On Understanding the Violence of Poverty

Posted on September 20, 2020 by greg

Poverty is a socio-economic issue. Socio-economic issues, factors that can have negative influence on an individuals’ economic activity, includes: lack of education, cultural and religious discrimination, unemployment and corruption. Violence does not cause poverty. Violence is a symptom of poverty. There is increased violence in cities as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. Community level risk factors for violence include increased levels of unemployment, poverty and transiency; decreased levels of economic opportunity and community participation; poor housing conditions; gang activity, emotional distress and a lack of access to services. Many people who were already on the margins before the pandemic have now been pushed over the edge. Managing on a very low income is like a 7-day-a-week job from which there is no vacation or relief. Poverty grinds you down, body and soul. Decades of racism left many minority Americans with crowded housing, bad health and little savings, making it more difficult to survive the pandemic.

Why does this occur in society? At the turn of the 20th century Georg Simmel (1858-1908) wrote that with the increasing use of money people do not need to have emotional relationships in order to acquire consumer goods in the modern city due to the free market economy. As social actions have now become transactional, they now lack social significance to the individual. In fact, Simmel points out, it would take too much emotional energy to engage in all human encounters but, as a result, people become conditioned to keep to themselves and carry about their own business. He believed reality is essentially movement, continuous processes – with only the human intellect fashioned to serve as an instrument of action and not for gaining knowledge for its own sake. Then one tends to perceive reality in terms of structures and substances. With reality essentially a process, a function, an interdependency, Simmel argues, there is no such thing as society as such.

For Simmel, society is made up of the interactions between and among individuals, thus the sociologist should study the patterns and forms of these associations, rather than quest after social laws. He was troubled by this relationship, viewing modern society as freeing the individual from historical and traditional bonds and creating much greater individual freedom, but leaving individuals experiencing a great sense of alienation within the culture of urban life. In modern society, money becomes an impersonal or objectified measure of value. This implies impersonal, rational ties among people that are institutionalized in the money form. For example, relations of domination and subordination become quantitative relationships of more and less money – impersonal and measurable in a rational manner. Society is nothing but the sum total of the interactions and interdependencies between individuals – whose unity, in turn, is constituted only by the interaction between parts.

In the 21st century, coronavirus exacerbates poverty of the less affluent – as renting is more expense than purchasing a home – because more renters have lost their jobs at a higher rate. Structural violence in America is about all the previous administrations and congressional sessions which have largely ignored the issue in favor of corporate concerns, or private interests of the economic elite. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) postulates individuals are shaped by one’s gender, class, ethnicity, education while the historical time period which shapes an individual’s habitus. This, in turn, influences what one does in everyday life, which is dynamic and fluid. He identified symbolic power to account for the tacit, almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring with everyday social habits maintained over conscious subjects. He developed these ideas around the concepts of (1) cultural capital, (2) habitus and (3) symbolic violence.

Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that a person can tap into to demonstrate one’s cultural competence and social status (from Bourdieu’s 1973 paper). For our discussion cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society. The greatest social role of institutionalized cultural-capital is in the labor market (a job), wherein it allows the expression of the person’s array of cultural capital as qualitative and quantitative measurements (which are compared against the measures of cultural capital of other people). Our cultural capital gives us power. It helps us achieve goals, become successful, and rise up the social ladder without necessarily having wealth or financial capital. Cultural capital is having assets that give us social mobility. The more cultural capital you have, the more powerful you are.

Unlike property, cultural capital is not transmissible, but is acquired over time, as it is impressed upon the person’s habitus (norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors of a particular social group or social class), which, in turn, becomes more receptive to similar cultural influences. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This way of thinking often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.

Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups. It is often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties and is manifested in an imposition of the norms of the group possessing greater social power on those of the subordinate group. Symbolic violence can be manifested across different social domains such as nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic identity. Bourdieu made efforts to stress that symbolic violence is generally not a deliberate action by a hegemonic power, rather an unconscious reinforcement of the status quo that is seen as the “norm” by those who exist within that social stratification. In the current dominant framework of neoliberalism, individualism, and self-responsibility, symbolic violence often leads people to (unjustly) blame themselves for their own suffering while the role of society remains hidden. Social forms of domination, such as poverty, are symbolic violence.

The economy of the 1950s and 1960s was about an unprecedented rise in middle class jobs: there was more room at the top. In 1958, Michael Young wrote a futuristic novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire on a society stratified by merit. Young coined the term, formed by combining the Latin root “mereō” and the ancient Greek suffix “cracy”, in his essay to describe and ridicule such a society. The story was intended as a warning: if society was viewed as perfectly meritocratic, then disproportionate awards are showered on the elite, and contempt is increasingly shown to those on the bottom. Young mocked the existing education system in Britain, arguing it was simply a centuries-old class system in sheep’s clothing. Typically lacking the best schools, underprivileged children routinely did badly on exams – the standardized intelligence tests that consequently determined their social position.

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson announces a War on Poverty with the main goals of ending poverty, reducing crime, abolishing inequality and improving the environment. Johnson’s policy initiatives introduced programs that included the Food Stamp Act and the initiation of Medicare and Medicaid – poverty decreased and people’s lives improved from this legislation. Between 1959 and 1973, a strong economy, investments in family economic security, and new civil rights protections helped cut the U.S. poverty rate in half. Investments in nutrition assistance have improved educational attainment, earnings, and income among the young girls who were some of the food stamp program’s first recipients. Expansions of public health insurance have lowered infant mortality rates and reduced the incidence of low birth rates. In more recent history, states that raised the minimum wage have illustrated the important role that policy plays in combating wage stagnation. It is possible for America to dramatically cut poverty.

Poverty, specifically, is not a single factor but rather is characterized by multiple physical and psychosocial stressors. Research at the University of Manchester shows that children who remained in the top 20 per cent of wealthiest families over their first 15 years of life were the least likely to harm themselves or commit violent crime between the ages of 15 and 33. While those from families who remained in the least affluent fifth of society were seven times more likely to harm themselves and 13 times more likely to commit violent crime as young adults. The concept of symbolic violence helps us understand people’s acceptance of their own domination. By addressing structural violence along with increased awareness of symbolic violence, we could reduce self-doubt and suffering by legitimizing the difficulties of welfare recipients and those who support them, as well as providing a platform for dissent.1

1 Katie Smith. (22 Dec 2007) Pierre Bourdieu – Challenging Symbolic Violence and the Naturalisation of Power Relations                                                                                                                                    https://www.e-ir.info/2007/12/22/pierre-bourdieu-%E2%80%93-challenging-symbolic-violence-and-the-naturalisation-of-power-relations/

Posted in economic inequality | Leave a comment

Beware: Populism Has Created a Culture of Victimhood

Posted on September 10, 2020 by greg

Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies stoke racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. Victim politics is cultivated for a reason – to keep workers distracted from the real causes of economic inequality. Populism is the new victimhood – now propelled by the digital revolution and the threatened insecurity. We need to distinguish between victimhood itself and the politics of victimhood – the process whereby suffering is confected or conferred, and then ‘weaponized’ for political purposes.

Populism calls for kicking out the political establishment, but it doesn’t specify what should replace it. Populists are dividers, not uniters. They split society into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other and they say they are guided by “the will of the people,” according to Cas Mudde. The distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have.  It is based on your values. The narrative of “the common people” is used in an attempt to legitimize conspiracy theories and emphasizes the need to take action. Populists often ask the right questions but give the wrong answers. Populism gives overtly simple answers to complex problems – answers that, if implemented, would not help solve these problems – they are just replacing one elite with another.

The presence of cancel culture and political shaming, particularly on US campuses, is where these identity politics thrive, is forcing tension between groups of different races and genders as figurative walls arise between those that agree whole-heartedly with the leftist view of identity politics, and those that believe otherwise. The left has always been prone to hair-splitting. Meanwhile, just as populism undermines democracy, “cancel culture” undoes the tolerance such that as you cancel disagreement, you start seeing it everywhere. Cancel culture’s zero-sum game plays off disadvantaged groups against one another, rather as right-wing populism pits the blue-collar “left behind” against groups that remain marginalized, such as Blacks, LGBTQ, low-income individuals and undocumented immigrants. Amid the left’s Twitter micro-wars, its real enemy – neoliberal hegemony – remains safely out of view. While black, queer, transsexual and feminist folk bicker, powerful white dudes carry on running the world.

