En el corazón del
Imperio ya se aprecian en toda su magnitud las consecuencias del modelo
económico, político y social que comenzara a aplicarse hace casi medio siglo en
la periferia del mundo. Hablamos del neoliberalismo, chicos. Concordantemente,
intelectuales de distintas corrientes del pensamiento comienzan a repensar esa
cosa tan curiosa que hasta ahora les pasaba alegremente por el costado. Rescatamos hoy este
doloroso ensayo de Henry Giroux para CounterPunch. Acá va:
Título: The Mad
Violence of Casino Capitalism
Texto: American
society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the
future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark
abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become
imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the
essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what
Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times. The politics of terror, a
culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence dominate America’s cultural
apparatuses and legitimate the ongoing militarization of public life and
American society.
Unchecked
corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and
depoliticization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining
American society. In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal modern-day
capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal
capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of
oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the
commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the
planet itself. The dystopian moment facing the United States, if not most of
the globe, can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention “that it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on
to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”1
One way of
understanding Jameson’s comment is through the ideological and affective spaces
in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are
normalized. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit
of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams
and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing
bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all
suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we
no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing
it.”[i]
Yet, there is a
growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence
and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will
experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet
itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological
disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian
possibility.2 The undermining of public trust and public values has now given
way to a market-driven discourse that produces a society that has lost any
sense of democratic vision and social purpose and in doing so resorts to state
terrorism, the criminalization of social problems, and culture of cruelty.
Institutions that were once defined to protect and enhance human life now
function largely to punish and maim.
As Michael Yates
points out throughout this book, capitalism is devoid of any sense of social
responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at
all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no
longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they
either exploit or consider disposable.
Security and
crisis have become the new passwords for imposing a culture of fear and for
imposing what Giorgio Agamben has called a permanent state of yatesexception
and a technology of government repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of
crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police, curtailing civil
liberties, expanding the punishing state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and
supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major narratives that define the United
States and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral
and political conviction, if not accountability.
In the midst of
this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that
not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the
middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth
and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most
people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies.
Michael Yates in
The Great Inequality provides a road map for both understanding the registers
that produce inequality as well as the magnitude of the problems it poses
across a range of commanding spheres extending from health care and the
political realm to the environment and education. At the same time, he exposes
the myths that buttress the ideology of inequality. These include an unchecked
belief in boundless economic growth, the notion that inequality is chosen
freely by individuals in the market place, and the assumption that consumption
is the road to happiness. Unlike a range of recent books on inequality, Yates
goes beyond exposing the mechanisms that drive inequality and the panoply of
commanding institutions that support it. He also provides a number of
strategies that challenge the deep concentrations of wealth and power while delivering
a number of formative proposals that are crucial for nurturing a radical
imagination and the social movements necessary to struggle for a society that
no longer equates capitalism with democracy.
As Yates makes
clear throughout this book, money now engulfs everything in this new age of
disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter
the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in
the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income,
power, and opportunity. Such power breeds more than anti-democratic tendencies,
it also imposes constraints, rules, and prohibitions on the 99 percent whose
choices are increasingly limited to merely trying to survive. Capitalists are
no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to
dominate economic, political, and social life. For Yates, it is all the more
crucial to understand how power works under the reign of global capitalism in
order to grasp the magnitude of inequality, the myriad of factors that produce
it, and what might be done to change it.
Accompanying the
rise of a savage form of capitalism and the ever-expanding security state is
the emergence of new technologies and spaces of control. One consequence is
that labor power is increasing produced by machines and robotic technologies
which serve to create “a large pool of more or less unemployed people.”
Moreover, as new technologies produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is
being used as a repressive tool for collecting “unlimited biometric and genetic
information of all of its citizens.”[iii]
The ongoing
attack on the working class is matched by new measures of repression and
surveillance. This new weaponized face of capitalism is particularly ominous
given the rise of the punishing state and the transformation of the United
States from a democracy in progress to a fully developed authoritarian
society. Every act of protest is now
tainted, labeled by the government and mainstream media as either treasonous or
viewed as a potential act of terrorism. For example, animal rights activists
are put on the terrorist list. Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden are
painted as traitors. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement are put under surveillance,[iv]
all electronic communication is now subject to government spying, and academics
who criticize government policy are denied tenure or worse.
Under
neoliberalism, public space is increasingly converted into private space
undermining those sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of social
responsibility, while also serving to transform citizenship into mostly an act
of consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of crisis is used both to
legitimate a system of economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an
increasing process of depoliticization. Within this fog of market induced
paralysis, language is subject to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a
commodity, and subject to the “tyranny of the moment….emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized
and squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to carry.”[v]
As the latest
stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and
political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid
concentration of capital, particularly financial capital.[vi] As a political
project it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public
services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks
on unions, and routine violations of labor laws.”[vii] As an ideology, it casts
all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit making
as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of
citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve
all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a
mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven
by a survival-of-the fittest-ethic, grounded in the idea of the free,
possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and
institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs.
As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public
services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public
problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods
and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial
institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions,
and the endless marketization and commodification of society.
Nothing engenders
the wrath of conservatives more than the existence of the government providing
a universal safety net, especially one that works, such as either Medicare or
Social Security. As Yates points out, government is viewed by capitalists as an
institution that gets in the way of capital. One result is a weakening of
social programs and provisions. As Paul Krugman observes regarding the ongoing
conservative attacks on Medicare, “The real reason conservatives want to do
away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the
government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it
even more when such programs are successful.”[viii] In opposition to Krugman
and other liberal economists, Michael Yates argues rightly in this book that
the issue is not simply preserving Medicare but eliminating the predatory
system that disavows equality of wealth, power, opportunity, and health care
for everyone.
Neoliberalism has
put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public
pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace
freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of
social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief
that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s
individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and
compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization
and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult
to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political
considerations. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people
to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it
produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments
of society– now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed
by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and
political elite. Unable to make their voices heard and lacking any viable
representation in the process makes clear the degree to which the American
public, in particular, are suffering under a democratic deficit producing a
profound dissatisfaction that does not always translate into an understanding
of how neoliberal capitalism has destroyed democracy or what it might mean to
understand and challenge its diverse apparatuses of persuasion and power.
Clearly, the surge of popularity behind the presidential candidacy of a buffoon
such as Donald Trump testifies to both a deep seated desire for change and the
forms it can take when emotion replaces reason and any viable analysis of
capitalism and its effects seem to be absent from a popular sensibility.
What Michael
Yates makes clear in this incisive book on inequality is that democratic
values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under assault from a wide
range of sites in an age of intensified violence and disposability. Throughout
the book he weaves a set of narratives and critiques in which he lays bare the
anti-democratic tendencies that are on display in a growing age of lawlessness
and disposability. He not only makes clear that inequality is not good for the
economy, social bonds, the environment, politics, and democracy, Yates also
argues that capitalism in the current historical moment is marked by an age
that thrives on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an alleged
culture of criminality, and a massive system of inequality that affects all
aspects of society. Worth repeating is that at the center of this book, unlike
so many others tackling inequality, is an attempt to map a number of modalities
that give shape and purpose to widespread disparities in wealth and income,
including the underlying forces behind inequality, how it works to secure class
power, how it undermines almost every viable foundation needed for a
sustainable democracy, and what it might mean to develop a plan of action to
produce the radical imagination and corresponding modes of agency and practice
that can think and act outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.
Unlike so many
other economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who address the issue
of inequality, Yates refuses the argument that the system is simply out of
whack and can be fixed. Nor does he believe that capitalism can be described
only in terms of economic structures. Capitalism is both a symbolic
pathological economy that produces particular dispositions, values, and
identities as well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and economic
structures. Yates goes even further arguing that capitalism is not only about
authoritarian ideologies and structures, it is also about the crisis of ideas,
agency, and the failure of people to react to the suffering of others and to
the conditions of their own oppression. Neoliberal capitalism has no language
for human suffering, moral evaluation, and social responsibility. Instead, it
creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is
morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those
whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are
considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Neoliberalism
is the discourse of shadow games, committed to highlighting corporate power and
making invisible the suffering of others, all the while leaving those
considered disposable in the dark to fend for themselves.
Yates makes
visible not only the economic constraints that bear down on the poor and
disposable in the neoliberal age of precarity, he also narrates the voices,
conditions, hardships and suffering workers have to endure in a variety of
occupations ranging from automobile workers and cruise ship workers to those
who work in restaurants and as harvester on farms. He provides a number of
invaluable statistics that chart the injuries of class and race under
capitalism but rather than tell a story with only statistics and mind boggling
data, he also provides stories that give flesh to the statistics that mark a
new historical conjuncture and a wide range of hardships that render work for
most people hell and produce what has been called the hidden injuries of class.
