Your Liberalism Won’t Save You

“All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.” — James Baldwin

In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has helped to shine a light on the failures of modern capitalism. Examples abound that function as living metaphors for the many ways neoliberalism has not served the common good: New York City schools were reticent to close, despite calls from the CDC and WHO, because thousands of children who depended on the public school system to eat would go hungry — in this: the richest country in the world! Another example might be how an organization that produced affordable ventilators for the crisis was immediately bought up by a corporation who produced ridiculously expensive ventilators with the sole purpose of taking the affordable ones off the market and insuring profits. Or, what about the opportunist who bought a hospital and then charged the city of New York to use it for coronavirus patients at an exorbitant cost. Or, the many who are dying in prisons because they are unable to quarantine themselves and are denied basic protection.

30 million are uninsured and do not go to the doctor. 100 million have insurance but have cost prohibitive co-pays. Market-driven, for-profit healthcare is clearly a failure. Our response to Covid-19 has been an utter disaster. Cost of healthcare in the US is 50–100% higher than all other developed nations, and yet our actual quality of healthcare is comparatively abysmal. All the while, the White House is continuing a program that seeks to further defund the CDC while expanding funding for the fossil fuel industry. As Chomsky tells us: “Capitalist logic is lethal.” This is more than just a crisis of medicine. It is a crisis of ideology. The coronavirus pandemic has clearly shown just how desperately we need to strengthen and reïnvigorate the working class, how necessary national healthcare would be and perhaps most importantly how effective a general strike could actually be if organized. The fact that our economy has come crashing down in only a couple weeks of inactivity goes to show you how the worker is the real muscle of the economy, not the CEOs and shareholders. The neoliberal mythos continues, as service employees and cashiers are held up as “brave” for continuing to go to work throughout this pandemic, even though the truth is: they have no choice. They are being held hostage. They are enslaved to capitalism. And it is clear that the deaths are disproportionately skewed towards poor, working class people and people of color. As Judith Butler tells us, “Fundamental vulnerability is not the same as exploitation, but it makes one susceptible to exploitation.” We have clearly seen that the millionaire and billionaire class cannot exist without the working class, or what we might hereafter dub the “essential class.”

It almost seems like literary irony that as we are in the midst of the election season where national public healthcare is a major topic of conversation, we should see firsthand how ill-equipped we are as a culture to deal with this problem — how nearly every post-industrial country in the world is doing a better job of ensuring the health and livelihood of its people. The stimulus bill was primarily concerned with bailouts for fracking companies and all sorts of luxury industries. That $1200 check you got in the mail was a tiny fraction of the spending. Public funds flooded the financial markets as regular people lost their jobs, received reduced pay, or else continued working despite putting themselves and families at risk.

2.

In 1992, political economist Francis Fukuyama called liberalism, “the end of history.” The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union was collapsing and it seemed liberal democracy had succeeded worldwide. Even Communist states saw the necessity of incorporating some measure of capitalism to ensure a competitive economy in the global marketplace, which was still an emerging concept in the early nineties. The world saw the rise of so-called mixed economies, of which the US’s is one. Since wealth-creation depends largely on the protection of private property, the demand for greater legal protection for individual rights would be inevitable.

Liberalism assumes itself to be the final result of political evolution, and capitalism to be the only viable economic structure within liberal democracy. Capitalism is considered by many to be “beyond ideology” — and yet: could there be anything more ideological than claiming one has no ideology? Capitalism enforces scarcity and poverty, and is responsible for rapidly destroying the planet. Capitalism has led us to a historical place where white supremacy and fascism are presently reörganizing themselves within the political right, while those on the political left seem powerless or apathetic to oppose it.

In America we generally conflate the idea of “liberalism” with the political left-wing, (ie the Democratic Party.) This may be useful in conversation — to be able to neatly parse the world with a sort of moral dichotomous key — but in practice, these ideas are not synonymous. In the present system, at least in the United States, both political parties — Republicans and Democrats — function under the principles of neoliberalism. For the purposes of this essay, “liberalism” will refer to the historical succession of thought generally associated with the writings of John Locke and John Stuart Mill — ideas about liberty, equality, private property, and the consent of the governed — of which the American Revolution and the French Revolution are the intellectual offspring. “Neoliberalism” will refer to a reactionist position within both political parties that emerged in the seventies and eighties, favoring wealthy elîtes and corporate power, under the guise of the so-called “free market,” which dominates the Western political theatre presently.

Political philosopher Patrick J. Deneen tells us, “Liberalism is internally inconsistent, and is built on a foundation of contradictions. It proclaims equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.” But is there some core ethos to liberalism which is pure but has only been imperfectly realized in the past? Actual self-government by the citizenry of the developed West is measurably on the decline. Twenty-first century liberal democracy has entered what has been called a “crisis of legitimacy.” Rights are limited to the rights that rich and powerful oligarchs have defined for us. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but does not adequately define these ideas. The framers of the U.S. Constitution made some effort to describe these “inalienable” rights, but they remain rather amorphous and ill-defined to this day. Beyond the right to bear arms, few can point their finger to a single “right” beyond the right to endlessly shop at Walmart and amazon.com. Even things like freedom of speech, which we think of as primary, can be taken away. What good are rights if they can be taken away? The only freedom is the free market which serves the oligarchs, and those the oligarchs choose to enable, rarely the average citizen of the liberal order. Educational institutions, rather than creating an environment for promoting the truth, have become like factories wherein “correct” thoughts and “right beliefs” are instilled in the students who will, after paying handsomely for it, be granted the privilege of entering elȋte economic, political and social institutions.