But it’s never been confined to the left – it was and is frequently deployed by anyone who can claim to represent a group with a grievance, religious, ethnic, national or whatever. After all, victimhood is Donald Trump’s main play: America is the victim of self-serving globalist elites (or Mexicans, or the Chinese, or Muslims) and he will save it. To say Trump is a populist is only a partial understanding of his success. Trump’s populism is a base populism, which excites the worst of the American psyche – the bombastic superiority paradoxically combined with a fear of the other – and offers himself as the only answer. Populism is invariably divisive, thrives on conspiracy, finds enemies even when they do not exist, proceeds to criminalize all opposition to it, plays up external threats, and more often than not insists its critics are working for ‘the deep state.’   

Donald Trump’s traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder involves a pattern of blaming others for the problems he causes for himself. He plays the victim card, for example, his attacks on women. His narcissistic pathology compels him to see women as inferior – any women asking an “impertinent question” is an affront to his self-importance associated with his high status. Trump’s populist policies include tapping the victimhood of white supremacists with accelerated race-baiting that serves his self-interest of winning a second term. Central to the psychological processes of the narcissist is the characteristic of “splitting”, which is a polarized perception of events and people into extremes of all-good, ideal, and wonderful or all-bad, entirely devalued, and demonized. Trump frames people or events in terms that are absolute with no middle ground for discussion. At the heart of this populism is the culture war divide between the so-called establishment and the people.

A gaslighter’s statements and accusations are often based on deliberate falsehoods and calculated marginalization. The term gaslighting is derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s insane by causing her to question herself and her reality. Consider Trump’s statement: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not happening.”  It makes victims question their reality, becoming even more dependent on the gaslighter as the only source of true information. In relation to hostile online material, the enthusiasts for chaos have no interest in whether it is true, nor even whether it supports their own ideological position. They will share hostile fake material both for and against their ‘side’, not simply for the devilment but because they see it as making collapse and chaos more likely. Social media has provided a huge proselytizing opportunity to those with destructive intentions. Many of Donald Trump’s tweets qualify.

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) claims individuals are in various states of alienation – the tension created between the way things are and the way they ought to be. Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly in the past were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. In contemporary usage, “populism” is generally understood to mean political movements and individuals who channel widespread alienation and frustration by claiming to speak for “the people” against forces that are said to be destroying cherished ways of life. There can be no progress, according to Hegel, without struggle. For Hegel, the struggle against alienation becomes the attainment of freedom.

Hegel introduced a system to study history – dialectical thinking – a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement with the development of freedom and the consciousness of freedom. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), one of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School, initially turned to Hegel’s ideas in his writing in order to explain their philosophical strength through the dynamics of socioeconomic contradictions. Marcuse uses dialectical thinking to expose the contradictions by which an advanced industrial society is constituted. The problem of concealment occurs here because not only does society produce contraindications in the forms of domination that come with them, it also produces the social and psychological mechanisms that conceal these contradictions. An example of social contradictions is the co-existence of the growth of national wealth and poverty at the same time.

Class and economy which until recently were the main ideological battle ground, have been replaced by culture and identity. Culture now actively promotes constant vigilance and outrage in response to perceived microaggressions and divergence from “approved” opinion. Historically, the left indulges in these victimhood narratives to a far greater degree than the right. However, cancel culture on the left is the mirror image of right-wing populism. Trump self-identifies as the chief victim of attacks, particularly attacks perpetuated by the media and Democratic party. Trump turns to victimhood culture to divide the population into two groups such as: strong on law and order compared to weak on law and order; Trump as the outsider while Biden is under the influence of globalist interests and “deep state radicals”. The goal is to distract attention from the widening imbalance of wealth and power between the vast majority and a tiny minority at the top who are accumulating just about all.

Hegel who saw a world governed by individual self-interest believed that we are controlled by external forces, and are nothing but pawns in the game. Victim identification is one of the strongest political forces in the world today. The apparent endgame of these cultural conflicts is perpetual one-party rule for Republicans, whose core mission is to enable the dramatic concentration of wealth within a privileged stratum, achieved through radical deregulation, corporate handouts, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Victimhood has been weaponized for political purposes to convince voters to support the project for fear of the alternative which is further stripping of their rights and the decline of safety in their community. The Republican slight-of-hand is to claim victim status while holding a viselike grip on much of federal, state and judicial power. Beware that populism of the right creates a culture of victimhood to use as a tool to sustain conservative politics.1

1 Zak Cheny-Rice (25 Oct 2019) Republicans Want Victimhood Without Being Victimized https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/republicans-scif-protest-and-the-politics-of-victimhood.html

Posted in economic inequality | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

In response to the fear of change

Posted on September 1, 2020 by greg

Know your place – poetry after the Black Death reflected fear of social change. Contemporary moralists complained about those who rose above their allotted station in life and so in 1363 a law was passed that specified the food and dress that were appropriate for each social class. In line with such attitudes, Langland railed against the presumption of laborers who disdained day-old vegetables, bacon and cheap ale and instead demanded fresh meat, fish and fine ale. The Black Death altered the fundamental paradigm of European life that included socio-economic and religious belief and practice, unleashing the forces that made the Renaissance possible. The Renaissance yielded scholars the ability to read the scriptures in their original languages, and this in part stimulated the Protestant Reformation. The 16th century reformers considered the root of corruptions to be doctrinal rather than simply a matter of moral weakness or lack of ecclesiastical discipline.

The Catholic Church officially accepted the doctrine of Purgatory in the 1200s – many died without last rites during the Black Death, so the concept of purgatory gave people hope that the souls of the dead could still achieve salvation. By the late Middle Ages, the practice of granting indulgences was associated with the interim state between death and the afterlife. For a fee, bereaved relatives could get a deceased loved one out of Purgatory. Indulgences were a way to pay for sins committed after being absolved, which could be carried out in life or while languishing in Purgatory. Leo X was Pope from 1513 to 1521, a member of the high-living de Medici family, dished out bishoprics to his favorite relatives and tapped the Vatican treasury to support his extravagant lifestyle. When the money ran out, he made use of sale of indulgences. The sale of indulgences was abolished by the Pope in 1567.

During the 14th century, a cultural movement called humanism began to gain momentum in Italy. Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science. In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly. As a result of this advance in communication, little-known texts from early humanist authors such as those by Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, which promoted the renewal of traditional Greek and Roman culture and values, were printed and distributed to the masses. The humanists believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life. Secular humanism posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or belief in a deity.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Albert of Brandenburg (1490-1545) was a young professional on the fast track of church success. At age 23, he was archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of Halberstadt. It was against canon law to hold more than one office, but everyone was doing it. It was a great way to play politics. So when the archbishopric of Mainz became available, Prince Albert sought to add a third office to his resume – this the most politically powerful of all. The problem was, Albert was low on cash. Seems he had spent his liquid assets in getting the posts he already held, and Pope Leo was asking a colossal sum to consider him for the job in Mainz. The normal strategy, passing the cost on to the common folk in the form of taxes or fees, was impractical, since Mainz had gone through four archbishops in ten years and was nearly bankrupt from supporting all those pay-offs.

But Albert had a good credit rating, and was able to borrow from the banker, Jacob Fugger. How to pay back the loan – Pope Leo authorized the sale of indulgences in Germany. Albert recruited Johann Tetzel, a German Dominican friar, known for his preaching on indulgences to handle the sales. Luther wrote his “95 Theses” in response to Tetzel’s activities. Luther and the other reformers became the first to skillfully use the power of the printing press to give their ideas a wide audience. No reformer was more adept than Martin Luther at using the power of the press to spread his ideas – his 95 Theses quickly spread debate through Europe.  Luther also directly contributed to putting the Bible into the hands of ordinary people, creating a highly influential German translation of the New Testament. Between 1518 and 1525, Luther published more works than the next 17 most prolific reformers combined.

But Luther wasn’t the last Protestant to defy a hostile government. The movement he started led relentlessly in that direction. Protestants asserted not the right to choose their rulers, but the duty to challenge them. In performing that duty, the Scottish radical John Knox wrote in 1558, “all man is equal.” He didn’t mean that the way we would understand it today, and he very definitely meant men and not women. But the idea had a life of its own. A generation after Knox, the Scottish King James VI was accusing his Protestant subjects of plotting a “Democratic form of government.” It wasn’t true. They favored monarchy, good order and social stability. Again and again, they were forced reluctantly to take matters into their own hands. They insisted that their voices be heard, and, when forced to, they took up arms against rulers who failed to meet their obligations.

