Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Michael Gurstein]

To add to these distinguished commentaries...

I think that in examining "neo-liberalism" as an ideology it is
worthwhile to also see it as a political program with quite direct real
world correlates and moreover one which for a significant period of time
was dominant in the World Bank and the IMF through its unconscionable
and now largely discredited imposition of the SAP's (Structural
Adjustment Programs) which laid waste to the social fabric of much of
sub-Saharan Africa and significant parts of Asia.  It also provided the
basis for the very widespread program of privatization of the teleco
services throughout the developing world and as I tried to show in the
blogpost I recently circulated re: the Alliance for Affordable Internet
(A4AI) is the program currently being promoted by the USG and its allies
for the management and regulation of the Internet throughout the
Developing World.

What is rather more insidious and of even greater and longer term (and
historical) consequence is the attempt through more or less direct
intervention by the US State Department and the NTIA and their allies in
the "Technical Community" (the IETF, IANA, ISOC, etc.), the corporate
sector (Google, Facebook, etc.) and civil society (APC, and other of the
"Internet Freedom" partners) to ensure that a neo-liberal regime is
built into the very fabric of the global Internet through the (non)
structuring of global Internet Governance (I've discussed this and
documented this at considerable in my blog (and over the last several
years shared it on this e-list) --search on "Internet Governance" at
http://gurstein.wordpress.com).

Among other things that are noteworthy about these latter initiatives is
the degree to which the Technical Community and virtually all of the
directly involved Civil Society have been either complicit or active
contributors to these efforts. (Also, of course it is of note that these
initiatives have been taking place while the internal "governance" of
the Internet via the FCC has taken a rather more interventionist and
socially aware set of directions.)

M

-Original Message-

From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org On Behalf Of Brian Holmes
Sent: April 28, 2016 5:12 AM
To: nettim...@kein.org
Subject: Re:  Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

There have been great points in this debate (notably Allan's and
David's), yet still it leaves me totally unsatisfied. I'm amazed how no
one seems to care about the history of ideas, and with all due respect
there's no way I can accept Florian's claim that ultimately,
neoliberalism is what people think it is -- in other words, it's some
kind of popular meme. No, it has a long and complex history with
diverging and reconnecting strands that can be excavated, reconstructed,
examined and evaluated. History matters and the devil is in the details.

 <...>

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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Brian Holmes]

There have been great points in this debate (notably Allan's and 
David's), yet still it leaves me totally unsatisfied. I'm amazed how no 
one seems to care about the history of ideas, and with all due respect 
there's no way I can accept Florian's claim that ultimately, 
neoliberalism is what people think it is -- in other words, it's some 
kind of popular meme. No, it has a long and complex history with 
diverging and reconnecting strands that can be excavated, reconstructed, 
examined and evaluated. History matters and the devil is in the details.


We know that Ordoliberalism emerged in reaction to the crisis of 
classical liberalism in the 1930s (and especially, in the Weimar 
Republic) and we know it was based on the refusal of Keynesianism as a 
solution. One of the leading Ordos, Rustow, coins the term 
"neoliberalism" at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. All the 
leading figures of the school subsequently join Hayek's Mont Pelerin 
Society. It is generally known (but apparently not accepted on this 
list) that for the Ordos in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the concept 
of the "social market society" was a conciliatory strategy to overcome 
Keynesian demand-oriented policies and socialist panning in favor of a 
strong moralizing state enforcing competition as a bedrock principle. As 
Rustow declared in 1953: "the only consequent, properly thought-out, 
unified and independent program of economic policy from our side known 
to me is the one of so-called neoliberalism or ‘Social Market Economy,’ 
according to the fortunate coining of my colleague Müller-Armack who has 
just recently been appointed to the Federal Ministry of Economics" 
(quoted by Ralf Ptak in Mirowski's edited volume "The Road to Mont 
Pelerin," p. 102). As in all the variants of neoliberalism, the 
enforcement part was the key: the modern bureaucratic state had to be 
recognized as a major actor, then theoretically remodeled to serve 
rather than counter market ends.


