Please suspend your judgments if you have a tendency to see the word “neoliberal” simply as a pejorative. This is not an ad hominem attack. Examine your own position and consider that you might subscribe to one or more of these perspectives. And if they seem contradictory, then you have work to do.
Two hegemons walk into a bar
Like privilege and entitled discourse, we know nothing else about ideology or class when growing up and it is when we realize that those informing us of what seem to be “natural” social relations are only hegemonic manifestations that enslave our everyday lives.
Folk theory and Junk Science rule some peoples’ lives. Similarly, Traditionalism is the defense of “it’s always been done that way or maybe it was better when X was in power”.
Entire historical bodies of knowledge can make a conversation advance to critical discourse by using a word that has a meaningful foundation. OTOH there’s the short hand of “statist”, “Globalist”, or Fakaybe.
And nothing makes a wine bar conversation more boring than meta, unless it’s perhaps discussing Jimmy Swaggart’s theory of dialectical materialism.
In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the "Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu". Later, it could be used to mean "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society".[7] Also, it could be used for the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over others, from which was derived hegemonism, as in the idea that the Great Powers meant to establish European hegemony over Asia and Africa.[8]
...cultural hegemony, associated particularly with Antonio Gramsci, is the idea that the ruling class can manipulate the value system and mores of a society, so that their view becomes the world view (Weltanschauung): in Terry Eagleton's words, "Gramsci normally uses the word hegemony to mean the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates".[10] In contrast to authoritarian rule, cultural hegemony "is hegemonic only if those affected by it also consent to and struggle over its common sense".[11]
Neoliberalism, as a manifestation of the capitalist mode of production, is simply the current historical moment, which seems endless and appears uneven as enslavement is rebranded as human trafficking.
It operates hegemonically, in being the enemy of participatory democracy, often as personifying certain myths and operationalizing them in politics: for example Trump truly is stuck in some 1980s image of Playboy magazine’s white male archetype of adult entertainment and cinematic fantasies of Cold War espionage. And as a hegemon he is a GOP prop still empowered with a nuclear trigger.
Neoliberal hegemony exists in tension with attempts to socialize national wealth and reduce social inequality, as countries we might have thought were socialist perhaps with some cultural hegemony were always despotic personality cults driven by classism and tribalism.
We return to discussing neoliberalism in ACM with another take on the problem of now seeing the US becomes more oppressive in anti-immigrant, racist, and classist in enforcing the rule of constitutional law.
One can apply this frame to analyze any of the recent actions of the WH, whether using the gender binary to define the military, or operating police agencies unconsitutionally. At its simplest it is the oppression of labor using gender/race/class in nearly every sector, and the use of culture to enforce marginalization. They are all manifestations of a neoliberal state.
...the neoliberal state uses ideological domination as a mechanism to keep people compliant. Combined with the state’s repressive mechanisms – police and armed forces – the ideological apparatus engenders conformity wherein exploitation and repression operate within the boundaries that the state defines as ‘legal’, thus ‘normal’ for society.
All discourses of privilege engender conformity enforced as hegemony, whether a physical wall on a border, or the classism of adulthood on the issue of gun control (see NRATV infantilizing adolescent protest) or the patriarchy ‘mansplaining bodily rights in reproductive health policy. Neoliberalism as a political project ensures this kind of hegemonic discourse.
I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.
In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.
Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.
So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.
[...]
It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.
I don’t think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?” And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.
[...]
Many liberals say that neoliberalism has gone too far in terms of income inequality, that all this privatization has gone too far, that there are a lot of common goods that we have to take care of, such as the environment.
There are also a variety of ways of talking about capitalism, such as the sharing economy, which turns out to be highly capitalized and highly exploitative.
There’s the notion of ethical capitalism, which turns out to simply be about being reasonably honest instead of stealing. So there is the possibility in some people’s minds of some sort of reform of the neoliberal order into some other form of capitalism.
more technical discussion below… and it will make your hair hurt
counter-hegemony
Advocates of neoliberalism, both from the pluralist-social welfare wing and the rightwing populist camp, have succeeded in institutionalizing the new social contract which has transformed the historically classical notion of individual freedom based on the Enlightenment concept of natural rights into freedom of capitalist hegemony over the state and society.
Whether operating under the political/ideological umbrella of pluralism-environmentalism in Western nations, combined with some version of a Keynesian social welfare pluralist model, with rightwing populism or authoritarianism in one-party state, political and corporate elites advancing the neoliberal model share the same goal with regard to capital formation and mainstream institutions.
More weird is why Agent Orange has such a jones for being like them, except that it does go to some very fundamental desires (1980s adventures in the USSR) that will be revealed in a few minutes on CBS 60 Minutes. Lord Dampnut is simply an aberrant baboon whose caricature of a land-rent capitalist is made more comic by his nouveau riche class aspirations.
