It Could Happen Here - Neoliberalism Part 4: This is What Democracy Looks Like
Episode Date: December 14, 2021In the final part of our Neoliberalism series we watch Reagan and Thatcher destroy the unions, gut the welfare state, and construct an enormous police-prison-slave state in its place. Learn more abou...t your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here,
a show about things falling apart
and is for one final time this week
about why and how things have fallen apart in this specific way
um i'm i'm i'm your host christopher and today with me i have garrison hello garrison hello
how you doing i'm doing fine we're going to talk about something that is not fine it's not fine at
all is in fact extremely grim and bad which is uh part four of our series
of neoliberalism i.e uh all of the bad things happen at once so in in in our last episode we
talked about how throughout throughout most of the third world or you know what was at the time
known as the third world neoliberalism is not really imposed by people voting for it. It's mostly imposed by either external forces via coup or by just the IMF going, okay, we're running the country now.
But this, yeah, we're going to shift our focus a bit this episode to the people who were, I don't know, unfortunate enough, misguided enough, decided that they hated each other
enough to actually choose neoliberalism for themselves.
Now, one of the sort of stories we've been tracing here on sort of a very broad arc is
the reaction by neoliberals to a kind of compromise that had been worked out between labor and
capital, particularly in the US after sort of the open class warfare from the 1930s and you know there's essentially
there's a kind of deal that's set up informally which is so the the the working class will stop
literally constantly going on strike and showing up the strikes with like enormous numbers of guns
and shooting at people and they will you know stop trying to overthrow the government in exchange the
state gives you welfare programs the state will give you a house.
This is particularly after World War II.
The American state just, you know, does this massive home ownership campaign.
And, you know, if you're a union worker, particularly if you're a white man, like this, you know, working one of these union jobs will put you into the middle class.
You can take vacations.
You can have a house.
You can get pensions.
Your unions are legal now, which is the thing that like you know hadn't happened before and this is essentially
you know this is essentially a kind of insurgency tool um the the the goal of this is to stop people
from you know doing the kinds of revolts that were happening in the 1930s but by the 1970s it's
becoming very clear that this sort of detente like can't it can't
really be maintained because it's too expensive for sort of the capital states to maintain and
trying to maintain both well you know the secondary thing here is is you know okay so this deal
specifically goes out to white men right now in throughout the 60s and 70s you get a bunch of
other people who are not white men uh attempting enter the workplace, attempting to get the same bargain.
And they're in a lot of ways significantly more militant, and this causes enormous amounts of intentional strife.
You get the US is murdering the Black Panthers.
You get similar stuff in the UK.
and the neoliberals basically are the people who just fully called this to taunt off and are you know essentially going to return
to full-scale class war and so now now we are finally getting to reagan and thatcher and one
day we will do a full episode about how ronald reagan and a weird shadowy cabal of italian
intelligence services rigged the 1980 election by planting fake stories about jimmy carter's brother in the press which is do you hear that story uh garrison
no but it sounds like regular media manipulation that happens all the time now yeah yeah it's yeah
there's there's there's there's there's a whole through line there because you know a lot of those
like same kind of intelligence tactics are going to be used
to sell the iraq war and there's this whole sort of thing then you know there's also the the
specific italian angle of uh yeah the italian states being run by this rogue masonic lodge
led by a fascist and it's it's a time there's a whole lot going on there but that's you know
i'm just i'm just thinking like hunter biden laptop and all of that yeah yeah stuff it's like oh so that's just the same playbook yeah it's the same thing except
like they were like actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of like
whatever tucker carlson yeah tucker carlson and glenn greenwald trying to get people to like
care about this thing that just nobody gives a single shit about
yeah you know it was it was but the 80s version of it was significantly more effective and you
know the product of this is that reagan sort of reagan finds like the secret sauce for right-wing
politics which had kind of you know in in in some ways nixon had been trying to develop but hadn't
quite gotten right which is
no yeah yeah yeah he figures out that you know if you want to do neoliberalism if you want to
destroy the unions you want to destroy the welfare state the way you do it is basically a combination
of sort of racist tax and welfare recipients and you mobilize new religious right and this is
extremely effective and it's but i think it's also interesting and worth noting that, you know, if you go all the way back to episode one, like, this is Röpke's, like, white nationalism, like, sort of German white nationalism thing.
This is explicitly what Röpke's sort of strategy for implementing neoliberalism was.
The problem is he was German and Catholic, which meant that, like, it could never work in the U.S.
but you know you get reagan suddenly you get the american version of it that is you know white but american and then also works off of sort of off of the sort of mass protestantism
in the u.s and this becomes a force that is
responsible for like almost every bad thing that exists today in some form or another a lot of them
yeah i mean not all of them but you know i think things go extremely badly and you know so so
reagan wins this election and then almost at exactly the same time margaret thatcher wins
this wins her election in in the uk and that the combination of those two things and also as you talked about last episode
the volcker shock where volker raises the interest rates uh just raises the fed and she becomes so
volker volker is installed weirdly not by ronald reagan but by jimmy carter but is given this sort
of mandate to just do whatever literally do whatever you have to to get inflation under
control the thing that he decides to do is just literally nuke the entire world economy you know we talked about the effects this had on sort
of the world in the last episode but in the u.s this sets off a recession that lasts basically
from like 1979 to like 1982 um at the height of it it's like it's i think we finally got more
people unemployed during the pandemic but i'm like like 80, 90% sure that between World War II and the pandemic, that was the single largest number of people who've been unemployed in the US.
