I am struck with disbelief with the apparently unlimited extent of their smug arrogance. It is these very men (and yes, they are mostly men!) who are singularly responsible for the mess we are in. Blair and Clinton in particular presided over the massive accumulation of debt, reckless deregulation and disproportionate and unbalanced boom in our economy which brought us to the precipice. That they and their ilk imagine that they should now be ‘sorting things out’ is cause for worry. In another time they might have been thrown in the dungeon.
All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
“Neoliberalism” is the term used to refer to the most recent form capitalism has taken in the modern world. It is shorthand for the new order gestating since the 1970s, characterized by “extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy,” as the Wikipedia entry has it. Such characteristics are explanation enough as to why neoliberalism has become a veritable swearword among left-leaning thinkers.
An article by George Monbiot published in The Guardian succinctly summarizes the left’s case against this Novus Ordo Seclorum. The title says it all: “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems.” Neoliberalism is responsible for everything from the 2008 credit crisis to the epidemic of loneliness to the collapse of ecosystems. At its heart is the unfettered individual in competition with other such individuals, wherein “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… Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty.”
Although it rose to ascendancy in the 1970s, as an agenda neoliberalism was first put on the map back in 1938 by the throwback Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, in the face of a Keynesian onslaught that carried all before it. They and like-minded thinkers, holding fast to the old-school ideal of limited government and free markets, kept to their belief even when it seemed a lost cause. But their perseverance was repaid. With the collapse of the Keynesian consensus in the 1970s, their ideas gained a new lease on life, and with the ascent to power of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, they became the new political-economic orthodoxy.
Then came the harvest. As Monbiot relates: “massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services.” And not only in these countries but across the globe: “Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world.”
The “freedom” neoliberalism promises resembles the “equality” pilloried by Anatole France in The Red Lily (“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread”). For what does it entail? In Mobiot’s words, “freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.”
And where such freedom is restricted in rich countries, it is transferred to poor ones, “through trade treaties incorporating ‘investor-state dispute settlement’: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections.”
Essentially, neoliberalism has gutted the state, privatized its services to the detriment of all but the owners, reduced through austerity the transfer payments that “lifts people out of poverty,” and legitimized the destruction of the environment.
Martinez and Garcia provide an additional summary of the neoliberal agenda: 1) the rule of the market, 2) cutting public expenditure for social services, 3) deregulation, 4) privatization, and 5) eliminating the concept of the “public good” or “community.” Here deregulation is added to the list of failures, while the eradication of the pursuit of the public good and community parallel Monbiot’s mention of the epidemic of loneliness.
The roster of witnesses could be multiplied, but without adding much. It is a rather bleak and somber picture that the critics of neoliberalism paint. But things are perhaps even worse than they think they are. For in their critique, they advance hardly any new notions beyond the traditional critiques of capitalism that have been leveled since the emergence of the “social question” in the 19th century. It is rather too easy simply to put the blame for the failures and dysfunctionalities of the modern world system at the feet of traditional free-market capitalism. This enemy has been long defeated; things have progressed far beyond such simplicities. Might there be a reason that precisely this obsolete bogeyman is so energetically pressed as the root of all evil? Might it be that such a critique obscures what is really going on, and hides from us the true problem?
For there are realities to the new “neoliberal” order that this critique does not take into account. This is a form of intellectual blindness. And it is being exploited precisely in favor of neoliberalism.
Is neoliberalism simply old-fashioned classical liberalism (i.e., modern conservatism)? To argue as much is to lose sight of some extremely important factoids. One such, as was documented here, is that budget deficits and spending on social programs are not down, but up. Especially in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008, governments in both the United States and Europe have increased deficit spending, not decreased it. Another is that the developed countries still exhibit high, some would consider crippling, levels of regulation. Spending is therefore not going down, and the regulatory state so decried by conservatives shows no sign of being dismantled.
The critique of neoliberalism proffered by Monbiot et al. is quite simply outmoded. It is based on an exclusive focus on the nation-state as the locus of economic and political activity, supplemented by a likewise outdated center-periphery construct of the relations between nations, whereby e.g. the rich Northern nations exploit the poor Southern nations. But that explanatory framework only obscures the true dynamics of the globalist economic system.
We have explored this system in some detail in previous posts (go here for a catalogue of articles). The important thing to glean from those treatments is that the center-periphery framework of exploitation has been superseded by a transnational corporate arrangement that stands over and outside of specific national constrictions and allegiances.
