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English Fascism, when it arrives, is likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind (presumably, at any rate at first, it won’t be called Fascism),
I was recently musing upon global neoliberalism , and its semi-totalitarian reach into almost every corner of the Earth, and thought of this Orwell quote.
I decided to google “Neoliberalism is fascism” and came across this really cool chick’s blog:
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/10/neoliberalism-i.html
She says, in part:
One last prefatory remark: I think it is important to recognize that fascism (forms of contemporary conservatism) is a result of neoliberal thought. It is not simply a supplement that aims to save neoliberalism from itself. So, even as forms of religious fundamentalism provide supplements to the extremes of neoliberalism, neoliberalism on its own has horribly conservative effects.
You can watch a really wonderful discussion with the author here. I highly recommend watching it. She is one of my new heroes. I am shamelessly thirsty for vision and insight. And she is full of some vision and insight.
She’s a commie, which was an interesting coincidence for me. As I expressed in a previous entry, I REALLY want to understand Noam Chomsky’s’ vision for how society should work. I know for a fact that his facts about foreign policy and geopolitics are correct, more or less. I know he’s brilliant. But in my search to understand his actual vision, I kept hitting brick walls. And I really really have looked. That does not in any way degrade him or his intellect or his monumental contributions to the Westerners’ understanding of geopolitics. Chomsky will always be King.
Yet (heh? I was trying to not say “but”, because I really mean all that) I think this might be true:
Chomsky has never written systematically about how his brand of small-scale socialism will be achieved. This would require a discussion of matters such as human agency and economic policy that seem to matter little to him. For despite his affiliation with a movement that wrote a vast literature on such questions, Chomsky himself often seems content to proclaim its superiority to state socialism on face value.
The best ideas I mooched off of the chick I linked to earlier are:
1) DE-privatization! REVERSE privatization. That’s what we should be uniting behind and endorsing. No matter what flavor of leftie you are.
2) politically, who knows? OWS?? (she’s a huge OWS advocate, like us.) Keep on keepin’ on? She’s been writing academic stuff and whatnot about it, like here.
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How about YOUR ideas of what the new society would look like, how would it be attainable?
Okay, that’s not a fair question. But get my point? Marxism had a marvelous integration of end goals and how it was to be achieved, and it inspired hundreds of millions. But history moved beyond it, beyond a society dominated by heavy industry. This is why, in my own writings, I focus more on method than on concrete solutions. Only by advanced our method of discussion can concrete solutions be reasonably discussed.
I still draw some inspiration from Marx’s statement at the end of the German Ideology:
But if you want some serious analysis of today’s world, “as Marx would have done it,” the best around to my thinking are the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in 3 volumes, Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth.
Stalin’s bogus form of communism, “socialism in one country”, was bound to fail just because there was no united movement towards socialism in the western nations. I personally believe that the failure of German socialists to bring off a successful revolution was because of the deliberate failure of the Comintern to fully support revolutions anywhere so as not to diminish Uncle Joe’s accomplishments.
Anyway, while Chomsky may not provide you with answers, a man who will always keep you thinking is David Harvey. You can spend an entire weekend with him and not be bored and you will leave with answers, but also many questions that you can start answering for yourself.
http://davidharvey.org/
What we discovered in the cases of the Soviet Union and China (and possible other state socialist countries) is that state socialism finally isn’t socialism. That now is a non-starter on very practical grounds. And we can suspect why. State socialism requires bureaucracy and information control of planning to the last detail. It requires hierarchy and hierarchy introduces feudal relationships — bargaining obedience for security. The same disease that infects the corporate form of capitalism. The top of the hierarchy in both appropriates the surplus.
Second the information system for dealing with the economic, being top-down is so inflexible that it cannot adapt to the complexity of an economic system’s behavior. Top down definitions of the amount to produce invariably miss the mark.
My own sense is that we are at a point without previous systemic models of how to move forward—that is, at a point of invention of something new. It will be developed through trial-and-error. There is a quotation of disputed origin that says, “Action removes the doubt that theory cannot solve.” We are at that point.
We have experience with cooperative enterprises and their problems. We have experience with intentional communities and their problems. We have experience with labor credit systems, with local scrips, and other small-scale economic mechanisms and relationships. We do not yet know how to scale them up.
The Occupy movement, with its local autonomy and connectional global structure, has the possibility of being the laboratory for scaling up some of the small-scale socialist relationships that work. Theory cannot help escape the messy local decision-making that that will involve.
