What’s Neoliberalism Got To Do With It? A Lot, Actually.
“Neoliberalism makes us miserable by creating a society designed solely for buyers and sellers… [neoliberalism] instructs us to build a society around one core insight: that human beings are atomized individuals who approach life by rationally maximizing their own self-interest…
Neoliberalism crashed the global economy in 2008 and is on its way to crashing the planet’s ecology.”
– Johann Ari
In his iconic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), German media scholar Walter Benjamin explains Marx’s critique of capitalism as being a system that will produce the conditions for its own downfall starting with increasingly egregious exploitation of workers. He discusses Marx’s ideas of Superstructure and Substructure, the way in which economic modes of production shape and maintain the ideology that in turn legitimizes and upholds that mode of production. In the case of Capitalism, Neoliberalism is the superstructure. Neoliberalism associates freedom with the economy: a free market means a free society of free people… right?
Neoliberalism tells us we are powerful alone, that we’re independent! And that our individual vote and dollar are the most powerful tools of influence we have; that if we want to stop climate catastrophe, we should replace plastic straws with stainless steel ones rather than organize and demand that the 100 companies that produce 71% of the Earth’s carbon emissions are held accountable.
Podcaster and writer Soleil Ho writes about ‘post-plastic’ straws in her 2019 article Why nonplastic straws are a terrible solution to a systemic problem:
“The idea that you can help buy your way into a better future, whether through a tote bag or an $8 glass straw, is seductive. Shifting the behaviors of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, like the Chinese coal industry or global petroleum oil corporations, seems like something for other people to deal with. In so many ways, this push echoes so many of the little choices we make as consumers every day to save the world: We choose the “natural” laundry detergent, screw eco-friendly light bulbs into our lamps and wipe with recycled toilet paper. As Americans, we are under the impression that buying things constitutes activism.”
“Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing.” – Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism…” (18).
Oliver Thorne of PhilosophyTube speaks on this subject in his video Elon Musk (2018). Pulling from Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Thorne says that:
“Nowadays capitalism sells us symbols of anticapitalist resistance because as long as we’re consuming those symbols- wearing the Che Guevara T-shirt, watching a movie where a bad guy is an evil corporation, praising wealth hoarders for their generosity or [praising] people who got where they are because of their workers as visionaries who did it alone- as long as evolution is sold as revolution the actual revolution, the substantive break with everything that has come before, is delayed.”
Thorne was pulling from The Culture Industry of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. The scholars write that “Culture is a paradoxical commodity… It mergers with the advertisement. The more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. Its motives are economic enough, (131)”
NEOLIBERALISM KEEPS US ISOLATED. NEOLIBERALISM DETESTS UNIONIZING, ORGANIZING, NEOLIBERALISM DETESTS DIRECT ACTION- VIOLENT OR OTHERWISE.
Neoliberalism upholds Capitalism, and Capitalism is the fuel of the Climate Catastrophe that is currently set to kill us all- that has already begun killing those who contribute the least to the problem.