All of that was a long time ago, and there is no way to reduce the 
complexity of a large country's development to a few old theory books. 
Definitely the social market society has been a distinct political 
economy, centered around the ideals of full employment, state support 
for industry and generous welfare benefits. No one would care at all 
about defining what Ordoliberalism is or how it compares to 
Anglo-American neoliberalism, if it were not the case that a continuing 
Ordo tradition in government all the way up to Schauble and therefore 
Merkel herself is behind current German austerity policies, based on 
repugnance toward unpayed debts and fear of inflation. To convince 
yourself of the damage that old theory can do in new times, just search 
"Ordoliberalism today" and read for an hour or so. What you will find 
(but everyone knows this, we discussed it at length in 2014) is that 
while the rest of the so-called Western world including Japan has turned 
to a kind of financialized Keynesianism, pumping newly minted money into 
the banks and asset markets rather than into infrastructure programs and 
people's pockets, Germany has pursued a policy that aims at slashing 
welfare benefits, not so much within the country (that was done to a 
great extent by Shroeder/Harz in the early 2000s) but rather in southern 
Europe. In this respect, Merkel's Germany is most comparable to Ronald 
Reagan's USA. In both cases a hugely unpopular and socially destructive 
monetary policy (extraordinarily high interest rates in Reagan's case) 
was imposed in a bid to end a crisis, restore competitiveness and 
institute a new principle of authority. With their policy, Reagan and 
Volcker (his central banker) ignited a giant new growth wave in the 
world economy. Will Merkel/Schauble do the same? I think we already know 
the answer. No. What they have done is to help prove that no variant of 
neoliberalism has a response to the ongoing major crisis of capitalism. 
If you want more proof, look around you: the global lurch toward 
rightwing populism is gathering steam in country after country.


Neoliberalism in all its variants is about the regulation of the economy 
and of society as a whole according to market accounting of profit or 
loss on invested capital. Accounting means what it says: price and 
volume of exchange are the two crucial pieces of information. More 
competition = greater speed and efficiency = more volume = higher profit 
= lower prices. Globalization and just-in-time logistics derive from 
these principles. State remodeling of educational, health and cultural 
systems, the financialization of money by central banks, and the 
military imposition of corporate rights to exploit resources anywhere 
across the globe are the complements that a strong moralizing state can 
bring to the neoliberal program (that's the "neocon" side of it). But 
the neoliberal program does not work. The neoliberal program has in fact 
collapsed. One of the results, but far from 

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the

[Eric Miller]

> On Apr 25, 2016, at 9:17 AM, John Young  wrote:
> 
> Rise of the Internet and other personal devices for handy-witted exposition 
> has affirmed wealth accumulation by digital technology's inventors, producers 
> and distributors, and thereby neoliberalism and ordoliberalism in shrewd 
> disguises especially that of digitally empowered expositors quite satisfied 
> at reaching far more consumers than by paper and ink and talks, thereby 
> empowering (i.e, enslaving, aka educating) consumers who are taught and 
> instructed and seduced to affirm intellectual wealth accumulation at their 
> student-indebted expense and thrillingly diverting fandom of very own 
> smartest of personal devices and brilliantly cogitating bold-name digitally 
> dropping heros, heros of dual-hatted complicity with neo-ordo contributors to 
> intellectual dole, aka socialism of the top 5% of finest minds social 
> engineering for <1% grant-masters and prize bestowers.

Wondering if this should be subject to Hanlon’s Razor ("never assume bad 
intentions when assuming stupidity is enough” is Wikipedia’s version) regarding 
the intent of the digital producers, whether they are pop stars or corporations 
or (ugh) ‘thought leaders’

So those digital technology inventors, producers and distributors _might_ just 
be behaving economically rationally.  Bread and circuses sells quite nicely, 
thankyouverymuch.  The net corrosive impact on society might just be an 
unfortunate externality.  "We have met the enemy and he is us" and all that.

Or maybe someone wants to argue that ProPublica could actually beat TMZ’s user 
metrics, but the only thing holding them back is a skewed playing field….

Eric

ERIC MILLER
PRINCIPAL  →  SQUISHYMEDIA
O: 503 488 5951  M: 503 780 1847




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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the

[John Young]

Rise of the Internet and other personal devices 
for handy-witted exposition has affirmed wealth 
accumulation by digital technology's inventors, 
producers and distributors, and thereby 
neoliberalism and ordoliberalism in shrewd 
disguises especially that of digitally empowered 
expositors quite satisfied at reaching far more 
consumers than by paper and ink and talks, 
thereby empowering (i.e, enslaving, aka 
educating) consumers who are taught and 
instructed and seduced to affirm intellectual 
wealth accumulation at their student-indebted 
expense and thrillingly diverting fandom of very 
own smartest of personal devices and brilliantly 
cogitating bold-name digitally dropping heros, 
heros of dual-hatted complicity with neo-ordo 
contributors to intellectual dole, aka socialism 
of the top 5% of finest minds social engineering 
for <1% grant-masters and prize bestowers.




At 10:22 AM 4/25/2016, you wrote:

> Now, you can respond like the Regulation 
school or even Deleuze and Guattari, and say 
that capitalism continually changes certain 
axiomatic propositions, in order that its major 
principle of endless accumulation through labor 
exploitation can continue. That's what I think. 
But such a statement still demands that one 
understand each new bundle of axioms, with its 
inner variations and their political origins, 
as well as their specific consequences. I don't 
see any other way to confront neoliberalism.