Donald Trump embraces policies such as privatization, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and ongoing financialization of the economy. Trump’s privatization shifts to private plans that includes restricting senior choice of providers and expanding Medicare Medical Savings Accounts as a tax shelter for the wealthy. He wants to privatize the Post Office – a department that was created in 1792 with the passage of the Postal Services Act. The bulk of the $150 billion corporate tax cut put into the hands of corporations in 2018 went into shareholder dividends and stock buy-backs, both of which line the pockets of the 10% of Americans who own 84% of the stocks. Financialization creates profit through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production, enriches a select few at the majorities’ expense. Because of the way financial services are measured, GDP data does not measure changes in inequality. The consequence of such dogma: inequality continues to skyrocket ever since the pandemic.  

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store. Pictures throughout northern newspapers of Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body in open casket sensitized the public to the fact that his killers were acquitted, and drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. In 1955 The Chicago Defender urged its readers to react to the acquittal by voting in large numbers; this was to counter the disenfranchisement since 1890 of most blacks in Mississippi by the white-dominated legislature; other southern states followed this model, excluding hundreds of thousands of citizens from politics. Videos of the deaths of George Floyd and Jacob Blake have sensitized many to the fact that such police practices are just the tip of the iceberg of processes to remind the poor of their allotted place in society.

Fear is created not by the world around us, but in the mind, by what we think is going to happen, observes Elizabeth Gawain. The Trump administration’s failed public health response is mirrored by its failure to respond to the economic crisis, which has led to an economic fallout that sets the United States apart from other high-income nations. This creates the worst economic shock since the Great Depression – societies are in turmoil and economies are in a nose-dive. We fear new because of the uncertainty it brings – we might lose what is associated with change. Our aversion to loss can even cause logic to fly out the window. The Republicans need a distraction, and turn to their old playbook: an emphasis on urban disorder and racist fears of Black people moving into largely white neighborhoods is a familiar play. It has boosted the party’s candidates at least since President Nixon’s “law and order” campaign in 1968.

When cities move from crisis management to recovery, how can we make sure these unexpected experiences and the large gaps in urban systems that the crisis has exposed translate into more resilient, more inclusive cities? The most immediate need is to work with partners to generate the data required at the city and neighborhood benchmarks to better monitor and respond to changing conditions on the ground. Cities cannot fix what they do not understand, and this crisis has made clear just how little many municipal governments understand about what is happening in their cities, or the potential impact of different policy options. Cities need technical support and data to create integrated social, economic and infrastructure strategies at the local level. And at the national level, we need to improve governance to allow more seamless national-local coordination for emergency response and recovery. This how we respond to the fear of social change.1

1 Ani Dasgupta. (28 April 2020) After the Crisis: How COVID-19 Can Drive Transformational Change in Cities https://thecityfix.com/blog/covid-19-can-drive-transformational-change-cities/

Posted in Enlightenment | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

We Must Reign in the Plutocracy to Close the Gap

Posted on August 20, 2020 by greg

The job of the politician in a plutocracy is always to find the line that provides the lowest level of pay, security, housing, consumer protection, health care and political access for society so that the economic elite can extract and hoard the greatest amount of wealth, power, and immunity from justice for themselves. The trickle-down economics narrative is a grand illusion for those in power to promote to justify dominance over those who are less privileged. Of course, it is based on greed being a virtue, relying on a system to harness the selfishness of people and direct it to public good, thus freeing itself from the need to depend unrealistically upon the uncertain moral virtues of its participants. In the US during the second decade of 21st century it is necessary to address the growing gap: 80% of the national wealth generated goes to the top 2%; and 65% to the upper 1%.

Within the plutocracy the wealthy win acceptance from the entire political class that its largely speculative activities, such as financialization – the growth of the scale and profitability of the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy – are normal. Through this process the financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites gain greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes. In addition, the wealthy control enough of the media to ensure they are credited for being the economy’s principle engine of growth. In return, they are given privileged treatment as the well-being of the national economy ‘relies’ on them. Plutocrats make investments to ensure ongoing upward flow of cash. They invest in the political system – in 2010 the Supreme Court held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited, because doing so would violate the First Amendment. Over the decades they have spent millions of dollars opposing unions and supporting deregulation.

Illusion is the ability to manipulate how other people perceive reality. The low unemployment rate as a measure of prosperity is an illusion – the quality of jobs is deteriorating. The illusion of wealth has become a way of life for Americans.  What makes our society unstable is when the illusions around income inequality start to disappear. People can or are more willing to overlook income inequality as long as their quality of life remains unchanged. As long as the greediness within the plutocracy does not affect their day-to-day life – your retirement is funded, you can afford to take vacations – you are willing to look away while the economic elite are doing their thing. This “market society” is based around a market economy, especially one in which political and economic life are dominated by ideas of individual freedom and self-interest. Maintaining the illusion of prosperity, though, is critical to the economy as it is, because its foundation is built on consumption, fraud, credit and debt.

There is no difference between the fake news, misinformation, disinformation of today – such lies have been churned out for years, but today it is designed to support the plutocracy. There is an orchestrated counter-revolution based on polarization. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies stoke racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. Victim politics is cultivated for a reason – to keep workers distracted from the real causes of economic inequality. Populism is the new victimhood.

The populist plutocrat is a leader who exploits the cultural and economic grievances of poorer, less-educated voters against traditional elites in order to achieve and retain power, but who, once in office, seem substantially or primarily interested in enriching him- or herself, along with a relatively small circle of family members, cronies, and allies. Much like other populist plutocrats who have come to power around the world, Donald Trump used anti-elite rhetoric to gain office, then performed an about-face to govern for the benefit of the very economic elites he derided as a candidate. He ran as a populist; but governs as a plutocrat. Conservative populists target those with a monopoly on representation (journalists, scholars, established political parties) rather than those with a monopoly on production. The gap between Trump’s rhetoric and his policies is not all that uncommon for populists. In Latin America, for example, many populist leaders who campaigned one way governed another.

The “narcissism of small differences” was Freud’s 1917 term for his observation that people with minor differences between them can be more competitive and hateful that those with major differences. This concept posits that human nature is essentially egoistic, capable of forming groups only by virtue of shared enemies, a prospect made more depressing because it posits group identities as fictitious, contrived on the basis of denial and distortion. Freud’s theory explains we tend to reserve our most virulent emotions such as aggression and hatred towards those who resemble us the most. We feel threatened by the ‘nearly-we’, who mirror and reflect us. Freud viewed this as a narcissistic issue because the stress comes from looking in the mirror. The narcissism of small differences can apply to politics as minor differences between individuals and groups are particularly prone to be the occasion of bitter dispute.

The Tea Party was funded by the Republican elite in the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat in order to provide opposition to the new Obama administration and create a wedge issue for the midterm elections.  During the 2012 election cycle, Tea Party anger over Obamacare was misread by the Republican Party elite as principled rejection of social welfare programs, despite evidence that those voters broadly supported spending what they believed they deserved – Social Security and Medicare. The Republican elite urged voters to blame the recession on excessively generous home-lending policies, while moving to roll back regulations of one of their biggest sources of campaign money, the financial industry. The Republican Party establishment misread the mood and organized to support tax cuts and deregulation. Exploiting the Citizen’s United decision, money poured into a super PAC that helped Romney overcome more populist challengers.

The Tea Party was welcomed into the Republican Party, and went on to elect members to Congress who support tea party principles. Tea party members ignored the established leadership and created a dysfunctional legislature. The principles of the Tea Party remained alive, and Donald Trump has figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger. His economic policy resonates with the Tea Party adherents who have seen good jobs disappear overseas – his policy has these jobs returning to America. Trump appeals to resentment that ultimately rests on economic failure: working-class whites have been left behind by soaring inequality (but they mistakenly blame emigrants taking their jobs). Donald Trump – figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger – is superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base.

The plutocracy is an exclusive group sharing a devotion to ideas and similar ideology. Many of their reactions to the working class can be explained by narcissism. Extreme individualism leads to narcissism. Narcissism creates the illusion that once one has an idea, then it must be reality. It is about bringing individuals of like thinking into their bubble, and attributing unique or perfect qualities to those with whom they associate. This consists of an idea of a hierarchical system in which elites are superior, have no empathy for the middle class, in fact, express distain for those who they consider inferior. Narcissists cannot take criticism. The plutocrats consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, and punished for their success. The strong expend resources to secure a plutocracy to ensure their vulnerability to appropriation by the weak through voting by the majority is countered, such as Trump’s manipulation of the Post Office to undermine mail-in voting.