Some issues to focus on.
How do you economically organize massively participatory urban agriculture and craftsmanship to support the needs of a city?
How do you connect rural communities so that they are not colonies of a city?
How do you structure economic relationships between cities and rural communities?
But those issues will have to be framed in terms of particular cities (Charlotte, Chicago, Fort Smith) and particular rural communities (Mt. Croghan, Monon, Lee Creek) in order to begin to gain insights and to change the practical economic relationships.
The lasting historical value of Marx’s writings is his systematic deconstruction of capitalism. A hundred-fifty years of thinking and multitudes of theoretical discussions have not gotten us closer to figuring out what the next step is. No one knows what a practical socialism that delivers liberty, equality, and fraternity looks like on a global scale.
Neoliberalism is not a kind of fascism. If fascism were to come to the United States, it would likely originate in an especially reactionary form of Christian fundamentalism, one that merged sectarian dogma with statist inclinations. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is an ideological expression of the unique socio-political form called inverted totalitarianism. Neoliberalism no need for reactionary cultural forms. Thus, Obama and Clinton — neoliberal mandarins who became political leaders.
To your title question. Neoliberalism was an attempt to have an economics that avoided Marx’s questions. It was a self-conscious and self-serving anti-Marxism. After a hundred years of the neoliberal project, it’s pretty clear that it is indistinguishable from imperial fascism. And maybe that was unavoidably baked in by all of the classical education that early neoliberal thinkers had; the preferred models of civilization, Greece and Rome both wound up as neoliberal fascist imperial states.
Rick Wolff loves to point out that one of the best iterations of Marxist ideals in the US is practiced by the Silicon Valley kids who get together in each other’s garages, program and design things, and democratically divide the surpluses amongst each other. These kids, who almost all think of themselves as Republicans, are shocked when he tells them that they’re actually being functional Marxists of the purest and best type.
When she takes issue with this:
She should have started out by saying: “It’s just not true”. Not “every” society does this. Hunter-gathering societies did not do this, *everyone* had the same access to resources. The competent ones were just more respected and gained leadership roles based on their competency and their always ‘doing the right thing’ and setting the welfare of the *group* above the welfare of *themselves*.
(I can just hear the Randies shriek now).
Furthermore:
The dinosaurs and the asteroid anyone? If neoliberals want to start comparing, fascist-like, “the market” with biological evolution, then they should know that a big driver of biological evolution is just plain dumb luck. The dinosaurs and the associated flora and fauna of their ecosystem were not unsuccessful, they were not “flawed”, but were just the victims of a global natural catastrophe that humans might well not have survived either. There is no Randian/Hitlerian striving for “superiority”, only just the kind of survival on the battlefield where a person standing next to you gets the bullet or shell fragment and you escape–and not based on anything that either of you did.
Well, I differ with Chomsky on a lot of things, including (cheeky me) linguistics (I think later research casts doubts on his central innate grammar hypothesis).
My ideal of the good society?
a) A mix of privately owned mom-and-pop business and large cooperatives (which replace corporations where economies of scale dictate large size). The cooperatives can raise capital by the selling of bonds.
b) Finance either controlled by credit unions and a Bank of the United States, the latter managed to make a *small* profit which is plowed back into Treasury. The goal is to discourage people from making money from manipulating money (and encourage them to make it by creating real goods and services)
c) Judicial system being one where:
1) You are really considered innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, the latter being described to the jury by analogy to statistics (“Does the jury believe beyond the 99.7 % confidence level that the defendant is guilty of the charges?”). After all, that’s how we determine outliers in the real world, why not at least conceptualize this in determining innocence or guilt?
In keeping with this, minimize the detaining of those arrested as much as possible. Imprisoning them before trial is de facto punishment and should be acknowledged as such. If it is deemed that holding someone before trial is necessary, then provisions must be made that they can’t lose their job, that their bills will be paid, and that things in their private life can be taken care of. They should lose none of these due to their being held.
b) Punishments in terms of fines should be equalized in terms of income. A $500 fine is a joke to a wealthy person, an inconvenience to a middle-class person, and a disaster for a poor person. If we want to make the penalties truly the same, the $500 should be $50, or less, for a poor person while being $5,000 or $50,000 or even $500,000 for a wealthy one.
3) That being said, we’ll still need a government. A cooperative or a small private business, might still discriminate, pollute, create unsafe products, or otherwise do harmful things. And there’d need to be a way to supervise the elections inside cooperatives.
