{"id":123046,"date":"2018-12-03T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=123046"},"modified":"2018-11-28T10:44:47","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T10:44:47","slug":"neoliberalisms-dark-path-to-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/neoliberalisms-dark-path-to-fascism\/","title":{"rendered":"Neoliberalism’s Dark Path to Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Nov 2018 – <\/em>Neoliberalism<\/a> as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings<\/a>\u00a0and fascism\u2019s belief in the \u00dcbermensch<\/a>. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite\u2014eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world\u2019s population\u2014while 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\u2019s \u201cCapital in the Twenty-First Century<\/a>\u201d to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.<\/p>\n

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a>\u00a0and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d said David Harvey<\/a>, the author of \u201cA Brief History of Neoliberalism<\/a>,\u201d when we spoke in New York. \u201cLike 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a political project, it was very savvy,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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 \u201968 generation, \u2018OK, you want liberty and freedom? That\u2019s what the student movement was about. We\u2019re going to give it to you, but it\u2019s going to be freedom of the market. The other thing you\u2019re after is social justice\u2014forget it. So, we\u2019ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. Don\u2019t organize.\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Harvey went on. \u201cIt promises equality of treatment, but if you\u2019re extremely rich, it means you can get richer. If you\u2019re very poor, you\u2019re more likely to get poorer. What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of \u2018Capital\u2019 is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cValue is fixed by whatever price is realized in the market,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cSo, Hillary Clinton is very valuable because she gave a lecture to Goldman Sachs<\/a> 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the philosophy that lies behind neoliberalism,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe have to put a price on things. Even though they\u2019re 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\u2019s the scam of the thing. It basically says if you\u2019re an entrepreneur, if you go out there and train yourself, etc., you will get your just rewards. If you don\u2019t get your just rewards, it\u2019s because you didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s administration, for example, has abolished numerous regulations<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism generates little wealth. Rather, it redistributes it upward into the hands of the ruling elites. Harvey calls this \u201caccumulation by dispossession.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cThat 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\u2019t be open to market.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was a kid, water in Britain was provided as a public good,\u201d Harvey said. \u201cThen, of course, it gets privatized. You start to pay water charges. They\u2019ve privatized transportation [in Britain]. The bus system is chaotic. There\u2019s all these private companies running here, there, everywhere. There\u2019s no system which you really need. The same thing happens on the railways. One of the things right now, in Britain, is interesting\u2014the Labour Party says, \u2018We\u2019re going to take all of that back into public ownership because privatization is totally insane and it has insane consequences and it\u2019s not working well at all.\u2019 The majority of the population now agrees with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under neoliberalism, the process of \u201caccumulation by dispossession\u201d is accompanied by financialization.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeregulation allowed the financial system to become one of the main centers of redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud, and thievery,\u201d Harvey writes in his book, perhaps the best and most concise account of the history of neoliberalism. \u201cStock 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism, wielding tremendous financial power, is able to manufacture economic crises to depress the value of assets and then seize them.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the ways in which you can engineer a crisis is to cut off the flow of credit,\u201d he said. \u201cThis 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<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvey warns that individual freedom and social justice are not necessarily compatible. Social justice, he writes, requires social solidarity and \u201ca willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.\u201d Neoliberal rhetoric, with its emphasis on individual freedoms, can effectively \u201csplit 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The economist Karl Polanyi<\/a> 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\u2014freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one\u2019s job\u2014are eventually snuffed out by the primacy of the bad freedoms.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlanning and control are being attacked as a denial for freedom,\u201d Polanyi wrote. \u201cFree 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of freedom \u2018thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise,\u2019 which means \u2018the 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,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Harvey writes, quoting Polanyi. \u201cBut if, as is always the case, \u2018no society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function,\u2019 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\u2019s view, to be frustrated by authoritarianism, or even outright fascism. The good freedoms are lost, the bad ones take over.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Nov 2018 – The financial elites have engineered a monumental con job that threatens to rip away the remainder of our freedoms. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism, which abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":123047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}