Thank you Brian..

Neo-liberalism’s Version of Original Sin-
(-Sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress…- WH Auden)



<...>


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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[David Garcia]

> Now, you can respond like the Regulation school or even Deleuze and Guattari, 
> and say that capitalism continually changes certain axiomatic propositions, 
> in order that its major principle of endless accumulation through labor 
> exploitation can continue. That's what I think. But such a statement still 
> demands that one understand each new bundle of axioms, with its inner 
> variations and their political origins, as well as their specific 
> consequences. I don't see any other way to confront neoliberalism. 

Thank you Brian.. 

Neo-liberalism’s Version of Original Sin- 
(-Sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress…- WH Auden)

Brian Holmes’s challenge to us to better understand the theoretical foundations 
of neoliberlism has clearly touched a nerve (as Brian often does). I hope that 
this is not a distraction from the spirit of his challenge to connect the 
political economy and its evolving statist infrastructure to the distinctive 
neoliberal psychology with its vision of what constitutes a successful (as well 
as frequently unsuccessful) human subject. 

The sense of urgency propelling the discussions on the list and can be 
attributed to the stubourn persistence of one compelling and inescapable 
question: -Why has the financial crash and the -great recession- failed to 
dethrone neoliberalism?-. [A supplementary question might be why, of the many 
uprisings we have witnessed in recent years, has nothing surpassed in 
effectiveness, of revolutions that transformed the Eastern block in 1989 ?] 

I want to argue that part of the answer to at least to the first of these 
questions is that long ago neo-liberalism won one of the most the most 
important battle of all; the battle for the social mind. And the left has yet 
to regain the lost ground. 

It was a victory based on the progressive emergence of a distinctively 
neo-liberal political subject whom Foucault has characterised as the 
"entrepreneur of the self”.  It is a subject arising as an epiphenomenon of 
neoliberalism's foundational myth of the market as vast and infallible -global 
information processor-, sitting outside of politics, a processor faster and 
more powerful than any human being or organisation, rendering all attempts at 
planning and political contestation futile as no human mind can know what the 
market knows (You can’t buck the market. M Thatcher). 

This is a world in which the state has one primary function, to facilitate 
strong markets. Neo-liberalism has not been dethroned in part because all of us 
have, in varying degrees, internalised this new eschatology, in which winners 
and losers replace sin and the redemption. We are locked into a logic that 
requires us to tirelessly transform ourselves into -entrepreneurs of the self- 

Why? Because in the neo-liberal version of original sin we are all (when 
compared to the market) flawed thinkers and our only hope is continuous 
transformation in a timely response to discrete wafers of market truth. 
Moreover in the sharing economy the one thing we must not share is failure. 
Every failure is solitary. It is mine and mine alone. Whatever happens its my 
fault. The entrepeneurial self by definition takes total responsibility, as we 
struggle to adapt to volatile market conditions.  This is one reason why we 
struggle to retain the momentum of resistance to neo-liberalism because we are 
locked into a new and uniquely solipsistic version of original sin. 

---

d a v i d  g a r c i a
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
http://new-tactical-research.co.uk
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net







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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Florian Cramer]

   Brian,

   What you and Felix state is, no doubt, historically correct when we
   focus on the overlaps between "Austrian economics" and "ordoliberalism"
   (most importantly, their common stance against political control over
   currencies, more on that later). However, the meaning of terms often
   shifts once they become everyday language. I would argue that the
   colloquial meanings should, in doubt, be taken as the standard
   definition, even if they contradict textbooks. A good example is
   "media" whose colloquial use and understanding - as a synonym of news
   media - substantially diverges from the notion of "media" in media
   studies and media theory.

   From the time of Rüstow to that of Foucault, the term "neoliberalism"
   was only known to academics. It didn't become common language before
   Latin American political activist movements used it to attack the
   economic regimes installed in Chile in the 1970s and by the IMF in
   other countries. Their notion of neoliberalism referred to
   Chicago-school economics. When the word was re-imported into Europe in
   the early 1990s, leftist activists interpreted them as synonymous with
   Thatcherism and Reagonomics - particularly, with Thatcherist politics
   of union busting and large-scale privatization of public infrastructure
   (transport, energy, water, social services, education etc.). In
   Germany, which you cited as "the pionier" of neoliberalism,
   neoliberalism was (and still is) seen as a break with post-war social
   liberalism. Both activist literature and news media commonly juxtapose
   post-war "Rhineland capitalism" and its Fordist social consensus model
   to post-1990s Post-Fordist privatization- and precarization-oriented
   "neoliberalism".
   "
   I agree with you and Felix that, in economic terminology, this
   juxtaposition is problematic, since both types of liberalism broadly
   fall under a common school and ideology. However, an important
   historical difference is that Rüstow's "neoliberalism" was
   Third-Positionist while Hayek's position was clearly not. (Wikipedia
   claims that "In a letter Rüstow wrote that Hayek and his master Mises
   deserved to be put in spirits and placed in a museum as one of the last
   surviving specimen of an otherwise extinct species of liberals which
   caused the current catastrophe (the Great Depression)" but doesn't say
   where this letter is published or archived.) Over the course of time
   and thanks to their popularization as common language, the terms
   swapped their meaning. What is nowadays referred to as neoliberalism is
   what Rüstow was critical of.

