Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

[Opoponax]

That kind of thinking used to appeal to me, but now it honestly makes me gag. Why should the current climate dictate what the extremes are, and therefore what the 'moderate' position should be? Those are all relative terms. The excess of one time and place is the status quo of another. 'Decry excess' is thus a vacuous and lazy approach. It simplifies complex relationships and systemic problems to examples of sprinkling too much of one or another type of seasoning on your meal.

So, what is considered 'toxic' should not be determined simply by reference to what is commonplace or accepted. I'll give you an example from the very topic we're discussing. A few months ago, before I started devouring Marxist literature like it was steak, I was more or less on the same page as you about the Swedish system and similar 'social democratic' governments. Obviously they are better than the United States at taking care of everybody, by many metrics. Now, while I still acknowledge the policies they have as successful outcomes of struggle against capital, I see that there is still a much longer way to go. Whereas before, I thought that the United States was kind of like the slave-owning south and the western European democracies represented an egalitarian Star Trek society, now I see both as plantations, where the masters of the European ones are more benevolent than the American ones.

Once you get the idea behind Marx's labor theory of value, even if you dispute the specific calculations or favor one latter-day refinement over another, you can't look at any economy where workers are paid wages by capitalists outside of that context anymore. Then you start noticing the ebb and flow of the two classes, tugging away at society for either more freedom or more control, and problems that used to require specialized ways of thinking turn out to just be manifestations of this same phenomenon. The things that are usually taken for granted as inevitable aspects of existence in the developed world start to look like the arbitrary contrivances that they are.

At this point in my thinking life, the way I'm approaching politics is not through the lens of excess versus moderation in the usual spectrum of ideas, but autonomy versus everything else. The actual autonomy that we as humans should have, due to the complete lack of any justification for one person or group claiming more value than another, is only excessive if you fail to notice the thinness of the membranes that separate the socially acceptable zones of autonomy from the forbidden ones. Just looking at that layout, and trying to imagine what a powerful group of rich people who want to control the rest of us would try to make us think if they wanted us to lose our nerve, all the usual chestnuts of apologia are predictable. Most people are stupid. We need investors. We need to reward merit otherwise nobody will try to do anything. We can make it work with the right regulations. Democracy only works at certain scales. And of course: gradual change in the direction of moderation is preferable to any sort of immediate shift that could be regarded as excessive. I think we should reject all of these excuses for why nobody has any real autonomy.

I am not familiar enough with Marxism to be able to critique it. I feel sure it has many sensible, pragmatic and useful things going for it, not least (or also) that it is well-meaning in terms of its equity aims and ideals and that it is unfairly cast as the bogeyman in for example the USA (and here too). I really should read up more about it.

But you would have to go a long way to convince me away from a moderate 'western european' middle or something like the Nordic Model. 'Real' autonomy? What's that? Personally, I don't see that 'workers being paid by capitalists' is of itself a bad thing at all. I would argue for a smaller wealth gap, but not no gap at all. Imo, you have to reward entrepreneurial efforts, risk and responsibility-taking and self-betterment, for example. In general, I am in favour of more meritocracy, less profiteering and of surpluses being more equitably shared around society rather than going into the hands of a tiny minority, but I think it is a question of degree.

I would probably enjoy a discussion on Marxism if I had the time for it. If I read more on it, I suspect I might be more swayed in its direction, at least somewhat.

Marxism is a failed ideology. It never works full time. It doesn't work for a simple reason: humans won't work hard with passion and creativity when there are no rewards for extra effort and risk. And to make most businesses succeed, people have to work hard with passion and creativity with extreme effort and risk. My two partners and I started a new company about six years ago. We had to work incredible hours with no pay and extreme stress. We now have 61 employees and are doing very well. I'm very connected to the community. We pay the best wages and benefits. But the only way we went through all that was to make a lot of money. Period.

Agreed. Capitalism motivates.

There are people who would sacrifice time with family, more satisfying personal pursuits, and live with the stress of risking soul crushing failure simply for the pursuit of knowledge and/or a slightly better apartment, but those people are few.

