Neoliberalism as alienating fundamentalism

Neoliberalism imposes interests of minority sectors at the expense of majorities being harmed, something indefensible in the open. It needs to establish a regime that combines alienating manipulation of majority sectors with repression of those who resist its predominance. It is about colonizing minds of the subdued, formatting subjectivities, alienating them to disorient defensive or transforming actions. They rule with misinformation, fear, hate and a permanent state of induced dissatisfaction.

Neoliberalism magnifies the alienation that characterizes every fundamentalism to facilitate the unbridled accumulation of wealth and decisional power imposed to the world. They act to maximize benefits for powerful minorities, only doable through appropriation of good part of what is produced by the entire society. No one accumulates at that speed and intensity only with his/her own effort.

To achieve that, dominators need to obstruct the comprehension of what happens and how problems that overwhelm population are generated. This is done with the complicity of a network of media, sectors of the judiciary, politics, and some think tanks that impose values and a common sense that favors them. Together with such power, they have mechanisms to capture democracies and establish wealth-concentrating engines.

In this context, these lines briefly point to alienating acts of neoliberalism and, in particular, the role played by a permanently induced dissatisfaction. We do not ignore that there are other legitimate dissatisfactions that are necessary to be addressed and solved.

The purpose of an induced dissatisfaction

To maintain their interests and privileges, neoliberalism promoted dissatisfaction in various dimensions in the functioning of society. We highlight the dissatisfaction with politics, labor unions, public enterprises and consumption.

• Neoliberal governments make politics vilifying opposing politicians; they slander and hound those using partial truths or creating invented prosecutions. Dissatisfaction with politics (as if it were a homogenous space and not diverse) is not improvised but rather a perversely designed system to weaken or annul opposing leadership. The purpose is to eliminate resistances to the domination project by those who might suggest non-concentrating alternative options. To achieve that, they need to control the democratic functioning to exercise fully their economic and decisional power.

Dissatisfaction with politics opens the gates to disarticulation of the democratic order and transformation of its significance. Thus, neoliberalism aims at imposing its peculiar notion of what is freedom and consensus. For them, freedom is associated with debauchery to plunder national wealth, consensus only includes them, and those who could be manipulated or coopted; outside of consensus, remain the threatened, the repressed, the silenced. This ideological bias is part of the process of appropriation of the State and its resources, its regulatory capacity, concentrating public policies; everything else is subsidiary to such objective.

• In unionism episodes of corrupt leadership happen, which are crystalized in structures that block the access of other different workers’ movements. However, this is far from stating that all unionism is corrupt because they are not. Impossible to ignore is that from the union fight emerged labor rights and the permanent struggle for achieving fair salaries. Moreover, it is worth remembering that in various sectors people with different trajectories and values coexist, some honest and others not, both responsible and irresponsible, loyal and traitors, generous and greedy. This happens in the sphere of enterprise, as well as in politics, media, the judiciary, health, sports, entertainment, just to name a few. In unionism, there is also such diversity, which does not diminish the long tradition of honorable and dedicated democratic unionism.

Charging against unionism implies debilitating the negotiating capacity and ability to represent workers, an important component in the maximization of profits for large enterprises. Yet, union dissatisfaction constantly induced does not prevents them from taking over guilds and unions by coopting their leaderships who betray those they say they represent. A weak unionism facilitates the concentration of wealth and clears up resistance voices and attitudes.

• The strategic public enterprises are a booty for neoliberal interests. On the one side, because their monopolistic or oligopolistic position allows them to obtain considerable benefits if they fall into their hands. In addition, because by seizing them they successfully get rid of actors that do not follow the criterion of maximizing profit but rather prefer to serve their community, which is a much more dangerous reference. Through privatization, they pave the way for making profits and imposing the notion that all production of good and services must produce microeconomic results, that is, quantifiable at the level of each enterprise. Benefits to third parties and the entire society are not relevant. A concrete example, among many, is the case of a national airline that serves consolidated spaces but also territories that do not produce direct benefits to the company but that, surprisingly, with assistance, manage to make their contribution to national development.

Neoliberalism belittles the State by making people believe that there are no effective public structures in terms of producing essential goods and services for the functioning of the country. Such State bothers them because it regulates and unveils their spoilages, abuses, and illegalities in their appropriation of resources that belong to workers, providers, and consumers. Unlike oligopolistic enterprises, public corporations do not abuse their market power, do not evade their tax responsibility, do not flight their surpluses but rather they reinvest them in the country such as some though not all private companies do. Their strategic presence helps the country, although, of course, they stand in the way of the economic concentration plans fueled by dominant groups.

• In terms of consumption, neoliberalism suggests that it is indispensable to awaken a constant dissatisfaction in those who demand market products. If such dissatisfaction were not induced, enterprises could not place an always-growing offer of goods and services. Here, there is another deceit. That is true when consumption is concentrated because so are the incomes of middle and popular sectors. If a population majority does not have good incomes, thus, they need to generate dissatisfaction of those who have the resources to buy products beyond their needs. Therefore, an easy-throw-away economy is developed, without maintenance and repair of durable equipment, together with the promotion of a superfluous consumption. Tons of waste and few recycling activities are generated. In this context, enterprises produce the programed obsolescence, that is, goods and services that after a certain time become obsolete on purpose. All this is facilitated by publicity that encourages the permanent renovation of purchases in function of style, fashion, technological innovations (some superfluous), or simple improvements in presentation and packaging.

It is important to visualize that this permanent dissatisfaction of consumers is induced as a constitutive part of the concentrating course and functioning imposed on us. If that concentration did not prevail, resources in the hands of majorities will appear with quite different consumption patterns. In fact, existent productive apparatus cannot change instantly, thus, in the short term, it will tend to support the prevailing consumption patterns. However, sooner than later, they will have to adjust to the more massive demands in terms of housing, food, energy, transport, clothing, as well as caring for emergent sectors in care, science, and technology, solidarity practices, and so much more. In this new perspective, it is not about not buying but rather acquiring what we truly need, a consumption pattern with ethical, environmental, and technological impacts worth to make explicit.

Victimizers positioned as rescuers

Those who subdue their peoples, that impose concentrating dynamics that generate endless inequities and inequalities, offer to help their victims. Victimizers position themselves as rescuers while they take advantage of the social bewilderment they promote to plunder without limits, making their perspectives and interests to prevail. They establish legal norms that they do not respect, they decide that the illegitimate is legal, they unravel stampedes of appropriators of wealth that others generate, and they implant a brutal course that dispossesses workers and send thousands of enterprises into bankruptcy. These are not peaceful processes but rather mercilessly coercive trajectories. This is an outrageous sham, canard, hypocrisy that we need to tackle and unveil with militancy centered in social organization and clarification.

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