Last month, Bill Fletcher, host of THE GLOBAL AFRICAN on TeleSur, held a stimulating and intriguing interview with Prof. Lester Spence of Johns Hopkins University. Spence just recently published Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, an expansion on a previous paper he published in the academic journal Souls. Later, Fletcher discussed the recent COP 21 climate change summit that took place in Paris.
Both issues share a similar trajectory. The black liberation and environmental movements were radical emancipatory political projects that challenged the basic coordinates of capital from the outset and contained within them the kernel of class warfare. Neoliberalism’s ability to co-opt these efforts and create a pro-capitalist version of these movements is not a new phenomenon, we can see it at work in the domestication of LGBTQQI or women’s or any other number of radical ventures that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.
Richard Wolff is a Marxist economist of great talent who lays out in this brief discussion why neoliberalism had to happen as a system and why capitalism itself is simply unable to keep itself away from the danger zone. As we have gone again and again through crisis after crisis, it has become abundantly clear that an alternative is necessary, something he explains with a certain deadpan irony and zeal indicative of a mind worth giving attention to.
But do not be scared off by this, here is a lucid, concise writer who explains economics in a fashion that any high school student could understand. Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote in a review I recommend you read:
Michael Hudson is the best economist in the world. Indeed, I could almost say that he is the only economist in the world. Almost all of the rest are neoliberals, who are not economists but shills for financial interests. If you have not heard of Michael Hudson it merely shows the power of the Matrix. Hudson should have won several Nobel prizes in economics, but he will never get one.
Hudson recently sat down with an interview with Eric Draitser of CounterPunch Radio (one of my personal favorite weekly podcasts) and gave a wide-ranging interview I found extremely illuminating. And if you really like what you hear, consider buying a copy of this excellent book.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN!
This is not a perfect film. However, I think it is quite accessible and helps us better understand the trends in this ideology that we all need to be wary of.
Over the past several weeks, we have carried a series of posts that articulate an explanation of the neoliberal epoch and how its coordinates have defined our modern discourse. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine is the half of the conclusion to this introduction of the trend’s macro-history before focusing in on specific elements of this discourse, including sexuality, ethnicity, and political trends. It has been my hope in this series that I might begin to widen the vocabulary of readers and help them better grasp the patterns the neoliberalism as an ideology of social control so we can hold our elected officials and their political appointees to higher standards in a fashion that is much more mature. By understanding neoliberalism as the ideology of the “tough on crime” police chief, the “urban renewal” pro-gentrification housing official, the “anti-terrorism” military leader, and others like them, I fundamentally believe we make the first step against their hegemony. Be sure to tune in this weekend for the Sunday Night Movie where we will show the documentary film adaptation of Klein’s book!
As the newest STAR WARS film trailer launched Monday night, there also debuted a hashtag, #BoycottStarWarsVII, that protested the creeping authoritarian regime of a film being released by Disney. The Hollywood Reporter, always my personal favorite periodical for dealing with our tremendously racist society, ran this story to explain how high the intelligence of this silliness actually is:
“#BoycottStarWarsVII because it is anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide,” read one tweet from an account calling itself “End Cultural Marxism.” (A subsequent tweet from the same account read “A friend in LA said #StarWarsVII is basically ‘Deray in Space,’ ” — a reference to civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson. “Jewish activist JJ Abrams is an anti-white nut.”)
Another Twitter account, calling itself “Captain Confederacy,” similarly griped that “SJWs [Social Justice Warriors] complain about White artists ‘misappropriating’ culture created by blacks but then celebrate a non-White Star Wars.” Yet another complaint read that the movie should be boycotted “because it’s nothing more than a social justice propaganda piece that alienates it’s core audience of young white males.”
Disney, who is releasing the new STAR WARS film following their purchase of the entirety of the LucasFilm Ltd. corpus from George Lucas some years ago, is now a haven of Marxism, cultural or otherwise? The irony is only matched by the stupidity in this statement.
