Elvis » Fri Apr 19, 2019 3:46 am wrote:
[...]Ira Glass
The World Order?
Zoe Chace
Basically, the idea that a cabal of rich guys is trying to take over the world and create one world government-- like one currency, one army, no national borders.
There's where I wanted to get out of bed and email them: "I think you just described everyday neoliberalism."
Not really though. Ideologically to an extent, but we are not obligated to believe ideological statements (e.g., the talk of "free markets" or "open borders") when the policy reality is consistently different over very long terms. Especially not when it is clear why the material reality must differ from the dogma, if the interests of the ruling class and of maintaining capitalist societies are truly to be served.
Neoliberalism like earlier capitalist forms relies on a highly authoritarian state, necessarily organized mainly through the existing nation-states, to set up, protect, and subsidize its "markets," and to aggressively police and suppress all tendencies who would counteract privatization and bone-crushing competition among the laboring classes, or raise the potential for an actual alternative to capitalism. They can't even hold a Davos or a G20 without an army of national police to protect them.
Open borders are for goods and above all capital, not for human beings. The association of human movement with money movements is a fatal, ungenerous, and indeed deplorable fallacy of those on the nativist right-wing who oppose neoliberalism.
Again, the neoliberal ideology may say otherwise, and neoliberal organizations may advocate open borders for human beings, but this is generally a low priority and often disingenuous. The money comes first. Harsh border regimes are supported by a consensus of actors along the standard political spectrum who otherwise sing together with neoliberal ideology and practice, and the "debate" currently only seems to be about whether and how much to punish children who didn't choose where they live and grew up (DACA) and who didn't choose to have their parents turned into refugees by repressive (US backed) governments and drug cartels. Borders are perhaps the most important factor in assuring that migrant labor is desperate, willing, unregulated, and cheap, which is such music to the neoliberal capitalists, including (as a minor example) that famous employer (and stiffer) of cheap undocumented labor, the mobbed up construction and money laundering entity known as Trump Org.
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