In 1997 Gerald Celente in his prediction in trends 2000 saw the increasing income gap being the cause of street unrest in the first decades of the new millennium, and the solution being the return back to democracy from a plutocracy. A consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is the end of our romance with a market society and extreme individualism. In order to confront a populist plutocracy, the system needs to be free from the corrupting influence of corporate money. Inequities – the unfair, avoidable differences arising from poor governance, corruption, or cultural exclusion – reduce the freedom and opportunities for an individual to reach their full potential in general, and wellness or good health, in particular. It is necessary to focus on the economy with its multifaceted connections to social issues, and build more equal societies. The new system must address the existing inequities to prevent this era of fear and hatred from evolving into a populist regime.

Posted in economic inequality, United States Economy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

We Need to Construct a New Politics of Truth

Posted on August 10, 2020 by greg

How do we approach the era of fake news? The contemporary neoliberal “regime of truth,” to use a term from Michel Foucault, greatly influences the ways in which knowledge is being interpreted and implemented. Disinformation and new propaganda can take many forms – from the use of false visuals or misleading headlines, to social media techniques that create an impression that the “majority” understands an issue in a certain way. In the echo chamber of the modern information space, the spreading of disinformation is as easy as a ‘like,’ ‘tweet,’ or a ‘share.’ For Foucault, to challenge power is not a matter of seeking some absolute truth, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. There is truly no universal truth at all, only systems of power creating a regime of truth.

During the 1940s, the tobacco companies promoted the health benefits of cigarettes – preventing colds and relaxing individuals. Lung cancer was rare in the early 1900s but by the mid-20th century it had become an epidemic. A 1950 medical report described a casual association between the smoking of cigarettes and lung cancer. In 1952, a Readers’ Digest article decried the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking. The following year was the first year in two decades that the sale of cigarettes dropped. The tobacco industry responded by setting up the Council for Tobacco Research. This meant denying the health consequences of smoking – deceiving customers about the true nature of cigarettes through marketing and PR, as well as damaging the credibility of industry opponents. The tobacco companies joined many associations who typically oppose taxation and promoted themselves as supporters of freedom of expression, but blocked making available any information linking smoking to death or any negative outcomes.

Today social media propagandists have out stripped the misinformation system used by the tobacco industry by applying techniques such as card stacking, wolf crying wolf, denying facts, narrative laundering, facts not backed up with proof. Social media gives populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. Politics of fear is used to get people to vote a particular way, allow excesses in spending, or accept policies they might otherwise abhor. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies. These “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it, or believe it if told.

Card stacking includes seeking to manipulate audience perception of an issue by emphasizing one side and repressing the other – basically to slant a message. Card stacking can happen by creating media events that emphasize a certain view, using one-sided opinions or by making sure critics are not heard. By card stacking device a mediocre candidate, through the build-up is made to appear an intellectual titan.  President Trump stacks the cards against anyone with different perspectives. This propagandist rhetoric confuses the public’s ability to reason clearly and attempts to suppress the opposition. This kind of threatening leadership creates a chilling atmosphere for anyone who dares step out of line and disagree. It is about highlighting good information and leaving out the bad. This is an example of authoritarian mind control. The authoritarian, like a cult leader, controls minds by creating a psychological split within individuals and within the society at large.

Wolf cries wolf is the vilification of an individual or institution for something you also do.  The fundamental argument is that race and ethnic-based hoaxes are typically employed by extremist groups to project victim status that in turn furthers a certain political project. The main objectives for hate crimes is feeding persecution fantasies and advancing a political or social agenda. Trump’s claim (delivered by Twitter) that Obama ordered his phone tapped in the 2016 election is to deflect from the controversy over the Russians supporting Republicans during the same election. Wolf cries wolf also refers to authoritarian leaders and propagandists in Ukraine and Russia, who denounced the protestors in Kiev’s Independence Square as fascists. In the same manner, Trump claims US is under siege from ‘far-left fascism’ in the Fourth of July event: “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

Denying facts or using a variant of “false facts,” occurs when real facts are denied or wrongly undermined. The facts of an event might be reported, but an attempt is made to discredit their veracity. Alternatively, the facts may be re-interpreted to achieve the same effect: to establish doubt among an audience over the validity of a story or narrative. Donald Trump has spent decades spreading and sowing dangerous misinformation about disease outbreaks – from falsely suggesting AIDS can be transmitted through kissing to warning Americans not to get vaccinated and falsely suggesting vaccines can cause autism. Trump continues to comprehensively misinform the public about the coronavirus, offering remarks riddled with false, misleading or scientifically questionable claims. As a result, the highly suspect claim that the death count is exaggerated can be smuggled into saner statements such as death tolls are uncertain or the numbers that you’re seeing in the media are misleadingly precise.

Russian-sponsored channels like RT or conspiracy sites, through narrative laundering, flood the public with intense negative messages associated with the initial story, amplifying or twisting facts in a way that challenges or dismisses the mainstream media’s description of events.  As the U.S. media sphere digests the story, the tale gains a life of its own, laundered from the initial obvious traces of interference. At that stage, the ghost media system gives it a further iteration of attention, reinforcing the story by quoting genuine national media sources about the initial story. The U.S. media echo chamber is an indispensable element of the information-laundering machinery, which unwittingly contributes to fulfilling its objectives. Putin practiced narrative laundering in blaming Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US election, a narrative that Trump now ‘believes’. For the 2020 election, narrative laundering will be one of the main venues used by Russia to influence the US election.

The no proof method is about facts or statements that are not backed up with proof or sources. President Trump insists there’s “no way” an election with increased mail-in voting will be legitimate. The subject has garnered increased attention as Trump has repeatedly attacked states for seeking to increase mail-in voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Documented voter fraud cases in the U.S. are few – and nothing close to the level that would constitute a “rampant” fraud, officials say. Trump doubles down, saying of mail-in ballots, “Nobody has any idea whether they’re crooked or not.” Voting by mail is secure,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, said. “And unfortunately, not only is the accusation that it isn’t baseless, but frankly, hypocritical. You look at Trump himself. He is an absentee voter. He’s the first one to try to undermine people’s confidence in vote by mail and elections in general.”1

Trump won the nomination as the candidate who lied the most, won the presidency as someone known to lie; has an unshakable base despite ongoing lies. Underlying social issues made this possible. His base is concerned about their place in the world, not so much about economic hardship. Rather it is about dominant groups that felt threatened by change, and a candidate who took advantage of that trend. The narcissistic personality is more of a store front designed to hide that there isn’t any there, there. Donald Trump uses Twitter with a deluge of lies, fake news accusations and outrageous claims as his provocative tweets create a chaotic, alternative reality. He sabotages democracy by creating his own swamp where one cannot tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts, and deflects accountability. The purpose of such activities is to turn the country into warring tribes by creating unyielding one-sidedness and enemies.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions: Power is all the more cunning because its basic forms can change in response to our efforts to free ourselves from its grip. Foucault adds that the essential political problem for us, today, is trying to change our “political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (where truth is modeled on the form of scientific discourse), in order to constitute a new ‘politics of truth’: “The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that ‘appear’ to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”

1 CEPA: Techniques. https://www.cepa.org/disinfo-techniques

Posted in Individualism, Objectivism Lost and an Age of Disillusionment | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Big Data Accountability and the Challenge of Institutional Discrimination

Posted on August 1, 2020 by greg

Discrimination can include comments, actions or decisions that make people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable, based on their identity or ability. It can also include policies, rules, and ways of doing things that knowingly or unknowingly disadvantage some groups of people, while privileging others. The unfair treatment does not have to be on purpose – it can happen when a person or organization does not mean or intend to discriminate against someone else. It exists presently, and the future remains a concern. The data-driven systems of the future, privileging automation and artificial intelligence, may normalize decision-making processes that “intensify discrimination, and compromise our deepest national values” (Eubanks 2018). The policy determined in the coming years about the role of big data in our lives will speak volumes to how we ensure the rights of the most vulnerable among us, in particular, strive to respect the rights of minorities.