Liberalism upholds science and technology as the cornerstones of education. In the classical liberal imagination, “Man” is master of nature. Beginning with Francis Bacon, liberalism sought to “torture nature to reveal her inner secrets.” Nature and the human body were seen as machines that could be directed towards any desire one has. For centuries, the picture of humankind dominating nature, without regard for ethics or the common good, has been upheld as a new sort of virtue, monolithic in its totality. This is what Mary Shelley was writing about in Frankenstein. And just as the atomic bomb, or the devastating effects of catastrophic climate change have shown, the monsters we create are often beyond our control. In modern liberal society, we live under the myth that technology will enable our freedom, rather than the practice of virtue leading us to freedom, as classical philosophers thought. Freedom is often understood as becoming free from any coërcion or influence from our family or local community, our cultural tradition. Under late-stage capitalism, however, the only true freedom, of course, is the freedom of the oligarch to manipulate and control the masses while enjoying the freedom to suck the marrow from the bone. Sex robots will surely be at the cutting edge of cyborg technology, because a population enslaved by its passions is much easier to control than one composed of virtuous citizens.

Even still, the popular myth tells us that “freedom,” as applied to democracy is foundational — stands at the core of our values as a people. Capitalism is assumed to be the natural extension of democracy, and therefore the culture, morality and economy that capitalism promotes is automatically associated with a free society. The myth goes: anyone with any common sense whatsoever would certainly be a capitalist. Ostensibly, then, capitalism is legitimized by democracy, but what we now see is the exact opposite: Democracy, as it is interpreted in formal polity, is determined by the so-called “free market,” which in itself is able to de-legitimize the very concept of democracy entirely. Wealth becomes concentrated in a small minority, law becomes the property of that oligarchy and social mobility is brought to a halt. This repurposed neofeudalism is what initially gave rise to Keynesianism in the twentieth century, and neoliberalism arose as a reaction to Keynesianism, which will be discussed in more detail later.

3.

During the American Revolution, liberal American oligarchs sought to take for themselves political and economic control from the oligarchs “across the pond,” there was nothing truly revolutionary about it — just wealthy, white, land-owning elȋtes transferring lands and power to themselves and away from other wealthy, white, land-owning elȋtes. Historians like to highlight the political distinctions between the different “founding fathers,” but they were clearly all operating under the tutelage of classical liberal ideology — most of them slave-owners, all of them complicit in the genocide of the Indigenous Americans. Jeffrey Langan in Liberalism’s Success, Our Failure highlights that despite the performative conflict between Adams and Jefferson, the two united in the attempts to run a comprehensive propaganda campaign to convince working class people to revolt against the British Empire, despite the initial lack of popular support. Historically, liberal institutions have always become increasingly exclusive to an elȋte that couldn’t care less about the needs of the working class, or any actual personal freedoms of the people as a whole. Liberalism serves a select few with an incredible amount of wealth and resources, while the masses slide ever downwards towards lower levels of subsistence living. British abolitionist and contemporary to the founding fathers Thomas Day had this to say: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independence with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

Liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that liberalism is, itself, an ideology, and not simply the natural end-state of human political evolution. Liberalism quite performatively claims its authority to be based on “facts.” Yet, don’t all political ideologies claim to deal with “facts?” What distinguishes these systems is which facts are to be prioritized, which are obfuscated, and more importantly: what is considered a “fact” at all, and by whom? It has been said that we are presently living in a “post-fact” or “post-truth” era, because of the incumbent neo-fascist agenda at creating “alternative facts” while simultaneously crying out against “fake news.” What can politics even mean in such an environment? Perhaps this will prove to be indicative of a larger social trend but it’s too early to say.

Political ideologies take fabricated thought-structures and use them to construct the bases of systemic power. Most political ideologies are at least self-referential as ideologies; one of the dangers of liberalism is that adherents to this ideology are often completely unaware that they are upholding and maintaining any ideology at all. Fukuyama’s claim about the ”end of history” was nothing more than a formal conceit projected within the context of the liberal state, to uphold systems of power as they are, while obscuring the fact that liberalism is, in itself, an ideology.

For example, liberalism emphasizes tolerance towards diversity of opinion (with certain key exceptions) but this includes tolerance of the intolerant. This idea has been widely discussed and is referred to as the “paradox of diversity.” This is why liberalism, once established, has the tendency to slide further and further to the right. As an intellectual question there may be some room for debate, and yet we needn’t appeal to theory, when we can simply look to history and see the results of the liberal position firsthand. Nazism was seen as “just another viewpoint” by open-minded liberals of the day, which in itself becomes a mechanism for propaganda. Under the guise of “free speech,” fascism can pretend to function as a part of liberalism, while actually seeking its destruction. Fascists know that they can always count on moderate liberals to give them the space to grow and flourish, and more importantly recruit others. This is because liberalism is inextricably linked to capitalism, and while capitalism is incompatible with socialism, because socialism is about putting human lives first, and capitalism is only concerned with extracting the most value out of resources and people. Capitalism unfettered looks like child labor, sex slavery, sixty hour work-weeks and unregulated hazardous industry. Capitalism is quite compatible with fascism and liberalism is nudged ever closer to the right, towards totalitarian fascism.