Which is, yeah, it was just epochal, just epochal devastation.
And, you know, there's a whole thing here where the head of the AFL-CIO is literally begging Volker, like, please don't do this.
Like, we can get inflation under control after, you know, after the economy recovers.
And Volker's just like, no.
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The consequence of this is that
you have an economy in which
there's a number of people unemployed
and the unions are weak.
And both Reagan and thatcher sort of see
this now the the the unions in the uk are in a significantly better position the american unions
reagan is able to sort of smash the american unions very quickly there's there's the you
know the famous air traffic control strike where a bunch of american air traffic controllers go on
strike technically illegally and reagan just has literally every single one of them fired and replaces them
with just like like like people from flight school like people who just just like literally anyone he
can just like pull off the street who sort of kind of knows how to land an aircraft like they
people from the military it's it's just like this absolutely wild sort of feat of strike breaking and then you know and when when that falls and that that
strike fails you know the air traffic controllers well okay funnily so the air traffic controllers
had actually backed reagan they were like the only union that backed reagan in the election
they immediately just get you know they get gutted for it which like i have mixed feelings about because like
on the one hand like yeah that's that that's what you get but on the other hand this is basically
what destroys this this is the consequences of this is basically what destroys like trade unions
in the u.s because at this at this point everyone realizes that the unions are weak and they just
start you know you get to the point where employers are deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire
all the unionized employees and it's extremely effective in in britain the fight is a lot more
intense um in in 1984 thatcher cuts coal like basically thatcher wants to provoke a fight with
with the coal unions and so she basically wants to shut
down a whole bunch of coal production and fire like 20 000 miners and the miners go on strike
and they go on strike for over a year but thatcher had basically stockpiled enough coal to stave off
the worst effects of the strike and then she makes these like incredibly elaborate network of deals
with like she's like this whole scab driver like union like basically this whole
network of scab drivers like make sure you can move the coal around while the strike's going on
there's all of this stuff and you know and and she eventually is able to crush the coal strike
and this also just just completely annihilates like the british trade union movement i mean
union participation i think dream thatcher's
term alone falls by 50 and it's gotten way worse since then so so with those two incidents the
air traffic control and the coal we did did those just kind of make people be disillusioned or did
that just like pave the way for similar tactics to be acceptable for every other union that tried
to do the same thing both and then the other thing was fear because you know so with the air traffic controllers right the
air traffic controllers are you know these are the most highly skilled like people people these are a
bunch of people who are incredibly highly skilled and they're in they're in they're in a logistic
industry right so you know in theory these are the people who have like the the maximum amount
of impact if they would go on strike yeah and when reagan shows that you can literally just fire 24
000 people of like the most highly skilled sort of workers in the in the u.s you can fire them
and just break the strike and nothing will happen and you know the result is total defeat and none
of these people ever work again that basically spreads this massive wave of fear through the
union movements because you know if they can fire those guys, they can fire anyone.
And then, you know, the employers just start doing it.
And the other thing that's been happening here is that for really since the end of the 40s, the unions have kind of – so we'll talk about this more in an interview that's going to come out probably next
week about the history of american union movement but american unions basically so american union
like the union movement was built by radical organizers and in the 40s and sort of moving
on from there all these people get expelled from the labor movement, and labor fights this basically incredibly intense battle against its own left flank.
who are, you know, they're forming unions,
they're going on strike,
but they're also fighting against the UAW because the UAW is cooperating too closely
with the bosses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And there's basically this battle between,
like not even just,
basically between the unions ranked in file
and the radicals and the sort of business union management.
And in fighting that battle,
the unions had basically
like massively weakened themselves and then you know and by by by the time you hit the 80s
especially in the u.s the unions are just sort of a shell of their former selves and
and reagan just sort of like smashes them aside and thatcher the british unions are much stronger
but you know i mean thatcher's preparing to like like there's she she has plans
to like the army is going to come in and suppress the strike there's these and especially there's
there's just i mean just an absolutely incredible amount of police violence um that's you know i
mean this is this is something that had like happened before dream strikes but the the the
the the level of intensity of it is just massively increased.