Disney as a corporation headquartered in Florida is a major donor of the Republican Party, dependent for decades on a series of tax and labor law exemptions that make the operations and maintenance of their various Orlando theme parks tenable. The people who work at Disney are non-union laborers who put up with low pay and even lower benefits. There is a dog-eat-dog culture in the employee pool caused by the economic neoliberalism made manifest on Main Street, USA. Many of the performers who wear the character costumes are in fact low-paid student interns who use their jaunt at Disney World as a resume booster to ascend the ladder in the performing arts, striving one day to work in unionized theater companies. This ethic dates back to the days when Uncle Walt was busting animator labor union efforts and denouncing the union drive leaders as commies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The fact that the studio is responsible for a string of unapologetically racist cartoons during the Second World War that demonized Latinos, Asians, and Africans is icing on the cake. There are humans that actually think the folks who brought us SONG OF THE SOUTH, featuring a literal Tar Baby, are now all of the sudden Leninists?
Perhaps the best critique of Disney comes from Providence native Dr. Henry Giroux, the radical scholar and educator who was denied tenure in 1983 by Boston University President John Silber due to trumped-up charges and a blatant case of anti-communism. He has been engaged for the entirety of his career in a left-wing response to the neoliberal war on critical thought and education. To that degree, he has written valuable scholarship describing Disney as what Louis Althusser called an ‘ideological state apparatus’, a structure like the Church, major media conglomerates, schools, and other cultural landmarks that creates docility and obedience in the population. Here he is in a clip from the film MICKEY MOUSE MONOPOLY: DISNEY, CHILDHOOD & CORPORATE POWER, produced by Media Education Foundation.
He says later in the film:
You can’t get away, anywhere you go, from the products that are being sold and they all overlap so that if Disney produces a bad film, it doesn’t have to worry because, you see it, owns a television station, or it owns a television network in which you can run that film over and over again to massive audiences. Or, it can use its retailers to in fact transform it into a video and sell it in its video store, or it can market it abroad, or create a whole new toy line. Or, if we missed the point, it can begin to advertise it over and over in its newspapers, in its magazines, in it journals, so that eventually it will seem as if that really is such a wonderful product. How can it be in so many places? How could you miss it? I mean, so it seems to me it has the power to place that product, it has the power to turn every element of communication and information in to an advertisement.
That is what makes this accusation of STAR WARS being a radical film due to its multicultural casting so dangerous. By creating the notion that our standard of the Left must include a multi-national corporate entity with a profound and vile record of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism masked as anti-communism, we as consumer-citizens (and there is no real difference at this point) allow the cultural dialogue and intellectual discourse slide that much farther to the right. By doing so, we surrender that much more of our freedom and ability to think critically. And it is abundantly clear, when one looks at the curriculums of neoliberal charter schools and even public schools ensnared in the neoliberal net of Common Core, Race to the Top, and other bi-partisan educational ‘reform’ schemes, that the capacity to think critically is directly targeted by neoliberalism as the mode of governance that both the Democrats and Republicans abide by.
Of course, the typical liberal/progressive response is either to point out the obvious, that the STAR WARS series featured black actors like James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, and Samuel L. Jackson, or to celebrate this shift in the casting dynamics of the Disney corporation. But that is a failure from the outset because it lacks in its critique a discussion of class and how Disney has, along with other major corporations like Wal-Mart, solidified the hegemony of neoliberal orthodoxy in the American economic order. The problem with simplistic identity politics that only emphasizing things that are skin-deep delegitimizes critiques of a Condoleeza Rice or Ben Carson for their obvious gaps regarding economic issues. That is not to say identity issues are invalid, far from it, but one must create a multi-dimensional spectrum that reflects class elements just as equally so to be truly incisive.
