‘Conspiracy’ defined
Conspiracy can be defined as a collaboration of people working towards a goal that those conspired against would not welcome. Sometimes the conspiracy can be visible but is pretending to aim for something different to what it really intends. Sometimes the conspiracy can be effective enough at presenting this false front that people do, in fact, welcome it.
Conspiracies often eventuate because those participating do not think their real but ‘good’ aims are realisable because other people might forcibly object to them, if they knew what they were. Conspiracies do not have to be evilly intended; the people involved can think that they are working for the greater good.
“Conspiracy theory” is usually a dismissive term, but conspiracies do happen and do succeed. People, who are not that powerful or competent, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks or Castro in Cuba, can succeed with conspiracies (although it helps their cause if the establishment is crumbling and incoherent), so why can’t conspiracies of the powerful exist and work equally well or even better?
Conspiracies of the already powerful
It is normal for people, who identify with each other, to “team up” to protect their interests, so it is not unreasonable to assume powerful people will team up for this purpose, in the same way that less powerful people do. Again they do not have to have evil intentions to be conspirators, they may well believe that the system, or people, they represent, are good for everyone – however, they still might feel deception is appropriate.
Powerful people also have advantages, so we can expect them to succeed in their conspiring more often than less powerful people.
For example, they may be friendly with those running the police or law enforcement, or they may be ‘above suspicion’. They know other powerful people, and get attention. Being wealthy they have the money to ‘bribe’ politicians, or reward them for cooperating, consequently they may have access to governmental agencies (even including intelligence and ‘dark ops’). They may get asked to write policy and legislation, while other more expert, or neutral, people are not. They have the money to set up ‘think tanks’ and can pay people to promote their aspirations and to spread ideas which appear beneficial to them. They can own, fund and control media. They can significantly determine the information present in society. They can even afford to buy their own mercenaries if needed.
These dominant groups can, by their position, already influence public discourse significantly without especially trying to do so. They have a massive advantage, even if they are not completely unified as a class.
In the modern world, the main source of power is wealth and business. Not all business of course, but the large scale transnational corporate business which accumulates wealth massively. Hence corporate owners and bosses may well be the people most likely to be involved in casual conspiracy to protect their already dominant interests and their wealth and power.
As an example, it seems reasonably well documented that Exxon’s own scientists demonstrated the dangers of climate change, and yet the company continued to promoted denial and delay, so as to keep its profit up and avoid change [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Promoters of ‘pro-corporate free-market’ ideology and neoliberal ‘individualism’, also were heavily involved in promoting denial of climate change, particularly in the early days before self publishing took off [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. They were involved in this conspiracy to keep up both profits and established modes of action, while preventing any ‘interference’ with corporate power or corporate liberty to harm people and planet for profit, by either the people, or the State.
[I would suggest that it may be particularly worthwhile looking at the financial industry, the arms industry, mining and fossil fuels as being sectors which are prone to engage in conspiracy as they are so ingrained in contemporary society.]
What I call the Neoliberal Conspiracy, is a conspiracy of the corporate wealth elites, to convince ordinary people that they are working on their behalf, and to conceal what they actually do to cement and increase the power of the ultra-wealthy.
In a democracy this deceit helps maintain political power. ‘Both’ parties are neoliberal. In the US the Democrats are largely humanitarian neoliberals who think there may be survival limits on corporate power, while Republicans tend to be hard-line neoliberals who think there should be no limits on corporate power and privilege. Trumpism is hardline rather than humanitarian.
Conspiracy and Scapegoating
The truly powerful attempt to distract people by pretending that other, much more marginal groups, really have all the power and are to blame for society’s problems…. perhaps university professors, socialists, enemy spies, people of another ethnic group, heretics, witches, feminists, people protesting against police brutality (while making those who shoot or assault protestors, good natured heroes standing up for order), people protesting against capitalism or climate change, or even occasional business people who seem odd or who support a politics which might promote different ideas to what the powerful see as their class interests.
It seems to be a normal human procedure to attempt to gain group unity by passing on sins and failures to a scapegoat, and then trying to expel that scapegoat, or blacken their name further. So, if you are blaming one or two people (even hyper-wealthy people), or a group of people who probably don’t have that much overt influence, or who repeatedly fail to achieve their goals (for example university professors rarely get decent funding for their own work, never mind agreement with their theories, or influence in government, unless the government already agrees with what they are saying), then you are probably falling for a scapegoat strategy.