I do part time work at a gun range because I enjoy it and I can shoot for free when I have time to go. I like the people who work there (they are shockingly moderate politically), and it's a wonderful outdoors environment. If I could work there and write fiction in my off time and be paid the same wages or slightly less for going to law school and passing the California bar exam, I would do that in a heartbeat. And I think most people would do the same. But I did go to law school, and I did pass that fucking exam, and it took everything I had in me to do it. If the potential outcome of all that would've been to be only slightly better off than I was before, I would've been rendered incapable of doing it.

This isn't to say that things can't be improved. They certainly can. In the U.S., our social safety net is pathetic, our healthcare system is a disgrace, basic education is bad, higher education is expensive well beyond sustainability, and our homeless population is an indictment of the callous nature of our society.

I'm not an economist. I only understand that economics are very complex. But it does appear that we have a severe wealth imbalance and that the only way to begin to correct it is through higher taxes and an educational system that promotes the idea that we all have an obligation to society in general. Or something like that.

 

[ruby sparks]

But I did go to law school, and I did pass that fucking exam, and it took everything I had in me to do it. If the potential outcome of all that would've been to be only slightly better off than I was before, I would've been rendered incapable of doing it.

I hear that tuition fees in the USA are awfully high. Cheaper here in the UK but still high in global terms. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany and Poland (and a few others in europe such as Slovenia and Slovakia) I think they're nil (for residents of those countries) and very low in some others (Spain, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg....)

 

[Canard DuJour]

That kind of thinking used to appeal to me, but now it honestly makes me gag. Why should the current climate dictate what the extremes are, and therefore what the 'moderate' position should be? Those are all relative terms. The excess of one time and place is the status quo of another. 'Decry excess' is thus a vacuous and lazy approach. It simplifies complex relationships and systemic problems to examples of sprinkling too much of one or another type of seasoning on your meal.

So, what is considered 'toxic' should not be determined simply by reference to what is commonplace or accepted. I'll give you an example from the very topic we're discussing. A few months ago, before I started devouring Marxist literature like it was steak, I was more or less on the same page as you about the Swedish system and similar 'social democratic' governments. Obviously they are better than the United States at taking care of everybody, by many metrics. Now, while I still acknowledge the policies they have as successful outcomes of struggle against capital, I see that there is still a much longer way to go. Whereas before, I thought that the United States was kind of like the slave-owning south and the western European democracies represented an egalitarian Star Trek society, now I see both as plantations, where the masters of the European ones are more benevolent than the American ones.

Once you get the idea behind Marx's labor theory of value, even if you dispute the specific calculations or favor one latter-day refinement over another, you can't look at any economy where workers are paid wages by capitalists outside of that context anymore. Then you start noticing the ebb and flow of the two classes, tugging away at society for either more freedom or more control, and problems that used to require specialized ways of thinking turn out to just be manifestations of this same phenomenon. The things that are usually taken for granted as inevitable aspects of existence in the developed world start to look like the arbitrary contrivances that they are.

At this point in my thinking life, the way I'm approaching politics is not through the lens of excess versus moderation in the usual spectrum of ideas, but autonomy versus everything else. The actual autonomy that we as humans should have, due to the complete lack of any justification for one person or group claiming more value than another, is only excessive if you fail to notice the thinness of the membranes that separate the socially acceptable zones of autonomy from the forbidden ones. Just looking at that layout, and trying to imagine what a powerful group of rich people who want to control the rest of us would try to make us think if they wanted us to lose our nerve, all the usual chestnuts of apologia are predictable. Most people are stupid. We need investors. We need to reward merit otherwise nobody will try to do anything. We can make it work with the right regulations. Democracy only works at certain scales. And of course: gradual change in the direction of moderation is preferable to any sort of immediate shift that could be regarded as excessive. I think we should reject all of these excuses for why nobody has any real autonomy.

I am not familiar enough with Marxism to be able to critique it. I feel sure it has many sensible, pragmatic and useful things going for it, not least (or also) that it is well-meaning in terms of its equity aims and ideals and that it is unfairly cast as the bogeyman in for example the USA (and here too). I really should read up more about it.

But you would have to go a long way to convince me away from a moderate 'western european' middle or something like the Nordic Model. 'Real' autonomy? What's that? Personally, I don't see that 'workers being paid by capitalists' is of itself a bad thing at all. I would argue for a smaller wealth gap, but not no gap at all. Imo, you have to reward entrepreneurial efforts, risk and responsibility-taking and self-betterment, for example. In general, I am in favour of more meritocracy, less profiteering and of surpluses being more equitably shared around society rather than going into the hands of a tiny minority, but I think it is a question of degree.