   That said, I agree that one should not forget that both positions were
   two varieties of the same ideology. In today's political debates, it is
   often overlooked that ordoliberalism wasn't Keynesian in any way. For
   example, the establishment of a politically independent federal reserve
   bank in post-1949 West Germany, the Bundesbank, was textbook
   neoliberalism and not far from Hayek's ideas on currencies - which
   were, as we know, the 1:1 blueprint for Bitcoin. Germany's current
   austerity politics in the EU simply follow the Bundesbank model, since
   the introduction of the Euro and post-2008 quantitative easing politics
   of the ECB amounted to a nightmare for German ordoliberals (not just
   economists, but also for many Joe Sixpacks: the ECB's Euro currency
   policy kickstarted the right-wing populist AfD into existence). The
   contradiction you state, "why did Germany veer away from being a
   society oriented toward labor unions, social welfare and complete
   inclusion, to gradually become the society that promotes unequual
   competition and savage inequality on a European scale?" - isn't one in
   my view. Post-war West Germany always had an aggressive economic
   politics of large trade surpluses coupled with a strong currency that
   forced other countries to devalue their own currencies. When the Euro
   was introduced, it expected all participating countries to follow this
   model since the ECB had been modeled after the Bundesbank (and placed
   in Frankfurt, too). It still is a country with labor unions and welfare
   - while much of that got slashed or cut down after 1990, union
   influence on contract work and welfare is still relatively high
   (compared to most other countries).

   In the end, it simply seems as if the contemporary meaning of
   "neoliberalism" is the one that people have given it, even if it
   doesn't fit textbook definitions. A young student who would read
   Foucault's discussion of neoliberalism today would be partly perplexed,
   and note differences in the concept and, most importantly, reality of
   neoliberalism.

   -F

   On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Brian Holmes  
wrote:

 It is rather astounding to me - a token of the profound laziness and
 irresponsibility of contemporary intellectuals - that people still
 be in doubt o

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

The apparent tremendous complexity of the situation stems from the 
inability to see the obvious and futile attempts to apply defunct 
notions and theories to the present.


In natural sciences and mathematics, a standard way of looking for 
explanation is to look at the extreme states, boundary conditions: what 
if technology retires all - or 99.9% - of the human work?


The end game then is that a small number of families controls 
'production' of everything on the planet, perhaps including O2 
allowances. What is the 'market' then, and where is all the bs around 
it? No one needs your work at all. You can't 'buy' anything. Without 
need for work there is no need for market. The 0.1% is perfectly 
happy without your participation in anything whatsoever (except maybe as 
a game in reservation ... "get that fatty over there".) Even sex 
becomes, finally, free. Nothing much is being produced, the planet is 
clean and green, and you get shot by a drone if you step out of the 
reservation.


Large number of humans already live in such world (they don't frequent 
nettime.) We are also getting there - most of the investments go into 
creating unemployment: self-driving, self-fucking, self-reporting 
things. Remote-operated is a transition phase, you will fondly remember 
'militarized police' when the 'police' part gets factored out.


It's hard to find anything that prevents the above scenario. Most 
'employed' are already blindly following scripts on their screens, they 
are like the compulsory 'human driver' in the self-driving cars. The 
millions of technocrati believe that they are safe as programmers and 
maintainers (just saw a poll that 50% of twentysomethings want to work 
for two major corporations), but that's just underestimating the 
technology. There will be a need for few thousands, maybe.


The 'market' will not thrive even within reservations. That's a fantasy, 
as Zizek's rants that future social models will arise from Brazilian 
favelas.




prices. The volume of exchanges along with price discovery and the
gradual emergence of a "just price" for each type of product tells the
state not only what people value, but also, what is the most efficient
way to produce what people value. Every move of the state that furthers
the cheaper production of whatever people value is therefore legitimate
in neoliberal politics and foundational for neoliberal society. That is
the foundation of the ordoliberal state through a pure reference to the
market. So, why did Germany veer away from being a society oriented
toward labor unions, social welfare and complete inclusion, to gradually
become the society that promotes unequual competition and savage


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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Brian Holmes]

It is rather astounding to me - a token of the profound laziness and 
irresponsibility of contemporary intellectuals - that people still be in 
doubt or even in complete ignorance as to what neoliberalism is, how it 
has developed, what its major doctrinal differences have been, how its 
theory has been made into practice, the role of technology, of the 
financial markets, of the military, etc. THIS IS YOUR LIFE, FOLKS. It's 
also your death due to climate change. Maybe study up a little? Maybe 
produce some arguments that can help others?


