What is neoliberalism and how does it work?

by Dr Robert Muller, Medium: https://medium.com/@DrRobertMuller/what-is-neoliberalism-and-how-does-it-work-34c6e6e96030

(Image: uncomputing.org)

We are currently living in a neoliberal era, but what does this actually mean? We need to differentiate neoliberalism from what came before; so this paper is an attempt to clarify this issue.

Firstly, let us say for the sake of the argument that the neoliberal ascendancy started in around 1974, just after the oil shock. This date gives us the generation of approximately 30 years of development of the ideas of Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics before the ideas started to gel into a dominant discourse in the mid-1970s.

In terms of neoliberal political figures, we can say that Margaret Thatcher was the first of the significant neoliberals; however, there were still significant opposing currents of thought. Today, we have what I would characterise as a neoliberal western world which has the ideological power to have an enormous imperialist influence over much of the global south (or the developing world). This can be seen in the push for the developing nations to take on board policies to ‘reform’ their public services through outsourcing, privatisation, the expensive application of outside consultancies, and so on, all to gain access to loans by global neoliberal agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the European Central Bank, in the case of the ‘European south’.

Secondly, one can say that neoliberalism is an ideology that combines personal technologies with governmental technologies. These personal technologies are concerned with regulating the self, while the governmental technologies are concerned with regulating the state.

It is the intersection of these two sets of technologies that characterises neoliberal capitalism and that I will explain in some detail below.

Personal technologies

The particular personal technologies of the neoliberal era have deep roots in history, stemming from what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic. According to Weber, in the early stages of capitalism, Protestants worked hard (hence the Protestant work ethic) and lived frugally, seeing this as a sign that they were good and righteous, and therefore, that this MIGHT be a further sign of being one of the chosen few to be taken up to heaven after they die. Of course, there was no guarantee of this, but Weber says that they constantly worked hard and looked for these signs. This was what set Protestantism apart from Catholicism and, according to Weber, led to the development of Capitalism. This was also a very strong manifestation of self-regulation. They curbed their desires and appetites and lived very sober, frugal, hard-working lives.

It is these attempts at self-regulation that we call ‘personal technologies’. They are techniques employed to ‘work on the self’ and to continuously improve oneself.

Governmental technologies

If we take the state in its widest possible sense, then we can talk about, not only the government as part of the state, but also many other institutions of society, such as corporations, trade unions, banks, the parliament, and so on. In fact, any institution that is in negotiation with others to ‘govern’ or ‘manage’ the population can be considered to be part of the modern western state.

This was not necessarily as apparent prior to the neoliberal era, as previously, it appeared that the state was ‘the government’, whatever that actually means. In the neoliberal era, after the mass privatizations, the public-private partnerships, and the outsourcing of public services, there has been a blurring of the notion of what constitutes ‘the state’.

The neoliberal era

What sets the neoliberal era apart from previous political and social configurations is the combining of personal and governmental technologies. Some examples here will be instructive:

1. There is a constant discourse emanating from ‘the state’ that individuals (the building block of a society) should (which is a moral term) improve themselves and that those who don’t are users, bludgers, or even worse, criminals. We can see this in the language used in the 2014 Australian federal budget in which the Treasurer used the terms “lifters” and “leaners” and “the deserving” and “the undeserving” when referring to basically the middle-classes and the working classes (of course, there was no word for the rich because they, apparently do not require one, because who they are, is apparently, obvious). This is an example of the state stepping in to label various sectors of the population, ‘assisting’ them to regulate their own behaviours. This, of course, is not a conscious thought process, but is more of a manifestation of the ‘conscience collective’, as Emile Durkheim would have put it.
2. There has also been a ‘psychologisation’ of society in the neoliberal era which has facilitated the process of self-regulation. We see the explosion of self-help books and resources, and the proliferation of coaches, with so much of the population wanting to coach the rest of the population who have little desire to be coached. We see a huge proliferation of psychologists in all companies and organisations, and we see thriving schools of psychology propping up entire collapsing faculties of social sciences in our universities. And we see the state using this psychologisation as a convenient way to label people as failures or winners. Those who can regulate themselves and compete as time-crazed producers and consumers are the apparent winners, while those who can’t are the losers. This labelling results in our elected representatives justifying the cutting of services that affect those labelled as ‘losers’ the most.
3. Finally, neoliberalism is also perversely associated with neoclassical economics, even though this link is contingent on a number of factors rather than a link made of necessity. Again, the sense of self-regulation moves across to the realm of economics in which people, as individuals, are expected to operate their lives as if they were running a business. This, of course, is also linked to the notion of avoiding any sense of subsidisation. Thus, in the economy, every service or good must “stand alone” and not be subsidised by any other part of the organisation or of the economy. If IT does not make a profit, then IT must be left to fall over at the whim of the market. In the personal economy of the neoliberal world (that is, in the life of the individual), one must not be subsidised (or propped up or helped) by the collective (by public services for example) — if one succeeds, then one is contributing; if one fails, then they must be left to fall through the cracks.

