What Corporate Propagandists Deny When They Deny Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is the logical conclusion of a society that’s slaughtered, enslaved, and persecuted vulnerable people for five centuries to serve rich whites. The neoliberal worldview was first defined during a 1938 assembly of free market intellectuals as one that advances “the priority of the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and a strong and impartial state.” This meant that if neoliberalism ever became dominant, the state would merge with corporations to censor, propagandize, rob, and murder for the sake of profit. In law enforcement, academia, the press, and both major political parties, this dominance has since then been thoroughly achieved. After neoliberalism was fully articulated by Thomas Friedman, whose class of intellectuals forced it into the political mainstream in the 1970’s, it became what columnist Stephen Metcalf calls “the idea that swallowed the world.”

With this week’s release of the Paradise Papers, which document how elites around the world have secretly hoarded around ten trillion dollars in offshore tax havens, the completion of our society’s corporate takeover has been revealed. The U.S. government, whose parties are both funded by the billionaires named in the papers, will make no response to the scandal. Most Americans will simply glance at the leak disapprovingly, like they’ve done with every other advancement in our forty year corporate coup, as those in power willingly surrender nothing.

Like when Wall Street looted hundreds of billions from the national treasury, or when money was redefined by the Supreme Court as a means of political speech, or when the fates of workers were turned over to the WTO’s secretive and undemocratic three-person board, the corporate state tries to make us comply. One way the state does this is by limiting our reference points. We’re told we live in a capitalist system-the greatest system there is. That we live in a democracy, meaning this system exists by the popular will. That anyone who opposes this system is fringe, is unable to understand the genius of this system, is ungrateful for the massive ways it’s benefited them. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” said the multimillionaire congresswoman Nancy Pelosi this year to a voter that questioned the system. This is why the system’s propagandists, especially the ones in Pelosi’s party, are determined to stop the use of terms like “neoliberalism.”

Neoliberalism is supposed to be a meaningless word. It’s supposed to be an insult used by socialists, unsupported by any deeper historical pretext. Commentators that repeat this lie about the term, like the columnist Jonathan Chait, are elevated as the voices of reason. Chait’s address to those using the term, from his article How “Neoliberalism” Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals, has been: “The ubiquitous epithet is intended to separate its target — liberals — from the values they claim to espouse. By relabeling self-identified liberals as ‘neoliberals,’ their critics on the left accuse them of betraying the historic liberal cause.”

This complete twisting of the language surrounding the term, wherein “liberals” are presented as its only targets while neoliberalism has in fact infected both the mainstream left and right, is how the rot of our body politic gets concealed. Like when Chait was endorsing the invasion of Iraq, or praising Obama’s drone  campaign, he must maintain the fictions that the corporate state uses to justify itself. Fictions like the continued meaningfulness of terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” which now represent the exact same despotic structure. The ultimate aim of Chait’s class of pundits, consciously or not, is to keep us in an intellectual poverty that kills our motive for rebelling.

When the oppressed are deprived of comparison with a more free and comfortable life, when rampant destitution and suffering can be erased by citing false reports from authorities, despotic regimes become almost unstoppable. The real unemployment estimate, which counts those who’ve stopped looking for work and those only scarcely working, says nearly 8% of Americans are without a job; the government estimates say unemployment is around half that high. 51% of American workers are now making less than $30,000 a year as the majority of the country has regressed to a developing world lifestyle, with most unable to afford a car and a third unable to afford food or health care; mainstream media accounts of the economy fixate on the stock market and investment opportunities for the wealthy. The campaign to deny neoliberalism is about making us ignore our own systemic, decades-long economic pummelling.

Until enough awareness spreads of this theft for the people to rise up, we will continue living in the kind of despotism described by George Orwell: “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”