"As I've argued in detail in the US quarterly journal Dissent, one explanation for this triumph of neo-liberalism and the economic, political, social and ecological disasters that go with it is that neo-liberals have bought and paid for their own vicious and regressive "Great Transformation". They have understood, as progressives have not, that ideas have consequences. Starting from a tiny embryo at the University of Chicago with the philosopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students like Milton Friedman at its nucleus, the neo-liberals and their funders have created a huge international network of foundations, institutes, research centers, publications, scholars, writers and public relations hacks to develop, package and push their ideas and doctrine relentlessly.
They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talking about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony. If you can occupy peoples' heads, their hearts and their hands will follow. I do not have time to give you details here, but believe me, the ideological and promotional work of the right has been absolutely brilliant. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result has been worth every penny to them because they have made neo-liberalism seem as if it were the natural and normal condition of humankind. No matter how many disasters of all kinds the neo-liberal system has visibly created, no matter what financial crises it may engender, no matter how many losers and outcasts it may create, it is still made to seem inevitable, like an act of God, the only possible economic and social order available to us.
Let me stress how important it is to understand that this vast neo-liberal experiment we are all being forced to live under has been created by people with a purpose. Once you grasp this, once you understand that neo-liberalism is not a force like gravity but a totally artificial construct, you can also understand that what some people have created, other people can change. But they cannot change it without recognising the importance of ideas. I'm all for grassroots projects, but I also warn that these will collapse if the overall ideological climate is hostile to their goals.
So, from a small, unpopular sect with virtually no influence, neo-liberalism has become the major world religion with its dogmatic doctrine, its priesthood, its law-giving institutions and perhaps most important of all, its hell for heathen and sinners who dare to contest the revealed truth."
So, if neo-liberals were able to decide something to be applied in the future and succeeded, why can't we?
Because we love spending time in remembering past thoughts? Are we walking to the future looking back to the past? Is that the way you imagine progress? Are we too old to shape our own world? Or is the nihilistic point of view of some dialectic professionals be enough conservative to consider the crash as an ineluctable event and admire it as the final bouquet of capitalistic history?
Will you love seeing more exploitation, people starving and runing through bombs? Do you tolerate current situation of third world people or may be you consider that point as a theorical matter?
No proposals, no risks! Is that your world?
I'm affraid that I'm loosing my time here meanwhile millions of people are dying in the real world..
So let say bye-bye to virtual games and reach tens of millions of people to change the world.
Don't worry we will keep you informed, by e-mail from the street to your computer in a tiny house somewhere in a quiet first world country...
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Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar 1060 Bruxelles
tel: 32-486 751 668
fax: 32-2 538 10 82
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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