Phillip Blond
English political thinker, theologian and philosopher, director of the think tank ResPublica and a proponent of Red Toryism, a radical communitarian traditionalist conservatism against both state and market monopoly.
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Without civil intervention the free market tends to monopoly. What we should do is try to restore a truly free market, try to restore a market where there are no barriers to access and people have something other than their labour which they can trade or exchange..
What is actually happening now is that monoploy capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's institutions and lives. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each other's regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only those at the very top of society in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years.
What we are seeing is the rise of new oligarchies. It is almost as if the 19th century is returning to the 21st century where we are going to live in a world where most of us are disempowered, most of us permanently struggle, most of us can't make ends meet, all the while a very small elite at the top is reaping vast rewards.
The welfare state disempowered working class people people by taking away their ability to self-organise, by taking away their ability to work with each other. It atomised working class communities and also prevented innovation and aspiration for those at the bottom.
The great error of the last 50 years is that conservatives think that they should unthinkingly endorse laissez -faire economics, but as presently conceived the free market destroys most of the things conservatives value; it destroys traditions, family life, societies, cultures, and established ways of doing things. The market place, as understood by contemporary neo-liberalism, is something no genuine conservative should support or endorse.
Both the unlimited state and the unrestrained market have destroyed civil society, which is our world. ... Civil society is something that is not the state or the market. Civil society is the world of you and I.
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