Institutional or systemic discrimination is captured in everyday thinking at a systems level: taking in the big picture of how society operates, rather than looking at one on one operations. This includes ideas of mistreatment of an individual or a group of individuals by society and its institutions as a whole through unequal bias or selection, intentional or unintentional, as opposed to individuals making a conscious choice to discriminate. The achievement gap in education is an example of institutionalized discrimination. The achievement gap refers to the observed disparity in education measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. This disparity includes standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college enrollment and/or completion rates. “Defund the police” programs are efforts to trigger change and introduce police reform to address institutional racism.

Socioeconomic status, whether measured by income, education, or occupational status is among the most robust determinant of variations in health outcomes in virtually every society in the world (WHO 2008). Race still matters after socioeconomic status is considered. In particular, health is also affected by exposure to adversity throughout the life course. Early life adversity – poverty, abuse, traumatic stress – influences multiple indicators of physical and mental health later in life, including cardiovascular, metabolic and immune functions. There is a community cost to inequality. The non-equivalence of socioeconomic indicators across racial groups, for example, compared to Whites, Blacks and Hispanics receive less income at the same education levels, have markedly less wealth at equivalent income levels, and have less purchasing power due to higher costs of goods and services in residential environments where they are disproportionately located.

In the US racism puts you at higher risk for COVID-19. It does so through two mechanisms: People of color are more infected because they are more exposed and less protected. Then, once infected, they are more likely to die because they carry a greater burden of chronic diseases from living in disinvested communities with poor food options and poisoned air, and because they have less access to health care – testing is located in more affluent neighborhoods. Institutional discrimination and socioeconomic status disadvantages lead to over-representation of minorities in toxic residential and occupational environments that leads to elevated exposure to major hardships, conflicts, and disruptions such as crime/violence, material deprivation, loss of loved ones, recurrent financial strain, relational conflicts, unemployment and underemployment. Also, residential segregation by race is an example of institutional racism, has created racial differences in education and employment opportunities which, in turn, produces racial differences in socioeconomic status.1

Neoliberalism advances the view that economic and political freedom are inextricably linked. Milton Friedman preached that through the elimination of centralized power whether in government or private hands, each can serve as a counter balance to the other. Friedman feels that competitive capitalism is especially important to minority groups since impersonal market forces protect people from discrimination in their economic activities for reasons unrelated to their productivity. On the other hand, economist Paul Krugman has argued that “laissez-faire absolutism” promoted by neoliberals “contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and distain for government often trumps the evidence.” Other scholars have argued, in practice, this “market fundamentalism” has led to a neglect of social goods not captured by economic indicators, an erosion of democracy, an unhealthy promotion of unbridled individualism and social Darwinism and economic inefficiency. This has been associated with a widening inequality gap between the rich and middle class.

In articles published in the 1930s, Erich Fromm considered the criminal justice system as an important legitimating institution within the capitalist social order. The state uses the criminal justice system to enhance itself, Fromm claims, by treating the criminal as a scapegoat instead of confronting society’s deep social problems. In dwelling on crime and punishment, the state manipulates society into becoming less attentive to the social and economic inadequacies and oppressions in daily life. That is, a punitive criminal justice system was employed to divert the anger of the masses from the oppressive social conditions that required government remedies. In brief, the criminal rather than state policy became the social scapegoat for social ills, economic inequality, and government corruption and callousness. Did this “criminal system” at least deter crime? Fromm observes that evidence consistently demonstrated that imprisonment, harsh conditions, and even capital punishment had no salutary effect on the crime rate and thus did not protect the public.

Fromm notes the criminal justice system has a decided class bias. Whereas the propertied class has opportunities to sublimate their aggressive propensities into a socially acceptable channel, the disadvantaged lacked these channels and were consistently more likely to commit crimes. Therefore, the reform of social inequities through the redistribution of wealth constitutes a more effective plan for combatting crime than a harsh system of incarceration and punishment that offered little protection to the public. The psychanalyst Fromm observes wars, revolt, and other signs of social discontent are not rooted in infantile fixations, but in external economic structures, concrete social conditions, and shared ideologies and emotions. Social cures or at least reforms could be implemented by changing these collective structures through political actions. The writings of men like Fromm have taught us that pure and absolute freedom is an illusion – freedom is given rather than achieved.2

With nearly 2.3 million prisoners behind bars, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Rachel Barkow notes that people have a sense that, while you lock them up; we never throw away the key. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person comes back out, and you are just kicking the can down the road. Incarceration is buying you some time, but the underlying issues the person might have, or the underlying cause of the crime in the first place, you’re just putting off. While you’re incarcerating people, not only are you not making them better, you’re often putting them in environments where they are likely to become worse. With respect to recent reform: The First Step Act established “earned time credits” that allows inmates time off their sentencing if they participate in programming while incarcerated. The people who need it most are high risk, while the only people eligible are low risk.

An Obama-era White House report entitled Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values states: “big data analytics have the potential to eclipse longstanding civil rights protections in how personal information is used in housing, credit, employment, health, education, and the marketplace”. To this list, we can add immigration, public safety, policing and the justice system as additional contexts where algorithmic processing of big data impacts civil rights and liberties. Automated, data-driven decision making requires personal data collection, management, analysis, retention, disclosure and use. At each point in the process, we are all susceptible to inaccuracies, illegalities and injustices. We may all be unfairly labelled as “targets or waste”, and suffer consequences at the bank, our job, the border, in court, at the supermarket and anywhere that data-driven decision making determines eligibility. While this threatens us all, the research is clear: vulnerable communities are disproportionately susceptible to big data discrimination.

The quickly changing procedures for determining and implementing labels from myriad data points and aggregations must be scrutinized, as policy struggles to keep up with industry practice (Obar and Wildman 2015). People of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities; Indigenous communities; the disabled; the elderly; immigrants; low-income communities; children; and many other traditionally marginalized groups are threatened by data discrimination at rates differing from the privileged. The maintenance of biased policing techniques to generate new data, raise considerable concerns for civil rights in general, and automated criminal justice efforts in particular. Addressing such challenges involves a combination of strategies for eliminating biases in historical and new data sets, being critical of data sets from entities not governed by law and developing policy that promotes lawful decision-making practices (i.e., data use), and mandating accountability for entities creating and using data sets for decision making.3

1 David Williams, Naomi Priest, Norman Anderson. (April 2016)  Understanding Associations between Race, Socioeconomic Status and Health: Patterns and Prospects    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles

2 Lawrence J. Friedman. The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet Page 35-36.

3 Jonathan Obar and Brenda McPhail. Preventing Big Data Discrimination in Canada: Addressing Design, Consent and Sovereignty Challenges. (12 Apr 2018) https://www.cigionline.org/articles/preventing-big-data-discrimination-canada-addressing-design-consent-and-sovereignty

Posted in economic inequality | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How Individualism Supports the Underlying Structures of the Power Elite

Posted on July 20, 2020 by greg

It seems like there are two conditions that must be met for something to be a lie: there must be a falsehood and that falsehood must be presented with the intent to deceive. Hyperbole, exaggeration and sarcasm may, strictly speaking, can be falsehoods, but the intent is clearly not to deceive. The pandemic exposes the truth: Right-wing “individualism” is being rapidly exposed as not but silly, but meaningless and even dangerous in the age of coronavirus. The Tea Party protests – which began during Obama’s tenure – were fueled by this faith that “society” is merely an illusion and that conservatives are a bunch of rugged individuals who don’t really need anyone else to survive. Certainly, in this far-right mythology, there’s no need to respect the concept of a “social contract,” or any obligations, such as paying one’s fair share of taxes, that flows from it.

Racism has long been the not-so-secret fuel for this cult of individualism. The rise of Barry Goldwater, with his hostility toward federal anti-discrimination legislation and social safety-net programs, was a direct result of white people’s anger at the civil rights movement’s insistence that black people be included in the social contract as full equals. The Tea Party was full of people whose newfound loathing of taxation was directly proportional to their anger that a black man had become the face of the federal government. The “every man for himself” philosophy is why Republicans resisted building up the public health infrastructure that could have responded to the COVID crisis with the kind of mass testing and tracing needed to stop the spread. Alexis de Tocqueville identified America’s apparently extreme partisanship on behalf of the individual as a democratic excess, and claimed it is the theoretical error that threatens the future of humanity.

Under neoliberalism, lies become an accepted feature of political leadership. The goal is purely to instrumentalize democratic legitimacy, in order to gain the power to make the necessary decisions that ordinary people can never understand or be persuaded of. The Reaganist rhetoric that has sought to connect economic and political freedom for the past three decades is all the more cause for anger. For if capitalism and democracy were never meant to reinforce one another and democracy is instead perceived as a nuisance to overcome, then neoliberalism’s most vocal proponents were either liars (as they parroted a liberating narrative while simultaneously seeking to curb democratic influence), or stupid (as they really believed what they were saying even as neoliberalism reoriented society in the exact opposite direction).