If you are too busy with your job or you don't like concepts (there are 
other ways of dealing with society, for sure) then just don't bother 
with the below. It is long, but fascinating for those who care about how 
are societies are governed.


I highly recommend Philip Mirowski's book Cyborg Economics as well as 
the subsequent edited volume on the "neoliberal thought collective." The 
latter came AFTER Mirowski had read Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics 
(Sorbonne course in 1978-79/ English publication in 2008).The new 
clarity of Mirowski's thought after this encounter speaks volumes about 
the importance of Foucault's analysis. For Foucault, capitalism is not a 
single, essentially unified system bearing essential contradictions, as 
the classical Marxists still think. Rather, it is a thoroughly political 
process and therefore it is susceptible of reformulation at each turning 
point or crisis. Now, you can respond like the Regulation school or even 
Deleuze and Guattari, and say that capitalism continually changes 
certain axiomatic propositions, in order that its major principle of 
endless accumulation through labor exploitation can continue. That's 
what I think. But such a statement still demands that one understand 
each new bundle of axioms, with its inner variations and their political 
origins, as well as their specific consequences. I don't see any other 
way to confront neoliberalism. It is so powerful that most of what we 
think stands against it - especially, most anarchism - is merely 
subsumed beneath it. In the 70's, emergent US neoliberalism was often 
called "anarcho-capitalism." Let's look at some of Foucault's central 
arguments about the Freiburg school of German Ordoliberalism, and then 
maybe we can discuss it all much better.


To begin, Foucault explores the background of the German "social market 
state" that emerged against heavy contestation from the left, who 
obviously wanted a socialist state, not a social market one:


"In 1955, Karl Schiller, who will later become Minister of the Economy 
and Finance in federal Germany, writes a book that will cause a big stir 
since it bears the significant title Socialism and Competition, that is 
to say, not socialism or competition, but socialism and competition. I 
don't know if he states it for the first time in this book, but anyway 
he gives the greatest publicity to what will become the formula of 
German socialism: "as much competition as possible and as much planning 
as necessary." This is in 1955. In 1959, at the Bad Godesberg congress, 
German social democracy first renounced the principle of transition to 
the socialization of the means of production and, secondly and 
correlatively, recognized that not only was private ownership of the 
means of production perfectly legitimate, but that it had a right to 
state protection and encouragement. That is to say, one of the state's 
essential and basic tasks is to protect not only private property in 
general, but private property in the means of production, with the 
condition, adds the motion of the congress, of compatibility with "an 
equitable social order." Finally, third, the congress approved the 
principle of a market economy, here again with the restriction, wherever 
"the conditions of genuine competition prevail."


Foucault's point here is that yes, we have a social market state in 
contemporary Germany, but its aim is primarily to plan for the 
marketization of society, and not for the socialization of the economy. 
In other words, this is a political strategy for running a neoliberal 
economy under conditions where there is a strong push for socialism. How 
to argue for this plan? and how to implement it? Let's start with the 
argumentation, which turns mainly around the ordoliberal quest for a 
rule of law utterly distinct from Nazi authoritarianism:


"The search for a Rule of law in the economic order ... was directed at 
all the forms of legal intervention in the economic order that states, 
and democratic states even more than others, were practicing at this 
time, namely the legal economic intervention of the state in the 
American New Deal and, in the following years, in the English type of 
planning. What does applying the principle of the Rule of law in the 
economic order mean? Roughly, I think it means that the state can make 
legal interventions in the economic order only if these legal 
interventions take the

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Jaromil]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2016, Florian Cramer wrote:

> Michel Foucault's discussion of "neoliberalism" in his late lectures
> refers to this original definition of neoliberalism, too.

true. vastly overlooked because the title is "the birth of
biopolitics", which he originally intended to be the subject of his
lectures at college de france in '78-79. the lectures are fundamental
to understand the politics of contemporaneity. unfortunately he never
managed to arrive to the description of biopolitics in that last
period of his life, too busy making a geneaology of liberism, which of
course cannot be really overlooked if debating the matter.