Sklair provides a succinct summary of this arrangement. “[It] is based on the concept of transnational practices, practices that cross state boundaries but do not necessarily originate with state agencies or actors. Analytically, they operate in three spheres: the economic, the political and the cultural-ideological. The whole is what I mean by ‘the global system’…. The building blocks of the theory are the transnational corporation [TNC], [which is] the characteristic institutional form of economic transnational practices, a still-evolving transnational capitalist class (TCC) in the political sphere, and the culture-ideology of consumerism in the culture-ideology sphere.”
At the heart of this system is, then, the TCC, the transnational capitalist class. This group is the major extractor of surplus value in the modern world. In previous posts we have explored the skewed relationships of nations in the current economic framework, characterized by trade deficits run by some countries and trade surpluses by others. We have noted that this arrangement has to be financed by continuous indebtedness, for every trade imbalance has to be financed, and we have asked the question, why allow these imbalances to continue? Who benefits from this deficit consumerism whereby debt piles up with no end in sight? As I put it here:
Qui bono? Not the workers, neither in the exporting nor in the consuming countries. Rather, it is our familiar friend, [Fernand] Braudel’s “shadowy zone” of behind-the-scenes capitalist power brokers, which benefits from its “commanding position at the pinnacle of the trading community” to steer the profits in its direction and the losses to both ends of the trading network. In this arrangement, there is no core and no periphery – there are only regions of exploitation. The difference is in the form the exploitation takes.
Already in 1977 Goldfrank noted the incipient formation of this new group that would become the TCC:
There is growing evidence that the owners and managers of multinational enterprises are coming to constitute themselves as a powerful social class beyond their role behavior: forming interest groups, engaging in common educational and recreational activity, attempting to include top economic managers in the socialist countries (with which trade and joint investments are increasing rapidly), and working out an ideology in which the world is truly their oyster.
Since then, the literature exploring the TCC has burgeoned. One of the leading proponents of this explanatory framework is Leslie Sklair, now professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics. In the article cited (note 5 above), one of the many he has dedicated to the subject, he provides a succinct outline of the characteristics of the TCC (pp. 521ff.):
- Outward-oriented, global perspective. “The growing TNC and World Bank emphasis on ‘free trade’ and the shift from import-substitution to export-promotion strategies of most developing countries over the last decade or two have been driven by members of the TCC.” This is accompanied by a globalist orientation in the training of business managers: “There is now a huge literature in the popular and academic business press on the ‘making of the global manager’ and the ‘globalization of business and management’ … confirming that this is a real phenomenon and not simply the creation of a few ‘globaloney’ myth makers.”
- Cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.”
- Shared lifestyle, including education and consumption patterns (“luxury goods and services”). Members of the TCC enjoy “exclusive clubs and restaurants, ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, ‘the right places to see and be seen’, private as opposed to mass forms of travel and entertainment and, ominously, increasing residential segregation of the very rich secured by armed guards and electronic surveillance, from Los Angeles to Moscow and from Manila to Beijing.”
As a class the TCC is held together by these elements, oriented about a common goal: the exploitation of the possibilities provided by global consumption. “The culture-ideology of global capitalist consumerism is the fundamental value system that keeps the system intact” (p. 523). And so it behooves this global elite to maintain and foster this state of affairs. Sklair refers to this as the siege mentality of capitalism: “The siege mentality entails the view that social systems are always potentially vulnerable to attack, no less from inside than from outside. Approval, and reward for behaviour which sustains it, must be maintained to ensure the persistence of the system” (p. 517).
This is the imperative: the TCC needs to foster the ideology of global capitalist consumption in order to maintain its hegemony. Thus far, it has been quite successful doing so. “The practical ‘politics’ of this hegemony is the everyday life of consumer society and the promise that it is a global reality for most of the world’s peoples. This is certainly the most persistent image projected by television and the mass media in general. In one sense, therefore, shopping is the most successful social movement, product advertising in its many forms the most successful message, consumerism the most successful ideology of all time” (p. 531).
The success of the TCC in propagating this universal ideology meets us at every turn. The question then is, how in blazes have they done it? It is at this point that our argument takes a curious turn. For we have to proceed beyond the usual consumption critiques revolving around the deleterious effects of advertising (manipulation, subliminal messaging), wastefulness (the throwaway society), and the like. There is an added dimension to this newfangled globalist consumerism, the understanding of which unravels many a mystery.