I would probably enjoy a discussion on Marxism if I had the time for it. If I read more on it, I suspect I might be more swayed in its direction, at least somewhat.

Marxism is a failed ideology. It never works full time.

Marxism - insofar as there's any such thing - is a description of capitalism. The failure of Marxism is failure to describe a "full time" alternative.

It doesn't work for a simple reason: humans won't work hard with passion and creativity when there are no rewards for extra effort and risk.

Few of the innovations which have transformed human life have come from people who were in it for money. Many have come from public investment which for-profit entities would never have made.

And to make most businesses succeed, people have to work hard with passion and creativity with extreme effort and risk.

Well that's a shit system. We should not - and need not - be reliant on "extreme effort and risk" when we can already produce surpluses of nearly everything. That's pointless human misery (which was kinda Marx's point). And the extreme risk bit keeps crashing the economy. By now, we can afford a market economy without "extreme effort and risk", which are disincentives to passion and creativity. That's why generous welfare states tend to be more innovative and why productivity has fallen off with neoliberalism.

 

[SimpleDon]

I was glad to see Karl Polanyi quoted in the article. He wrote in the 1940s, 1944 I believe the same year that Hayek published the Road to Serfdom, the carillon call of neoliberalism. Polanyi warned that the capitalist equable spring of Keynesian political economics would be short-lived because the wealthy would attack it relentlessly. This what occurred and neoliberalism was the form of the attack.

Polanyi thesis was that there would be cycles in capitalism in democracies that the wealthy would slowly accumulate more and more of the income and thereby the wealth of a nation until the non-wealthy finally broke and claimed their share by voting the politicians devoted to the wealthy out as occurred after the Great Depression.

I believe that Polanyi was an optimist. He couldn't have anticipated the massive propaganda machine that would be able to keep conservative workers and farmers voting to do the one thing that the wealthy would never do, to economically disadvantage themselves. Conservatives need lies to support their belief that the status quo can't be causing the many problems that we see in our society. The wealthy owned the media and were able to provide these lies to them.

 

[poster]

Agreed. Capitalism motivates.

Neanderthals existed for ~200,000 years and left the place in pretty good shape. We've been around for ~40,000 and have the planet ready to either explode or self-destruct. Whats ya say we throttle back on the motivation just a little?

It is all about the environment? Right?

 

[PyramidHead]

Marxism is a failed ideology. It never works full time. It doesn't work for a simple reason: humans won't work hard with passion and creativity when there are no rewards for extra effort and risk.

Just to add to what Canard has said, from the get-go you're not criticizing any central tenet of Marxist thought here. As far as I'm aware, there is no reason that a socialist society would not reward extra effort and risk. In fact, in capitalist ones, it is usually the case that those who make the most effort at the most risk--the workers--get the same reward regardless of either, compared to those who undertake comparatively less risk with less effort (where risk is a matter of survival rather than simply a return on investment, anyway). All that socialism in the vein of Marx and Engels requires is that the workers themselves democratically answer all the questions about:

1. What work needs to be done (for any reason, either because it is socially useful or for pleasure/entertainment, but not dictated by a special board of directors)
2. Who should do it (which can certainly be based on talents, willingness to do harder work for greater incentives, rotating responsibilities, etc.)
3. How much surplus should be produced (given the inputs, how much over and beyond the cost of paying the workers should be expected from them as outputs)
4. What should be done with that surplus (reinvestment, taxes, distribution among the workers based on effort and risk if that's what they want)
5. What materials are required and where they should come from (and these would not be owned by any individual person, but by the people using them, whoever they are)

The lack of worker participation in any of these basic choices under capitalist organization is what makes it exploitative. Workers are expected to surrender their time and energy to tasks they have little power to influence, producing value that is completely owned by their bosses, who appropriate it for various uses without their input, for wages that are vulnerable to changes beyond their ability to directly alter. This relationship is antagonistic and not conducive to the needs of the majority, but it is conducive to the needs of the wealthy, which is why it has persisted for as long as it has.