Antonio Caronia left us his last lecture series about Foucault "Per
una genealogia del soggetto" a few years before dying. the recordings
in Italian are archived here
https://archive.org/details/MichelFoucault_PerUnaGenealogiaDelSoggetto
following this was a fantastic journey through Foucault's oeuvre.

now I sort of wonder if 'biopolitics' can be sold as the
ideology-buzzword people are looking for here - dare you not know,
nettime is a buzzword incubator and perhaps accelerator! :^)))

perhaps our times are not so epic anymore and we should settle on the
"millenial" definition, stick to think in generational terms. I still
wonder what are your thoughts about this
just a matter of words, sure. has anyone used cryptoliberism yet?

ciao

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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the

[John Young]

On 4/17/16 1:55 , Alexander Bard wrote:



Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).


Still laser-aged jeans 1968 (albeit pitifully 9/11 provincial NYC 
sans sanitized streets not admirably tres terrorist chic metropolitan 
Paris laced with magnifique couturded boulevards) has its doddering 
nostalgics willing to endure dimming recollections brightened by 
beaux-artful overkleigs:


http://www.thestickingplace.com/projects/projects/columbia/

"A Time to Stir makes use of six hundred newly filmed interviews and 
tens of thousands of never-before-seen photographs, plus hours of 
archival footage, to explore the hows and whys of the 
campus 
protests at Columbia University in 1968. An eighteen-hour version of 
the documentary will be ready in 2017, along with a number of 
accompanying books, including an illustrated documentary history, a 
collection of essays, and a complete transcript of the film. 
Here 
for an article from 2008."


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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

To enumerate what we know about the unknowable future shifts:

1. The change will not happen by violently interacting with keyboards, 
touchscreens and displays;


2. The change will not happen by violently interacting with others on 
the street.


What envisionable venues does this leave available? Somebody or 
something must convince the keepers of the current physicality dynamics 
(where food, fuel, energy, bullets, chains, sex, etc. go or do not go) 
to change their ways and have these go somewhere else.


Few come to mind:

A. Technologically empowered individual (everyone is Batman). One makes 
robots and drones (or designer viruses or mind control appliances) in 
the closet (along with required chips, chemicals and enclosures), and 
these go out to intimidate/eliminate/baptize targets.


B. New religion/philosophy/ideology (wetware virus). It's so good, that 
after few minutes of exposure to it (several kilobytes of text, imagery 
or few megabytes of video/audio), subjects permanently change their ways 
and are capable of sustainably converting others.


C. Alien intervention. (Mars Attacks!)

The current efforts are evenly split between A (hackers, cypherpunk 
leftovers) and B (tenured scribblers, FSMers and establishment rebels.) 
C is sadly neglected.



On 4/17/16 1:55 , Alexander Bard wrote:


Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).


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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Felix Stalder]

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On 2016-04-17 13:40, Florian Cramer wrote:
> ...only that it is plainly wrong. At this meeting, the Colloque
> Walter Lippmann, Alexander Rüstow defined neoliberalism _against_
> the radical free market liberalism of von Mises and Hayek as a
> liberalism that combined the free market with state intervention.
> It is the school of liberalism that later became known as
> "ordoliberalism" and pretty much shaped post-WWII Western European
> economic politics.
> 
> Michel Foucault's discussion of "neoliberalism" in his late
> lectures refers to this original definition of neoliberalism, too.
> 
> Florian

Here's an excerpt from a recent interview with Thomas Bierbichler,
Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe Universität
in Frankfurt. In the introduction to the interview, the economist and
historian Philip Mirowski (who you might know from Adam Curtis's
films) is quoted as subsuming ordo-liberalism under the “neoliberal
thought collective.” So perhaps we should not make too much of the
difference between the two schools of thought, one very much German in
the 1950s, the other broadly Anglo-saxon since the 1970s.

Why it's worth quoting at length, though, is that this "thought
collective" addressed really profound challenges and found ways of
reformulating a political project that seemed all but dead when they
started their work. So, while a clever idea is never enough to change
history, without one, it's all the much harder.

It's worth reading the entire interview.

Felix

http://nearfuturesonline.org/return-or-revival-the-ordoliberal-legacy/

WC: Before we discuss the relevance of ordoliberalism in Europe today,
perhaps you could begin by recalling the historical context of its
emergence. Under what conditions did the ordoliberal doctrine come
into being?

TB: My understanding is that neoliberalism in all its variants is a
response to a multifaceted crisis – the crisis of what is now referred
to in the Anglo–American context as “classical liberalism.” I think
that very early on, when the neoliberal movement was in its formative
stages, there was a broad agreement between the narrative produced by
the ordoliberals and that of other early neoliberals. According to
this narrative, sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century
liberalism went astray: its doctrine was either impoverished – reduced
to slogans like laisser-faire – or distorted – leading liberals to
make an alliance with progressive or even social-democratic forces.
Early neoliberals saw both the impoverishment and the distortion of
the liberal doctrine as major problems – especially as they persisted
in the first part of the twentieth century. Thus, neoliberalism
actually arose as a response to the crisis of liberalism, and
especially to the alliance between liberals and progressives.