This added dimension was first referenced (to the author’s knowledge) by David Rieff in a celebrated article published in the August 1993 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Entitled “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner,” it laid bare a hitherto (and still) unrecognized, because improbable, correlation: the “newly globalized consumer economy” has its flip side in multiculturalism.
Rieff begins his analysis with a tantalizing assertion. In the face of universal agreement that Marxism had died with the Soviet Union, he argues that precisely a Marxist hermeneutic explains the current climate of opinion and practice, which by that time was being dominated by the notion of multiculturalism. “For an application if not of the methods of ‘vulgar’ Marxism then at least of those (related) modes of understanding that are to be found on the business pages of the better newspapers might produce a rather more grounded sense of what we are talking about when we talk and talk about multiculturalism. Despite the denials and mystifications of the intelligentsia, multiculturalism is a phenomenon with a silent partner: the broad and radical change now taking place within world capitalism” (p. 62).
The debate about multiculturalism had given the sense that ideas mattered, that what the intelligentsia of either the right or the left, for or against, had to say on the matter would prove decisive to the social order. Rieff pours cold water on the notion. It is not ideas that are driving this debate, he says; rather, it is the new reality of an emergent global capitalist order.
“Reality is elsewhere,” says Rieff.
Can conservatives really believe that a few curriculum changes will undermine a system that could not be weakened by the Comintern or the Soviet Black Sea fleet? As for our campus revolutionaries: How can they insist on the emancipatory power of multiculturalism when during the 1980s – the very decade in which multiculturalism became the dominant intellectual current in elite sectors of academia – the conditions of the poor, of working-class women, and of America’s non-white citizens deteriorated dramatically? If multiculturalism is what its proponents claim it is, why has its moment seen the richest 1 percent of Americans grow richer and the deunionization of the American workplace? There is something wrong with this picture (p. 63).
There is a new game in town, he writes, and multiculturalism is simply an epiphenomenon thereof. “The curiousness of the situation is that both sides have misconstrued the power of multiculturalism in precisely the same way: as a threat to the capitalist system. In reality, it is nothing of the sort, as becomes clear the moment one stops looking at multiculturalism in ideologized, millenarian terms – as if it were some kind of pure, homegrown manifestation of the Zeitgeist – and instead sees it as perhaps the most salient cultural epiphenomenon of an increasingly globalized capitalist system” (p. 63).
To perceive this is to hold in one’s hand the key to understanding some otherwise puzzling phenomena. For instance, the increasingly incongruous nature of university curricula. “Behind the embrace of multiculturalism among college administrators is the belief that there is no incongruity in simultaneously subsidizing an English department made up of feminists and poststructuralists, a physics department that is up to its eye balls in research grants from the federal government, and an enormous (and enormously profitable) quasi-professional sports establishment, complete with athletes who are students only in the technical sense.” The point is, the mentality has changed: “Once administrators have decided that the university will be a kind of department store, then each new course offering becomes little more than another product line, and department chairpersons begin to act like the store’s buyers” (p. 63).
Far from undermining the detested capitalist system, the presuppositions of multiculturalism turn out to dovetail nicely with those of the new corporate mentality. “The multiculturalist mode is what any smart businessman would prefer. For if all art is deemed as good as all other art, and, for that matter, if the point of art is not greatness but the production of works of art that reflect the culture and aspirations of various ethnic, sexual, or racial subgroups within a society, then one is in a position to increase supply almost at will in order to meet increases in demand” (p. 64). Indeed, culture becomes something of a bazaar; and is that not what makes for good business as well?
Instead of being a rare and costly thing, culture becomes simultaneously a product, like a car – something that can be made new every few years – and an abundant resource, like, well, people. The result is that the consumption of culture can increasingly come to resemble the consumption of goods. After all, just as one cannot say that a preference for Pepsi is superior to a preference for Dr Pepper, what is euphemistically known as “cultural pluralism” permits a similar abdication of judgment in matters of artistic taste. The rules of the market are soon in full control. If students want to read Alice Walker in a literature class instead of the Iliad, fine. The publishing industry certainly has no qualms. It knows it can market Walker more savvily than it can market the Greeks. At any rate, it is not a case, as conservatives allege, of the student as barbarian. Rather, it is a case of the student as customer. And in our society – and, increasingly, most societies – the customer is always right (pp. 64-66).