Citibank, along with Countrywide Financial, was making junk mortgages. These were mortgages called NINJA. They were called liars’ loans, to people with no income, no jobs and no assets. You had this movie, The Big Short, as if some genius on Wall Street discovered that the mortgages were all going to go down – all of Wall Street knew that it was fraud. So, the Federal Reserve has given Wall Street $4.5 trillion. That $4.5 trillion could have been used to write down the debt. And then we wouldn’t have a problem. Then everybody would have a lower cost of living. The $4.5 trillion could have been spent into the economy – they didn’t spend any of it. It’s a fraud. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner slow-walked a direct presidential order to prepare the breakup of Citigroup, instead undertaking other measures to nurse the insolvent bank back to health. Paulson and Geithner then write books to try and rewrite the history of the debacle.

Podesta staffed Obama’s top posts with Clintonite neoliberals, ensuring their ideology predominated in the administration. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, chosen precisely for the Wall Street-friendly credentials that would reassure the finance sector, was almost monomaniacally focused on protecting the interests of banks. Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag was a deficit hawk who wanted to put fiscal policy on a fast track toward a balanced budget. Larry Summers, chair of the National Economic Council, believed too much debt was the country’s economic problem, opposed infrastructure investment, and habitually dialed back proposals based on what he believed could pass Congress. It was they and others like them who systematically scaled down Obama’s ambitions, narrowing the range of possibilities available to the president, and ensuring the road to recovery would be longer, slower, and ultimately incomplete – not so much Republican obstructionism.1

Under neoliberalism the cult of individualism reigns supreme, forced upon us through culture, media and politics, it fatally limits our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics. If we can take care of ourselves, why can’t they? It is in this way that the very wealthy – and unfortunately, many others – justify their behavior morally and politically. They are not going to say they are greedy, selfish, avaricious, unfeeling or racist. Rather are they going to say they are acting on principle, especially the principle of the inherent freedom of individuals to freely pursue their own projects as they wish so long as they respect the similar freedom of all other individuals to do the same. These people are thus only insisting on the right to be left alone, and to dispose of their resources as they see fit. They reject the most basic of social contracts.

Libertarians have attempted to define the proper extent of individual liberty in terms of the notion of property in one’s person, or self-ownership, which entails that each individual is entitled to exclusive control of his choices, his actions, and his body. Libertarians can then extend their moral argument with an economic one: most of them will also claim that in the long run, the overwhelming majority of people will be better off if individual (and corporate, usually) freedom is protected in all areas at all times for all persons not imprisoned, letting the free market reign for the maximally fair distribution of all goods.  Those who don’t prosper will have only themselves to blame; that is what the concept of individual responsibility is all about. In this manner, individual (and corporate) freedom and self-interest will bring about the greatest utility for the society, if one accepts a foundational individualism as grounding ethics.

Modern capitalism societies are built on a dichotomy: in the political space decisions are (to be) made on an equal basis with everybody having the same say and with the structure of power being flat; in the economic space the power is held by the owners of capital, the decisions are dictatorial, and the structure of power is hierarchical. By introducing economic rules into politics, neoliberals have done an enormous harm to the “publicness” of decision-making and to democracy. By extension, Donald Trump is just applying to an area called “politics” the principles that he has learned and used for many years in business. While neoliberal policies created so many people living from pay cheque to pay cheque, now the power elite argue that reopening businesses is a necessary prerequisite to reviving the economy and improving the well-being of the poor and racialized who have been disproportionately harmed by both the lockdowns and the virus itself.

Individualism limits the public space for social movement activism. The challenge is not the amount of democracy rather it has to do with public policies that determine how the resources of the nation are to be distributed among the population. As the pandemic has demonstrated, however, it is not the existential dangers, but rather everyday economic activities, that reveal the collective, connected character of modern life beneath the individualist façade of rights and contracts. The costs and benefits of individualism vary with economic conditions. In good times, individualism encourages effort and innovation. But in bad times, it can be very costly, because it disincentivizes collective actions that are particularly important when facing challenges. Joanna Redden notes that “mainstream news coverage narrows and limits the way poverty is talked about in a way that reinforces the dominance of neoliberalism and market-based approaches to the issue” – see the 2008 crash.

Donald Trump personifies the indifference toward social externalities and the fake news of neoliberalism – power elites control a narrative in which their greed is kept out of public view for as long as possible. A primary component of individualism is individual responsibility – being accountable for one’s personal choices. It leads to placing the focus of responsibility for one’s health status within the motivations and behaviors of the individual rather than health status being a result of how a society organizes its distribution of a variety of resources, which supports Trump’s response to COVID-19. Neoliberal libertarians claim the only alternative to the system would be worse – socialism where people lose their individual rights – identical to Trump’s criticism of Joe Biden. While cell phones have enabled citizens to document how the cult of individualism supports the use of police brutality to control minorities, concerned citizens now see how individualism reinforces their understanding that something is seriously wrong with the underlying structure of the current social and political system.2

1 Branko Marcetic  (May, 2019) How Obama Failed             https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/obama-white-house-financial-crisis-hundt

2 Tim Coles (22 Dec 2018) How Fake News Perpetuates Neoliberalism.             https://renegadeinc.com/fake-news-perpetuates-neoliberalism/

Posted in Individualism | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Libertarian and postmodernist ideas can be used to legitimate political and social inaction

Posted on July 10, 2020 by greg

Postmodernism made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts and helped create an environment in which there is less pushback against populist ideas – like a body with a depressed immune system. The obsession of the libertarian with individual liberty crowds out the value of truth. In the end, their thinking becomes deliberate and contrarian for the sake of it. They end up believing what they want to believe – they don’t want to accept the truths of ecology, of climate science, etc. so they deny them – since the truth is an imposition on the individual and puts him at odds with willingness to accept other truths. Once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted there are many accepted valid truths and realities; once the idea of gates and gatekeepers was discredited, not just on campuses, but throughout culture, the American right could have their claims taken seriously. Postmodern intellectuals turned out be ‘useful idiots’ for the economic elite.

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all”, claims Adam Smith. In this Smith is stressing that the main task of government was the defense of the rich against the poor. However, democracy ceased to be the exercise of political power and was identified instead with the resignation from it and the associated transfer of this power, through the elections, to a political elite, even for the Founding Fathers. They not only saw representation as a means of distancing the people from politics but proposed it because it favored the economically powerful. For the Founding Fathers like Hamilton not only was there no incompatibility between democracy and the domination of the economically powerful but, in fact, this was considered to be the rule.1

The more or less simultaneous institutionalization of the system of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’, during the Industrial Revolution in the West, introduced the fundamental element of modernity: the formal separation of society from the economy and the state which has been ever since the basis of modernity. Not only direct producers were not able anymore to control the product of their work but, also, citizens were offered a new form of political organization called ‘democracy’, where political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives. In other words, the market economy and representative democracy had in fact institutionalized the unequal distribution of political and economic power among citizens. Furthermore, it could be shown that the gradual extension of the right to citizenship to the vast majority of the population – a process that was completed only in the 20th century – did not offset the effective loss of the meaning of citizenship, in terms of the exercise of power.

The neoliberal version of libertarian policies was based on the belief of economic ‘democracy’ through the market and individualism, in the sense of the citizen’s liberation from `dependence’ on the welfare state. Ironically, the main demand of the New Left for self-determination and autonomy was embraced by the neoliberals and was reformulated by them in a distorted form as a demand for self-determination through the market! In this manner postmodernity contributes to the neoliberal ideas that seek to eradicate the discussion of power asymmetries. Embracing postmodernism, much like embracing neoliberal ideology, depends heavily on the group to do your thinking for you. By happenchance, there occurred a coalition between neoliberalism, an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology – postmodernism – that appears to include everybody. Louis Althusser has remarked, ideology consists of trading in your real problems for the imaginary problems you would prefer to have.