Neoliberal Conspiracy
The most established contemporary conspiracy, which is so overt it might not be called conspiracy, is the plan to promote and establish the ideology of neoliberalism to justify and extend corporate domination, or to promote a kind of corporate feudalism, in which everything exists in service to the corporate sector [See the works of Philip Mirowski to begin with, but there are plenty of others on the corporate funding and promotion of neoclassical and Austrian Economics].
Neoliberalism does not explain its actions in these terms of protecting corporate power, of course, as otherwise it would be hard for its supporters to get voted in [13]. This is why I am labeling it a conspiracy – it is inherently deceptive and is aimed at benefitting a particular group of people. President Trump (who is part of the wealth elite by inheritance) is connected to this movement, while also being slightly disruptive of it.
Let us be clear that Donald Trump by himself, or through his cabinet choices, does not explain the decline in the USA, or its fragmentation. President Trump should not be made a scapegoat to excuse, or bypass, the neoliberal movement as a whole. It is a far bigger group than just him that promotes neoliberalism, and some of the destruction we observe undoubtedly results from the unintended consequences of their acts. Trump is just a useful, if slightly chaotic, figurehead, or ‘symptom’, of what is happening. While he does help further destruction, profiteering and wealth transfer to established people, he is unstable enough to be something of a liability for everyone, which is probably why he is openly challenged to the extent he is. This open challenge does not have to mean he really is engaged in looking after ‘the people’, as is often said by those supporting him. That fact that some elites tell us he is corrupt and incompetent does not mean he is honest and incredibly competent. He is not a force for good whatever the other elites in the Republican party, and the really Righteous media tell us – he is part of the conspiracy.
But first it is necessary to understand what ‘neoliberalism’ promotes and why.
Neoliberal “Free Markets”
Neoliberalism is a movement which officially praises the free market, and promotes this idea as a source of liberty. However, the function of the doctrine of the free market, is to defend the corporate sector, from any control, regulation, or hindering, by public action. That is it. Not to prevent taxpayer subsidy of, or protection for, established industry, but to prevent people interfering with corporate privilege. Corporate privilege and liberty to make money by almost any means possible is, in practice, defined by them as the free market. Stopping corporations from, say, poisoning people, or exploiting them, is interference with that market and with the freedom of people to agree to be exploited or poisoned. Neoliberalism’s support for the corporate sector can be authoritarian, as it is corporate liberty, rather than the people’s liberty, which counts.
Neobliberalism promotes the ideology that the free market is the most important of all institutions. In neoliberalism the official synonym for the ‘free market’ is ‘individual liberty’. However, in practice, the term ‘free market’ is used to justify untrammeled corporate domination and the undermining of any liberty that could possibly oppose that power.
In neoliberalism any restriction on corporate power can be portrayed as a restriction on the market, and therefore it must be stopped. Possible restrictions include: consumer protection, environmental protection, care for the planet, taxation of wealthy people and organisations, and any support for the general population that lessens people’s dependency on, or subservience to, the corporate sector.
As the free market is the most important institution of all, then the State’s only reason for existence is to protect that market and those big players who make up the market. All big-enough and established corporations should be eligible for protection and taxpayer bailout, because of their virtues and the necessity of preserving them. Otherwise the market might collapse, or people might argue that the market does not work and needs ‘inhibiting’ regulations – which would be ‘bad’.
Because ‘the market’, as controlled for the benefit of the established corporate sector, is the ultimate good, then government should not do anything other than support and protect the market. This is why neoliberal governments cheerfully bail out wealthy corporations, while increasing the penalties for lack of success, or bad fortune, for ordinary people. This is the reality of the ‘free market’ in action.
In neoliberalism, no organisation, activity or relationship, is allowed to exist outside of the market. Consequently nothing is free of profit seeking, or corporate control. Corporate control and corporate ideologies start to look natural as they are applied everywhere, and hence the corporation becomes the dominant institution of the modern world, as neoliberals intend.
In neoliberalism, there can be no public good without corporate profit.
Neoliberal Virtue
Wealth, plus adherence to neoliberal talking points, demonstrates virtue. There are no other virtues of any consequence. Everybody who is wealthy and praises the market, has made it, because of their virtues and positivity. With the right thinking you can do anything.