Popular youtube intellectual, Olly Thorn, observes that Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis to kill millions of people was a brand name, and not a specific type of chemical. It was purchased from a corporation called IG Farbin, which, although it has been “in liquidation” since 1952, still has securities traded on the Frankfurt Exchange to this day. Shockingly, most of the NAZI corporations (Bayer, BMW, Nestlé) are still around today. Even American darling Coca-Cola collaborated with Hitler’s régime. Corporations will always support fascism, because fascism opposes socialism, and socialism is the only real threat to the power of the capitalist class. Hence, why we see neoliberals becoming Reaganesque bedfellows with authoritarian regimes, simply because these regimes also oppose socialism. This fact is obvious, when one considers the present political climate where, within the Democratic party establishment, there has been an intense opposition to an even moderately socialist candidate, while remaining relatively soft on actual white supremacists and fascists. Fascism does not challenge the primacy of capitalism and in many ways it enhances it. The Democratic establishment has done demonstrably more to oppose Sanders than they ever have to oppose Trump.

4.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “ There is no society, only a collection of individuals.” The concept of individualism has historically been used to support a sort of liberal myth that the best possible outcome will always be achieved if everyone just individually pursues their personal best interest. This focus on individual decision-making deliberately ignores a more systemic analysis. Sure, we can make decisions as a consumer, but we are limited only to the specific range of options allowed us by corporations who have a vested interest in our insecurities, our dissatisfaction, and our self-loathing in order to sell more products and maximize profits.

Capitalism functions because of personal fears and insecurities — fear that you won't smell right, so you must buy deodorant — fear that you will not be sexually desirable so you must wear the right brands and buy cologne. Now we see the emergence of green-washing within late-stage capitalism. Products are introduced as “more ethical” using the rhetoric of progressive environmentalism. The pressure is put on you, the consumer, to buy green products or drive a Prius, rather than where it should be directed: demanding systemic change or corporate capitulation. The onus should not be on the person who forgot to recycle, but on the corporation who produces the plastic object, pollutes the air and water, or fracks the Earth in the first place. Corporations use lobbying power to control markets and politicians, hence: surplus capital is converted into political power under neoliberalism. Useless innovation and a very inefficient use of resources are the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Success is defined within this paradigm, and all failures are blamed on the individual, with no regard for the many ways in which Individualism ignores systemic privilege. Neoliberalism offers no solution to the question of care ethics.

Capitalism claims to be promoting freedom via these sorts of consumer options for choicemaking, and every ideology claims to love freedom. But how is freedom defined? and for whom is it afforded? The so-called free market is presented as the pinnacle of personal freedom, viz the illusion of the freedom of choice. This, of course, is an illusion, because our only choices are those we have been given. The unending, ridiculous gimmicks meant to catch our eye and differentiate one company’s product from the others on the shelf have done little to actually improve our quality of life. The very value of our lives has been reduced to a consumerist exchange value. A nation based on “freedoms” under neoliberalism becomes an endless shopping mall. Can we even clearly define what these freedoms entail? So-called “freedom of speech” is more important to corporate oligarchs than to actual working class people. The significance of a single voice is heavily devalued when financial resources can be converted to political power, and it is certainly more than mere coïncidence that the site of the 9/11 memorial shares space with the largest shopping mall in Manhattan.

5.

The history of liberalism begins with the Enclosure — a very complex political reӧrganization that happened in England, beginning in the 13th century. Common lands began to be fenced or walled off, so that political power could be consolidated by the landed gentry. Ideas about land use were restructured. What it meant to be a peasant was redefined. Subsistence farming gave way to an agricultural revolution.

Centuries later, the execution of Charles I became a symbol of the rule of the people and the end of royalist oppression, but it was this landed gentry that stood to benefit. Although the English Civil War gave way to some amazing new ideas and freedom of thought, even some ideas which might be labeled proto-anarcho-syndicalist by modern standards, Cromwellianism ultimately amounted to an increase in slavery and exploitation. Populism becomes unwieldly. John Locke writes at length about the profound contradiction between new ideas and an increase in state power.

Who are the acceptable targets of violence under liberalism? Liberalism markets itself as “nonviolent,” but tolerates, and even sustains itself via certain types of violence in various forms. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was first assassinated (probably by the CIA) then later fetishized as a national symbol — his image made canon — while the more revolutionary aspects of his message were obfuscated. He has been turned into a sort of Christ, offering some kind of psyco-spiritual absolution for the collective white guilt of transatlantic slavery. The villainization of Malcolm X as the sort of devil character in this mytho-historical duality relieves the pressures of shame and renders the mythos complete, while white supremacy is tacitly maintained and altered to keep up with various changing social trends. We are presented with national symbols of both acceptable blackness and detestable blackness, respectively. Mill and Locke, the fathers of liberalism, both make very clear that liberty was never intended for “barbarians and savages,” i.e. those who resist so-called “civilization,” or are otherwise barred from it on racial grounds, based on the new emerging concept of “whiteness.” But the question begs to be asked: who is allowed to define what “civilization” means? Throughout colonial history, Indigenous people have been offered autonomy only if they succumb to the “civilizing force.”

