[This post is a slightly revised version of the original, and now deleted, end of the post Neoliberal Conspiracy 07]
Is the neoliberal conspiracy theory plausible?
Wealthy people do have power. The more wealth they have the more power they can exert if they choose to. The fewer non wealth based sources of power that are around, or are not phrased as businesses, the more power they can exert. They can buy all the other kinds of power from political representation and legislation, through violence, to communication and information. They can buy status, because they must have virtues if they are wealthy; they must be wealth generators for everyone, and deserve special privileges. Neoliberalism appears to both increase their power and hide opposition to that power. So wealth-power and neoliberalism fit together quite harmoniously or, as in a previous blog post, we can say that crony capitalism is normal capitalism, and neoliberalism intensifies crony capitalism.
It is not difficult to find the main propaganda points of neoliberal ideology in the media and elsewhere. It is widespread, although the analysis of what neoliberals actually do, and aim to achieve, is not. This lack is also significant.
Thus it is easy to find people extolling the virtues of business, the talents of business people, the centrality of ‘the economy’ to prosperity and freedom, the importance of growth, the importance of tax-cuts, the importance of cutting regulation, the importance of free markets, the connection of free markets to liberty, the idea that governments are always useless, the parasitic nature of people on welfare, the evils of socialism and the left, the evils of ‘greentape’, the need to encourage the economy whatever, and so on. Business news is expected, even if ordinary people don’t read it or watch it, union (marxist, or communitarian anarchist) news is not. Neoliberal ideas are widely and repetitively propagated. This is hardly surprising given corporate control of the media.
Thus not only do neoliberalism, crony capitalism and increasing the power of wealth (plutocracy) fit together but the main points of the ideology are so prevalent that they can be taken as ‘common sense.’ They can be referred to and accepted, without needing justification. They must be true. They can seem true a priori.
This does not mean the wealth elites are totally united. For instance, some of them don’t like Trump, even if he is carrying out most of the neoliberal programme, doing quite well at hiding it and cultivating passionate followers to help keep the project going. It is as equally possible they don’t like him because he defrauds other businesses and his word means nothing, as that they dislike him because he is doing something mysterious to benefit ordinary Americans, as is frequently alleged. Some people in dominant groups actually believe in climate change as well, but the media rarely explains why it is happening, and it usually reports climate change in a way suggesting its not that much of a problem for neoliberalism, or we just need to act as individuals. This is the more humanistic version of the conspiracy in action. The result is much the same; maintaining elite wealth and power comes before dealing with climate.
All this implies, the idea of Neoliberal conspiracy is plausible.
Neoliberal explanations of the problems
On the other hand, Neoliberals tend to explain the current crisis of democracy in terms of ‘government,’ which they control but pretend is controlled by others. These controlling and malevolent others appear to include ‘cultural marxists,’ ‘critical race theorists’, postmodernists, socialists or whatever is today’s evil figure. The problems that we face result from some big and dangerous conspiracy of the Left, or are invented by the conspiratorial Left out of thin air (i.e. the climate fraud, the covid fraud, the Biden victory). This is heavily implausible.
I’ve no real idea what cultural marxism or critical race theory is, and I’m not sure the general public would understand the main points of these ideologies either, as put forward by their supposed proponents. These theories don’t seem as widely distributed and explained as they would be if they were important to a major power group. So, if these movements exist, they are clearly not being promoted by a particularly powerful or influential class. They are not widely taken for granted by people. And the general approach in the media, would seem to suggest that you can just say ‘Cultural Marxism,’ or ‘Critical Race theory’ and know that your audience will assume whoever is being associated with these theories must be evil, even if the audience don’t know what they are. Jordan Peterson seems to have made a career out of behaving like this.
From this alone, it seems likely that the opponents of these cultural marxists, whoever they are, have all the relevant power, or the strategy would not work.
[My initial hypothesis was the neoliberals and their supporters could not use the old horror of revolutionary Marxism, because it was nowadays so rare, and so they turned cultural criticism (which is a standard from of Western behaviour, since Plato or the Reformation, depending on your choice) into a dismissible evil, by calling it cultural Marxism. But then I remembered how a few people who got together to protect some protestors from attacks by fascists, became portrayed as a vast, violent and subversive movement who conveniently wore black clothes and supported Joe Biden. So the neoliberals could have pretended that revolutionary Marxists were still a problem, and perhaps by magnifying anti-fa they did.]
Academics, who I suppose are supposed to promote these things, don’t have much power. Universities are nowadays run as neoliberal business, with generally relatively high level business executives in charge (often such overt neoliberal ideologists as Maurice Newman). Universities nowadays aim to bring in money, not change the world. Academics frequently have to ally with the corporate classes for research money, so the days of investigative independence is fading. In Australia academics were among the only people not eligible for the highest government support if their jobs were made redundant by Covid. Again not a mark of power. So the chances are high that those who tell you academics are powerful are lying to cover their own power and give you a relatively powerless enemy to dislike.