It is not only students and department heads that are affected by this; professors are as well. The radicals turn out to have found a comfort zone in the new material order, even if that clashes with their professed beliefs.
For all their writings on power, hegemony, and oppression, the campus multiculturalists seem indifferent to the question of where they fit into the material scheme of things. Perhaps it’s tenure, with its way of shielding the senior staff from the rigors of someone else’s bottom-line thinking. Working for an institution in which neither pay nor promotion is connected to performance, job security is guaranteed (after tenure is attained), and pension arrangements are probably the finest in any industry in the country – no wonder a poststructuralist can easily believe that words are deeds. She or he can afford to (p. 66).
Indeed, words offer another telltale sign of confluence. Rieff cites an article by “new historicist” professor Janet Nedelsky in which she writes of the need to do away with boundaries because boundaries indicate, in her words, “a separation and opposition that does not capture the complex, fertile, and tension-laden interconnection between self and others.” But isn’t it curious that this viewpoint regarding boundaries coincides with e.g. Larry Hirschhorn and Thomas Gilmore writing in the Harvard Business Review about the new ideal: the “corporation without boundaries.” Why is the one radical and the other not? In fact, they are equally so.
The more one reads in academic multiculturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world. Far from standing in implacable intellectual opposition to each other, both groups see the same racial and gender transformations in the demographic makeup of the United States and of the American work force…. [B]oth CEOs and Ph.D.’s insist more and more that it is no longer possible to speak in terms of the United States as some fixed, sovereign entity. The world has moved on; capital and labor are mobile; and with each passing year national borders, not to speak of national identities, become less relevant either to consciousness or to commerce (pp. 67-68).
Rieff goes so far as to say that it is business, not the radicals, that is having the more practical effect implementing a multicultural agenda. “The multiculturalists may pride themselves on posing a fundamental threat to what Professor Henry Giroux has called ‘the hegemonic notion that Eurocentric culture is superior to other cultures and traditions by virtue of its canonical status as a universal measure of Western civilization.’ But the reality is that no serious player in the business world has anything but the most vestigial or sentimental interest in Western civilization, as it is roughly understood by campus radicals and conservatives alike.” When everything is submitted to the market for valuation, then all values become relative. The business community has embraced this relativity. “The market economy, now global in scale, is by its nature corrosive of all established hierarchies and certainties…. If any group has embraced the rallying cry ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,’ it is the world business elite” (p. 69).
The result may not be what the idealists had in mind. The brave new world of global consumerism is a far cry from visions of egalitarian, environmentally friendly utopia. “The collapse of borders, far from being the liberating event that the academic multiculturalists have envisaged, has brought about the multiculturalism of the market, not the multiculturalism of justice. And if there is a mystery about all this, it is that so many people could have expected a different, more ‘enlightened’ outcome” (p. 70). Nevertheless, it is the reality of the borderless world in which we have landed.
What is revealing is how academics, the proponents of a supposed anti-capitalist alternative, have fallen so easily into line with this “multiculturalism of the market,” ruled as it is by the corporate business world.
Campus radicalism is awfully selective anyway. Its talk is long on race and gender, short on class. And that is probably just as well, since the market economy, ready though it may be to admit blacks and women, is hardly likely to sign its own death warrant by accepting a radical revision of class relations. Were such proposals to be seriously advanced, on campus or elsewhere, the multiculturalists would soon discover just how tough capitalism can be when its real, as opposed to its sentimental, interests are threatened (p. 71).
Indeed, it is in their economic interest to do so. “That is the beauty of the academic multiculturalists’ approach: they can appear to be radical and can feel themselves to be radical, but they can advance a program that, stripped of its adorning rhetoric, is little more than a demand for inclusion, for a piece of the capitalist pie” (p. 71).
This is more than just coincidence. There is more than just a correlation between multiculturalism and globalist corporate capitalism, between the corporate elite and the academic elite. There is in fact the “Marxist” connection to which Rieff refers in his article: the illusion clung to by the left and its intelligentsia that it calls the shots in this culture war, when in reality it is only carrying the water for the global corporate regime.
Rieff makes this clear with a pertinent comparison.
The rise of multicultural capitalism is comparable to abolitionism: the slaves were freed when the abolitionists could count on the support of economic interests in the North, for which an economy based on slavery was an impediment to the future economic well-being of the United States. It was industrial civilization, not justice, that the hardheaded plutocrats of New York and New England were interested in furthering. And until they were convinced that their own interests were at stake, all the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, and their colleagues was for naught. After they were convinced, this same oratory seemed to sweep all before it (pp. 70-71).
