rights - an approach that fails to recognise the conditions that produce inequality, including the practices and cultures of racism. Whiteness still circulates as an axis of power, at global, national and local levels, but its effects are generally unrecognised - even, or perhaps especially, when race itself is put forward as explanation for social behaviour, as in recent debates about street crime.

Elsewhere in the issue Allan Kellehear argues that western societies no longer recognise the processes of dying - except in the very limited cases of those with terminal illnesses such as cancer - and that there is a need for a greater understanding of how to support people at the end of their lives. Andrew Pearmain, drawing on Gramsci's ideas about the national-popular, puts forward a view of Englishness that is likely to stimulate debate; George Irvin shows how the Anglo-American economic model has not only led to increasing levels of inequality but is also likely to precipitate a global recession; and Michael Prior argues that, given Gordon Brown's apparent desire to entrench Labour as a centre-right nationalist party, it is time for the left to get itself better organised and networked. Finally, Jon Cruddas discusses with Jonathan Rutherford his views on socialism, class and the prospects for a left renaissance within the Labour Party.