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| I have several of Chris Hedges books and have seen him speak many times. I highly respect his work and the gifts he brings to our world. |
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| Neoliberalism generates little wealth. Rather, it redistributes it upward into the hands of the ruling elites. |
Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom
for the few. Its logical result is neofascism.
By
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.”
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