Ultimately, the good, modern liberal is able to condone violence if it keeps the wheels of capitalism moving. Hence: slavery and genocide as foundational actualities in the history of the United States, or we can look to the present situation in the prison system, or at the racialized brutality at the US-Mexico border. Political ideologies determine not just which facts matter, but also who may be the acceptable targets of organized violence. The fascist centers this question around ideas of race, ability or social behavior. The Leninist or Bolshevik might center this problem on questions of class. One need only look at President Clinton’s involvement in Mogadishu to see that for the bourgeois neoliberal, this question is quite a bit more complex and problematic. The Obama administration ushered the dawn of automated warfare, (drone bombs) elevating violence to an ever higher level of technological sophistication and abstracting any tangible awareness of war itself from the general public even further.

Under Obama we saw more deportations of immigrants than under any other president, the militarization of the police force in most major cities, dramatic increase in fracking, the devastating Keystone Access Pipeline, and militarized force used against Indigenous people who opposed it. Neoliberalism is about finding ways to remodel imperialism to reflect progressive cultural values. Perhaps there is some truth to be found at the core of the joke, popular amongst radical leftists, that neoliberalism tolerates militarized force, but demands bombs are being sent off by trans women of color. Neoliberalism relies on always being eager to coöpt the going social trends and retool them to support their corporatist agenda, enlisting pop stars and celebrities and glossy high-dollar ads to generate revenue.

6.

In the United States, neoliberalism first emerged within the GOP under Ronald Reagan in the late eighties. Later, Bill Clinton introduced neoliberalism into the Democratic party in the nineties. The two parties began to agree on a lot more than they disagreed on and began restructuring their messaging to reflect a focus on specific dog-whistle topics in order to maintain the illusion that the parties are quite different, such as abortion access or gun ownership on the right and identity politics (IDPOL) on the left.

IDPOL create a state of dependence because it feeds on the very need to feel represented in the public, political arena. Notable feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler teaches us that, “The very ‘I’ that I know has been constituted through colonialist categories which also demean me and devalue me. [It is] what constitutes “me” and conditions my survivability under these historical conditions within capitalism, but it is also that which subjugates me and serves to control me. If I reject these categories I risk having no recognizable place in society, while at the same time, affirming these terms serves to limit my mobility and survivability.” This instability is exploited by capitalism.

Neoliberal policies by the end of the twentieth century led directly to the financial crises of the early 21st century, followed by major cuts to public services around the world (“austerity”). By assuming capitalism as the only possible system to ensure everyone’s best interest, neoliberalism props itself up in some very specific ways, using straw man scare tactics such as: if we were to regulate businesses in such a way that would benefit workers, i.e. increasing wages or workers’ rights, corporations would simply take jobs elsewhere. This reduces the lived experience of working class people to a set of numbers. The golden goose of “job creation” does not concern itself with the quality or type of said jobs, nor how many jobs one must work to maintain their standard of living, only with the numbers on paper.

If capitalism is such a great system, why does it require major federal bailouts every eight to ten years? In the first two decades of this century alone, we’ve had three major crises. Everytime there is a financial crisis, public discourse treats the market like some sacred entity — a holy innocent — affected by outside forces, but neutral unto itself. The crisis is often named after these external forces — Covid-19 this time, or the “housing” crisis of eight years ago, always keeping us distracted from the internal inconsistencies of capitalism itself. Capitalism is destined for failure, and like the man behind the curtain, we are meant to not see the truth, for giddiness of the illusion.

Myths about the free market abound. And yet the reality is that capitalism requires the state to maintain itself. Although the citizenry are placated with the myth that the state can be changed via electoral politics, the choice is always between two politicians deemed “electable” by either party who have each already been bought by corporations who exist with very specific and calculated interests. Super PACs emerged in 2010 and are able to pour unlimited amounts of money into a particular candidate without donation limits. Politicians are effectively commodified to be bought at sold at the whim of the true ruling class. The internal contradictions of capitalism have already been clearly demonstrated and we can see capitalism’s inability to maintain itself without help from the state.

One of the most profound internal contradictions inherent to capitalism was identified by Marx, and is referred to as the Crisis of Overproduction. The idea, in a nutshell, is that, in order for the economy to succeed, the sum total of products produced must be bought back by the very same class which is producing it. Yet, the full value of these products must not be paid back to the workers who produced the product — the cream must be skimmed off the top to line the pockets of the capitalist class. In other words, some of the value of the workers’ labor is being given to a nonproductive class who does not share in the labor. Because of this gap, the working class can never buy back the full value of what they have produced, hence: we are always in a situation of overproduction. It needn’t be tangible objects produced, as we do very little of that in the US now, but just the value of the workers’ collective labor which is in opposition to the profit interest of the capitalist. In order to bridge this gap, we must do one of three things: offer credit to the poor, inflate the currency or lay off some workers in order to hire new ones at lower wages. In the US, we see all three occurring constantly, supplemented with the unsustainable political relationship between the US service economy and the steady influx of undocumented labor from Central America.

