Neoliberalism will lead to Fascism
Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism
Chris Hedges
Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — 8 families now hold as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population.
As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian critics were pushed out of academia. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs were groomed given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of third-rate writer Ayn Rand.
Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and
It was a con. But it worked.
“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,” “Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were that
“As a political project, it was very savvy,”
“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 social justice.
Don’t organize.’
The attempt was to dismantle 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.”
“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 and think tanks 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. 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
We have to put a price on things. Even though they’re not really things that should be treated as commodities. For instance,
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 says if you’re an entrepreneur, if you go out there and train yourself, 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 received multibillion-dollar tax breaks to set up distribution centers).
This has forced the ruling elites to make alliances with right-wing demagogues who use the crude tactics of
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 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 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. 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 the 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 are all these private companies running here, there, everywhere. There’s no system which you really need.
One of the things right now, in Britain, —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.”
financialization
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.
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. Major institutions would not lend money.
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.”
individual freedom and social justice are not necessarily compatible.
Social justice 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.”
there are two kinds of freedoms.
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.
good freedoms
are eventually snuffed out by the primacy of the bad freedoms.
“Planning and control are being attacked as a denial for freedom. 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.
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 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 (a symbol of cruel or authoritarian behavior or rule).
Essay by Christopher Hedges
Chris Hedges is
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 during his work for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of a New York Times team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.
Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, including ancient Greek and Latin, at Harvard University.
Hedges has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey in which half of the students are Princeton undergraduates and half are prisoners.
Hedges began his career reporting on the Falklands War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He went on to cover the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for five years, first for The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio and later The Dallas Morning News. After six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he was based in Paris as part of the team covering al-Qaida and global terrorism. He left the Times after receiving a formal reprimand from the newspaper for publicly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
In 2012, Hedges successfully sued President Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturned the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act along with its prohibitions against the military acting as a domestic police force. (Section 1021 gives the military the authority to indefinitely detain and deny due process to U.S. citizens who are branded as terrorists by the state.) The decision was overturned on appeal by the Obama administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the ruling, known as Hedges v. Obama, in 2014.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He spent a year studying classics at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. In 2014 he was ordained as a minister for social witness in a ceremony at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, N.J. The theologian James Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, preached the sermon along with Cornel West. The ordination was approved for his work in New Jersey prisons, where Hedges has taught college credit courses for nearly a decade.
Hedges, who was born in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and grew up in a small farm town in upstate New York where his father served as a Presbyterian minister, lives in Princeton, N.J. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong, with whom he has two children. He has two children from a previous marriage.
Chris Hedges
Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — 8 families now hold as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population.
As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian critics were pushed out of academia. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs were groomed given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of 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,
It was a con. But it worked.
“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,” “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,”
“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 social justice.
Don’t organize.’
The attempt was to dismantle 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.”
“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 and think tanks 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. 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
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 says if you’re an entrepreneur, if you go out there and train yourself, 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 received multibillion-dollar tax breaks to set up distribution centers).
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 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 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. 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 the 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 are all these private companies running here, there, everywhere. There’s no system which you really need.
One of the things right now, in Britain, —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.”
financialization
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.
- 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.
- 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. Major institutions would not lend money.
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.”
individual freedom and social justice are not necessarily compatible.
Social justice 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.”
there are two kinds of freedoms.
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.
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. 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.
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 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 (a symbol of cruel or authoritarian behavior or rule).
Essay by Christopher Hedges
Chris Hedges is
- a Truthdig columnist,
- a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
- a New York Times best-selling author,
- a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and
- an ordained Presbyterian minister.
- He has written 12 books, including
- the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012),
- "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt," (2015)
- “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010),
- “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009),
- “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and
- the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008).
- His latest book is "America: The Farewell Tour" (2018).
- “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) has sold over 400,000 copies.
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 during his work for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of a New York Times team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.
Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, including ancient Greek and Latin, at Harvard University.
Hedges has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey in which half of the students are Princeton undergraduates and half are prisoners.
Hedges began his career reporting on the Falklands War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He went on to cover the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for five years, first for The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio and later The Dallas Morning News. After six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he was based in Paris as part of the team covering al-Qaida and global terrorism. He left the Times after receiving a formal reprimand from the newspaper for publicly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
In 2012, Hedges successfully sued President Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturned the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act along with its prohibitions against the military acting as a domestic police force. (Section 1021 gives the military the authority to indefinitely detain and deny due process to U.S. citizens who are branded as terrorists by the state.) The decision was overturned on appeal by the Obama administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the ruling, known as Hedges v. Obama, in 2014.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He spent a year studying classics at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. In 2014 he was ordained as a minister for social witness in a ceremony at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, N.J. The theologian James Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, preached the sermon along with Cornel West. The ordination was approved for his work in New Jersey prisons, where Hedges has taught college credit courses for nearly a decade.
Hedges, who was born in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and grew up in a small farm town in upstate New York where his father served as a Presbyterian minister, lives in Princeton, N.J. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong, with whom he has two children. He has two children from a previous marriage.
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