Hedonism: what it really means

by Dr Robert Muller, Medium: https://medium.com/@DrRobertMuller/hedonism-what-it-really-means-1f0768742594

(Image: classicalwisdom.com)

The philosophy of bourgeois society, after the rise of the middle-classes, was based on utilitarianism, which, according to Daniel Bell, is ‘a hedonistic calculation of pleasure and pain’. Such beliefs and ways of conduct partly paved the way for modern-day hedonism. Such hedonism is characterised by Bell as “the idea of pleasure as a way of life”. Furthermore, Bell argues that hedonism now provides the basis for the cultural justification of capitalism. Bell calls such hedonism ‘fun morality’.

In the contemporary era, if a person is not having fun, there is a period of soul-searching in which the individual attempts to establish what the problem is. Such ‘fun morality’ stands in stark contrast to the ‘goodness morality’ promoted within the Protestant ethic in which impulses must be controlled and resisted. Within such fun morality, instinct has become the basic justification for life in the contemporary era. Pleasure and the release of impulse become the priorities of living.

For Bell, hedonism is a ‘world of make-believe’ in which one lives for the future, dreaming of what will happen rather than what is happening. In this way, Bell’s conception of hedonism represents the idea of ‘self-autonomous illusory hedonism’ in which illusions are created in the mind of the individual, dwelt upon and often dreamed of.

Social Changes Leading to Hedonism

Bell points out the social changes which occurred throughout the 20th century which have helped to usher in the hedonistic ethic. He argues that the demographic changes that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century resulted in the rapid growth of American cities and a resultant decline in influence of ‘small-town’ lifestyles and mentality. 

Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of an economy based increasingly on consumption. Such a change, according to Bell, was in direct contrast with the Protestant ethic and as a result, began to undermine the older tradition. The emphasis on consumption saw priorities move towards ‘spending and material possessions’ and away from ‘thrift, frugality, self-control and impulse renunciation’. On top of these changes, the automobile, and the spread of media, particularly the increasing popularity of movie theatres and radio, helped to lessen the isolation of rural communities and to create a national culture with more homogeneous goals.

Further social change occurred throughout the 20th century, acting to undermine the last vestiges of the Protestant ethic. Bell cites changes in banking as a significant step towards the cultural inculcation of hedonism. With credit and overdraft facilities becoming commonplace by the end of the 1960s, the consumer no longer saw the need to delay gratification through the curbing of impulse. Instead, those impulses could now be given free rein when they arose. With credit, the longing of the consumer could be satisfied immediately. 

Throughout the 20th century, the shift in emphasis from an economy based on production to one based on consumption, saw consumer durables and the invention of credit and installment plans, together with the growth of marketing and advertising, which promoted spending and instant gratification, leading to the undermining of the Protestant ethic. Ultimately, these transformations brought about the end of Puritanism as the moral underpinning of American life. American capitalism, ‘the new capitalism’, claimed to produce abundance, and the fruits of the system were promoted as ‘the glorification of plenty’. A higher standard of living, not work as an end in itself, then becomes the engine of change.

Replacement of the Protestant Ethic by Hedonism

Bell’s thesis is that the Protestant ethic has been undermined and displaced by an ethic of hedonism or a ‘pleasure ethic’, as a culture based on consumerism took hold. The Protestant ethic had provided a transcendental justification in people’s lives and had served to place limits on the accumulation and experience of luxury. On the other hand, capital accumulation was not subject to these same limitations, as long as such accumulation was sober, rational, and responsible. Bell argues that once the Protestant ethic began to fade as an influence upon modern society, all that was left was hedonism.

Such private wants and unlimited ends with which to attain them (due to the burgeoning of the ‘new’ capitalism of America), had a belief in individualism as their underlying justification. According to Bell, bourgeois middle-class society had incorporated strands of both Protestantism and individualism. On the one hand, the Puritan style of capitalism which emphasised a certain type of character based on ‘sobriety, probity, work as a calling’ in a particular form of capitalist economic activity, contrasted and acted in tandem with a secular Hobbesianism, a radical individualism which saw humans as unlimited in their appetite, which was restrained in politics by a sovereign but ran fully free in economics and culture. Gradually, the relationship between these two sets of ethics weakened. Secular individualism gained in strength at the cost of the Protestant ethic, a situation continuing into the present.

Ultimately, the changes that were wrought by the transformations of the early decades of the 20th century, heavily promoted hedonism but could not provide any justification for it. Hedonism lacked a value system with which to replace the old one.

The Lonely American

(Photo: Seth Wenig / AP Photo)

by Chris Hedges, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/29/lonely-american

Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.

A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men.

They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport. “Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.

But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population.

No-one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations - with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.

The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities.

The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR - which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers - is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.

“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.”

Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for it. “We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,” he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this past weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them. We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid Googles ‘Ferrari - racing - sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But it’s not working the way it should.”

Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement, or what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness and alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.

Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.

The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.

The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them.

And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda - content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free - is mistaken for reality.

Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”

Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded to new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public, to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action.”

“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.”

Heiden, forced to flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”

Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin  called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”

“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin wrote. “It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects, who had no direct union more among themselves.”

Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted. We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.