Other factors were involved in the crisis of liberalism: first, there
was WWI, when a bourgeois liberal world collapsed after thriving for
more or less a hundred years – the era that Karl Polanyi describes in
The Great Transformation. After WWI there were of course all kinds of
economic problems, including the Great Depression, which constituted a
major blow to liberal ideas about markets and put their harbingers on
the defensive. At the same time, Keynesianism was on the rise, partly
in response to the Great Depression, while, in the United States,
there was the New Deal – a defining step in the development of the
American welfare state.

Still in the 1920s and 30s, very illiberal forces were also on the
rise, from Soviet Communism to fascism and National Socialism; so,
altogether, the “crisis of liberalism” points to a very complex crisis
syndrome. All of these factors put together – grave internal factors
within liberalism itself as well as important external factors – led
to the formulation of a neo-liberal project, which was not supposed to
be a restoration of classical liberalism, but actually a modernization
of the liberal creed and in that sense really and properly a
neoliberalism.

For the German ordoliberals especially, I think that all of these
factors played an important role. In their particular narrative, what
is of great importance is the failure of classical liberalism to
theorize what a properly functioning market order should be; they thus
took on that theoretical task as their main project. They associated
the failure of both the discourse and the practices of “old”
liberalism with the Weimar Republic, a context which was at once
revealing and traumatic for them, not least with regard to what they
considered to be the deficiencies of pluralist democracies. I think
that, politically speaking – for their political thought – the
collapse of the Weimar Republic was the most important event.




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iQEc

Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[Florian Cramer]

Nice story...


> The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938.
> Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology,
> Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria,
> they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt's New
> Deal and the gradual development of Britain's welfare state, as
> manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as
> nazism and communism.
>

...only that it is plainly wrong. At this meeting, the Colloque Walter
Lippmann, Alexander Rüstow defined neoliberalism _against_ the
radical free market liberalism of von Mises and Hayek as a liberalism
that combined the free market with state intervention. It is the
school of liberalism that later became known as "ordoliberalism" and
pretty much shaped post-WWII Western European economic politics.

Michel Foucault's discussion of "neoliberalism" in his late lectures
refers to this original definition of neoliberalism, too.

Florian



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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the

[John Young]

Defeating an ideology takes another ideology that produces better 
weaponry. Historically speaking, the new winner is generally less 
aesthetically pleasing than the defeated one. Expect nostalgia for 
neoliberalism.


This is tremendously encouraging to armaments enthusiasts, historians,
preservationists, archeologists, museologists, all curators of rosy
iconic remembrance to rouge current slaughters, for example, the
Internet of Things branded with timelessness and ubiquity (until ISIS
arrives with dynamite Nobel).

Veneration of the past, present and future sanitized of horror may
well be the most beneficial outcome of the Internet, certainly
its world washing freedom of information delirium erecting copied
Parthenons of Openness of immigrant-enslaved Platonic democracy.

Already ICYMI there are admirable efforts to preserve the birth of the
Internet and archive all its heady loggings, spewings, siphonings,
censorings, controllings -- archives even of this very alimentary
dumpings are treasured, not to say the horrifying bowdlerizations
of Wayback and Wikipedia, the voracious aggregating by thousands,
millions, of bots and manifold layers of webs and swarms and purloins
of social media, spies, clouds, International Consortia of Journalists
conjoined with NGO, press and academia associations running their
proprietarily privileged, minimization of disclosures, oligarchic
wealth concentrating, tax avoiding, Mossack Fonsecas.

The abysmal classical-revival architecture of centralized finance
of big banks and big governments at all levels shamelessly exhibits
aspirations to exploit the populace with faux little d democracy,
backed by the biggest megadeath machines ever, totally unaccountable
to the masses it ostensibly protects but in fact terrorizes as
thoroughly as any regime coutured by ideological theology, say, those
inseparable bedmates Engel's capitalism and Marx's marxism, more like
Black Widow and tasty SO, iconized in the Lincoln Memorial neo-Greek
pile and sheltering a gigantic white guy in whitest of marble axial to
the greater neo-Roman guanoed anthill opposite.


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Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[Alexander Bard]

Exactly, dear Morlock!

Which means we have to go "more Freudian than Freud himself" at this
junction, since even the old and cynical Freud was deep at heart a
Rousseauian who insisted that "truth will set us free". The Freud of
"Civilisation and Its Discontents" in the 1930s. And with him the entire
ultimately naive Frankfurt School. No, truth is never available to us. It
is the lower degree of lying that we must aim for since this is what is
indeed available to us. After a lot of hard work.

