If I recall correctly, the term “neoliberalism” wasn’t at all obscure during the second Bush admistration (at least on the left-leaning forums I frequented). If it is falling out of fashion in recent years, I suspect it’s only because people have failed to see how it applies equally to Obama and the Clintons (or perhaps it’s just wishful thinking).
The Chomskian critique gets lost during tense election cycles; everyone forgets that the modern incarnations of the Republican and Democratic parties are basically just two warring factions of a larger Privilege Party.
Engineering terms like “scaling” and “scoping” may help too, e.g., finding food in our gardens and our neighbors’ gardens and local farmers’ markets using locally shared FOSS social networks to time and chain together matches of needs and supplies.
This is the sort of approach I like to imagine is intended when @doctorow references integrating tech into social justice remedies.
I agree. Although, I have to point out that neo-liberalism isn’t the dominant ideology in solely the US, so American election cycles don’t really explain the lack of understanding globally. It is the dominant political ideology across most of the world, and yet most people don’t really understand it or have a clear definition of what it is, exactly (left-leaning internet forums aside).
I’m no fan of Mulroney, but he actually stood his ground against Reagan and Thatcher in many ways (but not all, of course).
Although they were all Conservatives, Mulroney was not on board with the policies at least as they were being implemented by Reagan and Thatcher (whether he would have gone on to do so or whether he would liked to have done so more slowly is wide open to speculation, of course).
Whether this makes him (or not) a proponent of neo-liberalism I think depends on how the term is defined (and when).
If we’re following neo-liberalism as a political-economic theory as it existed post-1970’s then I think it would be more accurate to see Paul Martin as the first overt neo-liberal proponent (And, ironically, the ‘Liberals’ in British Columbia under Gordon Campbell and, now, Christy Clark. The irony is because the BC ‘Liberals’ were ejected from the Federal Liberal party in 1995).
I’ve always found David Harvey’s ‘A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism’ a good resource.
I think this looks interesting, and I unfortunately lack the cultural literacy to decode it. I think the Matrix is a reference-rich “text” though … esp. for thinking about neoliberal norms.
The problem is: if the Earth is an experiment to see how many humans can live here without destroying the ecosystem, we don’t have a control group, another identical Earth. This one is all we got, and if we fuck it up, then what? Clearly at some point we will have to scale back human population growth if it doesn’t happen naturally, so we’re just debating what that optimum population will be, and we’re basing it on mathematical models that might not include all variables. In a complex system it is difficult to predict outcome, and small changes can have large implications down the line.
But do we know the consequences of that high tech agriculture? DDT was heralded as a miracle when it was invented, and it was high tech for its time, but it had unintended consequences on the natural world well outside a farmer’s field. I have a hard time believing that humans won’t keep making the same kinds of mistakes again and again. I’m not opposed to scientific advances in any field, but I don’t understand why population control has to be taken off the table. Is it just too prickly a subject morally or politically?
I would love to believe in a beautiful “Star Trek” future, where scientific advances provide for everyone, but the universe of Star Trek still has humans leaving Earth to settle other worlds. The Earth is not infinite, and I would rather live in a nice green sparsely populated neighborhood than a noisy overcrowded one.
I assume you’ve heard of human capital, long-lived infrastructure, and the like? Productivity gains, etc.? We’re probably on the same page, largely, but just because “technology” is a commonly misused term when it comes to growth that’s currently/recently measured doesn’t mean we have to run back to debunked demographic oopsies from Malthus and Erlich.
Instead, give Veblen and Sen another look. Give up on trying to push the idea of shrinking and instead to maintaining the value of what we make and increasing the adaptability and usefulness of what we make.
Talk about the wastefulness of unnecessary transportation costs rather than moralizing about local production. It amounts to the same thing in some ways, but moral arguments only work when talking about what we are being restricted from doing (our rights to use our skills and experience for more productive, sustainable local production) rather than trying to impose unworkable, morally-worded caps on what we can use, or, sigh, “consume”.
Without the flexibility to respond to material constraints, collapse ideology is simply driving us toward a lame, unnecessary global genocide driven by owners. It won’t happen because there are so many other options, but collapsers are driven by fear of the many. They, or you, don’t give people the credit for being able to adapt because you believe the aristocratic propaganda that the little people will always act like a ravenous horde, eating everything in sight and shitting in our wells.
I disagree with the premise. “Neoliberalism” is an ideology. Thatcher and Reagan didn’t have any ideology that they stuck to. What they had was tactics.
Thatcher saw the decline of the old working class, replaced by the middle class. And that the poor tended not to vote. She saw that she could win elections on a platform that simply ignored the wishes and needs of the poor. Reagan and Mulroney followed her lead.
That worked so long as you had a large, largely content middle class.
But the Thatcher/Reagan crowd have been robbing the middle class of what wealth they had, taking us back to a wealthy few vs. the poor working class. And so her strategy has stopped working.
Or maybe not. Cory’s twitter exchange here seems counter to this post:
Chris Oestereich - I want the high tech society, but could we cut back on overall use while we get that going?
Cory Doctorow - We certainly can! By developing more energy efficient technologies, better renewables, and better storage
Well that’s exactly what conventional left-leaning environmentalists are proposing. It is clearly better to have energy efficiency, renewables, storage etc AND transition away from an economy built on stuff that’s designed to be disposed of in a matter of months to one built on stuff that’s designed to last for decades. That’s not austerity. It’s just good design and resource efficiency.
On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL [tetraethyllead]. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. . . . Midgley would later have to take leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.
This won’t happen if we continue the fiction that owners of patents have the right to restrict their use. But yes, collapse isn’t anything close to inevitable.
I didn’t think pun right away.