-stewartm
Very interesting conversation, thanks for this thread athena.
Tarheel, you pose a question about using ancient Greece and Rome as models given what happened to them:
“And maybe that was unavoidably baked in by all of the classical education that early neoliberal thinkers had; the preferred models of civilization, Greece and Rome both wound up as neoliberal fascist imperial states.”
I would take gentle exception here, since I am sure that Professor Chomsky himself also has had a classical education that has served him well, and it is not the degenerative aspects of those former empires which were emulated by the founders of this country but rather their nascent philosophically oriented institutions.
At my hallowed institution of learning we knew of the ‘neoliberals’ – they stuck out as oddities back then, as modelled on the Alcibiades of the Platonic era, not as genuine classical scholars. The pity of it is that these aberrations take advantage of the rest of us, given favorable climate and a general relaxation into wellbeing that seems to eventually menace societies in general, and like fungi or mould they fix and take advantage and grow. Then power and empire replace morality and character building, as a few able historians have pointed out.
These tendencies have been the grist of philosophical discussion all along, as the problem of creating a sustainable society model has expanded into the mess we are in now. Progress it most definitely has not been, and we need all the tools at our disposal to work our way out of it. We need to hone our minds with more than marxism, though the latter is very helpful as a response to the problems of the industrial age, which were more than the classical era had to deal with. Now we are facing planetary degradation as the most pressing problem – we do need a new philosophy and a new model for society that goes even beyond socialism.
Isn’t it interesting that these questions really have surfaced with the millenium, from 2000 on? Everything seems to have come to a head, the positives as well as the negatives.
Excellent points. All of them.
These questions have surfaced because a large group of powerful people have been in denial of reality for forty years and suffer from the illusion that they can keep bulling their way through. Meanwhile the economy is collapsing, the environment is in danger, and ordinary people are catching on that there are serious and dangerous problems with those people who control decision-making publicly and privately.
No. Fascism is state-capitalist nationalism. Neoliberalism is internationalized state-capitalism. This is the inspiration for the neocons’ dissimulation that “democracies” don’t go to war with each other. Rather, internationalized state capitalists only need fight class “terrorists”; they are permanently warring against insurgents. The Straussians raise false threats to deflect the majority of the population from understanding the secret war.
IMO, neoliberalism is a component of crypto-totalitarianism rather than an “inverted totalitarianism”. This totalitarianism is the acme of bourgeois merito-aristo-cracy and Wolin’s “inversion” is an obfuscation.
“Inverted totalitarianism” is a mindfuck passing as insight; rather, we have the culmination of the bourgeois revolution, international totalitarianism.
How do you suppose the delusions of ‘neoliberal’ oddities were adopted by “a large group of powerful people”?
Rather, another phase of opportunism has reached it’s “end of history”.
It fit their purposes for what they were doing, and thus they endowed chairs for the folks who adopted this viewpoint. Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University comes to mind.
If it’s the end of its history it is because they got everything the wanted from stripmining the social order. They squandered a generation of labor. Stripmined (sometimes literally) natural resources. Destroyed the countryside. Impoverished the cities. Squandered a half century of savings. The seed corn is just about gone, and they persist.
The “end of history” was a prematurely declared as the “end of phyics” at the end of the nineteenth century. Reality confounds human arrogance.
Or Dean could have attacked the absurdity of this neoliberal manifesto, in which the economic success (read supremacy) of the state requires an optimal citizen euthanasia. No wonder these a-holes needed the Nazi’s, Commie’s, and now the Chineese. My totalitarianism is bigger than your totalitarianism.
Keeping this farce going requires immense immoronization of the population (like crediting Zionist-Christian poseurs with authenticity, trust, or authority).
Dean is closer to the mark in assessing that “bad outcomes are the result of [...] key elements and presuppositions of the system.” The neoliberals’ social Darwinism arises out of an exploitation of evolutionary theory, not a misunderstanding. The bad outcomes are integral, not accidental, to maintaining a bad system. A terrified population is unnatural and a clear disproof of society’s “economic success” imperative.
And so who is to blame here, the “oddities” (who eternally return) or the “powerful people”?
Funny neither ever learns from the inevitable, eh?
p.s. – Reality doesn’t confound human arrogance. Vice-versa. Human arrogance now “squanders” “savings” as it strives for the end of history.
