Neoliberalism: A critical issue of our times and of over the past 40+ years that I am moved to post about and illuminate again and again.
Too many of us, I believe, do not hold a deep understanding of neoliberalism. We do not see the dangers of neoliberalism lurking behind the political candidate we support or the media sources we turn to for our information. We do not recognize the links of neoliberalism to crushing poverty, to endless wars and the current genocide unfolding in Gaza, to the climate crisis and destruction of our biosphere, to an economic system that relentlessly continues to redistribute wealth upwards, to the rise of Christian nationalism and right wing fascists, and on and on. This lack of awareness makes us vulnerable to supporting neoliberal political candidates and policies endorsed by both major political parties in the US and the American mainstream corporate funded media.
Yet, this knowledge and understanding of the waters in which we swim and the air we breathe is essential if we are to have any chance of standing up to the status quo and dismantling the forces of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is so embedded and normalized in our culture that it can be difficult to see. This has certainly been my experience. It wasn't even until Obama and the painful disillusionment that came with his administration that I had begun my journey of learning about neoliberalism.
Hopefully the truths illuminated in the short documentary below, in the brilliant words of George Monbiot, and in quotes from a variety of truth-tellers and wisdom-holders will empower more and more of us to increasingly dismantle within ourselves, individually and collectively, those belief systems and actions which are not rooted in the highest good for any of us.
It's taken us a while to come to the precipice humanity and life on Earth is experiencing today. We are all needed in this great universal struggle to birth a new world, one which honors and supports and protects life rather than destroys it. — Molly
Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony. ― Arundhati Roy
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy. ― Noam Chomsky
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. ― George Monbiot
Under neoliberalism, you have a political-financial class that doesn't care about whether people are suffering. They float above politics. They have power and they don't care. They'll do anything to simply increase their wealth. ― Henry Giroux
The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it’s violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet. ― V (Eve Ensler)
[For the past forty years], guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite. ― Jason Hickel
Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. ― Naomi Klein
Neoliberalism is a driving force causing the climate crisis. This is because neoliberalism is a variant of classic liberalism, and classical liberalism builds from the idea that everyone should be granted maximum freedom to pursue their self-interest within capitalist market settings. But neoliberalism also diverges substantially from classical liberalism, and therefore also from the basic premises of orthodox economics that free markets, left to their own devices, will produce outcomes that are superior to government interventions. Here is the problem with neoliberalism, when counterposed against a purely free market model celebrated by economic orthodoxy. That is, what really occurs in practice under neoliberalism is that governments allow giant corporations to freely pursue profit opportunities to the maximum extent. But then government fixers arrive on the scene to bail out the corporations whenever their profits might be threatened. This amounts to socialism for capitalists, and harsh, free market capitalism for everyone else. ― Noam Chomsky
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Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. ― David Harvey
There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three. ― Cornel West
In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury. ― Catherine Liu
No European country – not even the United Kingdom – is ready to tolerate the levels of social dereliction produced by the free market in the United States. ― John Gray
Neoliberalism is a panoply of cultural and political-economic practices that sets marketized competition at the center of social life – even as the sole ruler of social life. It aims to create a society that does not merely include markets but is based on the market and where there are, right down to the dirt under the fingernails of flesh-and-blood individuals, only agonizing private enterprises. ― Rodney Clapp
I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want. ― V (Eve Ensler)
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We should bear in mind that highly authoritarian, vicious states, are quite compatible with neoliberalism. ― Noam Chomsky
While people like myself may be dissatisfied with how the Exxon story was covered, people on the right are dissatisfied that it was covered at all! If they had their way, your average newspaper would be nothing but a few glorifying stories about the wonders and blessings of private enterprise, and then a few anti-communist horror stories, you know, what the North Koreans are doing, torturing little babies when they come out of the womb or something, and then some cross word puzzles, and cooking recipes, and comic strips. And by the way, that does describe a lot of newspapers in America. You go across the country and you pick up these papers, and that's pretty much what they are. Now to the extent that they AREN'T those things, that's when the right wing media gets bothered. To the extent that they've gotta hear an occasional bumbling comment about the media (that never goes too far over), to that extent they say "liberal media." And by calling it "the liberal media", you keep the media on its guard, you keep it dressing off to the right, you keep that drumfire hitting from the right to keep pulling it, pushing it over to the right, so you change the center of gravity. ― Michael Parenti
In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors. ― Jason Hickel
Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal. ― David Harvey
Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.... The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15. ― Noam Chomsky
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Language is never neutral. Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects. ― Paulo Freire
Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous, and must be trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life. ― Henry Giroux
This government has represented benefits as somehow shameful. The point about universal benefits is that they affirm the value of such social tasks as having children, rearing them, or caring for relatives; they make benefits themselves an expression of collective approval for the endeavour, not begrudged hand-outs, stigmatising the recipients as beggars and failures. ― Marina Warner
The function of small corner shops in maintaining cities as viable social institutions does not appear in the Washington consensus. The possibility that corner shops may do better at safeguarding social cohesion than mass imprisonment is considered outlandish – if it is considered at all. ― John Gray
Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not. ― Cynthia Cruz
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The neo-conservative ascendancy has identified the free market with America's claim to be the exemplary modern nation. It has appropriated America's self-image as the model for a universal civilization in the service of a global free market. For a public nurtured on such illusions the coming years will be traumatic. ― John Gray
The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures—just as the myth of imminent cure (by some “breakthrough” of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying as to foreclose any possibility of an interest in prevention. ― Wendell Berry
A democracy barely functions under the neoliberal system. ― Noam Chomsky
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ― George Orwell
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ― Paulo Freire
As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. ‘Freedom’ and ‘friendship’ have the same root in Indo-European languages. Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship – when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine freedom – to reinvent it – in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion. ― Byung-Chul Han
It turns out that we're actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we're really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we're in this process of publicizing it again. ― Rebecca Solnet
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