Which brings me to the second problem with your objection: humans have been making things, giving them to each other, inventing things, reorganizing nature, solving problems together, and generally taking care of themselves long before capitalist top-down control was ever put into play. Capital has successfully inculcated us with the idea that all value is exchange value and all productive activity is some kind of work. The truth is that if anything, such a way of thinking tends to stifle passion and creativity in most workers, putting them into circumscribed roles defined by profit motives they do not share and encouraging conformity rather than spontaneous inventiveness or experimentation. Again, if you had to predict the low-hanging fruit of vacuous one-liners that the capitalist class would love for workers to believe and internalize, "you wouldn't do anything worthwhile if we didn't pay you" would surely top the list.

Finally, the fact that a given business like yours has thrived due to your effort and risk, when it would not have done so without the promise of financial reward, cannot be taken outside of the context of the system it occurs in. Obviously, in a society where everybody's ability to live comfortably and in good health depends largely on income, there is understandable motivation to do backbreaking work to get more of it. But that's the very hamster wheel that Marxism tries to subvert: since nobody, in the entire world, could ever themselves consume as much output as they produce through their work, we already have vastly more than enough labor power to give everyone what they need so that their livelihoods are no longer tied to accepting a wage rather than stock options. That's the whole point. Your example shows what is possible under the constraints of capitalism, but it does not apply universally; quite often, a profitable venture might pay its employees crap wages, or might not be connected to community interests, or any number of pitfalls that can only be inefficiently addressed through regulations that are rarely enforced and easily repealed. Otherwise, we just have to hope that every capitalist has, at least apparently, a conscience like yours.

Upon this shaky combination of legislative band-aids and the dice roll of generating a Henry Ford rests the well-being of millions upon millions of workers who, working collectively for shared goals, could easily produce or provide whatever you and your partner do with a fraction of the effort and risk. No offense, but it's the undeniable truth because nobody is actually born special. So, in the end, even if there's a grain of truth in the regurgitated talking point that nobody would expend extreme effort at dire risk without financial reward, (a) financial reward is not ruled out by socialism, it is just determined democratically by workers, and (b) collective participation in any endeavor dramatically reduces both effort and risk anyway.

 

[PyramidHead]

Agreed. Capitalism motivates.

Neanderthals existed for ~200,000 years and left the place in pretty good shape. We've been around for ~40,000 and have the planet ready to either explode or self-destruct. Whats ya say we throttle back on the motivation just a little?

It is all about the environment? Right?

Also recall that capitalism is young. ECONOMIES are young, historically speaking. If we needed them to motivate us to do things that needed doing for our survival, we wouldn't be here!

Plus, not all motivation is the kind of motivation we want. The threat of being hanged from a tree was ample motivation for southern blacks to stay in line and keep their eyes to the ground, but that didn't make it a motivator worth preserving.

 

[Opoponax]

But I did go to law school, and I did pass that fucking exam, and it took everything I had in me to do it. If the potential outcome of all that would've been to be only slightly better off than I was before, I would've been rendered incapable of doing it.

I hear that tuition fees in the USA are awfully high. Cheaper here in the UK but still high in global terms. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany and Poland (and a few others in europe such as Slovenia and Slovakia) I think they're nil (for residents of those countries) and very low in some others (Spain, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg....)

Disgustingly high. Now I'm sad because I've had to think about it again.

 

[Opoponax]

Agreed. Capitalism motivates.

Neanderthals existed for ~200,000 years and left the place in pretty good shape. We've been around for ~40,000 and have the planet ready to either explode or self-destruct. Whats ya say we throttle back on the motivation just a little?

It is all about the environment? Right?

I'd say the environment left the Neanderthals in pretty bad shape--if non-existence can be said to be a state.

What I was clearly talking about was motivating people to be rewarded for their efforts. Capitalism tends to do that; communist tends not to. This doesn't mean that myself nor anyone else here believes in unbridled free market, Fuck You I Got Mine, and Fuck Everyone Because I'll Be Dead Anyway type of capitalism.

I think we should be motivated to convert to renewable energy ASAP, but the problem is that the money isn't there yet. Or at least that all the money that can be possibly wrung out of fossils fuel hasn't been made yet. That's a really, really bad aspect of capitalism, but it isn't a necessary result of it.