I can’t imagine how you would deal with the “bad people” (the Madoffs, etc) without a state? The naturally gifted predators seem to be the biggest bane of human societies.
I understand what you mean about hierarchy, but I’m inclined to think that’s a problem we’re going to have to accept and just limit to whatever degree possible. A certain amount of meritocracy is ok, I think. It’s just beyond important to ensure that accountability isn’t ever divorced from authority (which is the most shockingly dysfunctional aspect of our current “system”.)
About Marx, I think his biggest contribution was the basic observation that the story of history and politics is one of class struggle.
Even for an illusive non-corporate capitalism, “hierarchy [would introduce] feudal relationships”. Capitalist professors must evangelize their god.
The hierarchy of the intellect is no less a protection racket than the hierarchy of the strong; rather, they are conjugated.
Well, yeah, intelligence is a matter of pure, dumb luck. But I’m not sure the “iron law of oligarchy” isn’t a real phenomenon. I desperately wish is wasn’t, but it appears to be true. Which I think just means we have to devise a system to limit it as much as possible (as opposed to just happily embracing it, which is what seems to primarily drive neoliberalism.)
So what is the difference between inverted totalitarianism and athena’s definition of fascism? They do seem similar to me.
I just couldn’t disagree more. You and I are either operating from a different fact base or a different value base (and i suspect it’s the latter.)
What is “athena’s definition of fascism”?
Prolly something abut how fascism is “collectivist” (bla bla bla.)
I didn’t really give one except to invoke Orwell, who said:
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Sure looks like neoliberalism to me.
The larger the institution, the larger the institution required to hold it accountable and the greater probability that the rogue institution captures the regulator.
“I can’t imagine” is essentially the wall here. Essentially the function of the state is to hold a monopoly (or at least the upper hand) on the ability to inflict violence. Over-abstraction is the problem here, I think. Think through the situation of a Madoff. What institutions allow him to exist and hold the trust that he had? Why is it that his scheme was never vetted by anyone?
One of the failures of imagination is to jump to the “how would we punish them” issue first. How would we prevent what Madoff did from happening in the first place? Here’s a simple-minded solution: no paper investment vehicles. No financial sector.
We have to get well outside the box before we can imagine solutions that do not in some way risk being gamed.
That’s why as a method, I suggest bottom-up practical demonstrations with some idea of how to propagate the successful ones, knowing that the PtB are going to try to crush the change culturally, financially, juridically, or with force.
No, I neither implied that nor do I agree. It is clearly cultivated, as strength is.
I wanted to add, in another essential detournement to this crippled liberal rhetoric, that “natural” predators take the state, nay civilization, to be their invention. That is they say civilization is necessarily predatory and thus they are it’s best servants.
Can we finally claim, at their end of history, that they must be wrong?
It’s totally, totally a problem of imagination on my part. Everything you’re saying is what Chomsky says, so maybe you can help me imagine.
How would the elderly, disabled, etc be cared for? How would you keep a company/cooperative from polluting? These are the sorts of issues I see a need a state for.
Intelligence is partly nature and partly nurture, but a majority of the nurture happens in childhood, and children don’t get to pick their environment and parents. So, back to (mostly) dumb luck.
Are you a libertarian/conservative/rightwinger?
Yes, but that’s not even advanced as a “definition”. Still there is a distinction to be made between what Wolin mislabels “inverted totalitarianism” and what was labeled “fascism” before we survivors of fascism were subjected to totalitarian innovation.
Again, back to Orwell:
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
No and no. The social environment and the parents are not the product of dumb luck. Furthermore, I referred to a hierarchy of intellect, not intelligence, and that is neither the product of dumb luck. Can we avoid getting snagged in this foolish discourse?
Have you ever heard a libertarian/wingnut/fucktard address his comrades?
Has the time of circumspection passed?
IOW, isn’t there yet a distinction between what Wolin mislabels and Orwell’s epitomic 1984 fascism?
???
You chose your parents and environment as a kid?
OK. Think less abstractly. How would the elderly withing five miles of your house get cared for? Who would decide how that happened? Where would the resources come from? Specifically what resources would you need? What would you need from outside the neighborhood? And other practical questions. Isn’t this the thinking that Occupy Memphis went through to be able to care for everyone in the occcupation?
