Restoring a market economy took priority over human rights and justice

April 30, 2018 7:59 AM

“Within the Mont Pelerin Society, the problem of how to end colonialism without destroying property rights was much debated. The English economist William Hutt imagined that voting power in postapartheid South Africa could be made proportional to economic weight. Milton Friedman agreed that one man, one vote would be terrible for South Africa, and Hayek worried that putting sanctions on South Africa would upset the global order. They didn’t favor apartheid, but they were against almost anything that might bring it to an end.” - WORLDS APART - Patrick Iber discusses the roots and causes of neoliberal/“Post-Ford” ideaology, it’s growth in European economic circles, and it’s destabling effects on nations and democracies worldwide. (The New Republic)
posted by The Whelk (15 comments total)

Welcome to Liberty Island.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:08 AM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

nice article. it recognizes the impreciseness with which some use the "neoliberal" label but offers a useful alternative definition. it is true that most western countries overprioritize property rights of the wealthy while paying only lip service to the supposedly universal political rights they guarantee to all. it is also true that without economic rights, the power of classical liberal civil and political rights is greatly diminished.

but. my fear is that (perhaps due to the excesses of neoliberalism as the author defines it) the pendulum is now quickly swinging back. western pols are now moving in favor of granting economic rights to a favored class or race or ethnic group in lieu of universal civil rights, as poll after poll shows young voters say they dont care about liberal democracy anymore and it's the economy, stupid. in the US, that favored group appears to be middle class whites. in europe, various countries have their old ethnic-nationalisms to employ.

what we have yet to see in history is a 1) largely multiethnic state wherein the people have both 2) universal civil rights (or something close to it) and 3) economic guarantees. we can have the first two (e.g. the usa), the last two (e.g. scandinavia), or the first and third (e.g. singapore), but not all three at once.

making these three theories all compatible is political science's version of the quantum gravity problem in physics.
posted by wibari at 10:36 AM on April 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

Jonathan Chait has expressed a common point of view when he has argued that neoliberalism is little more than a slur used by writers on the left to label varieties of liberalism they dislike.

To be fair, “chait” will eventually become a generic slur, too.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:13 AM on April 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

Jonathan Chait has expressed a common point of view when he has argued that neoliberalism is little more than a slur used by writers on the left to label varieties of liberalism they dislike.

I see this as similar to people who say "Please don't call us racists. We find it so off-putting."
posted by JackFlash at 11:27 AM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yet granting black South Africans suffrage rights would inevitably lead to a reordering of property relations, since the black majority would favor reclaiming land that had been taken by white settlers. This was unacceptable in Hayek’s view.

Now there's a telling statement.

It **WASN'T** interfering with the black people's economic activity when white colonists arrived and expropriated their land. But it would be interfering with white people's economic activity if black voters reclaimed the stolen land.

I doubt very much that Hayek would argue that a bank robber should be allowed to keep the money they stole because it is wrong for the government to reorder property relations.

I can't help but notice that despite grand pseudo-philosopic claims about property and liberty when you get right down to it the thinkers discussed in the linked article were basically about protecting a status quo and keeping the wealthy protected. To comfort the comfortable was their primary goal.
posted by sotonohito at 11:43 AM on April 30, 2018 [14 favorites]

western pols are now moving in favor of granting economic rights to a favored class or race or ethnic group in lieu of universal civil rights, as poll after poll shows young voters say they dont care about liberal democracy anymore and it's the economy, stupid.

Yeah, but isn't a lot of that due to liberal democracy's conflation with capitalism, and younger people being less into capitalism these days?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:55 AM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

I no longer follow the media's implicit assumption that rejection of some centrist-liberal thing necessarily implies support for a more right-wing thing. Lots of people are rejecting the center-liberal for the actual-left.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:30 PM on April 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

isn't a lot of that due to liberal democracy's conflation with capitalism, and younger people being less into capitalism these days?

maybe, but if you look around the world, you dont see a ton of western countries adopting shiny new universal social-democratic programs. what you do see is lots of them adopting nationalist rhetoric.

at the very least, i think ethno-nationalist parties in the west see economically left leaning youth voters as "gettable," especially if they can direct their ire toward some ethnic scapegoat.
posted by wibari at 4:39 PM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

what we have yet to see in history is a 1) largely multiethnic state wherein the people have both 2) universal civil rights (or something close to it) and 3) economic guarantees.

Switzerland is a multilingual hodgepodge of French, German, Italian and Helvetic ethnicities, and they do OK. They're not free of racism or religious intolerance, but they're certainly doing better than a lot of places on those fronts at the moment.

So, it can be done. It must be done.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:13 PM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

If you want to go deepe on this shoutout to excellent post by the man of twists and turns THE ORGINS OF NEOLIBERALISM
posted by The Whelk at 9:18 PM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's easy to not worry about defining 'neoliberal' exactly (although I'm sure somewhere in our theory is a good solid definition) if you just think liberalism as an ideology is pretty terrible. :)
posted by AnhydrousLove at 12:57 AM on May 1, 2018

This isn't complicated once you know the history.

(not to undermine the nice job The Whelk does by helping have access to this history)

nature of ideologies to see some things clearly and place other things out of view

All this is really saying is that [neoliberalism/globalism/competitiveness/efficiency/...insert marketing phrase] is useful for those in the know as a dog whistle. For those who aren't in the know, the phrases have the veneer of a compelling rational argument, when in fact it's just a power play of "my stuff" vs "your humanity". There's no true 'ideology', it's all window dressing for entrenched power.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 7:17 AM on May 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

William Gibson himself was afraid to call it. Capital is its own creature, and it is not self-aware, it can only defend and go into spore mode and then reach out blindly for sustenance like the slime-mold it wishes it was.

Slime molds are cool. No-one who was an animal ever died because of a slime-mold. They are opportunistic, but do no harm to thinking, feeling things. They are amazingly successful despite being so weird (single cellular membrane, tons of nucleii!) Capital needs to stop being so pathogenic and chill. Don't make death, death happens, feed off rot and move forward, make it into beautiful fruiting bodies. Nurture the soil beneath it, so the plants can grow more diverse, and the animals among them more wonderful.

We got Trump instead. Capital is a self-destroying disease at the moment. It has the capacity to be something better, but...
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:36 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Paper: neoliberalism’s war against the welfare state is working and constructing to the rise of fascism
posted by The Whelk at 6:55 AM on May 11, 2018

Is Capitalism A Threat To Democracy? ) New Yorker)
posted by The Whelk at 12:18 AM on May 15, 2018