 

[PyramidHead]

Lastly:

If someone creates a product that is incredible demand that everyone wants (Amazon, Microsoft) and the value of their companies sky rockets - great for them. Great for us.

I just wanted to point out the naivete of this statement, in that it assumes the market and the capitalists who inhabit it merely react passively to the preferences of consumers. If they make something people want, great for everybody. If they don't, they go under. That ignores a sustained program of marketing, news media control, cultural manipulation through education, religion, film, music, and in the workplace itself to intentionally engineer the preferences of workers (who also happen to be consumers), so that we can maintain our willingness and ability to reproduce our labor power for capital. If there is some way of swaying the populace to be more likely to buy a product that Microsoft sells, to use it in a school setting, to see it as a status symbol, to see it as indispensable for work, to act as an advertising mouthpiece on social media, and to find new motivations to surrender more time and energy to generating profit for capital, what possible justification would such a company have for not leveraging every opportunity to do so?

The alternative usage of their time an energy, in creating values for themselves that do not benefit capital, crafting and exchanging goods outside of markets, subverting the degree to which everything has been digitized, participating in alternative modes of activity in groups that could present a threat to capital, these things have all been secured by our efforts at the expense of large companies. And they are usually discouraged by them: we should GET SHIT DONE, keep moving, join the digital revolution(!), stay connected, etc., but always with the hint of a prayer that we'll eventually have enough time, money, and energy to do what we really want with our lives, as long as we keep at it. This is the landscape of struggle that defines the preferences companies like Amazon and Netflix respond to; understood as a whole, rather than one-dimensionally, it is maybe not so great for us.

 

[Opoponax]

Also recall that capitalism is young. ECONOMIES are young, historically speaking. If we needed them to motivate us to do things that needed doing for our survival, we wouldn't be here!

The concept of economies are ancient, and go back as far as recorded history. The utility of an economy is obvious.

The threat of being hanged from a tree was ample motivation for southern blacks to stay in line and keep their eyes to the ground, but that didn't make it a motivator worth preserving.

That's clearly not what I was talking about.

 

[poster]

Lastly:

If someone creates a product that is incredible demand that everyone wants (Amazon, Microsoft) and the value of their companies sky rockets - great for them. Great for us.

I just wanted to point out the naivete of this statement, in that it assumes the market and the capitalists who inhabit it merely react passively to the preferences of consumers. If they make something people want, great for everybody. If they don't, they go under. That ignores a sustained program of marketing, news media control, cultural manipulation through education, religion, film, music, and in the workplace itself to intentionally engineer the preferences of workers (who also happen to be consumers), so that we can maintain our willingness and ability to reproduce our labor power for capital. If there is some way of swaying the populace to be more likely to buy a product that Microsoft sells, to use it in a school setting, to see it as a status symbol, to see it as indispensable for work, to act as an advertising mouthpiece on social media, and to find new motivations to surrender more time and energy to generating profit for capital, what possible justification would such a company have for not leveraging every opportunity to do so?

The alternative usage of their time an energy, in creating values for themselves that do not benefit capital, crafting and exchanging goods outside of markets, subverting the degree to which everything has been digitized, participating in alternative modes of activity in groups that could present a threat to capital, these things have all been secured by our efforts at the expense of large companies. And they are usually discouraged by them: we should GET SHIT DONE, keep moving, join the digital revolution(!), stay connected, etc., but always with the hint of a prayer that we'll eventually have enough time, money, and energy to do what we really want with our lives, as long as we keep at it. This is the landscape of struggle that defines the preferences companies like Amazon and Netflix respond to; understood as a whole, rather than one-dimensionally, it is maybe not so great for us.

It's true. Marketing sources and the availability of resources to market effectively is the key to the success of any product. The product need not be good, only marketed effectively.

Marketing and sales, that was my gig for a long time.

 

[untermensche]

It's true. Marketing sources and the availability of resources to market effectively is the key to the success of any product. The product need not be good, only marketed effectively.

Marketing and sales, that was my gig for a long time.

Advertising and marketing are potent tools to distort the system.

It is not a rational system as a result.

 

[poster]

It's true. Marketing sources and the availability of resources to market effectively is the key to the success of any product. The product need not be good, only marketed effectively.

Marketing and sales, that was my gig for a long time.