How would you keep a company/cooperative from polluting? I heard a Dan Knapp quote today: Waste isn’t waste until it’s wasted. Leave aside the fact that every application of energy creates a certain amount of disorder that is unavoidable. That said, the most practical thing for a cooperative to do is to not create waste in the first place. You apply imagination a the level of the cooperative. Now there are large farm cooperatives in the US, which actually operate just like corporations. So there is a polity issue that has to be fixed within any cooperative so that it functions as a cooperative and the membership is not just an annual picnic.
And it might turn out that after you go through your bottom-up analysis that it might turn out that you do indeed need a state to deal with certain types of issues. Or it might turn out that you can handle even complex problems with an ad hoc group of people focused on dealing with that problem.
Which raise another set of issues? How much do the folks working on certain task need to be persistent up to permanent? How much formalism do you need?
An example of the formalism question is the debate that folks in Occupy locations inevitably get into about how structured the facilitation needs to be.
Try this. The social environment into which a kid is born is the product of the class relationships in that environment and where the kid’s family shows up. The happenstance of the kids parents is the product of the geographical propinquity of the parents, which is partly the result of the social and geographical mobility permitted in the society. (From the viewpoint of God. From the viewpoint of the kid, it’s dumb luck.)
I give up, comrade.
That’s almost exactly what I think Chomsky would say. :)
I’m going to keep trying to imagine it, because yáll are both incredibly smart people, and I don’t think you are both probably just wrong, but I might be too brainwashed by modern society or something. I live in the hood where kids go hungry when they can’t find someone to beg for food from, and there ain’t a lot of food around because everyone is poor, because those with wealth move far, far away from places like this. I’m just too cynical, maybe, to envision how this could work without a state taxing wealth and yes, with force.
I agree with all of that. :)
The world is not the product of either choice or “dumb luck”. Too much spiritualism in that Weltanschauung.
I didn’t see any spiritualism at all in what he said.
It’s actually the atheist/naturalist perspective:
http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/faqs.htm
“From the viewpoint of God” — metaphor for from a global abstract level.
“View of the kid” — metaphor for from a local concrete level
Not spiritualism at all in that.
“View of the kid”" could be quite literal, too, right?
Depends on the kid’s ability for reflection.
And I bet they want the nanny state to wither some more, in testament to their success! Denying them that wish does not go far enough.
The profits of this evil system in hypertrophy are unconscionably mal-distributed.
Ha, true. (I just remembered all the times my kid has been convinced he’s the unluckiest kid EVAR and I’m the Worst Mom In The World.)
lol.
I wasn’t referring to your metaphors. I was referring to the viewpoint which denies the worldly contingent in it’s spiritual mania – there’s only someone’s choice (including God’s) or chance.
Are you responding to what I said or making a remark in general? I don’t think we are disagreeing.
I think fascism and neoliberalism are different ideas but not mutually exclusive either. We need a world where workers democratically control the wealth they produce, or communism. The question of biological evolution, while interesting for discussions sake, isn’t relevant to the question of the type of world we need to create IMO. This is because someones position in life shouldn’t be determined by genetic composition or “competence”, however one defines it.
@38 I am commenting on athena’s framing: that a child cannot choose his parents/environment/intelligence means those are the product of chance. A false dichotomy which I intuited to arise in a spiritualist mindset.
So, no, I was not disagreeing.
I have always felt that there was a small part of Obama that could have chosen to go the route of the visionary. That sometime between September 2008 and mid-November, he could have chosen to put the “experts” who were advising him aside and go with his gut. And allow for small farms, for community banks, for every aspect of our society that is about the community and not the Big Corporation.
But he was too “well schooled” in those matters that his CIA handlers wanted him to foster. And so he took the easy road, the road wherein he was encouraged to be pragmatic, to have Rahm and Geithner as his good buddies. Rather than the many Dems, like Jackie Speier, like Garamendi, like Kucinich, like Maxine Waters, who could have helped him arrive at an America where prosperity and recovery were not taken away from the Middle Class, but actually promoted.
And now the road he has taken us down is a road where every farm is pesticided to death, where our water is be fouled by the “clean energy” of natural gas, where Big Nuke Power Entities will receive the loans the states should have by rights. It has all been taken away from us, even the RECENT success of the medical marijuana clinics whose 125 millions of dollars of tax revenues were easing a burden on the Northern Part of CALIFONIA.
No, your definition of fascism is essentially inverted totalitarianism.
I’m not sure where your “collectivist” came from…
Well said.
Problem is, that holds true for capitalist enterprises.
