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the piece about nozik points out several underlying problems with this whole neo-liberal jive--the absurd narrowness of the notion of liberty; the collapse of the political into the economic; the evacuation of the whole of democratic process in anything like a modern capitalist context; the erasure of any notion of the public or the social; the impossibility from a right libertarian viewpoint of thinking about anything to do with social democracy and the ways in which it has **expanded** the space of freedom by expanding the spaces in which pressure can be brought to bear on private interests that bend them into more socially beneficial outcomes; the erasure of any coherent sense of the history of either contemporary capitalism or the contemporary state and the ways in which they are intertwined; the elimination of the idea that actually existing history is important in political deliberation and the substitution for those histories with a one-dimensional metaphysics. because within this kind of frame you can't think about the social you can't think about class and with that you entirely dispense with one of the most self-evident facts about conservative libertarian "thinking"--which is that it is a justification of class warfare that displaces the notion of class warfare onto some entirely reactionary notion of individual virtue. its all the worst aspects of aristotle turned to the service of a a brutal form of non-responsive capitalism. it's a rationale for a new form of feudalism that runs through some idiotic notion of natural hierarchy. it's indefensible politically. it's indefensible ethically. it's blind to its own history. it is a foul and dangerous ideology that's been a disaster once implemented that has the added problem of preventing people from even thinking about these simple facts of the matter. there is, in fact, no reason to take this horseshit seriously and it's a problem of very considerable proportions that it has become the dominant ideology in mainstream american politics. sooner or later this right-wing libertarian nonsense has to be dismantled publicly and marginalized at the level of detail. without that, there is nothing but delusion masking disaster that awaits the u.s. of a. as it sides into a reprehensible form of fascism while continuing to blab to itself about how very very free the place is. that this kind of incoherent horseshit is the lingua franca of institutions like the imf makes it entirely incapable of addressing the problems that contemporary capitalism faces.
initially it was possible to see in this neo-liberal delusion an aspect of a dynamic for dealing with capitalist crisis that argued for a retreat of the state and in so doing reduced the political risks for the existing political order of crises that it can not even address much less control. but after 40 years of the "washington consensus" it's spilled over into nothing more or less than an ideology that conceals the collapse of empire--a problem that it addresses by pretending it's not happening.
it's not obvious that there are alternative discourses available to a lot of people to help with the coherent consideration of alternatives. and that is a tragedy that, sadly, we are all living through.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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