One of Jean Francois Lyotard’s primary concerns was how metanarratives are often used toward “the goal of legitimizing social and political institutions and practices, laws, ethics, ways of thinking.” What are metanarratives? They are the types of grand stories that purport to tell us How Things Are. Marxism is a meta-narrative. Christianity is a meta-narrative. Libertarian neoliberalism is a meta-narrative. The rise of neoliberalism during the late 1970s in the West, however, fundamentally questioned the role of higher education institutions in the process of public good formation. Roughly at the same time that neoliberalism began to question the purposes of higher education institutions, theories which became labeled postmodern also emerged and challenged the notion that knowledge produced by higher education was liberating. The flattening of expertise and authority, the attack on professionalism and the rise of the cult of the amateur that these changes herald are also consistent with postmodernity.

Postmodern arguments also interpret the gross disparity of wealth and the abundance of famine and suffering in the world as the fault of modern thought, posing the question thusly: if modern thought and science indeed solves these problems, then why do they still exist?  Postmodernists believe the relationship between language and reality is unreliable because language is a subjectively constructed phenomenon that does not transcend time; a person can communicate utterances that are only true within the context in which they are spoken. Counterintuitively, in a postmodern context, words are never intended to be literal. Language and rhetoric are used elliptically, metaphorically and deliberately falsely, textured with layers of circumstantial meaning, designed to help the speaker evade answering a question or taking a permanent position. The theory of victory for a postmodernist is to either change the nature of the established power structure altogether, or to increase and maintain discord.2

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) asked: why did the revolution succeed in Russia, and not in Italy or anywhere else in Western Europe, where classical Marxism had predicted it would be more likely to occur due to the more advanced development of capitalism? He argued that the reason for this failure was an incorrect understanding of the workings of power in modern capitalism: while Marxist revolutionary practice had assumed that political power was concentrated in the state apparatus, Gramsci suggested that power also rested in the institutions of ‘civil society’ or the structures and organization of everyday life. The revolution would therefore have to aim not only at conquering state power, but much more importantly, to create an alternative civil society, which would have to be able to attract the majority of people by convincing them of the validity of the project, which was in turn premised on its ability to perform.

By 2020 many thinkers agree that prevailing neoliberal policy framework has failed society, resulting in monumental and growing income gap. The discipline’s focus on markets and incentives, methodological individualism, and mathematical formulism all seem to stand in the way of meaningful, larger-scale economic and social reform. In short, neoliberalism appears to be just another name for economics controlled by an existing economic elite. It appears that many of the dominant policy ideas of the last few decades are supported neither by sound economics nor by good evidence. This leads one to conclude that it is necessary to spend more time on the analysis of market failure and how to fix them rather than defer to the magic of competitive markets. The answer must address the growing concentration of wealth, the costs of climate change, the concentration of important markets, the stagnation of income for the working class, and the changing patterns in social mobility.

Foucault concentrates more on the ethic of truth as an individual position, while Gramsci is more concerned with the problem of a politics of truth, of the struggle for the means of knowledge and the ability to impose a certain “objective reality” within a hegemonic struggle. Cultural hegemony locks up a society even more tightly because of the way ideas are transmitted by language. The words we use to speak and write have been constructed by social interactions through history and shaped by the dominant ideology of the times. Thus, they are loaded with cultural meanings that condition us to think in particular ways, and to not be able to think very well in other ways. For Foucault, to challenge power is not a matter of seeking some absolute truth, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.

Since, postmodernists are relentlessly constructing and reconstructing their identities and realities, the postmodern self remains an unfinished project, with identity becoming a role and a performance in the making, temporarily selecting the one which becomes best for public consumption and recognition. What is our way forward? When faced with lies posing as truths, we should just call them what they are, rather than claiming there is no such thing as objective truth. All we can be certain of, is that insisting there is no truth; that claims of objectivity are always driven by interests of power, and that science is more objective than Scientology is simply not going to be. We need to get the gatekeepers back at the gates. If the media professionals restore public trust, they can still play the role of mirror for society, shedding light where there is darkness, pursuing vital stories that those in power try to hide from the public.

1 Takis Fotopoulos.  The Myth of Postmodernity https://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/dn/vol7/takis_postmodernism.htm

2 Larry Kay. “A New Postmodern Condition”: Why Disinformation Has Become So Effective https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/new-postmodern-condition-why-disinformation-has-become-so-effective

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Objective Reality: the Pervasive Atmosphere of Hostility of Neoliberal Narcissism

Posted on July 1, 2020 by greg

Powerful elites always have a justification for their obsessions. In the past emperors, kings, and aristocrats claimed they were God’s chosen. The plutocrats of the modern world have dispensed with God, but they have a philosophy that justifies in their minds the evil they do and the misery they cause: it’s called libertarianism, and Ayn Rand is their prophet. Objectivism is the name she gives to this philosophy. One thing about this pseudo-philosophy is that it is accurately named in that she objectifies people who are not entrepreneurs. She means us to understand the term in the sense that she is looking at the world objectively with no wishy-washy, goodie-two-shoes wishes and hopes obscuring her vision. She thinks human nature is purely selfish, and that any interference in the selfish quest for money, power and success is wrong. She divides humanity into creators and slaves – her objective reality.

Neoliberal libertarianism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of “winners and losers”. Neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right-wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success associated with growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008. From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet – this zero-sum game of winners and losers benefits only the far right.

As Erich Fromm argued, in order for any society to survive it must mold the character of its members in such a way as to make them comply unthinkingly with the dominant world-view. Broader social, economic, political and historical factors that are expressed in our current dominant neoliberal ideology essentially shape not only our understandings of ourselves, but also our understanding of what constitutes health and illness, right and wrong, success and failure. Further, as Fromm warned, if those character traits engendered by the extant socioeconomic system are unhealthy and destructive ones, that system will inevitably produce unhealthy persons and an unhealthy society. Neoliberalism has shaped and encouraged narcissism – creating a cultural shift towards narcissism in the last 40 years – as not merely something to aspire to, but to exalt. But what is it actually doing is destroying us.

Looking once more to Erich Fromm, in his book, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, he eloquently describes how evil is the outcome of a series of choices made that progressively cause one’s heart to harden. Two of the causes for this hardening of the heart are particularly relevant to understanding how neoliberalism has proven destructive to compassion and thus to justice as well. The first is what Fromm calls a love of death. What he means by this is adopting a set of values and beliefs opposed to reverence for life and respect for anything that promotes growth and thriving. This attitude leads such individuals not merely to inflict pain on others, but to seek to have complete control over them and to render them into helpless objects. The goal is to transform persons into things, like possessions. This transformation then facilitates and even justifies humiliating and enslaving them.1

Narcissism reduces everyone to an object to be maneuvered for the narcissist’s pleasure. Rand’s objectivism supports narcissism by demonizing altruism. Neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms, and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programs of redistribution, such as the New Deal, draw from these same principles and values.

This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political economy. Not the economy – rather privatization, monetization, deregulation, generalized competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalized capitalism. Over the last four decades, neoliberal restructuring of the economy created a symbiosis of debt and discipline. New legal regimes and strategic use of monetary policy displaced Keynesian welfare, facilitated financialization of the economy, broke the power of organized labor, and expanded debt to sustain aggregate demand. Republicans, in amplifying the individualist ethos, have amplified these dark, divisive, destructive and unsustainable forces in the body politic. Moreover, the narcissist is typically at a state of constant antagonistic warfare with others in order to assert dominance. Collective narcissists are a group of people who desperately need their group to be admired, and validated by others.

Since the election of President Trump, the Republican Party has become even more brazen in engaging in callous and ruthless acts that lay bare their utter disregard for human dignity and complete moral bankruptcy. Republicans have captured the ideal of American individualism, and taken it to narcissistic extreme. Depriving people of health care, undermining policies and laws to protect the excluded and vulnerable, stripping wealth and resources from those who already struggle under the burden of poverty. They have done more than lost their conscience. They are bereft of compassion and indifferent to justice. However, we must recognize that the insidious undermining of compassion and justice by neoliberalism contaminates all of us to varying degrees. If we confine our condemnation to the egregious actions of the Republicans, and fail to reflect on our own unthinking compliance with the dictates of neoliberalism, can we really hope to reclaim compassion and justice?

Although all concepts are metaphors invented by humans (created to facilitate ease of communication), Nietzsche observes, humans forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe they are ‘true’ and correspond to reality. In the 1980s the word meritocracy was being used approvingly by a range of new-right think tanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the West is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The rhetoric of neoliberalism is one thing; its reality is something else. The nineteenth century theory of neoliberalism (neoclassical economics) romanticized free markets; its twenty-first century practice (globalization) reveals a world-economy rigged in favor of the ruling classes and multinational corporations, at the terrible expense of the masses, the postmodern wretched of the earth. The normalization of hostile environments signals a worrying and global shift in values of tolerance, empathy, compassion, hospitality and responsibility for the vulnerable. The current symptoms and underlying trends of neoliberalism are hardly unprecedented. In fact, they remind us of the reign of imperialist oligopolies in the world-economy around the turn of the previous century, during the long wave of capitalist expansion from 1893 to 1914 that culminated in structural crisis and ultimately World War I. That crisis is instructive today because it proves that capitalism without planning is unsustainable.