The only aspirations to be praised are wealth or maximal consumption – anything that hinders the activities of the wealthy, or of consumption, is bad, anything that supports wealthy people and consumption is good. All social security should be slowly broken down, as poor, or unfortunate, people should not really be supported as they are clearly not virtuous, and they are not ‘positive’. They are, at best, slack as they are not wealthy. If ‘given’ support (even if they they have paid for it via taxes), they may not work and thus may not show proper submission to, and dependence on, an employer. Ordinary people, even those who support neoliberalism, are not worthy of support. Opportunity should only exist for the children of the wealthy, as they have demonstrated their virtue by being wealthy. General social mobility is of little importance, although a few people who have come up from nothing, may be used as exemplars showing that everyone could do it.
Wealthy people who do not support the wealth collective, and their neoliberal talking points are to be attacked, to show people that you cannot disagree with the ideology without being slurred and attacked – which helps keep the others, who might have doubts, in line.
These disagreeing wealthy people become scapegoats for the workings of capitalism in general, while other significantly wealthy people who have even more socially dangerous and deleterious effects are ignored.
Hence the anger directed at Bill Gates, George Soros, or Warren Buffet (until he learned to shut up), and the relative silence about Rupert Murdoch, Gautam Adani, or the Walton Family or many other nearly anonymous billionaires.
There is a sense in which neoliberalism presents a continuation of 19th Century Social Darwinism, in which it is assumed that in the struggle for existence the wealthy have demonstrated their superiority over the poor. In neoliberal theory, when compared to the poor, the rich are as superior and better fitted to survive, as humans are to baboons. They are not open about this point, but it does make sense of many of their policies. Inferior people should be left to die out, if not killed off. Climate change, for example, can be solved by population culls. This ‘hidden idea’ can easily be made to plug into racism, which gives neoliberals even more popular support.
Neoliberal Privatisation
This support for what neoliberals call the free market justifies all collective, public or common property and services being privatised. This is supposed to improve them, while ‘incidentally’ transferring public wealth and income to the private sector, usually increasing public debt – as services now have to be paid for at commercial rates to guarantee profit. This procedure has the following advantages for the established wealth which can buy the property or service being privatised.
- High level management incomes in the service will increase, because they are now competing with the private sector, and have to pay more to get talent.
- Costly operations which are beneficial to only a few ordinary, or inconvenient people, will be shut down as the operation has to make a profit.
- Service staff will be cut back, and workers’ wages lowered by casualisation, as the operation has to make a profit. If the system is no longer quite as useful, or resilient, that is no problem for the business as long as it makes a profit. If it fails, it can always declare bankruptcy, or be sold off while the managers move elsewhere.
- The service can asset strip, or sell parts of the business to other businesses, and this sell-off is usually arranged to boost the incomes of the high level executives.
- Many such public services were monopolies, thus the privatised service faces little competition and can put prices up to help profits.
- Even when the services are not monopolies then they are often services which many people have to receive at some time – like unemployment relief, aged care, water, sewage, etc. So quality is largely irrelevant. If you can reduce the costs of the service, say by reducing injury payouts, then you increase profits again. So the trend of privatisation is nearly always downhill.
- The government loses knowledge and skills relevant to the privatised sector, as well as losing power over the operation. The corporate sector gains more power and wealth.
- If the privatised operation was previously profitable, then the government loses income and has to weaken other services to make up the shortfall of income, which weakens people’s control over the services they have to receive.
- The government becomes less capable of being useful to ordinary people, and therefore there is more excuse to cut back the remaining services it provides, further boosting the power of wealth.
Neoliberal appropriation for high level managers
On a milder note, organisations influenced by neoliberalism, and perhaps by other ideologies, tend to make sure the people at the top receive most of the organisation’s income. Lower level workers are simply costs. So the incomes of lower level workers must be cut, even while spending on incomes at the top increases. There is no real ‘mutual obligation’ at all.
Huge wage discrepancies between upper and lower workers, result from political acts, power struggles, and decisions, but they can be usefully blamed on the market, not on conspiracy conducted by those receiving high incomes. The market provides an excuse for any kind of action which reinforces inequality.