Under neoliberal capitalism, corporate profits are privatized (given directly to CEOs and others of the ruling class) while corporate loss is made public (in the form of corporate bailouts, tax subsidies, laws, etc.). Under this system, the poor grow ever poorer while the rich get richer and the middle class is snuffed out entirely. We live with the possibility of abundance and surfeit in this culture, but only if the capitalist’s greed can be subverted. Bourgeois neoliberal capitalism cannot function unabated. Given time, the machine will eat itself.

7.

There is a very real angst felt under late-stage capitalism but because it is a vague, uncertain feeling, it is interpreted differently by different groups: incels, alt-right adherents, trumpites and even so-called “Bernie bros” have all emerged in recent years as a sort of response to the indescribable malaise of what can easily be referred to as neofeudalism. It’s deeply felt, but so hard to put your finger on. Right wing angst blames the “other” — racial or ethnic minorities, immigrants, “terrorists” etc. Obama, for them, became an embodiment of all those things and a living effigy on which to project their fears and anxieties, even if some of their claims contradict each other. Obama was somehow meant to have simultaneously been a Muslim, a Kenyan national, a radical leftist, an overeducated Harvard elîte, a black nationalist, and a “do nothing president.” In the same breath they will blame him for being both ineffective and overreaching. The same people will accuse Mexicans of being simultaneously lazy and conspiring to take away all the jobs.

Left wing angst also blames an “other” but it is more complicated and difficult to define. The “deplorable,” the gun owner, the Southerner, someone who doesn’t recycle! — the left wing pariah can be constructed around just about any identity. Donald Trump has become the embodiment of this fear, but what is important is that both vehicles of fear-mongering can be used to manipulate consumer choices and generate profit for corporate powers. Donald Trump says something shocking on Twitter, and MSNBC and CNN amplify it while pretending to be scandalized, they also stand to profit just as he does like some postmodern Punch and Judy Show.

Neoliberalism coӧpts the state to create markets where there are none. We believe this makes us strong and powerful. We do not want socialism because we do not want to think of ourselves as common. We like a good old fashioned class system because it gives a way to feel superior to others and it gives us something to strive for. The American Dream tells us we are all special and glamourous and deserving of fame and celebrity, while the American Reality withholds from us even the basic necessities of life. We don’t want to be comrades, we want to be movie stars. As Steinbeck tells us, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

8.

Capitalism preys upon our fears and insecurities, offering us the opportunity to ameliorate them exclusively within the bounds of consumerism. And it has been proven throughout history, that capitalism is really bad at generating happiness. In pre-industrial societies, the laborer could at least take pride in the product of their labor. A blacksmith or a wheelwright might live in poverty but even a king had a sort of respect for them because of the product which they provided for society and for them. Under post-industrial capitalist systems, there exists a phenomenon known as the Alienation of Labor, in which we have no choice but to sell our labor in such a way as we become alienated from anything we produce. Our labor may only be expressed within the context of privatized production, wherein we become like an object or thing — disposable and interchangeable. We do not see the fruits of our labor except in the form of a pitiful wage, and hence we are not only alienated from the fruit of our labor but from our very humanity itself. Most of us don’t make something tangible when we go to work and there can be no pride or satisfaction in the impersonal exchange of a paycheck every two weeks. The system is organized so that we are made to believe we are in competition with our coworkers, with the unemployed, and with the immigrant, rather than our actual oppressors: the ruling class! Capitalism purports the myth that competition generates profit and causes us to objectify our coworkers and vicariously become objectified. We are but cogs in a vast machine. Never are we even allowed to express that we are truly being exploited by the capitalist, because we have now normalized and internalized our very condition. We must participate in the inane office parties, team-building exercises and other pseudo-social activities so that we can pretend that we enjoy our subjugation and subsequent exploitation. As popular youtube intellectual Natalie Wynn observes, “Not only do you have a shitty oppressive job, but you’re not even allowed the basic pleasure of openly hating your life.”

The very concept of advertising itself fabricates desire — “manufacturing consent,” to borrow a term from Chomsky. This directly contradicts one of the foundational concepts of neoliberalism: namely that we are rational autonomous individuals making free choices for our lives, when in fact the very nature of advertising under capitalism fosters completely irrational associations to consumer products and goods. Desires are implanted into our brains via commercial advertising which are only fulfilled by the very product which they are selling. We have come to accept this situation as normal. Nearly every advertisement on television exploits an insecurity, anxiety or fear that might be common to the masses, amplifies that fear and then presents a solution. The same system which exploits us also demands our tribute.

9.

All over the world, we have seen firsthand that the free market has only ever benefited the upper echelons of society, while the gap between rich and poor has only ever widened. Everywhere, the average income for the working class has trended downward in relation to rising CEO salaries and cost of living. As Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee observed in “It’s Still Not the End of History,” the failures of capitalism have “turned democracy against liberalism.” While some people in this country are struggling to meet basic nutritional needs, other people are eating $300 gold donuts or $1000 tacos garnished with gold leaf. The discrepancy of these ways of life is inherent to capitalism and some would say the tension created by this disparity is like a dynamo propelling late-stage capitalism ever forward. Despite what proponents of the free market would have you believe, capitalism is notorious for inefficient allocation of resources. The problem of world hunger is not due to overpopulation, as some would have you believe, but of a misallocation of resources: tremendous amounts of food are wasted every day. The “repulsive juxtaposition of scarcity and abundance,” as Natalie Wynn calls it.