I’m a little bit of a pessimist here. True, pollution is waste, and often preventing said waste or recovering it is not only ethically right, but makes sense from a bottom-line perspective. In many cases, laws which prohibit pollution turn out to promote the efficiency and economy of the affected businesses.
But it’s also true (just work in any company) that short-term thinking often carries the day. That’s why I believe in many cases (most?) firms won’t stop doing such things unless prevented by strong regulation. In others, they won’t do the right thing unless the infrastructure is already set up.
Let’s talk about a specific example, today: recycling. Americans throw gobs of potentially recyclable stuff into landfills. In many cases, it is possible *now* to reuse/recycle this trash economically, and in others it would be possible if more research were done. But the recycling infrastructure in most places in the US is poor, and also individuals and firms are not rewarded enough for recycling and not punished enough for not recycling. I think this sort of thing doesn’t happen w/o a government promoting it.
And as for discrimination against others, age-old prejudices just won’t be theorized away. Again, I only see government intervention as a solution.
-stewartm
Having read Robert Paxton’s article “What Fascism is Not”, fascism is indeed hard to define. Like pornography, however, most of us recognize it when we see it.
Having said that, I think the simplest thing to do is to recognize that Hitler’s National Socialism was a uniquely virulent and extreme type of fascism. In most other countries fascists shared power with traditional conservatives and neoliberal business types; it was only in Hitler’s Germany that the “fascists” gained clear supremacy.
Given the above, I prefer to think that the old saw about fascism being “the last evolutionary step of capitalism” contains a lot of truth. In a state given to neoliberal policies, it makes sense that what will happen is that the successful firms will find that a strategy of buying influence and power in the government to be a more successful to their bottom line than competing in the marketplace or innovating new products (hint, hint). You end up with corporatism, and from there it’s only a short hop to fascism.
As for fascism’s “the enemy” and encouraging some age-old bigotry against “the others” of a different race/religion/ethnicity/sexual orientation/whatever, borrowing from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? these are 1) useful distractions to the actual loss of popular power, and 2) provide an approved outlet for popular action and participation that’s not provided elsewhere. Here again Hitler’s Germany was the outlier, most fascists in other regimes were not as personally single-minded in their persecution as were the Nazis.
-stewartm
Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at. Maybe over time I’ll see that thing which I now can’t see and no one I’ve read/heard/talked to has been able to really articulate. (Or maybe, if it is being articulated already, I’ll do a better job at hearing.) But for now, it looks to me like we can either have a strong state or end up with liber-dystopia. I have a lot of faith in people but not THAT much, you know?
Ha, I should just follow you around going “Yes! This!” lol.
But, yeah. You’re articulating really well everything I want to say.
Thinking more about this…
There is new tech being innovated, but it’s often either subsidized by gov or CREATED by gov and then given to industry.
Take Merck and Monsanto biotech. That’s all based on and created in large part by cold war government technology. There was a “public private partnership” (before the term was coined) between government and those industries (preparing for biowar), and massive tons of research was tax funded, carried out by the gov (often military), and given to those companies in exchange for the promise that if need be, they would convert their facilities to bio-defense. (and that’s not even going into the NIH, which is an interesting political subject all on its own.)
Computer technology has likewise been funded massively by tax dollars.
But anyway, I agree with you, overall. It’s a complicated story…how this all came about.
Which raises an excellent question of how government is to govern. You see one of the issues with a strong state and a centralized state is that it is real easy for elites to capture it (in fact the way the Constitution was discussed was exactly as an antidote to what they called then “democracy”). The preference for elites was baked in and has only been slowly pried open through various amendment, movements, and court decisions. So the practical issue is that we have the liber/dystopia on the one hand and corrupt state power on the other. If we need a state to hold large institutions in check, preserve equality under law,….how exactly we get there is a practical decision that starts from multiple local discussions and moves forward because it involves neighborhood informal social contracts, homeowners association agreements, local governments, county administrative councils, state government, federal government, and whatever restrains transnational corporations.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions; they are intuitive. I am making an argument about the necessity of dealing with concrete, local situations and moving change from the bottom up. And part of that is acknowledging that human beings are, well human in their diversity of motivations and ethics and capabilities.
And I’m saying that it is one huge problem that takes lots of people to solve, not something that can be solved with a few hypothetical cases. We shouldn’t expect to be able to easily articulate how to get out of this mess. If it were easy, we would not have a mess.
Random thought: Are the neoliberal proponents running out of lies?
