Finally, I'd like to throw a shoutout to "Prof. Denim" on my Discord server who pointed today's video out to me a little while ago; it's always easier to get by in life with a little help from your friends.
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Alright then lads, welcome to 2021; where the world is still on fire, Captain Trips still stalks the land like a wheezy grim reaper, and due to logic based primarily around the lack of early American road maintenance and the declining horsemanship of aging squires - Donald Trump is still president for roughly another eighteen and a half days. Of course, baring an extremely unlikely (at this point) chud uprising, the winds of change are blowing us towards a neoliberal triumphalist Palooka Joe Biden presidency. Which leaves the question, is that an improvement for the American labor class? Well, it's complicated, but in as few words as possible, the answer to that query is almost certainly "no," and today we're going to start to unpack why.
Now given that my biggest regret in just over four years of writing about modern fascism is that it took me that entire time to properly articulate a working definition of the concept in practice, I've decided to approach Joe Biden and the return of neoliberalism in an entirely different way. This time, instead of cataloguing the media's incessant fawning over Biden's nightmare neofeudalist cabinet, I thought I'd use the last days of Trump's lame duck period to lay out the ideological groundwork for our future discussions about what I suspect will be the most important topic of the Biden era, namely neoliberalism.
So just what the heck is neoliberalism anyway? For the easy answer, we could turn to Dr. Cornel West who once described neoliberalism as essentially the worship of markets. As we'll see in a moment however, the problem with this definition is that in seeking to hoist the neoliberals on their own petards, it ultimately treats neoliberal theory as an honest descriptor of neoliberal practice - which is quite frankly, not a very smart idea.
For a more nuanced look at neoliberalism then, let's again turn to lefty Youtuber Tom Nicholas and his delightful cultural studies video series "What the Theory." I'm not going to lie, when I saw that Tom built this tight twenty-six minute video around the work of two of my favorite analysts (David Harvey, author of "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" and Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine") I couldn't resist writing up a film study about it eventually.
Kicking off the lesson by noting that neoliberalism is the "guiding economic, political, and social ideology in much of the world," Nicholas unpacks the (highly) theoretical underpinnings of the neoliberal ideology, touching briefly on concepts such as the primary importance of economic relations between humans, the idea that greed is good because self-interest drives progress and of course Smith's ridiculously overemphasized (and purely hypothetical) "invisible hand of the market." This then pairs with a brief discussion about the misleading use of the word "liberalism" in "neoliberalism" by noting that the term neoliberalism has its roots in the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and is thus primarily concerned with economic freedom for the rich (and capital itself.)
Cutting to the meat of the subject, Nicholas follows up with a back of the napkin history of neoliberal ideology's rise to power in the 1970's and 80's, looking at the role of key supervillains like the Mont Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Maggie Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. While obviously I don't want to short-sell Tom's discussion of this battle of ideas here, I think it's his focus on the ways in which the practice of neoliberalism in power cannot be reconciled with its ideas in opposition, that truly makes this video worth watching.
Looking at supply-side economics, neoliberal taxation policies, the effects of privatization, and even the gig economy, our narrator demonstrates that the priorities of neoliberal leaders have little to do with individual liberty, or driving progress. State-initiated attacks on labor organizations simply don't jibe well with arguments about protecting the liberty of the voluntary group, and policies built around deregulation and globalization have lead to vast concentrations of wealth (and power) for the ruling classes, and eroded living standards as well as democratic norms, for the larger labor class - which is hard to call progress unless you're a Lex Luthor-esque supervillain running a company the size of a government in its own right.
Finally, and in light of all this, Nicholas ultimately agrees with David Harvey and summarizes the most important argument you'll need to remember from this video; that more so than it's an ideology, or even an economic system, neoliberalism is a political project to restore power to the monied, corporate classes at the expense of the labor class and democracy.
Of course, given what I'm coming to realize is Nicholas's "soft leftism," it's not all gum drops and lollipops. I think that while mentioning both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, this video lets them off far too lightly for their pivotal role in cementing the neoliberal agenda in America and the UK; ditto for former U.S. President Barack Obama who inexplicably doesn't come up much. Similarly, key neoliberal leaders on the mainstream right (such as David Cameron, George H.W. Bush, and his even more repugnant son) are afforded seconds of screen-time at most.
More importantly however, and despite clearly having read both Harvey and Klein's seminal works on the violence of neoliberal rule, I was utterly baffled not to hear even a reference to Karl Polanyi's extremely accurate observation that the contradiction between economic freedom, and personal freedom under neoliberalism is inherently unstable and would logically seem to lead to a police state against the poor, if not outright fascism. Pursuant to this, as much as I like Nicholas's work here and I think it's a great introduction to Pig Empire neoliberalism in the imperial core, how anyone can read The Shock Doctrine and use it to make a video about neoliberalism that literally doesn't even mention Augusto Pinochet, is quite simply mystifying.
Despite these problems however, Neoliberalism: From Ronald Reagan to the Gig Economy is, on the whole, an excellent foundation on which we can build future discussions about neoliberalism; and as such I encourage readers to check it out today:
Additional Resources
Tom Nicholas's Youtube Channel
What Is Neoliberalism? Definition and Examples
Neoliberalism’s dark path to fascism
Ending the Myth of “Market Fundamentalism”
Neoliberalism: Free Market Fundamentalism or Corporate Power?
Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure
Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
How to Rebuild From the Disaster of Neoliberalism
The Fraud of Classical Liberalism
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world
Explaining Our Morbid Political Symptoms
Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
Thank you so much for doing this. It is very helpful.
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome and thank you for the kind words. :)
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