Then I guess there are scientists. Obviously neoliberals will argue that scientists are less trustworthy than businesses or the hunches of demagogues (Trump is great at that). The idea seems to be that, if science clashes with neoliberalism, it is necessarily wrong, despite all the successful stuff it does elsewhere. I’m more than a bit skeptical about that position. This does not mean scientists cannot be wrong; they are human (just like neoliberals), but they are the best we have got at the moment, and science tends to be self-correcting. That is how it works, and it is also why scientists and doctors can seem to change their minds quite often; they are ideally persuaded by the evidence, and new evidence is always arising. Yes they defend the positions they are currently holding, but eventually those positions fade – they are not held to be true a priori, and beyond challenge, like neoliberal economics. Scientists are often persecuted by governments and businesses, who remove data from websites, sometimes from libraries, forbid them to talk, smear them when it is handy, or sack them if they don’t give the correct neoliberal response. So they don’t appear to have much that much power as a class. They often can’t even get people in power to consider the desperate state of the planetary ecology. They also don’t have political unity as a class, as there is no particular politics necessarily associated with physics, geology, biology or whatever. Science is not like economics, where neoliberalism will get you places.
There is less obvious basis for scientific power outside the corporate sector anymore, and that is likely subject to neoliberal control. This is why we should not particularly trust pharmaceutical companies, insecticide and genetic engineering companies and so on. They are less concerned with scientific truth than with profit, and in neoliberalism profit is the true measure of everything.
There are a few billionaires who run charities, like Bill Gates and George Soros, and a few tech billionaires who routinely get blamed for the crisis and for deep conspiracies. But the odd thing is that the billionaire class is generally not mentioned as a class, and most members are not named. The people who attack Gates and Soros, rarely attack Rupert Murdoch even though he is clearly political and heavily involved in determining contemporary policies and issuing propaganda. They don’t furiously attack Meg Whitman, Jim Justice, Bill Haslam, Silvio Berlusconi, Suleiman Kerimov, Gautam Adani, Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Tom Steyer, Tommy Hicks Jr, Harold Glenn Hamm, Charles Schwab, Paul Elliott Singer, Joe Ricketts, Betsy DeVos, Linda McMahon, or Charles Koch (founder of the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Freedom Partners and the Koch Network) just to give a few names directly involved in political influencing unlike Bill Gates. Most people probably do not know many other billionaire’s names as they stay out of the media. We can conclude that while the billionaire influence on politics is pronounced, the neoliberal denunciation is highly selective.
Then of course there are those people protesting against being shot by police. This is obviously such a vast and powerful conspiracy they can’t even get the police to stop killing them, and the Republicans can just ignore them as they have such little influence, and some Republicans can support people who shoot at them, or drive into them. Not much ability for masses of evil power there, even if a few statues do get toppled.
Then there are the socialists. Well the Right fusses about them, but I haven’t seen nationalisation, as opposed to privatisation, of an industry for quite a while. In the US getting a general basic wage that people can live on, has not happened, and does not seem to have much hope of success. The US can’t even get a health system which does not bankrupt sick poor people, no matter how much Trump promised he would fix it easily. Furthering control of government by the working classes rather than the corporate class seems to have failed all over the Western World. ‘Socialism’ seems generally used as a swear word, and calling some idea socialist is the supposed end of many arguments. Again this could not happen if socialists had any power.
Not surprisingly because the corporate sector control the media, ‘left wing’ thinking and action, is passively censored; it is hardly mentioned, other than by its opponents, who are not always that accurate in their descriptions. If you want to find out what the Greens stand for, for instance, then you have to go to the Greens, or perhaps approach some lonely person selling a weekly or monthly newspaper on a street corner. The Left does not control the mainstream media or normal talk, so this takes effort and most people cannot be bothered. Why would they be? they are constantly told the Left is evil and idiotic. To most people this is just the way things are, even if they think they have worked it out for themselves.
At the end of all this, we can see that according to neoliberals, the enemies of liberty are a few named billionaires (Gates and Soros) who don’t fully subscribe to neoliberal theory (the huge majority of billionaires can be ignored as they support the establishment, or at least don’t overtly attack it), a few largely disorganised protestors and a bundle of academics who have next to no power in a system devoted to promoting fake news. These people have little in common, other than being despised by neoliberal followers. They do not seem a plausible danger, and if they form a conspiracy it seems extremely badly run and powerless.
Conclusion
Comparing the two ideas, it seems to me, that the idea of neoliberal conspiracy easily wins the plausibility stakes.
Tags: Disinformation, neoliberalism, politics
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