The bugabu of Mr. Sanders’ healthcare plan being untenable stands in direct contradiction to the reality of the data: Americans pay staggeringly more per capita than any other nation — the privatization (and hence profit-motivation) of healthcare in this country has generated one of the most absurd misallocation of resources imaginable. Kaiser-Permanente and the various other HMOs have accrued so much political power that few politicians on either side of the aisle can claim not to be on their payroll. Privatized healthcare means that the profit motive demands denying healthcare to some, in order to maintain profits for shareholders. It is ironic that one of the scare tactics used to frighten voters away from Obama’s attempts at healthcare reform were the so-called “death panels” when in actuality, HMOs decide who lives and who dies every day. Shockingly, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Republican Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick suggested that our elderly must be sacrificed in order to maintain the status quo. The right wing claims to be “pro-life” but only a couple weeks into “quarantine and chill” and right-wing politicians were talking about acceptable deaths in order to stimulate the economy. When we look back at history, we wonder how the Germans let Nazism get as bad as it eventually did. The wheels of capitalism must be oiled with blood, and the sacrifices to Mammon must be made.

In Liberalism’s Crisis, Socialism’s Promise, Joseph M. Schwartz tells us, “Socialism isn’t the negation of liberalism. It’s the realization of liberal values made impossible by capitalism.” In much of the popular discourse surrounding Bernie Sanders, it seems that, for many people, socialism and Marxism are seen as equivalent; this is reductive: not all socialism is Marxist, nor is even all Marxism really socialist, as evidenced by the sort of Marxist capitalism found in the People’s Republic of China. The idea that any move towards a more socialist approach within our own economy would necessarily usher us towards authoritarian communism is a scare-tactic used by the capitalist class to frighten us away from progress. We are only valuable to them if enslaved. If truly free, we would become valueless. The control they have over ways of thinking is not as strong as it once was. The internet has revolutionized the ability for the people to communicate. Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X people do not fear the word “socialism” the way the Baby Boomers did. The rising popular interest in socialism is a direct result of the inability of capitalism to ensure the livelihoods of so many of us. It is not dewy-eyed utopianism, as opponents claim, but the lived experience of so many of us who have less access and less social mobility as the generation before us. Many of our people are food insecure, burdened by outrageous medical debt, and with very uncertain futures. Historically, progress under liberalism has only taken place when very strong leftist ideological forces have stood guard to moderate the elȋte forces of capital, and to safeguard individual rights. In the present system, this can only occur if the left is able to rebuild the power of labor over the power of capital.

Socialists don’t want “free stuff” as opponents claim; we want to see a restructuring of current tax systems in such a way that would benefit most Americans. We work, and pay taxes. We want our tax money to be used in ways that can more tangibly benefit us. It is not a radical idea. Socialism has existed as an ideology for a very long time. In many other countries, politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Nina Turner would not even be in the same party as corporate shills like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. The coälition between leftist and liberal is being rent asunder. The center cannot hold. The call for “anyone but Trump” or “vote blue no matter who,” in 2020 belies an enormous amount of privilege in and of itself, and is frankly insulting to the people who have historically been marginalized. A return to normal is not good enough for many of us.

Donald Trump is garbage, to be sure, but the difference between Trump and Biden is a difference in manners, rather than ideology, and the “vote blue no matter who” cry is deliberately ignorant of the suffering of marginalized people under previous administrations. Indeed, the entire history of the US presidency is fraught with violence and cultural hegemony; American presidents have all been war criminals. Andrew Jackson enacted a genocide that rivaled the Holocaust! The Clintons had slave labor, conveniently euphemized as “unpaid prison labor” in the governor’s mansion of Arkansas, whom Hillary famously called “emotionally illiterate” in her bestselling book It Takes a Village back in 1992.

The Trump phenomenon has merely served to make reactionism popular and a return to status quo seem like a virtue. “Return to Normal!” is the left’s version of MAGA. The sensationalism on the left is so overblown, and all the public hysterics merely play into the right’s hands. After a Trump presidency, even Joe Biden seems palatable and we daren’t risk a “radical” candidate — not this time. Biden is considered “electable” while Sanders was seen as “risky,” only because the media told us it was true. Greg Taylor’s new documentary Bernie Blackout explains more about the liberal establishment suppressing the grassroots movement behind the Sanders campaign. Reactionism has always been an enemy to revolution.

10.

“There is no society, only a collection of individuals’’ — The liberal fetishization of the individual allows one to look away from the horrors of violence against those who are not afforded the status of “individual.” This is reminiscent of ancient Greek society and the portion of slaves, and it can be seen in our own history as well. In the bourgeois telling of American history, the Emancipation Proclamation is said to have freed the slaves, but a deeper economic analysis would yield a more startling truth: we did not end slavery in the late ninetenth century, we accutely streamlined it, revolutionized it in its horrors and globalized it in its scope. Slavery as a racial concept was seperated from slavery as an economic concept. The end of the US civil war coïncided with the colonization of the South Pacific and the establishment of plantation states that served American economic interests and absorbed the demand pressure created by ceasing domestic forms of slavery. In essence, slavery had been outsourced in the form of Asian and South Pacific hegemony. Meanwhile, back home, for-profit prison systems — another form of modernized slavery — emerged around this time as a response to the economic vacuum left behind when domestic slavery was ended, and exists as a means to terrorize and control African-American populations. The desires of the ruling class are maintained and status quo is carefully preserved; the system is merely retooled to reflect public ideas of morality.