“Seemed to.” It is all so quintessentially Marxian. The economic is the “base,” the intellectual is the “superstructure,” a framework that, “for all their professed respect for the Marxist tradition,” is “out of favor” with the multicultural intellectuals. As well one might expect, given the underlying reality.
This economic base is more than just an abstraction, a Marxian construct. It is the source of funding for the entire academic enterprise, and not only that, for the myriad of activities that impinge upon and determine the direction of the broader culture.
Here we hear echoes of Sklair’s contention that the TCC exerts great effort in gaining and maintaining its hegemony. In fact, we see looming before us one of the ways in which it concretely does so. Another article from the 1990s, in another leading journal of opinion, the New Republic, sheds light on this.
In this article, David Samuels charts a peculiar shift in orientation on the part of the leading foundations. Now foundations are the number one vehicle by which the wealthy influence public policy and the direction of “civil society.” Beginning with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, they have had great influence on the development of law, politics, education, and culture. But Samuels notes a shift in foundations’ emphasis, away from broad cultural initiatives and towards narrow advocacy. “Where the Ford Foundation of the 1950s and ’60s spent its money on efforts to promote writing and scholarship at major universities and on symphony orchestras and ballet companies in dozens of American cities, Ford today spends its money on arts projects designed to ‘promote tolerance and social understanding’ and ensure ‘access and equity.’… In the past twenty-five years … a startling shift in foundation funding has occurred, away from research and toward the support of advocacy groups.” This narrow focus has been bolstered by an uncritical atmosphere in which foundation leadership, itself wedded to a multiculturalist agenda, no longer pursues a broad agenda of what once was known as the public interest. It has become a narrow world of its own, without critical openness. “Over the past twenty-five years, the men and women who staff America’s major foundations have become a tight-knit world unto themselves…. The preponderance of foundation grants to advocacy groups … suggests that foundations are less devoted to the reasoned pursuit of the public good than to the multiculturalist dogmas propounded by their staff.”
What could be behind such a shift? Is it that foundations, and the corporate interests behind them, have become wedded to this form of idealism? Are they selflessly pursuing the agenda of “inclusion” and “diversity”? Or is this an expression of Rieff’s base-superstructure relation?
Another critic of foundations and their influence, Joan Roelofs, sheds light on the motivation behind the corporate interest’s advocacy of this agenda. Her critique is rather to the point. “Almost all progressive organizations look to corporations and foundations for funding…. These liberal foundations are closely tied to political and economic elites. Their original founders were wealthy capitalists, and their current trustees and senior staff have close ties to the corporate world. Furthermore, their investments are in the usual high earning corporations…. We are not arguing that foundations are ‘all powerful,’ but rather that their power is enormous, and rarely revealed by scholars, journalists, or activists….”
Foundations, as mentioned earlier, are a prime vehicle through which the corporate elite exercises hegemony. They are used to deflect, defuse, and coopt otherwise dangerously subversive or even revolutionary movements. “Foundations are not opposed to social change, but regard it as necessary and do not see it forthcoming from the political process…. The liberal foundations seek to direct change in a way that will not disturb the wealth and power of corporate elites and the hegemony of the United States” (p. 658). They do so in a myriad of ways. “They are gatekeepers for academics in all fields…. Foundations exert even more direct influence by co-opting activists and their organizations…. The radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s was often transformed, by grants and technical assistance from liberal foundations, into fragmented and local organizations subject to elite control” (p. 662).
As it turns out, multiculturalism, identity politics, and the emphasis on diversity and inclusion are rather convenient ways to attain this end. “Dissidence is fragmented through the creation of organizations for blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, the disabled, Native Americans, and even poor people, who are considered just another minority in need of rights. Foundations have created and funded litigation organizations…. In the early 1970s, the Ford Foundation began to fund women’s studies research centers and academic programs; similar efforts resulted in institutions for other disadvantaged groups. Social movement activists are thereby transformed into researchers, managers, and litigators; and movements are fragmented into ‘identity politics.’”
The strategy of splintering potentially disruptive populations into isolated identity-groups with accreditation in the political process serves to shunt these groups toward the relatively harmless activity of demands for “inclusion,” as Rieff put it, “a piece of the capitalist pie.” Because this does not bring the system itself into question – something which used to be the left’s raison-de-être.
