On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:23 PM, Brian Holmes <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
> This is the endgame of the neoliberal program for the total makeover of
> society, which began in the early Seventies with the Powell memo and the
> Trilateral Commission declaration on "too much democracy." I
>
Naw. Neoliberalism is not really an institution-conceived and -directed
thing like you seem to think. To the extent that the term usefully
describes anything, it would apply to a more or less improvised set of
policy and political responses to both the economic downturn of 1973-82 and
worldwide resistance and refusal. I know apres Harvey the left thing to do
is draw a straight line from the Chicago School to Chile et al., as if all
'ruling elites' had to do was devise a program and administer it on the
world. But that's bad history as well as bad theory and is closer to
rightwing conspiricizing ("inter-elite conflicts") than Marxist analysis.
Does this bad theory matter ultimately? Probably not, but only because
people resisting the current world tend to not care when intellectuals (or
is it soothsayers?) notify them that the endgame is here. Just as the
intellectual/philosophical reasonings behind neoliberalism came only after
their policy tenets were implemented, so left conjunctural analysis tails
popular movement, but usually does it poorly and misses the point.
It is remarkable, though, that you can write mellifluously about Russia and
Trump and psy-ops etc., but end up not having a single word to say about
the fact that the fascist US president and his coterie are working on many
fronts with the Russian state and its offshoots on reviving a pan-Western
traditionalism that is racist, sexist, antiqueer, and eugenicist. That
stuff is less sexy than brainwashing is, but it hits people where they live
and comprises the actual content that's being whispered into people's ears.
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
