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Totalitarian
Liberalism
by Liliana Limpidă
Whereas most experienced the 1970s as a decade of chaos,
crime, and confusion, for a small and devoted study
group of economists, academics, and businesspeople,
it was a golden opportunity. For almost 15 years, they had been
developing a return to classical liberalism without the pitfalls that
had led to its demise, and finally, with the collapse of the Keynesian
consensus, they saw their opportunity to enact it. Every text
written about neoliberalism has to define it and redefine it into
oblivion. It is constantly changing; as many versions of it exist as
there are countries on earth. It is the global market system, where
everything and everyone is a commodity to be bought and sold
and discarded and destroyed.
The original neoliberals saw the world in simple terms:
If it cannot survive in a market environment, then it shouldn’t exist
-- people and public institutions alike. The state would retain
only two major functions: Protecting the market from threats to
its existence and expanding the market as far into our everyday
lives as possible. The state would retain the economic powers it
endowed itself with under Keynesianism in order to prop up key
industries whose failure could trigger a total economic collapse.
This also necessitated a massive military-industrial complex, both
to protect against domestic civil unrest as well as to destabilize
and conquer nations refusing to integrate into the global market.
Competing economic systems pose a problem for the market. In
order for capitalism to sustain itself, the market economy must
grow infinitely, which is functionally impossible. Once hard limits
to growth are reached and economic stability is threatened, the
only way to keep expanding is to ruthlessly destroy all existing
reservoirs of capital to provide a justification for generating more.
War is not only highly efficient to this end, it serves the additional
function of battering 20th century nationalist holdouts into complete
submission to the new world order, eliminating the market’s
ideological opponents and pushing the hard limits to growth
slightly into the future.
Neoliberalism has a unique quirk that allows it to
lay deep mycelial roots in all of us, a quirk not found in other
totalitarian systems. Fascists and communists relied on people’s
devotion to the collective, to the party, to the state; neoliberals
prefer individualism. We have a paralyzing abundance of personal
choice in areas of life that don’t matter in order to mask the
fact that we have no say in the big decisions that do. An absurd
amount of individual responsibility is laid at our feet, especially
when it comes to problems that have social origins and require an
organized collective response, such as poverty or climate change.
In projecting this ideological framework, neoliberalism is able
to slip just below the radar of consciousness. It cloaks itself in
a billion brands, a billion diversions, a billion smiling faces. It
rarely makes itself known directly. Its propaganda is aerosolized
through a dizzying multitude of advertisements, content creation,
and worryingly, individuals themselves. It is so pernicious, so
insidious, that some of the most radical neoliberals alive today
don’t realize they’re neoliberals. They may believe themselves to
be progressives, nationalists, leftists, traditionalists, even communists!
They see the ever-multiplying crises caused by market
activity and can only think to respond with extreme solutions to
protect the market from its own excesses, wrapped in the utopian
rhetoric of long-dead political forces to mask the existing ones
they actually serve.
We are prisoners in Plato’s Cave, constantly inhaling the
spores of neoliberal ideology, convinced that the hallucinatory
shadows they conjure are reality, never knowing the true nature
of the world behind them. The possibility of freedom under any
form of liberalism has been disproven. Rest assured, there are
solutions to be found, but they can only be discovered through
careful, cautious analysis of our current conditions. Immediate,
decentralized, disorganized action produces no answers, only
more prisoners. Leaving the cave and breathing the clean air of a
new and unfamiliar world is a fraught, jarring, alien experience.
It’s only natural, but most will be content watching the shadows,
and may even fight for their right to stay in the cave. Unfortunately,
the only way to break everyone out is to do so forcefully,
through vigor and discipline and without regret or remorse. There
is no freedom in merely recognizing our bondage, nor in loudly
but impotently thrashing ourselves against our chains. A detailed
map still needs drawing before anyone can even dream of leaving.
Skip that step, and escape is just another shadow the spores have
convinced you is real.
For those interested in acquainting themselves further
with neoliberal theory, I recommend Road to Serfdom by Friedrich
Hayek and The End of History and the Last Man by Francis
Fukuyama. For those interested in a more critical perspective, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey and Capitalist
Realism by Mark Fisher. For the inner workings of capitalism
overall, I recommend The Marx-Engels Reader edited by Robert
C. Tucker (though I strongly recommend the full texts from which
this primer is compiled), as well as Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin. I must stress that each of
these readings should be approached critically and scientifically,
not passively or dogmatically. Read carefully and at your own
risk.
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Liliana Limpidă “Totalitarian Liberalism “