Let me update this by a reference to something said by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, to show that recognition of the basic fact is not necessarily a left/right division. [At the moment the broadcast does not seem to be on Fox’s Carlson transcript page] Carlson begins supporting President Trump’s tax evasion by saying it is normal. “What the president did was legal — in fact it’s all but universal among the affluent who earn their money from investments rather than from salaries… ” He refuses to state this behaviour is wrong, but asks:
Why does our tax code remain so obviously, so grotesquely unfair?…
Billionaires should not be paying a lower rate than you are paying, no matter who they are, no matter who the president is. The main problem with America right now is that a shrinking group of people controls a growing share of our nation’s wealth and power. America is lopsided, and it’s getting more lopsided every year. That makes our country unstable.
Lopsidedness…. is why young people seem so hopeless and nihilistic, why so many of them are not starting families. It’s why some of them are breaking things in the streets. It’s why your grandchildren will almost certainly earn less than you do. And by the way, it’s also why Donald Trump got elected four years ago. Americans could feel that something was profoundly wrong with the way our country was structured…. It seemed clear that the people in charge were in it for themselves.
Handover “Tucker Carlson got it right” Medium 1 October, 2020
Carlson then fell back into his role as a Fox News person, saying:
Four years later, some good things have happened, [really?] But the core drivers of the crisis that we faced, a dying middle class and the growing hegemony of billionaires, remain unresolved. This is not a small problem. If we don’t fix it soon, it’s a guaranteed disaster. No nation can live for long under the tyranny of selfish oligarchs.
If we don’t flatten our economy and make it possible once again, for normal people to live happy, productive lives, America will become a very radical place and quickly.
Richardson, “Tucker Carlson Highlights ‘NYT’ Tax Return Story to Warn About Power of Billionaires and ‘Tyranny of Selfish Oligarchs’ — But Never Criticizes Trump” MediaIte 28 September.
However, despite blaming the left for this reality, and the unspecified “good things” Carlson alludes to, President Trump, with support from neoliberal Republicans, seems to be continuing this war against fair income distribution, and against the people, through his massive corporate and upper income tax cuts. He has done nothing to help stop the middle, or working, classes from become more precarious, and nothing to halt the “growing hegemony of billionaires”.
Neoliberalism is not conservative
Neoliberalism conserves nothing, and reinforces plutocracy. It does not support traditional virtues if they conflict with profit. It happily disrupts traditional forms of organisation, replacing them with profit driven modes of elite appropriation (for example, the elite managers get more and more of the income). It does not recognise traditional modes of free collaboration. It does not care about preserving land. It does not recognise the traditional responsibility of the elites to ordinary people. It victimises poorer people.
50 years ago, these positions would have seemed crazy. People were able to recognise that wealth was not the equivalent of virtue, that selfishness did not automatically produce social harmony or functionality, that competing corporations did not always produce the best possible results, and that people had the both right to wages upon which they could live comfortably and the right to some control over the corporate sector. Taxation was seen as a way of providing services for people, that had never been provided satisfactorily by the market to most people. There was a sense in which society was thought to exist for the benefit of everyone. Nowadays, neoliberalism is what we are told is common sense. In Margaret Thatcher’s famous words “there is no alternative” – even in the face of the end of civilization as we know it.
Neoliberalism vs Ecology
Let us be really clear here. to neoliberals, the neoliberal corporately dominated economy is not only the most important social institution, it is more important than human life.
In neoliberalism, ordinary people and other creatures live to serve the economy, not the economy to serve the people or restore the ecology. If people have to die to maintain the neoliberal economy, then they will have to die. If the world must be destroyed to temporarily save the neoliberal economy, then it will be destroyed.
We can see this in the neoliberal solutions to Covid and climate change. For Covid, the neoliberal solution is that people must get back to work irrespective of the potential death figures and people must be convinced that Covid is innocuous. President Trump has no solutions for Covid other than being positive, bailing out favoured corporations with taxpayer money, demanding a return to normality, and rushing a vaccine through without proper safety testing. For climate change the solution is similar – protect the wealthy as much as possible, and convince ordinary people that being sacrificed to maintain the power and comfort of established wealth and profit, is true liberty.
One of the problems neoliberalism faces with ecology, is that ecology suggests that ecosystems are fundamental to everything. If you destroy ecosystems then you do not have any economy, or anywhere to live. Humans depend on ecologies and hence economies depend on ecologies, and have to be regulated so as not to destroy those ecologies.
Planetary boundaries and systems cannot be broken with impunity, and yet there is currently nothing to stop corporations from making a profit by destroying those planetary systems. Indeed it is obvious, that it can be profitable in the short term to destroy such systems, and in neoliberalism there is nothing wrong with this.