Perhaps one of the better critics of neoliberalism in the past few decades was the late Hugo Chavez. He took power in Venezuela and directly challenged Sith-like anti-Latino racism of the Monroe Doctrine with his policies. But he included in his defense of his people the vital issue of class. As a result, the world has seen a ripple effect across South America. Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay all elected populist leaders that have challenged the Disney-fication of culture, including economic culture, and mounted a powerful counter to bland identity politics that lack the class element. These are the real Jedi Knights. They have the bravery to take on the Dark Side of neoliberalism, which breeds by design a Palpatine-like imperial presidency. The fact they all come from humble beginnings proves you do not need midichlorians, just a level of insight into the way money, power, and empire work.
Even though one can call my own politics Leftist, this is not a Left wing position. The recognition of and speaking against neoliberalism is harkening back not to the Communist Party but the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Back then, the major Keynesian economic engine that pulled the country out of the Great Depression and created the boom of the 1950’s and 1960’s was our war economy, first developed to fight the Japanese and Germans and then turned against our wartime allies, the Soviet Union, in a Cold War that lasted until Nixon’s detente policies caused what was known as ‘stag-flation’.
As we stand on the precipice of ecological catastrophe and ever-expanding Middle Eastern wars caused in no small part by our dependence on fossil fuels, the Rhode Island Democratic Party now has at hand the ability to create a Green New Deal that would put thousands more people to work than a Spectra natural gas plant will, unionized jobs installing solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric, and geothermal electrical generation mechanisms that would create long-lasting, good-paying union jobs. As irony would have it, George Lucas has also been open about how the Cold War and Richard Nixon inspired his original STAR WARS stories. In a 2005 interview, he explained that REVENGE OF THE SITH’s purge of the Jedi was actually a fantastic version of Watergate and the infamous Saturday Night Massacre.
Do our Democrats dare enact the measures similar to our Latino Jedis and practice some actual democracy? Or will they stand by while our tottering Old Republic transitions into a real Empire? If it be the latter, we might do well to recall the words of T.S. Eliot, ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper‘.
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A recent article in The Washington Post on the effects the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has on Woonsocket has once again placed the federal program in Rhode Island’s sights. Though the article is an indictment of our collapsed economy, a single part of the article focusing on the family’s finances seems to have caught the attention of both right and left. Here’s the offending part:
For the past three years, the Ortizes’ lives had unfolded in a series of exhausting, fractional decisions. Was it better to eat the string cheese now or to save it? To buy milk for $3.80 nearby or for $3.10 across town? Was it better to pay down the $600 they owed the landlord, or the $110 they owed for their cellphones, or the $75 they owed the tattoo parlor, or the $840 they owed the electric company?
And here’s Marc Comtois over at Anchor Rising:
They made some of the all too typical mistakes: teen pregnancy, move in together, have another child on their already low income and all exacerbated by a recession where the low-skilled are first and worst hit. Their economic ignorance and inability to prioritize is displayed by their $110 cell phone bill and tatoo parlor debt. That won’t help earn them much sympathy.
Yet, while they don’t seem to really “get it”–and I don’t want to give them a pass–society and the system certainly enable their naivete and ignorance. In today’s world, having a cell phone is simply a given–well nigh a “right” in the eyes of many–and spending money on tatoo’s is another norm, like getting your ears pierced used to be. That’s what you spend your cash, your “extra” money, on. Food comes from SNAP.
Here’s our own Dave Fisher, linking this story to the educational models of the state:
While I can certainly empathize with this couple, the fact that tattoos are an expense in a budget this small is patently ridiculous. Even for those with disposable income, body art should be considered a luxury.
Why do they not know this? Is this a failure of our education system, or a failure on their parents’ part? Is it just poor decision making?
In any case, the esoteric mathematics knowledge supposedly assessed by the NECAP has no relevance in their lives. Knowledge of simple Home Economics, on the other hand, may actually help this young family squirrel away some money and someday be able to wean themselves from the teat of federal assistance…
…And I’ve got some news for you, folks: When they fail, we — the royal we — have failed.
I like both writers, and on most issues they could not be further apart, but here you see them neatly align, almost parroting their arguments (though there are significant differences between the two). I’ll get to their arguments, but first I want to make a media point.
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