The neoliberal ideology of the ruling class is imbued in class fear
-There are the police, the army, myriad laws and salaried politicians to guard the bourgeoisie’s assets as the ultimate defense when ‘its democracy’ ceases to assure it control over the most desperate people.
1. Everything seems to be geared to crush the working class using a friendly and unquestionable form of (soft?) violence to keep things as they are, to accept that “that’s the way it is” and to educate the masses to respect the rules religiously because, otherwise, there is a State specialized in ‘putting order’ –ergo, a hypocritical harmony. Central to this despicable approach is that the masses continue to have buying and borrowing power –that is, by seducing the masses on the one hand, and repressing them on the other. We know that there are effective new technologies to seduce the masses. For example, entertainment is being used as a doctrinaire source of values and customs that try to anesthetize the masses in order to keep everyone in a good spirit and disciplined, subordinated to the conservative will –that is, so that nothing alters their business. (Fernando Buen)
The world is wanting for viable alternatives that truly challenge the neoliberal hegemony and that lead to winning human rights struggles
2. Fredric Jameson argued that it is easier to imagine the end of the world today than the end of capitalism.(?) Nothing has corrupted the working class more than the idea that it is OK to swims with the current. More recently, among the youth, no less of the U.S., socialism is once again a popular and attractive word, but it quickly reaches a dead end: they simply do not know how to go on; they are far from the goal of implementing a social and political alternative to capitalism among the working class.* (Martin Mosquera)
*: The new society can no longer be imagined according to the primitive utopia of socialism. There remain fundamental programmatic questions for the case in which processes of transition to socialism are reopened in our times. Socialism will once again become a mass project only if we succeed in planting popular expectations in claim holders using simple powerful images of the human rights-respecting society we are fighting for. We must thus move away our utopian image from the joke of Oscar Wilde, who said that the problem with socialism is that it will make us lose many afternoons in the café… The ‘professional dangers of power’ (bureaucracy, privileges, passivity of the masses) must be taken into account in any transition. Socialism is not an absolute that can only be approached through an exercise of utopian imagination. It exists in our present, fundamentally as a product of popular struggles that have indeed achieved conquests and reforms. In each popular conquest breathes, albeit with difficulty, a possible future society. From the defensive eagerness to preserve conquests will emerge the offensive struggles for a new human rights-respecting society. The traditional Left seems vitally devoid of exciting futures –it is full of memories and the past; it deplorably looks backwards. (M. Mosquera)
Spreading irrational political panic is as a US phenomenon as apple pie (Noam Chomsky)
3. Marshall McLuhan’s prophesized that “the successor to politics will be propaganda.” Raw propaganda is the rule now in Northern (and Southern) so-called democracies. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured shaping a fake narrative. The practice is corporate driven –the currency of our age… In 1964, McLuhan also famously declared, “The medium is the message.” (Now meaning the lie is the message?). What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. The more objective journalistic space has shrunk. The narrative remains unchallenged offering no evidence of what is mere propaganda (i.e., the no-evidence challenge). …and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these often neo-fascist acts or to prosecute its initiators.** (John Pilger)
**: What is fascism but a way to hate… (Louis Casado)
Yes, we have seen a great number of social movements emerge
4. But many of these movements mostly struggle for sectoral goals and social revindications. One can safely assume that many of them have little direct relevance for social justice and human rights and for the need for structural transformations of a society that oppresses and excludes majorities. This is surprising since neoliberal governments have exacerbated social conflicts in all domains, i.e., Capitalism has not been able to solve sometimes the most elemental needs of claim holders. Its actions are primarily cosmetic, applying minimalist changes that have allowed elites to hang-on to power. (Sergio Rodriguez G.)
Bottom line: Are morality and law irrelevant today?
5. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. In practice, this is precisely the case involving international HR law. But that does not mean that we should ignore morality and law. Morality and law ought to be used as guidelines to contribute to a better world, a world quite different from the one we have. We can do many things and learn many lessons if we manage to shed the powerful Western propaganda systems and look at the facts as they are.
6. So, can we do anything? Yes. But instead …we prefer high-flown, verbose statements about crimes, violations and strategic enemies –which is much easier and less practical. Nothing new. (N. Chomsky)
7. Like in the Greek tragedies, everybody knows what will happen; everybody says they do not want it to happen, but each of them does precisely (or does not do) the necessary for it to (not to) happen. (RadomiroTomic)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-The most useful face to link to neoliberalism is not Pinochet or Thatcher, but Clinton, Blair and the European social democrats. (M. Mosquera)
-Un día, estaba Diógenes comiendo un plato de lentejas… No había ningún alimento en toda Atenas más barato que el guiso de lentejas. Pasó un ministro del emperador y le dijo: “¡Ay, Diógenes! Si aprendieras a ser más sumiso y a adular un poco más al emperador, no tendrías que comer tantas lentejas”. Diógenes dejó de comer, levantó la vista, y mirando intensamente al acaudalado interlocutor contestó: “Ay de ti, hermano. Si aprendieras a comer un poco de lentejas, no tendrías que ser tan servil con el emperador“. (use deepl.com to translate)
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