Foundation ideology attributed the radical protests to defects in pluralism. The pluralist ideology holds that any interest is free to organize and to obtain benefits from the system, through peaceful processes of compromise. Disadvantaged groups… needed help in obtaining their rights. Grant money would enable them to participate in the interest group process on an equal basis with the more advantaged groups, and then they would no longer waste their energies in futile disruptive actions…. Poverty, militarism, racism, and environmental degradation are not by-products of the economic system or related to each other. They are merely defects to be corrected through the pluralist political process (p. 31).
What we have here is an ongoing, full-court press, which has been pushing the multicultural agenda during precisely the identical time-frame that the globalist corporate system was being established and expanded – which is, since the 1970s, and especially the 1980s. This is more than coincidence. As Brandt points out, “The Ford Foundation began supporting feminist groups and women’s studies programs in the early 1970s. Just ten years earlier they were busy training Indonesian elites (using Berkeley professors as instructors) to take over from Sukarno, which occurred soon after a CIA-sponsored coup in 1965 that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Did the folks at Ford Foundation have a bleeding change of heart, or are they continuing the same battle on another front? It would appear to be the latter.”
No, it is not a change of heart, but a change of plan. The TCC means business, and it has for a long time. And its strategy is astoundingly effective. “The ruling elite are experts at manipulating their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why they continue to rule. As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those who are less equal begin to see society in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to emphasize our differences at every opportunity. Conventional wisdom becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged.”
We are being played, not in the interests of “U.S. hegemony,” as Roelofs supposes, but transnational hegemony, TCC hegemony. We are being splintered into antagonistic identity groups, the better to control us. “The objective is to define ‘us’ and ‘them’ in ways that do not threaten the established order. Today everyone can see that there is more Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when affirmative action began over twenty years ago. And for twenty years now one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one’s race on an application form in the 1960s). We are not fighting the system anymore, we’re fighting each other.”
But our problem is not so much discrimination, racism, and the like, but lack of opportunity generally, the byproduct of a system that wishes to hide that very fact. We are being pitted against each other in order to obscure this fundamental underlying reality. That lack is the result of a globalized economy structured in such a way as to squeeze genuine economic opportunity even as it proffers the consolation prize of limited redistribution of wealth and opportunity.
“Transnational accumulation” is what it’s all about; for the rest, let them eat cake. For “none of these dire trends are of any concern to the ruling elites who have the power to address them. They are citizens of the world, and no one – now not even the Soviet bloc – stands in their way. They have no need for borders; free trade is what they want and what they will eventually get. Many on Wall Street prefer unrestricted immigration, which would drive down wages and fold up our few remaining unions. For ruling elites, private security provides insulation and ‘social decay’ is just an irrelevant phrase.”
Does that sound like it was written during the election cycle of 2016? It does – but it dates from 1993! This has been going on for quite a while – and we haven’t even been aware of it. And in this context, the notion of La Trahison des Clercs takes on a whole new meaning. “The campus left speaks of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic and class distinctions. This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists should no longer be considered ‘leftists.’ As long as they claim this description, some of us – those who still feel that elites ought to be accountable – are beginning to feel more comfortable as ‘populists.’”
Speaking of the election cycle, it did at last seem as if the left had regained some of its lost resolve, its sense of mission. The candidacy of Bernie Sanders provided a rallying point about which the critics of the system could gather. And there was no shortage of criticism of the leading candidate for the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, precisely in terms of a critique of neoliberalism. For Clinton was viewed as the candidate of the ruling class.
In their article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s Empowerment” (subtitled “Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism”), Kevin Young & Diana C. Sierra Becerra explore the Clinton candidacy in the light of Clinton’s close ties to the corporate business world.
As first lady, Clinton had a significant impact on policy. “Clinton became perhaps the most active first lady in history. While it would be unfair to hold her responsible for all of her husband’s policies, she did play a significant role in shaping and justifying many of them. In Living History she boasts of her role in gutting US welfare: ‘By the time Bill and I left the White House, welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent’ — and not because poverty had dropped. Women and children, the main recipients of welfare, have been the primary victims.” President Clinton’s crime bill was similarly eye-popping from a progressive perspective. “Clinton also lobbied Congress to pass her husband’s deeply racist crime bill, which, Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, ‘escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible,’ expanding mass incarceration and the death penalty.”