Advertising and marketing are potent tools to distort the system.

It is not a rational system as a result.

But it can be so much fun and reward one with the feeling of power when one learns to manipulate people and their behaviors effectively. I had to walk away, I was losing sleep because of the guilt.

 

[ruby sparks]

Lastly:

If someone creates a product that is incredible demand that everyone wants (Amazon, Microsoft) and the value of their companies sky rockets - great for them. Great for us.

I just wanted to point out the naivete of this statement, in that it assumes the market and the capitalists who inhabit it merely react passively to the preferences of consumers. If they make something people want, great for everybody. If they don't, they go under. That ignores a sustained program of marketing, news media control, cultural manipulation through education, religion, film, music, and in the workplace itself to intentionally engineer the preferences of workers (who also happen to be consumers), so that we can maintain our willingness and ability to reproduce our labor power for capital. If there is some way of swaying the populace to be more likely to buy a product that Microsoft sells, to use it in a school setting, to see it as a status symbol, to see it as indispensable for work, to act as an advertising mouthpiece on social media, and to find new motivations to surrender more time and energy to generating profit for capital, what possible justification would such a company have for not leveraging every opportunity to do so?

The alternative usage of their time an energy, in creating values for themselves that do not benefit capital, crafting and exchanging goods outside of markets, subverting the degree to which everything has been digitized, participating in alternative modes of activity in groups that could present a threat to capital, these things have all been secured by our efforts at the expense of large companies. And they are usually discouraged by them: we should GET SHIT DONE, keep moving, join the digital revolution(!), stay connected, etc., but always with the hint of a prayer that we'll eventually have enough time, money, and energy to do what we really want with our lives, as long as we keep at it. This is the landscape of struggle that defines the preferences companies like Amazon and Netflix respond to; understood as a whole, rather than one-dimensionally, it is maybe not so great for us.

There is about as much chance of America going Marxist as there is of Donald Trump becoming a Social Justice Warrior.

I get that chewing juicy Marxist steak pie brings out your saliva. It might even bring out mine too, but it's steak pie in the sky.

Staying with the food analogies, there does seem to be a very encouraging appetite for Democratic Socialism, as evidenced by the support Bernie Sanders got, before the Democrats 'chickened out' (weak food analogy alert) and served up (I am surely going too far with the food thing, so I'll stop) Hilary Clinton instead, thereby removing a genuinely populist candidate and allowing her opponent to cash in on the widespread anti-establisment sentiments via cheap rhetoric instead, and I read that there are a number of polls suggesting that more US voters under 30 actually view the word 'capitalism' negatively than view it positively, and that almost half (49%) view the word 'socialism' positively. This is something which imo should and could be capitalised on (if you'll excuse the awkward pun) before the churning of the hamster wheel turns many of them into disillusioned middle-aged victims of ultra-capitalism.

In other words, even if it were desirable, in the real world (as opposed to in the world of rose-coloured ideals hypothesised in treatises) to get to Marxism, the route is surely through Democratic Socialism, and the door is at least half open, and personally I might even say that Democratic Socialism a good place to stop, but that could be decided after getting there first.

 

[J842P]

Over the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading on what Neoliberalism is and its consequences. This piece, in which Chris Hedges and David Harvey explore Neoliberalism, is among the better examinations I've come across. It ended up being a nice piece to sit and sip my coffee to in the quiet of my sitting room.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/neoliberalisms-dark-path-to-fascism/


Some snippets:

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.

[...]

“As a political project, it was very savvy,” he said. “It got a great deal of popular consent because it was talking about individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice. When they talked about freedom, it was freedom of the market. The neoliberal project said to the ’68 generation, ‘OK, you want liberty and freedom? That’s what the student movement was about. We’re going to give it to you, but it’s going to be freedom of the market. The other thing you’re after is social justice—forget it. So, we’ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. Don’t organize.’ The attempt was to dismantle those institutions, which were those collective institutions of the working class, particularly the unions and bit by bit those political parties that stood for some sort of concern for the well-being of the masses.”

“The great thing about freedom of the market is it appears to be egalitarian, but there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals,” Harvey went on. “It promises equality of treatment, but if you’re extremely rich, it means you can get richer. If you’re very poor, you’re more likely to get poorer. What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of ‘Capital’ is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.”

