Whatever country you’re in, the right-wing (or center-right if you’ve got fascists) tend to be a bit more shameless and psychopathic with their neoliberalism.
So tax cuts for the rich, deregulation until disaster, cut social services but keep letting your friends and donors overcharge tenfold for government contracts, hand them monopolies by privatising critical services then line their pockets further by letting them demand ransom payments on top, open hostility towards unions, that kind of stuff.
This is the Reagan and Thatcher way, they’ve just learned to never use the word “neoliberalism” in public because if people don’t know the word, they can’t find the studies that show it never actually works.
But unfortunately, in most wealthy countries, the left-wing parties are doing the same thing, just slower and with a well practised frown.
They’ll still give tax breaks to the rich, but they’ll throw in some crumbs for the middle class. They won’t read their climate policy directly from an oil company email, but they’ll still prioritise millions of dollars over millions of lives.
Often, they work as a holding pattern. They pick a small number of social issues that won’t touch the rich and work on those. Things like gay marriage, legal weed and helping the native people who weren’t genocided. Some infrastructure here and there (which still lines the pockets of friends and donors, but we actually get something back in return).
But they won’t actually undo any of the previous neoliberalism. They won’t nationalise critical infrastructure or significantly expand social services (for example, expanding universal healthcare to cover dental). They’ll keep most of the previous budget cuts, maybe undoing half of one here and there as part of the “pretending to be two different parties” pantomime.
There will be genuine progressives among them (much like fascists in the conservatives) but they never weild real power, always being outnumbered by faceless neoliberals at all times. But they’re basically PR, making the party look more (or less) progressive than it really is and serving as a litmus test for “how many crumbs will it take to keep us from the guillotine”.
One of the most high profile examples of this was Bernie Sanders, a genuine progressive that had a genuine shot at the presidency and once there, might make actual changes.
So left-wing politicians, right-wing politicians, left-wing for-profit media empires, right-wing for-profit media empires, progressive business leaders and conservative business leaders all joined together to undermine and attack him in an act of class solidarity that socialists and communists can only dream of.
Instead we got Hillary who offered crumbs or Trump who offered racism. Now we have Biden, offering slightly larger crumbs than expected because polling showed that “eat the rich” was gaining momentum.
Which is probably more than you ever cared to know about neoliberalism (and definitely more than I care to edit), but it’s important to identify it and challenge it.
With social media astro-turfing now being the most effective way to win an election and AI poised to be the most effective propaganda/mind-control tool ever created, we have a very small window to end this “endless financial growth forever” insanity before it kills hundreds of millions of people.
Unfortunately, not really.
Whatever country you’re in, the right-wing (or center-right if you’ve got fascists) tend to be a bit more shameless and psychopathic with their neoliberalism.
So tax cuts for the rich, deregulation until disaster, cut social services but keep letting your friends and donors overcharge tenfold for government contracts, hand them monopolies by privatising critical services then line their pockets further by letting them demand ransom payments on top, open hostility towards unions, that kind of stuff.
This is the Reagan and Thatcher way, they’ve just learned to never use the word “neoliberalism” in public because if people don’t know the word, they can’t find the studies that show it never actually works.
But unfortunately, in most wealthy countries, the left-wing parties are doing the same thing, just slower and with a well practised frown.
They’ll still give tax breaks to the rich, but they’ll throw in some crumbs for the middle class. They won’t read their climate policy directly from an oil company email, but they’ll still prioritise millions of dollars over millions of lives.
Often, they work as a holding pattern. They pick a small number of social issues that won’t touch the rich and work on those. Things like gay marriage, legal weed and helping the native people who weren’t genocided. Some infrastructure here and there (which still lines the pockets of friends and donors, but we actually get something back in return).
But they won’t actually undo any of the previous neoliberalism. They won’t nationalise critical infrastructure or significantly expand social services (for example, expanding universal healthcare to cover dental). They’ll keep most of the previous budget cuts, maybe undoing half of one here and there as part of the “pretending to be two different parties” pantomime.
There will be genuine progressives among them (much like fascists in the conservatives) but they never weild real power, always being outnumbered by faceless neoliberals at all times. But they’re basically PR, making the party look more (or less) progressive than it really is and serving as a litmus test for “how many crumbs will it take to keep us from the guillotine”.
One of the most high profile examples of this was Bernie Sanders, a genuine progressive that had a genuine shot at the presidency and once there, might make actual changes.
So left-wing politicians, right-wing politicians, left-wing for-profit media empires, right-wing for-profit media empires, progressive business leaders and conservative business leaders all joined together to undermine and attack him in an act of class solidarity that socialists and communists can only dream of.
Instead we got Hillary who offered crumbs or Trump who offered racism. Now we have Biden, offering slightly larger crumbs than expected because polling showed that “eat the rich” was gaining momentum.
Which is probably more than you ever cared to know about neoliberalism (and definitely more than I care to edit), but it’s important to identify it and challenge it.
With social media astro-turfing now being the most effective way to win an election and AI poised to be the most effective propaganda/mind-control tool ever created, we have a very small window to end this “endless financial growth forever” insanity before it kills hundreds of millions of people.