Lacan makes this break with Freud with his models of the conservatism of
all organisms, the defense of olf models at cognitive dissonance, and
ultimately the break into psychosis when old models break down, unless new
more functional models have arrived by then. Both dividually and socially.
We all keep whatever ideologies we seem to have - with their idiosyncrasies
- until we finally have new models (or ideologies if you will) available to
us that "seem" to work better.

Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).
Meanwhile populism will rule The Old Left and cause one major hype after
another followed by increasingly worse disappointments. In this regard and
speaking Lacanese: "Bernie Sanders is not it". Sanders might speak warmly
about American industrial workers but he does so completely ignoring
Chinese or Mexican workers in the process. And his budget maths do not add
up. At all.

Sanders might have his heart in the right place (and doesnät Obama too with
his sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous pacifism?), but merely the
way an old preacher is still peaching in a rural church to the already
converted while the factory landscape in the cities is on fire but
completely out of his scope. Like populists always have.
Occupy is therefore a good t-shirt (bless them) which however never manages
to even conquer the t-shirt factory where it is branded.
So this is the time to subtract, reflect and produce brand new and way
deeper ideology than what we have done during the past 100 years. We need
to kill poststructuralist cynicism, create new ideology to understand
ourselves and our predicament better. We need new monasteries to do this.
And most of all, we need to get over Marx. I agree with Zizek, Hegel is the
way forwad to do this. As always at historical locks.
Then we can make real change. Change of heart and body. Until then,
fighting for encryption between us (think Telegram, the most impressive
Russian innovation since Sputnik) is where the current struggle is at.
Fight the FBI for Apple, then fight Apple, but not to set us free but to
create new societies based on masses of open source technologies.
Always remember this tiny strategical detail: Once college kids get laid
their political staying power is zilch. As St Paul and Lenin would both
happily tell us.

Which is why the barricaders of 1968 quickly became wealthy conservative
yuppies once the dust settled. No, a new class with a new ideology is the
only possibility of genuine revolution. And such ideologies are derived
from the potentialties of new technologies.
My hope resides with participatory culture. I'm personally already immensed
in it.

So may I then speak Lacanese once again and provoke her on the rather
unified Nettime list: What if your beloved Neoliberalism "does not exist"?
Best intentions
Alexander Bard (call me accelerationist if you will, but I'm all for
Hillary Clinton next November)

2016-04-17 4:47 GMT+02:00 :

> The widespread imposed or voluntarily adopted anonymous (or not so
> anonymous) ideologies, that facilitate the demise of their believers, are
> hardly a new phenomenon. Expecting that naming them is going to change
> anything is a fallacy.

<...>


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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[morlockelloi]

The widespread imposed or voluntarily adopted anonymous (or not so 
anonymous) ideologies, that facilitate the demise of their believers, 
are hardly a new phenomenon. Expecting that naming them is going to 
change anything is a fallacy.


The current predicament is exactly this - assumption that changing mode 
of thinking is a way out. Modern rebel economists, activists, 
whistleblowers, all of them cement this predicament, basically that "the 
truth will set you free" (and that shit is hardly new - John 8:32). They 
are starting to sound like freakin' hippies.


It doesn't work. We've seen the truth and we are not free. Get over it.

Defeating an ideology takes another ideology that produces better 
weaponry. Historically speaking, the new winner is generally less 
aesthetically pleasing than the defeated one. Expect nostalgia for 
neoliberalism.



On 4/16/16 17:27 , nettime's_encyclopedist_ wrote:


Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems


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Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems

[nettime's_encyclopedist_]

Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems

 Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald
 Trump -- neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left
 failed to come up with an alternative?


George Monbiot
Friday 15 April 2016 07.00 EDT


Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism.
The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name.
Mention it in conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if
your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define
it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a
major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of
2007–8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers
offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and
education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the
collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to
these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that
they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent
philosophy; a philosophy that has -- or had -- a name. What greater
power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets
what they deserve. So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom
even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition
that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind
of biological law, like Darwin's theory of evolution. But the philosophy
arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus
of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human
relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices
are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit
and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers
benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax
and regulation should be minimised, public services should be
privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by
trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the
formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is
recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth,
which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal
society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market
ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves
that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages
-- such as education, inheritance and class -- that may have helped to
secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even
when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because
you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if
your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never
mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they
get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who
fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book _What About
Me?_ are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression,
loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's
unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most
rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all
neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among
the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social
democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the gradual
development of Britain's welfare state, as manifestations of a
collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In _The Road to Serfdom_, published in 1944, Hayek argued that
government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to
totalitarian control. Like Mises's book _Bureaucracy_, _The Road to
Serfdom_ was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy
people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from
regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation
that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism -- the Mont Pelerin
Society -- it was supported financially by millionaires and their
foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes
in _Masters of the Universe_ as "a kind of neoliberal internation