by
Chris Hedges / Mr. Fish
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
ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting
in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were pushed out of
academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and shut out of
the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as
Milton Friedman were groomed in places such as the University of
Chicago and given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding.
They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic
theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn
Rand. Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted
government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the
flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals
that sent jobs to sweatshops in China, the world would be a happier,
freer and wealthier place. It was a con. But it worked.
“It’s
important to recognize the class origins of this project, which
occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal
of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push
back,” said David Harvey, the author of “A Brief History
of Neoliberalism,” when we spoke in New York. “Like any
ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were
that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the
self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling
ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got
implemented in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“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.”
The
dissemination of the ideology of neoliberalism was highly organized
by a unified capitalist class. The capitalist elites funded
organizations such as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of
Commerce and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation to sell the
ideology to the public. They lavished universities with donations, as
long as the universities paid fealty to the ruling ideology. They
used their influence and wealth, as well as their ownership of media
platforms, to transform the press into their mouthpiece. And they
silenced any heretics or made it hard for them to find employment.
Soaring stock values rather than production became the new measure of
the economy. Everything and everyone were financialized and
commodified.
“Value
is fixed by whatever price is realized in the market,” Harvey
said. “So, Hillary Clinton is very valuable because she gave a
lecture to Goldman Sachs for $250,000. If I give a lecture to a small
group downtown and I get $50 for it, then obviously she is worth much
more than me. The valuation of a person, of their content, is valued
by how much they can get in the market.”
“That
is the philosophy that lies behind neoliberalism,” he
continued. “We have to put a price on things. Even though
they’re not really things that should be treated as commodities.
For instance, health care becomes a commodity. Housing for everybody
becomes a commodity. Education becomes a commodity. So, students have
to borrow in order to get the education which will get them a job in
the future. That’s the scam of the thing. It basically says if
you’re an entrepreneur, if you go out there and train yourself,
etc., you will get your just rewards. If you don’t get your just
rewards, it’s because you didn’t train yourself right. You took
the wrong kind of courses. You took courses in philosophy or classics
instead of taking it in management skills of how to exploit labor.”
The
con of neoliberalism is now widely understood across the political
spectrum. It is harder and harder to hide its predatory nature,
including its demands for huge public subsidies (Amazon, for example,
recently sought and received multibillion-dollar tax breaks from New
York and Virginia to set up distribution centers in those states).
This has forced the ruling elites to make alliances with right-wing
demagogues who use the crude tactics of racism, Islamophobia,
homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s growing
rage and frustration away from the elites and toward the vulnerable.
These demagogues accelerate the pillage by the global elites while at
the same time promising to protect working men and women. Donald
Trump’s administration, for example, has abolished numerous
regulations, from greenhouse gas emissions to net neutrality, and
slashed taxes for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, wiping
out an estimated $1.5 trillion in government revenue over the next
decade, while embracing authoritarian language and forms of control.
Neoliberalism
generates little wealth. Rather, it redistributes it upward into the
hands of the ruling elites. Harvey calls this “accumulation by
dispossession.”
“The
main argument of accumulation by dispossession rests on the idea that
when people run out of the capacity to make things or provide
services, they set up a system that extracts wealth from other
people,” Harvey said. “That extraction then becomes the
center of their activities. One of the ways in which that extraction
can occur is by creating new commodity markets where there were none
before. For instance, when I was younger, higher education in Europe
was essentially a public good. Increasingly [this and other services]
have become a private activity. Health service. Many of these areas
which you would consider not to be commodities in the ordinary sense
become commodities. Housing for the lower-income population was often
seen as a social obligation. Now everything has to go through the
market. You impose a market logic on areas that shouldn’t be open
to market.”
“When
I was a kid, water in Britain was provided as a public good,”
Harvey said. “Then, of course, it gets privatized. You start to
pay water charges. They’ve privatized transportation [in Britain].
The bus system is chaotic. There’s all these private companies
running here, there, everywhere. There’s no system which you really
need. The same thing happens on the railways. One of the things right
now, in Britain, is interesting—the Labour Party says, ‘We’re
going to take all of that back into public ownership because
privatization is totally insane and it has insane consequences and
it’s not working well at all.’ The majority of the population now
agrees with that.”
Under
neoliberalism, the process of “accumulation by dispossession” is
accompanied by financialization.
“Deregulation
allowed the financial system to become one of the main centers of
redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud, and
thievery,” Harvey writes in his book, perhaps the best and most
concise account of the history of neoliberalism. “Stock
promotions, ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through
inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, the
promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduce whole populations
even in the advanced capitalist countries to debt peonage. To say
nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets, the raiding of
pension funds, their decimation by stock, and corporate collapses by
credit and stock manipulations, all of these became central features
of the capitalist financial system.”
Neoliberalism,
wielding tremendous financial power, is able to manufacture economic
crises to depress the value of assets and then seize them.
“One
of the ways in which you can engineer a crisis is to cut off the flow
of credit,” he said. “This was done in Eastern, Southeast
Asia in 1997 and 1998. Suddenly, liquidity dried up. Major
institutions would not lend money. There had been a big flow of
foreign capital into Indonesia. They turned off the tap. Foreign
capital flowed out. They turned it off in part because once all the
firms went bankrupt, they could be bought up and put back to work
again. We saw the same thing during the housing crisis here [in the
United States]. The foreclosures of the housing left lots of housing
out there, which could be picked up very cheaply. Blackstone comes
in, buys up all of the housing, and is now the biggest landlord in
all of the United States. It has 200,000 properties or something like
that. It’s waiting for the market to turn. When the market turns,
which it did do briefly, then you can sell off or rent out and make a
killing out of it. Blackstone has made a killing off of the
foreclosure crisis where everyone lost. It was a massive transfer of
wealth.”
Harvey
warns that individual freedom and social justice are not necessarily
compatible. Social justice, he writes, requires social solidarity and
“a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires
in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality
and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric, with its
emphasis on individual freedoms, can effectively “split off
libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually
narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of
social justice through the conquest of state power.”
The
economist Karl Polanyi understood that there are two kinds of
freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around us and
extract huge profits without regard to the common good, including
what is done to the ecosystem and democratic institutions. These bad
freedoms see corporations monopolize technologies and scientific
advances to make huge profits, even when, as with the pharmaceutical
industry, a monopoly means lives of those who cannot pay exorbitant
prices are put in jeopardy. The good freedoms—freedom of
conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of
association, freedom to choose one’s job—are eventually snuffed
out by the primacy of the bad freedoms.
“Planning
and control are being attacked as a denial for freedom,” Polanyi
wrote. “Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be
essentials to freedom. No society built on other foundations is said
to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is
denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers
are decried as a camouflage of slavery.”
“The
idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free
enterprise,’ which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose
income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance
of liberty for people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their
democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of
property,’ ” Harvey writes, quoting Polanyi. “But if, as
is always the case, ‘no society is possible in which power and
compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function,’
then the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is
by force, violence, and authoritarianism. Liberal or neoliberal
utopianism is doomed, in Polanyi’s view, to be frustrated by
authoritarianism, or even outright fascism. The good freedoms are
lost, the bad ones take over.”
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.
Source,
links:
Comments
Post a Comment