Much of what he writes is informed by a decade long research trip across the
United States in which he attempted to see first-hand what the effects of
capitalism have been on peoples’ lives, the environment, work, unions, and
other crucial spheres that inform everyday life. His keen eye is particularly
riveting as he describes his teaming up with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm
Workers in the 1970s and his growing disappointment with a union that
increasingly betrayed its own principles.
For Yates, the
capitalist system is corrupt, malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism
leaves no room for the language of justice, the social, or, for that matter,
democracy itself. In fact, one of its major attributes is to hide its effects
of power, racial injustice, militarized state violence, domestic terrorism, and
new forms of disposability, especially regarding those marginalized by class
and race. The grotesque inequalities produced by capitalism are too powerful,
deeply rooted in the social and economic fabric, and unamenable to liberal
reforms. Class disparities constitute a
machinery of social death, a kind of zombie-like machine that drains life out
of most of the population poisoning both existing and future generations.
The politics of
disposability has gone mainstream as more and more individuals and groups are
now considered surplus and vulnerable, consigned to zones of abandonment,
surveillance, and incarceration. At one level, the expansive politics of
disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army
of debt-ridden students, the increasingly harsh treatment of immigrants, the
racism that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing attack on
public servants. On another level, the politics of disposability has produced a
culture of lawlessness and cruelty evident by the increasing rollback of voting
rights, the war waged against women’s reproductive rights, laws that
discriminate against gays, the rise of the surveillance state, and the growing
militarization of local police forces. Yates argues convincingly that there is
a desperate need for a new language for politics, solidarity, shared
responsibilities, and democracy itself. Yates sees in the now largely departed
Occupy Movement an example of a movement that used a new discourse and set of
slogans to highlight inequality, make class inequities visible, and to showcase
the workings of power in the hands of the financial elite. For Yates, Occupy
provided a strategy that can be and is being emulated by a number of groups,
especially those emerging in the black community in opposition to police
violence. Such a strategy begins by asking what a real democracy looks like and
how does it compare to the current society in which we live. One precondition
for individual and social agency is that the horizons for change must transcend
the parameters of the existing society, and the future must be configured in
such a way as to not mimic the present.
What is
remarkable about The Great Inequality is that Yates does not simply provide a
critique of capitalism in its old and new forms, he also provides a discourse
of possibility developed around a number of suggested policies and practices
designed to not reform capitalism but to abolish it. This is a book that
follows in the manner of Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to break the silence. In
it Yates functions as a moral witness in reporting on the hardships and
suffering produced by grotesque forms of inequality. As such, he reveals the
dark threats that capitalism in its ruthlessly updated versions poses to the
planet. Yet, his narrative is never far from either hope or a sense that there
is a larger public for whom his testimony matters and that such a public is
capable of collective resistance. The Great Inequality also serves to enliven
the ethical imagination, and speak out for those populations now considered
outcast and voiceless. Yates provides a furious reading of inequality and the
larger structure of capitalism. In doing so he exhibits a keen and incisive
intellect along with a welcomed sense of righteous fury.
Notas:
[i] Tony Judt,
Ill Fares the Land, (New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 12.
[ii] Giorgio
Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,” Philosophers
for Change, (February 25, 2014). Online:
http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/02/25/the-security-state-and-a-theory-of-destituent-power/
[iii] Ibid.,
Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,”
[iv] George Joseph,
“Exclusive: feds regularly monitored black lives matter since ferguson,”
Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/;
Deirdre Fulton, “Exposed: Big Brother Targets Black Lives:Government spying can
be an ‘effective way to chill protest movements,’ warns Center for
Constitutional Rights,” CommonDreams (July 24, 2015). Online:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/24/exposed-big-brother-targets-black-lives
[v] Zygmunt
Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid
Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 46.
[vi] I have taken
up the issue of neoliberalism extensively in Henry A. Giroux, Against the
Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008) . See also, David Harvey, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy,
The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Henry
A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Henry A. Giroux,
and in Against the Violence of Organized Forgetting: Beyond America’s
Disimagination Machine (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014);
Wendy Brown,
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books
2015).
[vii] Michael D.
Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Significance of Political Slogans,”
Counterpunch, (February 27, 2013).
Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/
[viii] Paul
Krugman, “Zombies Against Medicare,” New York Times (July 27, 2015). Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0
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