There was a time when they could promise that that privatizing everything, from social security to the water supply, would make everyone (besides the lazy) better off. And a lot of people, even the poor, fell for it.
It seems that an increasing number of people are wising up, globally. So now the financier class has to crash economies to get what they want. (and they are in a unique position to do that. How to extract the Wall Street/LSX tumor out of the global exchange system is a subject I hope folks like Michael Hudson and Bill Black will continue explaining.)
Fucking tear gas, pepper spray, L-RAD, and torturous plasti-cuffs (Gitmo-Cuffs.) That’s what they’re down to. Err…and O “hope and change!” bama lies.
Brian Holmes on Neoliberalism and The Flexible Personality:
The legal jabberwocky behind the term “moral persons” puts a facade of culpable autonomy on corporations in order to shoehorn them into law. Obviously,
This is another locus of capitalist anarchy: a legal definition which presumes unincorporated provisions! Holmes references Foucault’s “The Birth of Biopolitics” which introduces “biopower“:
A characteristic of this political technology is the use of persuasion and the masking of manipulation. In this way, neoliberalism was formalized in distinction to fascism … so that by shedding the power of the state fascism could not be resurrected and government would be practiced by “nudging”.
In short, what was sought was a hegemony and autonomy of the “moral persons” and their benefactors, a corporatocracy, an international totalitarianism which distinguished itself from the fascism of nations with the objective of humanity’s pacification … in perpetuation of the noble moral masquerade.
The big problem I see there is that neighborhoods are monumentally divided by class, where at the bottom, there’s, say, my neighborhood. In the poorest area of the poorest big city in the nation. Where most people have very little to give. We’re (my house) already a food bank, free childcare provider, etc a lot of the time. And people have helped us out when we needed it, too, but nothing any of us can do is close to enough.
And then there are richer areas, where most people don’t need a whole lot.
“Economic segregation” is a fact, and it totally throws a wrench in the system of “start hyper-locally”. As far as I can tell, at least.
Simply, no. Liars in power never run out of lies.
Are they, themselves, disillusioned? Considering that neoliberalism was formulated when Limits to Growth were being realized, it is very likely that they are remaining true to their ultimate objective.
And, economic segregation is the fuel of the capitalist system with neighborhoods reflecting that segregation.
What new lies have they come up with in the last 20 years?
I don’t even see them re-hashing the old lies any more.
Can’t say my “foolish” mind disagrees with that.
Al Quaeda. Have you been asleep? The media is awash with new lies.
In any case, you didn’t ask if they will run out of grand lies. And rest assured, they are working on those too.
Fair enough.
Yep. Add that to your issues list. Now, how would you deal with the fact of economic segregation at the metropolitan, state, federal, or global (it’s not unique to the US, maybe more extreme here)? But globally, it is all about economic segregation of residence and wage arbitrage.
It’s no mystery why Europe is dropping the Schengen agreement and putting up borders again. If not the African and Middle Eastern immigrants, now France, Germany, Netherlands, and Denmark are concerned about a flood of Spanish and Greek immigrants. (They just are not nice enough to say that out loud.) It is why there is a passport system and border controls–economic segregation.
I really gasped with joy when Occupy went global, because I really think a “collectivist” sort of globalism will be the only answer to the neoliberal’s version of globalism. To the depths of my bones, I believe that.
TINA. There Is No Alternative.
The people of the world can either unite, or become enslaved (further.) And never, ever before have the people of the world been so able to so easily unite! The internet is just magnificent! I’m surprised Chomsky is so skeptical about the internet (as it exists now.) I would imagine that Orwell and Marx would have thought it was the answer (and I suspect that the ruling elite agree – hence the internet crackdowns they’re attempting.)
I suspect that once an idea, clearly articulated, of a better world order is formulated, it will just go viral. That’s the biggest lesson from Occupy. As soon as people are connected and aware, ideas absolutely do undergo a process of natural selection, and the oligarchs can’t currently stop it. They’ll have to shut down the internet as we know it to stop it.
The biggest oligarchs know they are war criminals who have “given material comfort” to actual, violent terrorists. They know the masses are an angry mob that wants to hang them. I’d be scared if I were them, too.
I’d just accept it and tax the snot out of the rich. I really hate the IRS as much as anyone (even tho we live in poverty, we still owe the IRS!) so I can think of all kinds of schemes to tax the crap out of the wealthy. A really, really progressive national property tax comes to mind for one. Also, more “luxury taxes”. Combined with full-on criminalizing making money out of money.