The elaborate conceptual frameworks that guide economic policy-making have their own dynamics, distinct from objective reality. Objective reality can undercut certain ideas as it did in the 1970s, when poorly understood crises undermined the post-war consensus on Keynesianism – but never clearly dictates new ideas. Thus, the turn to neoliberalism and monetarism in 1980s resulted from the simple availability of these ideas incubating in right-wing think tanks more than from their objectively functional solutions to real problems. Inequality has not arisen by accident or due to the chaos of capitalism or ‘globalization’. Ontologically, critical realism holds that reality exists independent of our knowledge of it – critical realism insists that the meaning of such a reality is a social construction. The economic-political philosophy behind the social construction of neoliberal ideals is the determinant factor in preserving the status quo, even after numerous economic crises.

1 Frank Gruba-McCallister. Neoliberal Narcissism: With the Death of Compassion Comes the Death of Justice (3 Dec 2017) https://medium.com/@FrankGrubaMc/neoliberal-narcissism-with-the-death-of-compassion-comes-the-death-of-justice-d50ee4225c17

Posted in neoliberalism | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Reawakening of the Ongoing Class Struggle for Economic Stability

Posted on June 20, 2020 by greg

Neoliberalism intensifies and extends itself by displacing competing socioeconomic forms that restrict it. This means that a through, nuanced, comprehension of capitalism is more important than ever for understanding neoliberal social life and psychology. Marx and Engel’s analysis of capitalism remains a touchstone for any discussion of neoliberalism and its transformation: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For many today you can only get a decent income if you put a huge amount of hours in. Prior to COVID-19 around 80% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, meaning they have no significant savings. Now half of US homes have lost wages during the pandemic. The pandemic highlights the problems with the existing economic system. Our current economic system values corporate interests more than the needs of humanity and the planet. The economic system as a whole is rigged in favor of big business.

The French Revolution was certainly not the first class conflict, because class struggle also characterized the history of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In July 1791, Leopold of Austria (brother of Marie Antionette) instigated the Padua Circular, an open letter to the leaders of Prussia, England, Spain, Russia, Sweden and other nations. This circular called for a European military coalition to invade France, halt the revolution and reinstall the monarchy. The consensus now is that the Girondins wanted to militarize the revolution, to provide it with direction and impetus, to distract from domestic economic problems and to consolidate their own power. Some Girondins also believed that a revolutionary war would become a “crusade for universal liberty”, and challenge absolutist monarchies elsewhere in Europe. Notwithstanding, the French Revolution was the first important conflict of the modern class struggle, which continues today.

In making his case, Jacques Pauwels sets the Great War in the context of what historians call the long 19th century, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789 which, with its watchwords of liberty, equality and fraternity, helped inspire reformers and revolutionaries alike. The 1848 February Revolution – one of a wave of revolutions in 1848 in Europe – established the principle of the “right to work” (droit au travail), and its newly established government created “National Workshops” (ateliers nationaux) for the unemployed. The Paris Commune occurred in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-German War and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70). The program that the Commune adopted, despite its internal divisions, called for measures reminiscent of 1793 (end of support for religion, use of the Revolutionary calendar) and a limited number of social measures (10-hour workday, end of work at night for bakers).

Jacques Pauwels makes the case that World War I was not simply a war between states, but also a war between social classes. Pauwels claims it was wanted by European elite of aristocrats and capitalists who saw in war the means to reverse the growing democratization of society that threatened their position and power. The power elites feared the working class eating into profits by forming unions and demanding higher wages along with better work conditions. The elite believed that a war would crush revolutionary zeal, aspirations for democracy, and replace socialism with nationalism. They expected the demands of war would instill in the working class the discipline, sense of tradition and respect for authority they saw as so obviously lacking, as the pre-1914 wave of strikes and of socialist and feminist agitation demonstrated. In fact, union leaders travelled around the country to encourage the rank and file not to strike, but to volunteer for the army.1

In the ten years from 1935 to 1945 the working classes across the world were pushed harder in greater numbers to produce much more. As well as working more people harder for longer, business and government worked together to hold down their wages – so boosting industry’s operating profits. Holding down wages was not easy because putting so many more people to work ought to have pushed wages up. In fact, in cash terms, weekly wages did go up. But on closer inspection we find that hourly wages tended to go down. People were working for much longer hours, sometimes giving up their time for free, often losing out on overtime payments. What increases there were in wages did not keep pace with the increase in output. In 1941, Roosevelt helped war profiteers by banning strikes and taking away labor legislation protections in the armaments industry. In 1935 he had made a dispute procedure, the National Labor Relations Board, which barred wildcat strikes.2

The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1861 “to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society”. Francis Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay centers around the idea that now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy. It’s not surprising that Fukuyama, who was also a member of the RAND Corporation (the Cold War think-tank that was part of governmental efforts in the US after World War II to prove the validity and superiority of liberal democracy), made the political statement in 1989 that the liberal democracy with its neoliberal economic system is the best and final one in our history.

To account for movements not able to be explained by his formula, Newton proposed the hand of God to guide the planets in various circumstances – providing long-term stability to the universe. Adam Smith’s claim about the ‘invisible hand’ in Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, pertains to a scheme consisting of all the voluntary actions of people who engage in buying, hiring, producing, consuming, and selling, typically mediating these actions by exchanges involving money. Smith’s point is that, if certain conditions are met, these actions will collectively produce a result that a benevolent God would wish for us. Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action, uses the expression “the invisible hand of Providence”, referring to Marx’s period, to mean evolutionary meliorism. He did not mean this as a criticism, since he held that secular reasoning leads to similar conclusions. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, called Smith’s Invisible Hand “the possibility of cooperation without coercion.”

Neoliberalism was never really simply an economic doctrine. Neoliberalism was a political project carried out by the corporate elite as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s to curb the power of labor. It is the fear of the nation state as a democratic force that underpins the neoliberal project. It was necessary to separate the economy from the nation state – cultural issues could still be managed at the national level. The goal of this “double government” was to separate politics from economics. Hayek argued for global institutions to protect what he called the ‘negative right’ for foreign investments to have freedom from expropriation, and the right to move capital freely across borders. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world.3

Basically, money controls labor. If you can’t get the finances to start a business, you’re forced to work for someone else. Instead of financing small and medium sized businesses, who are the main job creators, to create goods and services for the future, banks in the U.S. mainly grant loans to people or businesses with collateral that’s already existing and can be foreclosed on; such as real estate, land that holds valuable minerals and oil, and profits from monopolies. Stock markets were supposed to supply capital to businesses in exchange for equity, however they’ve been turned into casinos in pursuit of short-term profit betting which way prices will go instead of assisting industry with producing more goods and services. The drastic inequality of the control of resources – as the big get bigger – creates the majority of the problems we have today. This breeds cut-throat competition which leads to crime, corruption, non-cooperative behavior, and many other negative side effects.

According to Adam Smith, everyone in the marketplace is operating out of their own self-interest. However, by each individual being so motivated by self-interest, they inevitably lose sight of how their role plays in the economic system as a whole. COVID-19 exposes the ugly underbelly of neoliberal fundamental economics. Small and medium sized businesses, who are the main job creators, to create goods and services for the future, are the least likely to secure bridging funds, will take the brunt of the economic downturn. While the global financial crash in the summer of 2008 sensitized workers to the issues, the class struggle is resurging around the world because of COVID-19. The goals of the French Revolution are still relevant. It is necessary to completely change the relationship between the power elite and the working class – small business owners, and redefine the nature of political power to bring about economic stability.

1 Dutta, Manas (2019) “Review of “The Great Class War 1914-1918″ by Jacques R. Pauwels,” Canadian Military History: Vol. 28 : Iss. 2, Article 9.

2 James Heartfield. (20 Jan 2010) World War As Class War https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/world-war-class-war

3 Phil Mullan. (22 March 2019) The truth about neoliberalism. https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/22/the-truth-about-neoliberalism/

Posted in Global Economy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment