Submitted by asbestosstar in Liberalism

Liberal Parties like the Democratic Party and Labour party claim to be in lots of way to the left, though many political compasses put Obama and other Dems fairly far to the right. Their ideas are very similar to those of Conservatives and they even seem to often work together. It seems like Neo-Liberals are just more right wing than left wing to me, and in some ways I think they are even farther right than AnCaps (Neo-Libs also like capitalism (just with a few tiny regulations), funds wars, supports imperialism, support useless laws, support cops, more stuff). I understand that to a leftist like me Neo-Libs may seem right, but what do yall think? Would you put Neo-Libs on the right or left?

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Neoliberalism, its proponents devoutly eschewing any label, is a religious ideology more than anything else. It is the best attempt capitalism can produce at creating a holistic worldview which sanctifies the inner mechanisms of capital accumulation, from the individual to grandly systemic levels. It is a spirituality of wealth, and there is no coincidence that its rise to power was accelerated by the same people who promoted the prosperity gospel megachurch phenomenon.

Best way it can be defined is as an attempt at emergent synthesis, to the problems inherent to the social relationships between people which are mediated by capital: alienation.

For example, what does the neoliberal say to a woman out of work? Well, you should look inward, why have you not gotten more credentials or applied yourself more? To the man of great wealth? Inheritance couldn't be the explanation, his investments have been so profitable. And so on. It is a rationalization of a broken world into terms which create clear moral sense, defiant against any critique.

And so neoliberalism, when faced with the persistence and in fact heightening of the underlying social tensions, has created already the framework for a slide into fascism. For see, if you didn't take advantage of the liberal order to make it big and rise to the top of the hierarchies, it must be because of something inherently problematic about you as a person, right? And if that is the case, if certain undesirables like you are the problem, well then it is only rational and in a certain sense, holy, that we should find ways of incentivizing, and ultimately controlling this population of unproductives. Holy, because this is really about the spiritual meaning of life, which is found through the twin altars of productivity and consumption.

Perhaps the multi-level marketing scheme is the best example of this new religion, the most blatant.

You see the "need" for a new religious force dominant throughout western society in the sermons of liberal pastors to historically empty pews, the "realpolitik" cynicism toward most politicians by even the middle classes, a splintered and search-bubbled media environment, the death of all public spaces ranging from malls to concert halls to bars, the disintegration of "traditional family" and the lack of anything substantial to replace it, the rising worker productivity-to-wages ratio, the proliferation of, the plateauing and even decline of life expectancy throughout the colonizing nations. Far from nihilism, which might be emancipatory, it seems that most people have embraced a sort of cynicism, consigning ourselves collectively to passively receive the programming of this cult, and acquiesce to its absurd rituals: netflix binges in your apartment alone instead of playing cards with your neighbors, amazon "wishlists" instead of actual gift-giving or DIY, posting for upvotes and likes on social media instead of calling your friends, the using of drugs to the point of self-abuse, numbness and death instead of use to enhance pleasurable experiences or engage in a healthful or healing process.

Power needs a new religion, because something has to hold all this together enough so that markets remain predictable. That's why the rituals involve productivity and consumption, these margins must continue to expand in order for the owning classes to maintain the power imbalances. However, neoliberalism is failing, because that's all it can do. You can only patch up the cracks so much, on a house divided against itself.

So where are we going? What will be the organizing narrative of power? If we continue on the trajectory of neoliberalism, the future looks bleak. Neoliberalism has already totalized society, which unsurprisingly lays the groundwork for a totalitarianism which is distributed throughout society. Fascism, or really any form of authoritarian politics including the state-capitalism favored by MLMs, requires broad participation throughout the society. The police agencies of the neoliberal state have heavily implemented this for decades through their successful snitching incentive programs, but really you can see its tell-tale stink every time a housed person complains about houseless people, or when a commuter curses at a protestor blocking the road for a few minutes. The lines are drawn, the scapegoats are picked, and time is starting to run out for everyone as multiple intersecting crises jeopardize the fragile political economy which allows neoliberalism to exist.