In Geology class that was Bird’ s Eye View and Worm’s Eye View :)
Ludwig, I appreciated the distinction you made initially between neoliberalism and fascism on the national/international front, though I don’t think athena is incorrect in linking the two.
It really works to put a global perspective on the problem, and perhaps that is where disparate forms of protest can be seen to have important issues in common, since for many of the ‘common’ folk love of country has put them into the category of one or the other political postures featured by the media as the only government permitted to exist.
I was struck by the following remark you made:
“I wanted to add, in another essential detournement to this crippled liberal rhetoric, that “natural” predators take the state, nay civilization, to be their invention. That is they say civilization is necessarily predatory and thus they are it’s best servants.
Can we finally claim, at their end of history, that they must be wrong?”
It does seem to me that we can claim that, since following this path of logic will not bring a happy conclusion even to them. (I suppose one must take a definition of ‘wrong’ to mean simply, it does not work.)
We achieve no nirvana following the neoliberal path. We destroy our planet, our civilizations, probably our ability to exist. Is that right for anyone?
This conclusion, becoming more and more apparent, must be faced by any intelligent person among us (I fail to see why nature or nurture is of importance here.) Even the predators must face the fact that predation leaves nothing but annihilation. What does a heartless Cheney see as his accomplishment in the long run, other than having outlived someone less fortunate than he?
They who have gone this powerchase are only a few of them Cheneys. Some of them are Stephan Trofimovitches, don’t you think?
But of course, if one is so certain about ultimate conclusions, such possibilities don’t fit the pattern, perhaps. But thank you for those two important insights; I did find them helpful.
For whatever reason, elisemattu, he really didn’t like us, the ordinary people. He couldn’t have used us had he had any affection for us. And he did use us. I think it goes to what Ludwig said about the predator mindset. Campaign rhetoric for Obama was simply the big cat waving his tail to lure the inquisitive deer close enough. Sorry, but that is what happened to us.
Now, hopefully, we find humanity where it may be found. We search for it. We MUST find it before it is too late. And the soulsearching has to proceed among unlikely compadres, ones we have to not be too proud to recognize.
I’ve been reading about George Washington. He used help from any source willing to provide it, and that was his genius. Constantly reinventing his army, his supporters, his friendships. We have to do that.
That’s an excellent formulation, Tarheel, and it strikes me that what occurred when this country changed from colonial status is instructive. It didn’t happen overnight, but very much as now it happened to all levels of the society. It wasn’t just the elites orchestrating the change – they couldn’t have done it without the ordinary people. Both suffered under colonialism, and even the elites were not simply paying lip service to the issues that concerned the populace – they were uneasy about things like slavery even when they kept the institution.
We can say, well, the elites currently are raking it in, living the high life. Down with them! And for the one percent of the one percent – sure, they are probably too far gone to ever realize how mad their course is. But there’s 99 percent of that one percent who know good and well this is the road to hell we’re on. I don’t know what it will take to get a portion of them rowing the other way, but we might as well try. (No, I am NOT advocating we vote for Obama – never that!) George Washington fought for the British before he fought against them. But once he figured it out, he became a champion, just like FDR did. It happens.
My pleasure and thank you for your acknowledgement.
I wonder what consensus there could be between “left” and right partisans on the prescription for this neoliberal malignancy. Is it possible that their stereotypical priorities of egalitarianism and might evaporate in light of international capitalist domination? Wouldn’t rather the necessary paralysis ensue, as calculated?
And why give the right of first refusal to psychopaths and tyrants? Fuck them, their too long concealed regrets, their selfish mocking pontifications, and the rest of their reflexive class contempt. Even if you can’t say it to the man’s face, you can admit it here, no?
re Professor Trofimovithch, do you mean that some chasing power are naive idealist reformers? That doesn’t strike me as a consonant. Foolishness, not powerlust, was Dostoevsky’s complaint. Our subjects suffer both defects.
American fascist Lammont Dupont’s 1932 speech (yes, the Duponts were into fascism):
“We will win the war by reducing taxes on corporations, high income brackets, and increasing taxes on lower incomes, by removing unions from any power to tell industry how to produce, how to deal with their employees or anything else, by destroying any and all government agencies that stand in the way of free enterprise.”
Neoliberalism, fascism, corporatism, whatever you want to call it.