In order to survive, or to keep current civilisations going, people need to be able to interfere with corporate activities, and this is precisely the situation that neoliberalism attempts to combat and cannot allow to happen.
It is either ecology or neoliberalism; and neoliberalism would rather you die than be able to curtail corporate activity and power.
Neoliberalism as a ‘solution’ to the ‘Crisis of (too much) Democracy’
Why suggest this change from a milder form of capitalism to neoliberalism is a conspiracy, or the result of a conspiracy? Partly because it seems that in the late 1960s and early 70s the political Right was worried about the so-called ‘Crisis of Democracy‘.
The Crisis of Democracy is the idea that too much democracy is a bad thing.
In the late 1960s, people from all walks of life were getting involved in political processes. Women were gaining rights, workers were gaining more rights, there was a huge anti-war movement wondering why so much money was going to the military and its corporate suppliers. There was the beginning of what looked like a massive environmental movement which suggested that that natural world should not be destroyed heedlessly, and that corporations should not be able to pollute or poison people without restriction. It has been estimated that on April 22, 1970, about 10% of the U.S. population came out onto the streets for the first Earth Day – a truly amazing figure. The ‘Club of Rome’ was persuasively arguing that a program of endless economic growth and consumption would lead to an ecological and economic disaster in the first half of the 21st Century. On top of this there was the economic effect of the oil shock, and the birth of post-colonial movements and growing independence in resource rich, but previously colonised, countries.
The prospects of all this extra democracy and chaos was scary for those who had been dominant, and who could see themselves as only just clinging to power.
In short, the capitalist wealth elites feared further loss of their power, and possible loss of their wealth, from public activism and popular political participation. Something had to be changed.
They took advantage of disillusionment with Richard Nixon in the USA to promote distrust in government and attack the value of people participating in formal self-governance, and they promoted the idea of a free market as the basis of all liberty. Liberty was defined as individual and ‘selfish’, not collective or collaborative. Unions were attacked as infringements on workers’ liberty and prosperity, while business associations were encouraged to attack people’s freedoms in the name of prosperity and the market. Political talk became more focused on the economy, and moved away from other aspects of life. Prosperity was more important than becoming ecologically conscious. People who wished to constrain corporate power, or prevent it damaging ecologies, where said to be interfering with the lives of ordinary people. Intellectuals were snobs unless they promoted free markets and so on. Hayek was ‘rediscovered’ and said to be more useful than Keynes, due to the problems of stagflation – which it was true that governments did not know how to deal with. We were told that free markets would solve everything, but after 40 years we can see they clearly have not. They have brought us to our current crisis.
During the Reagan years the Neoliberal Right discovered that they could build support by starting culture wars which would fragment opposition and build loyalties to them. They could start openly partisan and aggressively rude ‘news’ and current affairs services. They could also recruit authoritarian religious people to support Mammon, because those people were likewise frightened of the prospects of the sinful masses coming into power, or of secularists taking over.
Even nowadays we still have Republicans insisting that the US is not a democracy, whenever they worry the people may not support them – although if the Electoral College had served its designed function and ruled that Donald Trump did not have the character to be President and that Clinton should have won, we probably would have them screaming about the importance of the voting allocation.
Some Marxists predicted that the result of this ‘return’ to free markets (as defined above) would be destruction of the welfare state, higher unemployment, stagnation of wages, growing impoverishment, recurrent economic crises, the takeover of the state by the wealth elite and the alienation of people from each other, and from most kinds of real satisfaction. These predictions were certainly more accurate than the official neoliberal predictions of a free market paradise for all. No Marxist, that I’m aware of, was clever enough in the late 1970s or early 80s to predict that ‘free market’ capitalism would destroy the stability of the world’s ecology and climate, as they foolishly expected that intelligent capitalists would avoid such collapse, or that the workers would rebel against the prospects of disaster. They saw capitalism and science as intertwined. This was clearly over-optimistic.
Conclusion
Judging by its results, neoliberalism seems to be a conspiracy promoted by the already powerful to consolidate and extend their power and wealth, Unfortunately, it has unintended consequences which result, firstly, in social stagnation and decline for the vast majority of people, and secondly in a collection of extreme ecological crises which it cannot solve.
In summary: the Right are willing to sacrifice your lives for their power. They will promote fascism if they see it as helping them.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 