[...[

Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism. Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.

As a bit of an aside; I've noticed since the midterm elections that in some corporate media articale I've read, that many of the Democrats who are in fact neoliberals are being referred to as "progressives". It's an interesting sleight of hand. Case in point is this piece from Policico where the caption below the top photo of Rep Adam Smith (D-Wash) reads "Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) who is set to become the first progressive in decades to run the House Armed Services Committee." When Smith is not, in the slightest, a progressive in the traditional sense of the word.

Great thread and article. Your point about labels and the political spectrum needs to be repeated more often. The right and the left are not just relative terms, there is an actual left that is usually not part of the conversation at all because of how far right we have moved, especially in the United States but also globally.

Well, *particularly* in the US, there really is no left with any political power. Only now have we seen some inklings.

- - - Updated - - -

Great thread and article. Your point about labels and the political spectrum needs to be repeated more often. The right and the left are not just relative terms, there is an actual left that is usually not part of the conversation at all because of how far right we have moved, especially in the United States but also globally.

Fair point. But would you not agree that people who hold your beliefs are a pretty small segment of the population? IMO, nothing wrong with that. I like having differing opinions. But there is also a very large segment of voters like me who are pro business, pro jobs, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pro environment, pro science, and who want a larger safety net. We need a place also... And it damn sure isn't on the right.

No, in fact, the major leftist/progressive proposals such as universal healthcare ect. enjoy wide-spread popularity among both self-described Democrats and Republicans.

And of course your place is on the right. What you are describing is being a Republican in 1970.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Great thread and article. Your point about labels and the political spectrum needs to be repeated more often. The right and the left are not just relative terms, there is an actual left that is usually not part of the conversation at all because of how far right we have moved, especially in the United States but also globally.

Well, *particularly* in the US, there really is no left with any political power. Only now have we seen some inklings.

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Great thread and article. Your point about labels and the political spectrum needs to be repeated more often. The right and the left are not just relative terms, there is an actual left that is usually not part of the conversation at all because of how far right we have moved, especially in the United States but also globally.

Fair point. But would you not agree that people who hold your beliefs are a pretty small segment of the population? IMO, nothing wrong with that. I like having differing opinions. But there is also a very large segment of voters like me who are pro business, pro jobs, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pro environment, pro science, and who want a larger safety net. We need a place also... And it damn sure isn't on the right.

No, in fact, the major leftist/progressive proposals such as universal healthcare ect. enjoy wide-spread popularity among both self-described Democrats and Republicans.

And of course your place is on the right. What you are describing is being a Republican in 1970.

Have you been reading the thread?? This thread has digressed to progressive vs Marxism. Under Marxism, all businesses are universal or you go to the gulag! The amount of Americans who favor Marxism takeover are pretty small.

 

[untermensche]

Have you been reading the thread?? This thread has digressed to progressive vs Marxism. Under Marxism, all businesses are universal or you go to the gulag! The amount of Americans who favor Marxism takeover are pretty small.

There are no gulags with Marxism.

That was Stalinism which was just a brutal dictatorship despite the names it called itself.

Marx had nothing to do with it and could not be found in it.

 

[poster]

This thread has digressed to progressive vs Marxism.

There is a prevailing attitude among a certain band of members on this site that if one votes for candidates of the Democratic party and express their dislike strongly enough for Donald Trump, they must be "progressive". That, I imagine, comes from watching way too much corporate television entertainment news shows where neoliberals misrepresent themselves in their constant stream of incoherance. I see this so often when I go into the homes of my customers to do work.

 

[PyramidHead]

Lastly:

If someone creates a product that is incredible demand that everyone wants (Amazon, Microsoft) and the value of their companies sky rockets - great for them. Great for us.

I just wanted to point out the naivete of this statement, in that it assumes the market and the capitalists who inhabit it merely react passively to the preferences of consumers. If they make something people want, great for everybody. If they don't, they go under. That ignores a sustained program of marketing, news media control, cultural manipulation through education, religion, film, music, and in the workplace itself to intentionally engineer the preferences of workers (who also happen to be consumers), so that we can maintain our willingness and ability to reproduce our labor power for capital. If there is some way of swaying the populace to be more likely to buy a product that Microsoft sells, to use it in a school setting, to see it as a status symbol, to see it as indispensable for work, to act as an advertising mouthpiece on social media, and to find new motivations to surrender more time and energy to generating profit for capital, what possible justification would such a company have for not leveraging every opportunity to do so?