Similarly Putin is perhaps the same kind of gangster like Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, manipulating a legal system for money and power, in the most cynical ignorance of ideology. Their bro-mance could be the death of us all.
1. For me, the neoliberalism in “left neoliberalism” is taking for granted the idea of neoliberal governmentality (as articulated by, among others, Wendy Brown [pdf]): that the state responds to the needs of the market, that the state itself is governed by a market rationality, and that individual subjects are constructed as entrepreneurial actors.
The left in “left neoliberalism” is the idea that the state actually can do something about things like jobs, as against those who adhere to right-wing neoliberalism, for whom the state needs to get out of the way and let markets operate freely.
Both groups share the basic presumptions of neoliberalism but they differ about how much the state should be involved in providing a safety net and a set of incentives for economic actors to arrive at the appropriate outcomes (for themselves and for society as a whole). That’s why, in this debate, left neoliberals are often described as technocrats.
2. The anti- or non-neoliberal Left rejects neoliberal governmentality, at the level of both economics and politics.
In terms of economics, it rejects the idea that the fundamental choice (for example, in the debate about jobs) is between monetary or fiscal policy in order to encourage capitalist enterprises to hire more workers.
It puts on the table the possibility of creating other, noncapitalist institutions—the state capturing some of the surplus and directly hiring workers, the setting-up of worker-owned enterprises, and so on—in order to solve the jobs crisis.
When it comes to politics, it inserts two issues into the discussion that neoliberals, on both the Right and the Left, seem not to want to talk about: class and hegemony.
Class is a way of understanding how current politics are structured (as a form of class struggle) as well as a way of changing the current political situation (by organizing people as class actors).
Hegemony serves a useful role precisely by making sense of the hegemony of neoliberal ideas—on both the Right and, beginning with Clinton, the Left—and, then, by putting on the agenda the possibility of challenging the existing hegemony.
And, of course, all the intellectual and organizational work necessary to produce an alternative hegemony.
Before that, we should provide a reference to define neoliberalism. For academic purposes, I like Foucault’s definition, taken from the 1978-1979 “The Birth of Biopolitics” lectures given at the Collège de France. Here neoliberalism “does not ask the state what freedom it will leave to the economy, but asks the economy how its freedom can have a state-creating function and role, in the sense that it will really make possible the foundation of the state’s legitimacy.”
When the state intervenes in the functioning of markets, it isn’t to rectify injustices but instead to further create and maintain the rigor of the economy itself.
Worker-owned cooperatives are a counter-hegemony, an alternative hegemony necessary to transform the neoliberal social contract. Not so much a return to an earlier mode of production, but as means to transcend the unevenness.
Sometimes, serfs would get squeezed, Richard Wolff says–maybe a serf who was permitted to work his own land three days a week was cut down to two, and had to work on the lord’s the rest of the time, struggling to feed his family. Those serfs would run away. They’d jet off into the forests around the manors, where they’d encounter other runaway serfs (this is the origin of Robin Hood). That group of runaways, who’d cut ties with the feudal system, would establish their own villages, called communes. Without the lord controlling how the former serfs used their land and their resources, those free workers set up a system of production and trade in the communes that would eventually evolve into modern capitalism.
In 2011, the same year that Occupy Wall Street injected dissatisfaction with the financial system into the American mainstream, Wolff founded Democracy at Work, a nonprofit that advocates for worker cooperatives–a business structure in which the employees own the company, and share decision-making power over salaries, schedules, and where profits are directed. “If I had to pinpoint right now where the transition away from capitalism is happening in the United States, it’s in worker co-ops,” Wolff says. Though he’s been championing the cause of cooperatives–a radically democratic departure from the top-down capitalist business structure–for years, certain recent events, like the 2008 recession and the presidency of Donald Trump, poster boy for corrupt capitalism, have galvanized a distinctly anti-capitalist movement in the U.S.
"The End Of Capitalism Is Already StartingâÂÂIf You Know Where To Lookâ says Richard D. Wolff @profwolff... https://t.co/5SWOCfjasC
But the problem with neoliberalism is neither that it has no meaning nor that it has an infinite number of them. It is that the term has been applied to four distinctly different phenomena. “Neoliberalism” stands,
first, for the late capitalist economy of our times;
second, for a strand of ideas;
third, for a globally circulating bundle of policy measures; and
fourth, for the hegemonic force of the culture that surrounds and entraps us.
These four neoliberalisms are intricately related, of course. But the very act of bundling them together, tucking their differences, loose ends, and a clear sense of their actually existing relations under the fabric of a single word, may, perversely, obscure what we need to see most clearly. What would each of these phenomena look like without the screen of common identity that the word “neoliberalism” imparts to them?
I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left don’t like to hear that.
But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into the hands of neoliberalism?