Neoliberalism is a theoretical set of ideas that articulate the specific needs and desires of the ruling class. Under the guise of “entrepreneurialism” and “freedom of the market,” neoliberals were able to shift the focus of power away from the electorate and towards the powers of finance. Big business replaced public virtue. The CEO became an oligarch. The seventies and eighties saw the emergence of the “think tank” as an ideological opposition to universities, because Keynesian thinking still dominated academe. Keynesianism is primarily an ideology of properly managing the demand force in economic systems, so as to grow economies in rational, sustainable ways — i.e.: throw the poor a bone from time to time so they don’t bring out the guillotines again. This had been successful but had also caused many results which were deemed undesirable by the capitalist class — economic inflation and too much political power shifting towards the working class.

The seventies saw the creation of the EPA and the consumer protection bureau. Nixon, incidentally was the one who signed these agencies into effect. Keynesiansim was the pinnacle of historical liberalism and was chiefly concerned with preserving capitalism by balancing the needs of labor and capital. Neoliberalism is primarily a reactionist position against Keynesian liberalism. In response to the social movements of the sixties, the power structures saw the people’s desire for personal liberty and freedom, but responded with expanded consumer choices on the so-called “free market.” The people demanded social justice, but were placated by expanded tolerance for more diverse forms of personal expression, suppressing any direct action that might have taken place, while any actual power the working class possessed was being dismantled before their very eyes. An expanded public acceptance of diverse hairstyles or colors, tattoos and piercings, etc. was enough to allow the masses to largely forget about the actual material demands of the decades before. This dismantling of a grassroots movement saw its fulfillment in the nineties when the imagery and fashion of the sixties was repackaged and marketed to us in the form of hippie-fied consumer goods, such as the rerelease of the iconic Volkswagen, the return of bell bottoms or the Beatles CD anthology boxed set. The only real freedom we have witnessed is the freedom to buy. “Freedom” is just a thinly-veiled compulsion towards being a gear in the massive machine of capitalism. Where monarchical powers had sought to curtail the desires and peculiarities of the working class via religious piety and austere patriotism, the neoliberal order attempts to free our desires by offering a wide range of options, always making certain to dangle certain desirous objects and experiences just outside the reach of the individual’s buying power.

11.

Marx clearly demonstrated in Volume I of Das Kapital that freedom of the market produces one result with assurance: greater social inequality and disparity of wealth and power. In the seventies, the ruling classes revolutionized this consolidation of power. The Business Roundtable has been identified as one of the first times capitalists began acting together on behalf of their own interests as a class. The underlying philosophy of neoliberalism is that the purest value of a thing is in its monetary exchange value. The big obstacle neoliberalism faced in establishing itself was the problem of popular legitimacy. Freedom had to be redefined as the freedom to sell one’s labor. Neoliberalism offers limitless options for the condition of wage-slavery, but make no mistake: wage-slavery remains the only option. The only future promised is a future of paying off debt.

The public is placated by the illusion of choice — both consumer buying choices as well as the highest illusion of all: the voting illusion. The public is deluded into believing that there are two parties with opposing needs and values, when in effect we have both parties making performative gestures of opposition while working together to maintain a structure of neoliberal economic policy and neoconsnservative political theory. George W. Bush is widely regarded as a warmonger, but neoliberal champion Obama was responsible for both the automation of the military and the militarization of the police. He is also responsible for more deportations of undocumented immigrants than any other president, a dramatic increase in fracking, and DAPL which increased oil pipelines and which directly resulted in violence against indigenous people. To be certain, the “Indian removal” of the nineteenth century is still alive and well and happening before our very eyes. Neoliberalism is sustained by perpetual expansions of military powers throughout the world, while marketing themselves with a compassionate, peaceful public image.

The sensationalism of Nancy Pelosi tearing up Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech reïnforced the illusion that she and Trump were opposed, inspiring a barrage of “yas kweens” on the left and vitriolic outcries on the right, but the more astute observer questioned why, if she really stood to oppose Mr. Trump, she had not done the same with his military budget, or any of the other bills of his she has approved? Literally a few minutes after tearing up the speech, she stood up and applauded Juan Guaidó, and only a few days later approved Trump’s trade deal that further expanded corporate powers. This is why there are such impregnable boundaries about what ideas may and may not be discussed on the left, and why a more classically liberal candidate such as Mr. Sanders may be presented as a sort of radical to be opposed tooth-and-nail by party establishment.

The end of World War II occurred abruptly, with such totality and technological precision, demonstrating firsthand the potential for violence and destruction in a liberal science devoid of any ethical considerations. Although Gertrude Stein called the atomic bomb “uninteresting” in 1946, this grand symbolic gesture — the instantaneous annihilation of two entire cities — represented the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism. Liberalism fails to acknowledge the importance of form as the basis for our knowledge of the nature of things. Once form is rejected, as Plato saw, society will turn to experts, who present themselves as the authority on morality because they know the inner workings of nature as manifested by their ability to exploit science and technology to make advances in the exercise of power. The anthropocene was so dubbed because of the existence of catastrophic climate change as an event directly caused by human activity, namely: capitalism. The two biggest threats to our existence as humans are nuclear war and catastrophic climate change — both could be said to be the result of unbridled neoliberal policy.

Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine shows that immediately following a major public crisis, the capitalist class exploits the public’s sense of disorientation and uncertainty to expand radical free market policies that further exploit the working class and suppress democracy. We have already seen some evidence but it should not be allowed to continue.

Instead, we must take this momentum and take control of our future. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, the Conservation Corps and Social Security. It’s been said that Dukakis lost in ’88 but he won in ’92 because he was able to shift the public discourse in such a way that made room for the then-charismatic Bill Clinton to sweep the ballots. Likewise, Bernie Sanders may have suspended his campaign after the intense opposition from the establishment, but in some way, he already won, or at least, progressive ideas are growing ever more mainstream in a way I never would have thought to have seen in my lifetime. I try to remain optimistic, though we have seemingly learned nothing from the endless war in the middle east, or from the plethora of school shootings we see in the news. I try to remain optimistic that the Covid-19 pandemic will act as a trigger event that will help us move forward in the right direction, for the well-being of all, not just the profit of a few. Now, more than ever as riots engulf the nation, and Donald Trump makes plain his fascist intentions, it is clear the need for a new politic to take us into the future. The intense societal pressures that led to the eruption of so-called “rioting” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd had been building for a long time. Sometimes only a crisis can produce real change, as we’ve seen in history. Do not be fooled by the “looting and rioting” narrative — the powers that be want to shroud your gaze from the very real demand being brought to the table from the black community right now. An act of desperation is a cry for help.

Even in the midst of the struggle for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations happening all over the country, we see opportunistic corporations once again trying to coöpt the movement for their own gain. Capitalism rewards sociopaths and holds nothing sacred but the bottom line. Consider the completely tône-deaf response to the Covid-19 crisis, with Nancy Pelosi’s $25,000 ice cream freezer, David Geffen tweeting “I’m hoping everyone is staying safe.” from his $590 million “Super Yacht.” Or, Ellen DeGeneres’ ridiculous comparison of quarantining in her mansion to being in prison. The guillotine has never felt like a better option. Milton Friedman tells us, “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” Now, more than ever, we must be careful of what ideas are lying around. Who will lead us into the future, when clearly the leadership of both the left and the right has run aground? What can politics even mean in the present era?

If liberalism has failed, what can be salvaged from it, as we forge new political ideas for an uncertain future? Is there some core set of values that can be retained? Many Marxists would say no. The end of liberalism is being heralded by some as clearing the way for real progress to be made. The “founding fathers” did not, in their intentions nor in their practices, effectively realize the vision “that all men are created equal” but they did give us the idea. Now the question comes down to what we shall make of it. Populism is effective at mystifying and mobilizing the people, and while riots are effective at getting the attention of the ruling class, what we so badly need is a new political theory to articulate our needs and demands in an uncertain future. It is unclear to me whether that remains possible within the present paradigm. Ideas that come to us from the previous centuries may no longer equip us to survive the future appropriately. We need a leadership that is responsive to Black and Indigenous voice, protective of Trans bodies, affirming of all citizens regardless of intersecting categories of identity; we need leaders who are responsive to the environmental and biodiversity crises that are the results of catastrophic climate change. We need universal healthcare and a liveable wage. This is our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The current system may very well be unreformable. Perhaps Audre Lorde is right when she says: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Further Reading

Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding. New York: Garrett. 1968.

Butler, Judith. “On Critiques of Liberal Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual.” University College of Dublin. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzrO8cmoBcw>

Chomsky, Noam. “Noam Chomsky on Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response, Bernie Sanders & What Gives Him Hope.” Democracy Now. Pacifica Radio. 10.April 2020. <https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/10/noam_chomsky_trump_us_coronavirus_response>

Day, Thomas (1831) [1784]. Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes. Boston, MA: Garrison and Knapp. p. 10

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press. 2018.

Fideler, David. Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. Simon and Schuster. 2013.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Herman, Edward S, and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Jefferson, Thomas, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, et.al. The Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia. 1776.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2007.

Langan, Jeffrey. Liberalism’s Success, Our Failure.

Madison, James, et.al. The Constitution of the United States. Philadelphia. 1787.

Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: H.Regnery. 1959.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Wage-labor and Capital. Vancouver: Whitehead Estate, 1919.

Schwartz, Joseph M . “Liberalism’s Crisis, Socialism’s Promise.” Jacobin. 2016.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press, 1998.

Stanley, Timothy & Alexander Lee. “It’s Still Not the End of History.” The Atlantic. September 2014.

Thorn, Olly. “What Was Liberalism?” parts 1–4. Philosophy Tube. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlLgvSduugI>

<https://youtu.be/L1jJXfufMzc>

<https://youtu.be/pzVf9ce80Nc>

<https://youtu.be/7gCspHmTCpQ>

Wolff, Richard D. “Is the Coronavirus the End of Capitalism and the Revival of Socialism?” acTVism Munich. 17 April 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVr9hH6aBg0>

Wynn, Natalie. “What’s Wrong WIth Capitalism?” parts 1 & 2. Contrapoints. 2017. <https://youtu.be/gJW4-cOZt8A>

<https://youtu.be/AR7ryg1w_IQ>