The alternative usage of their time an energy, in creating values for themselves that do not benefit capital, crafting and exchanging goods outside of markets, subverting the degree to which everything has been digitized, participating in alternative modes of activity in groups that could present a threat to capital, these things have all been secured by our efforts at the expense of large companies. And they are usually discouraged by them: we should GET SHIT DONE, keep moving, join the digital revolution(!), stay connected, etc., but always with the hint of a prayer that we'll eventually have enough time, money, and energy to do what we really want with our lives, as long as we keep at it. This is the landscape of struggle that defines the preferences companies like Amazon and Netflix respond to; understood as a whole, rather than one-dimensionally, it is maybe not so great for us.

There is about as much chance of America going Marxist as there is of Donald Trump becoming a Social Justice Warrior.

I get that chewing juicy Marxist steak pie brings out your saliva. It might even bring out mine too, but it's steak pie in the sky.

Change happens slow until it happens fast. It's not a matter of "going Marxist", in the sense of following a prescribed path toward a clear endpoint. Autonomism, the school of thought I'm currently most attracted to in the extended leftist family of ideas, says we've been moving in that direction all along through individual and collective acts of shirking the work imposed on us. Cutting class, slacking on the job, skipping ads, stealing office supplies, carving out a way of being human that isn't marketable, these are all beginnings of the same kind of activity that bubbles up to protests, sit-ins, strikes, and eventually elections and shifts in government policy. And it has worked, judging by the reactions from the class who controls most of the wealth, who have doubled down in the last few decades to limit and stifle all these avenues of autonomy.

Staying with the food analogies, there does seem to be a very encouraging appetite for Democratic Socialism, as evidenced by the support Bernie Sanders got, before the Democrats 'chickened out' (weak food analogy alert) and served up (I am surely going too far with the food thing, so I'll stop) Hilary Clinton instead, thereby removing a genuinely populist candidate and allowing her opponent to cash in on the widespread anti-establisment sentiments via cheap rhetoric instead, and I read that there are a number of polls suggesting that more US voters under 30 actually view the word 'capitalism' negatively than view it positively, and that almost half (49%) view the word 'socialism' positively. This is something which imo should and could be capitalised on (if you'll excuse the awkward pun) before the churning of the hamster wheel turns many of them into disillusioned middle-aged victims of ultra-capitalism.

All true, and I'm not gonna disparage democratic socialists unless they try to make people forget that there can be progress beyond democratic socialism. The other disagreement I have is with the idea that we can gradually reform society to get to where we want to be. I think the imbalance of power and influence is too great for that to work; you'll just get the same trajectory we saw in the last century after the New Deal was passed to placate business leaders and progressives without really changing how the economy was structured. Gradually, since money was still the best way to secure power over others, capital reversed or weakened almost all of those regulations. The only stuff that really stuck was the outcome of the revolutionary 50's and 60's.

Despite those gains, we have been sufficiently convinced that the civil rights movement was about social policy, and furthermore that there is a meaningful distinction between social policy and economic policy. It's commonplace to hear someone say without any irony, "I'm socially liberal but economically conservative." That's a weaponized bit of ideology that places a barrier between the impulse to revolt and the money of capitalists. At worst, if we can be bothered to get off our asses and into the streets in our frustration, it will probably just be about something like gay rights or animal welfare. We don't do that anymore in response to explicitly economic injustice, partly due to the weakening of unions, but also I think because of this neoliberal idea that market freedom is the final freedom.

In other words, even if it were desirable, in the real world (as opposed to in the world of rose-coloured ideals hypothesised in treatises) to get to Marxism, the route is surely through Democratic Socialism, and the door is at least half open, and personally I might even say that Democratic Socialism a good place to stop, but that could be decided after getting there first.

That's still a point of contention for me, like I said. In the past, the most successful examples of socialist organization of life have been spontaneous and rapid, only later co-opted by establishments that moderated and stratified the social order again over time. I think reforming capitalism can only help, but I don't think that it's the only way or even the best way to help.