Resistance to neoliberalism can occur in a number of different ways. In my work I stress that the point at which value is realized is also a point of tension.
Value is produced in the labor process, and this is a very important aspect of class struggle. But value is realized in the market through sale, and there’s a lot of politics to that.
A lot of resistance to capital accumulation occurs not only on the point of production but also through consumption and the realization of value.
a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning 'the way of producing') is a specific combination of:
*productive forces: these include human labour power and means of production (e.g. tools, productive machinery, commercial and industrial buildings, other infrastructure, technical knowledge, materials, plants, animals and exploitable land).
*social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power, and control relations governing society's productive assets (often codified in law), cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.
Uneven development is the process by which the social relations of capitalist societies are translated into spatial forms. It is a systematic rather than arbitrary process, the hallmark of the geography of capitalism. Uneven development results from the resolution of competing tendencies toward the differentiation of levels and conditions of development, rooted in the division of labor, and the equalization of conditions and levels of development impelled by the circulation of capital. These social and economic contradictions are resolved geographically as different places crystallize as discrete territorial entities, localities, cities, regions, nation states, the global economic system itself—resulting in the production of a nested hierarchy of geographical scales. Historically, there is therefore a tendency for development to move around, at different scales, in a seesaw pattern whereby development of an area is often followed by its underdevelopment, which in turn establishes the conditions for redevelopment. www.sciencedirect.com/...
A form of control exercised by a dominant class, i.e., by a group controlling the means of production.
The success of dominant classes in presenting their definition of reality, their view of the world, in such a way that it’s accepted by other classes as ‘common sense’.
A set of ideas by means of which dominant groups strive to secure the consent of subordinate groups to their leadership.
Domination is not imposed from above, but is won through subordinate groups’ spontaneous consent to the cultural domination they believe will serve their interests best.
Therefore, hegemony = force + consent.
According to Gramsci:
Force is practiced on enemies;
While hegemony is practiced on friends/allies.
I originally was working on a discussion of Lani Guinier’s views of racial gerrymandering and the betrayal of her appointment to the Department of Justice in 1993.
But here we are, talking hegemony and neoliberalism.
the Corporatist States of Oligarchia, where the Rich have tricked all into thinking that they have actual "Democracy" when in fact they have us living in a Plutocratic-Oligarchy that pretends to be a Meritocracy,,,,Like Rome all over again!
Please suspend your judgments if you have a tendency to see the word “neoliberal” simply as a pejorative.
Really is something needed over on the neoliberal web site. Of COURSE they see the word "neoliberal" as a pejorative. In fact, if someone has a tendency to see it that way, all that really indicates is that they are ignorant. One cannot take a word that has been well defined and in use among political scientists for decades now and hand wave it away as "meaningless mumbo jumbo". The fact that neolibs don't know what neoliberalism is makes total sense.
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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
@SnappleBC
Are manipulated by those controlling the dialogue. Evidence the smearing of terms like left, liberal, progressive, conservative, communist, solcialist and democratic. It smells like psy-ops on steroids. Without a meaningful banner to proclaim, the resistance loses traction.
Your request:
Please suspend your judgments if you have a tendency to see the word “neoliberal” simply as a pejorative.
Really is something needed over on the neoliberal web site. Of COURSE they see the word "neoliberal" as a pejorative. In fact, if someone has a tendency to see it that way, all that really indicates is that they are ignorant. One cannot take a word that has been well defined and in use among political scientists for decades now and hand wave it away as "meaningless mumbo jumbo". The fact that neolibs don't know what neoliberalism is makes total sense.
![DYIwTqIVoAE517h_1_[1]](https://genehowington.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/dyiwtqivoae517h_1_1.jpg)
Two hegemons walk into a bar
Comments
Good Essay & Long Too!
Lots of food for thought. I'm going to have to smoke a bowl of Kush and think it over before I comment.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
hegemony...
~ Théodore Géricault, circa 1818
Cheers annieli!
Welcome to
the Corporatist States of Oligarchia, where the Rich have tricked all into thinking that they have actual "Democracy" when in fact they have us living in a Plutocratic-Oligarchy that pretends to be a Meritocracy,,,,Like Rome all over again!
So long, and thanks for all the fish
I doubt we have too many like this
Your request:
Really is something needed over on the neoliberal web site. Of COURSE they see the word "neoliberal" as a pejorative. In fact, if someone has a tendency to see it that way, all that really indicates is that they are ignorant. One cannot take a word that has been well defined and in use among political scientists for decades now and hand wave it away as "meaningless mumbo jumbo". The fact that neolibs don't know what neoliberalism is makes total sense.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
The meanings of words
Are manipulated by those controlling the dialogue. Evidence the smearing of terms like left, liberal, progressive, conservative, communist, solcialist and democratic. It smells like psy-ops on steroids. Without a meaningful banner to proclaim, the resistance loses traction.