Will the Pincers Kill Us?
We face an absolutely lethal combination of neoliberalism and various terminal threats.
“You might look around and wonder why humanity is responding to these terminal threats in such a disastrous and irrational and destructive and suicidal fashion—the answer has to do with neoliberalism.”
“I think the fate of the species depends on it because, remember, it’s not just inequality, stagnation. It’s terminal disaster. We have constructed a perfect storm. That should be the screaming headlines every day. Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them. That’s our pincers. That’s what we face, and if that problem isn’t solved, we’re done with.”
“Can we fight back in time? That’s up to you and others like you—your action will answer the question, and the action of others like you will answer the question.”
People who read the news know that humanity faces multiple terminal threats—regarding terminal threats, I think that you should add to nuclear war and global heating the threat of pandemics and the threat of antimicrobial resistance.
You might look around and wonder why humanity is responding to these terminal threats in such a disastrous and irrational and destructive and suicidal fashion—the answer has to do with neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a lethally bad combination with these terminal threats—neoliberalism smashes society up into atomized individuals who then become confused and toxic and irrational people, and you can’t solve the potentially terminal problems that humanity faces if you’re all smashed up like that and all confused like that and all toxic like that and all irrational like that.
I have a phobia regarding Karl Marx where I find Marx’s work to be a setback for the left, but Marx has a great quote about atomization and about what atomization means for a society:
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France‘s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
This is the memorable image:
Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.
So if we are—in the neoliberal era—a “sack of potatoes”, then we’re absolutely doomed, since we need to be able to actually respond in a rational way to these various terminal threats that are bearing down on us.
So we can’t remain potatoes—if we do, we’ll be boiled potatoes and the lucky people will die sooner.
Also, neoliberalism is completely and wholly and purely fraudulent. The ideology stands before us and talks about markets, but with its fingers crossed behind its back—here are my notes:
“Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market.”
“Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn’t bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society.”
“Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others.”
“They get together, they defend themselves, and so on.”
“There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us.”
“Most people have to face the ravages of the market.”
“And, of course, the rich don’t.”
“Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there’s some trouble.”
“The rich have to have the powerful state—as well as its police powers—to be sure nobody gets in their way.”
It’s really just a way to rip people off and screw people and prey on people—here are my notes:
“You look up ‘neoliberalism,’ the word ‘neoliberalism,’ in the dictionary, you find bromides about belief in the market, trust in the market, fair—everyone’s got a fair shake, and so on.”
“You look at the reality, neoliberalism translates as bitter class war.”
“That’s the meaning of it, everywhere you look, every component of it.”
“the $50 trillion robbery is just one sign of it”
“If you’re going to have a sensible project, if you’re going to carry out a major class war attacking workers in the middle class, you better destroy their means of self-protection.”
“the major means are labor unions”
“That’s the way poor people, working people can organize to develop ideas, to develop programs, to act with mutual aid and solidarity to achieve their goals.”
“So that has to be destroyed.”
“that was the major target of attack from the beginning”
“What we’re left with is a society of atomized people, angry, resentful, lacking organization, faced with concentrated private power, which is working very hard to pursue the bitter class war that has led to the current disastrous situation.”
And a critic will observe that there’s lots of cynical lying:
We have been subjected to 40-plus years of a neoliberal assault on the general population.…Margaret Thatcher—“There is no society, only individuals cast out on the market to somehow survive.”
Of course she was lying, and she knew it. There’s plenty of society—rich, complex society—for the rich and powerful to defend themselves.
So we’ve created pincers and those pincers will probably kill us:
CL: So, the question is, at a moment when people are almost ready…when they’re ready to act and almost ready to recognize that this game is not working, this social system, do we have the endowment as a species to act on it, to move into that zone of puzzlement and then action?
NC: I think the fate of the species depends on it because, remember, it’s not just inequality, stagnation. It’s terminal disaster. We have constructed a perfect storm. That should be the screaming headlines every day. Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them. That’s our pincers. That’s what we face, and if that problem isn’t solved, we’re done with.
We’re trapped in the pincers:
“Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction.”
“Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them.”
“That’s our pincers. That’s what we face, and if that problem isn’t solved, we’re done with.”
Can we fight back in time? That’s up to you and others like you—your action will answer the question, and the action of others like you will answer the question.