We will certainly see a resurgence of authoritarian statist politics, but preceding and underlying that will be the development of religious thought and practice, the sanctification of new gods and saints, and the affirmation of new pariahs to be scorned and marginalized. This is the biggest danger, for in times of revolutionary potential and unusually high tension, there is a huge risk of libidinal reactionary theology. It gratifies the desire for moral sense, providing a reproductive euphoria to the individual as an implement of symbolic social perpetuation. So, it can only be confronted effectively by a coherently expressed, deep and actualized nihilism, which is necessarily a contestation of the theocracy in both its material and discursive forms.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

As a follow-up, I would like to add that the problem with left-wing ideology with respect to this battle between theocracy and nihilism, is that it is a project of creating a new religion. In the US, look at the strange discourse forming around bernard sanders, full of unrealistic expectations. The tankies are even weirder, with their fixation around defending long-dead leaders of toppled regimes. Even anarchists contribute to this, ranging from the "an"cap fetishization of markets (literally just neolib bullshit on steroids, would require a return to feudal social relationships) to the anarchist communist strangeness around mass politics, unions, strikes, and breaking windows somehow transforming the fundamental relationships that reproduce society. Everyone is creating their own little religion, on the left and the right.

That's why anarchism and communism is most authentic when in the context of nihilism and the post-left. It offers a genuine contestation of this phenomenon of petit hegemonies, where you get to choose which death cult most accurately defines you as a person. It offers a context for meaningful action, by destroying the idea of a morally coherent universal world and instead recontextualizing the experience of being alive in a less symbolic and alienated way, one more direct and less mediated by anything, least of all capital. It also avoids the traps of recuperation which especially electoral and workerist "praxis" tends to fall into with predictability.

All anarchists should engage meaningfully with nihilist and post-left discourse, for these reasons and more.

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asbestosstar OP wrote

What I thought, in someways I often put religion as part of the spectrum

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El_Sabate wrote

Well, the Labour party isn't a neo-liberal party, they're more socc dem, so I'd put them at center-left. The Democrats, on the other hand cover a spectrum of centrist to right-wing, with most of them and their policies being center-right to right.

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LostYonder wrote

Tony Blair was full on neoliberal...

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El_Sabate wrote

That's true. I would say that Labour under Corbin is significantly different than that, but I'm sure there's a blairite wing that would be firmly neoliberal.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

We will see, once they get into power. "Left" politicians in the West always seem to come down with a certain sickness, I call it "Syriza Syndrome"

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El_Sabate wrote

I think Bernie and Corbyn are better than Syriza, but I'm not holding my breath on either of them. Electoralism is and always has been useless for actual change.

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LostYonder wrote (edited )

One of the challenges is the multiple uses for the term "liberal". In the US liberal refers to the democratic party and thus implies a left leaning orientation. Thus when people use the term neo-liberal they also automatically think it refers to leftist thinking. However, liberal also is a broad term encapsulating a range of philosophical ideas emanating from the European "Enlightenment". Most strands of western thought emerge out of liberalism, particularly political ideas. Marx is certainly immersed in liberal philosophy but attempts to offer an internal critique. Thus critical theory, emerging from the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, etc.) provide one avenue of moving outside of liberalism, but mostly as a critique of it rather than any clear alternative.

Neo-liberalism emerges from this later usage - it is a transformation of a broad philosophical idea into a particular political/economic ideology. As an ideology neo-liberalism is in fact right-wing, combining libertarian ideas with western imperialist interests and corporate capitalism. It became naturalized in the US and UK in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher and every president and prime minister since, be they republican or democrat, tory or labor, have advanced the neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism has pushed the leftist democratic party and labor party to the right of center today. Clinton, Obama, Blair have been nightmares to anyone with a true liberal vision (not that such a vision is any better). But just because it is embraced by democrats and labor doesn't make it leftist - it just makes them rightists!

David Harvey has a pretty in depth take on neoliberalism? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/ http://davidharvey.org/2018/11/video-a-history-of-neoliberalism-with-david-harvey-interview-with-chris-hedges/

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LostYonder wrote

One should add that there is only a slight difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives. Neocons take neoliberal ideas and mold them into the interests of the nation-state while neoliberals are more, in theory, against national borders and policies that disrupt the free market and free flow of goods and capital.

Neoliberals are imperialist in the interest of capital. Neocons are imperialist in the interest of western nation-states, embedded in capitalist formations.

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Majrelende wrote

I was thinking recently about the left and right and concluded that a general rule is that the right moulds the individual to fit society and the left moulds society to fit the individual. In theory, if you believe the laws of capitalist economic theory to be universal, then it would appear firmly left-wing. But seeing the reality of the mental and physical health issues arising from work and neoliberalism— as well as the numerous attempts to cover them up— it is, in reality, a right-wing ideology masquerading as left.

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