Of course now Mrs. Clinton is campaigning as if both welfare reform and a tough-on-crime policy were uniquely Republican (racist! sexist!) policy positions. What she does not point out is her own role in putting them in place.
But the real criticism focuses on her years as senator from New York (2001-2009) and secretary of state (2009-2013), during which “her promotion of US corporate profit-making and her aggressive assertion of the US government’s right to intervene in foreign countries” were the two defining features. Young and Becerra quote Bloomberg Businessweek’s assertion that “Clinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business,” seeking “to install herself as the government’s highest-ranking business lobbyist.” They cite her article in Foreign Policy in 2011 which “speaks at length about the objective of ‘opening new markets for American businesses,’ containing no fewer than ten uses of the phrases ‘open markets,’ ‘open trade,’ and permutations thereof.” In that article Clinton champions the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): “Like Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal is intended to further empower multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment in all countries involved. Lower wages and increased rates of displacement, detention, and physical violence for female and LGBT populations are among the likely consequences, given the results of existing ‘free trade’ agreements.”
They further detail her penchant for militaristic intervention in foreign countries, and cite “neoconservative” Robert Kagan as to her likely policies should she be elected. “‘I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,’ Kagan told the New York Times last June. Asked what to expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency, Kagan predicted that ‘if she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon.’ But, he added, ‘clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.’”
Actually, they call it “experience and exposure,” or as Michelle Obama recently put it, “No one in our lifetime has ever had as much experience and exposure to the presidency, not Barack, not Bill, nobody…. And yes, she happens to be a woman.” (Appeal to gender – check!)
Young and Becerra quote Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes, that while “‘Hillary Clinton has been more outspoken than any previous Secretary of State regarding the rights of women and sexual minorities,’ this position is ‘more rhetoric than reality.’”
Given Clinton’s backing of neo-liberal economic policies and war-making by the United States and its allies, her advocacy of women’s rights overseas . . . may have actually set back indigenous feminist movements in the same way that the Bush administration’s “democracy-promotion” agenda was a serious setback to popular struggles for freedom and democracy. . . .
Hillary Clinton’s call for greater respect for women’s rights in Muslim countries never had much credibility while US-manufactured ordinance is blowing up women in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The bottom line is, Clinton is a representative of what we have now come to recognize as the TCC. The Clinton Foundation and its various branch activities has ensconced the Clintons firmly in the world of “philanthrocapitalism” with its hegemonic functionality within the global system. The influence peddling which seems to be at the heart of the Clinton email controversy should be seen in the context of this brokerage functionality, mediating relations between the TCC and government. Similarly, the $21 million earned by giving speeches to various corporate, banking, and Wall Street entities since leaving the State Department, and the $153 million total for speechmaking since 2001, are part and parcel of this linchpin functionality within the global system. As I noted in a previous article, Hillary Clinton is the “poster child” of that system.
And what of her opponent in the current election? Whatever one may say of Donald Trump, no one has said that he represents the corporate elite. Quite the opposite. Of course, reality may be otherwise. Were he to be elected, he might turn out to be cooptable as well.
Be that as it may, one thing has become clear. The culture war may have been won by the left, but it was won because the corporate world got behind it and indeed coopted it. This means that progressives should recognize their role within the global system. For given this understanding, the categories “right” and “left” have lost all meaning.
The tragedy in all of this: it is not a matter of right versus left, but top versus bottom. “The ruling elite that finds diversity useful is an elite operating at a level which transcends right and left…. Nothing shows this better than the fact that this ideological right has always been as concerned as the left over the real source of power, the elite globalists…. It’s not a right-left problem, but rather a top-bottom problem.”
And yet the left is so easily egged on to do the dirty work: vituperate conservatives and champion the poster child of the TCC simply because she, as her husband before her, has mastered the art of shifting the blame for all ills to unpopular political opponents. This seems to be the role the left plays within this neoliberal order.
That is why I used the word “role” in the title of this article. To have a role to play is to be put into a particular position in order to perform a particular, scripted, function. It is allocated by whoever is in control of the situation. In other words, the left plays the role set for it by the powers that be, in this case the TCC. And as can be seen in this election cycle, it does so with alacrity, as if the surface phenomenon of a left-versus-right confrontation were the only reality. When the real reality is that this is only an epiphenomenon. The real reality determining the roles and the dance is that of a transnational capitalist hegemony that is busy turning the world into a surplus value yielding colony. The multiculturalist, diversity-oriented agenda in the end turns out to be just another brick in the wall.