And there's also another thing that's happening basically at the same time of this, which is squeezing the units from the other side, which is there's this – I guess you could call it an internal class war inside the ruling class between well specifically inside of the sort of corporate management between
the sort of traditional like manager ceo class and the sort of like i i guess you could call them
i don't know the the sort of wall street finance bank types and so so yeah so one of the other
things that that happens at the end of you know basically after the war is the sort of class
compromise was talking about
like this this happens inside of the company too and people start to see the corporation as like a
social institution it has you know it's like well okay so there's this alliance between
middle management and uh and the workers and you know it's like okay so we we both work with each
other and you know the compromise is that you guys get to have unions but the unions won't
sort of disrupt production we'll all work together and we'll just make like i don't know we'll make really really
good ballpoint pens together and so yeah you have this alliance between sort of middle managements
and and these unions and you know and this this is embedded into the structure of the corporation
because you know you're not you not only have the unions but you have corporations paying pensions
what one of the the things that that reagan does is that Reagan starts, you know, Reagan does this
massive series of financial deregulations.
And the other part of this agreement basically had been that like the high level finance
class had sort of stayed out of the way of management.
And so management, I kind of like, you know, you get this like this independent sort of
CEO class that's a distinct thing that, you you know that there are people who come up through the company
who were managers and they worked away the top and this is a distinct thing from sort of the
finance people who are like yeah they're not supposed to be allowed to like you know to touch
production yeah yeah but in in the 1980s the finance people start to look at this and go
wait hold on why are we not running things and the finance people
have well because they have two things on their side one they have a sort of neoliberal ideology
and the second thing they have is so michael milken he figures out that how to do this thing
called a leverage buyout option it's it's it's a kind of complicated financial instrument
the short and simple explanation of what it is, is he figures out a way to basically go
into a bunch of debt, and he gets people to give him a bunch of money in the form of these
bonds, and then he uses it to just buy out entire companies.
He buys 51% of the company, and if you own 51% of the company, now you control, you have
a controlling interest.
51% of the company. And if you own 51% of the company, now you control, you have a controlling interest. And so he, he, he goes in and he just, he just raises the stock prices of all these
companies. And now, you know, but now he he's gone into an enormous amount of debt, right.
In order to buy, in order to buy this company. And so, you know, in order to pay off that debt,
he just starts strip mining the company. And so he starts, you know, anything that can be sold
for money that he can put in his pocket to pay off his debt starts getting sold.
And, you know, anything the corporate, the company is doing, it doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock price gets cut.
And so, you know, there are two major things that a company has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the stock price.
And that is pensions and research and development.
that don't immediately make money and don't raise the stock price and that is pensions and research and development and this this has you know this this this this becomes known as the the sort of
this is the hostile takeover wave this is it gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions in the 90s
but it's this huge sort of wave that's these corporate squeeps corporate america and it turns
the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like well everyone's
cooperating and companies sort of have this responsibility to like uh provide for their
workers and provide sort of for like the social good into literally the only like the single
entire purpose of any company is to raise the stock price and this yeah yeah this is really bad yeah and and and you know the the part about it that's
awful is that you know okay so all all literally all a corporate raider has to do in order to
buy out one of these companies is be able to is be able to offer a price for the stock that's
higher than the stock price of the company now and this means even, so there's a very famous series of battles.
They buy out,
an enormous number of companies
get bought out into strip mines like this.
And, you know, and again,
these are very, very profitable companies, right?
These are companies
with large research and development budgets.
These are companies
that are making enormous amounts of money
and they're just completely destroyed
in order to sort of just like satiate these just like absolute ghoul corporate like vulture raider people this is
you know if you remember uh might be too young for this but mitt romney's campaign for so yeah
one of the reasons why mitt romney loses is that like he he's one of these guys like he he's he's
like he's the big bang capital guy and everyone kind of
looks at him and goes like you are the reason we like got into this mess in the first place
but the problem is that these people have enough money and they have enough power they're able to
do this and in order to stop them so either there's a mass there's a massive fight a bunch
of people try to take over a good year who you know they make the tires they have the blips
and good year ceo is like fanatically opposed to all of this because you know he he's he's from the
old ceo crop who's like well okay we're here to like make things instead of you know increase
stock prices but the problem is the only way he can save off the raiders is by increasing his stock
price and the only way to increase stock prices is by doing the things the corporate raiders are already doing so he starts
slashing pensions he starts slashing with your development budgets yeah and this and this this
sort of cycles because now you have you know there's there there's it's it's you're not only
having pressure from you know like the government that's that's anti-union the corporations
themselves are being forced to become more anti-union because they're you know they now have this have this pressure on them from the top down from, from these sort of, these sort of finance ghouls.
And the finance ghouls in a lot of ways, just the perfect kneelable subjects, right?
Because they, they, they only see the world in money.
They see everything as a market.
They literally think that like, they, they are like these, these like shamans.
If there's a really good ethnography that I've plugged before on here called Liquidated – an ethnography of – wait.
Yeah.
Liquidated an ethnography of Wall Street where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street and works there for a while and then you can talk to a bunch of interviews.
It doesn't end up logical stuff.
And the way they talk about the market, they literally talk about it as if they're channeling it.
It's like something and they're like a shaman these are yeah these are these are that's what's one of the new gods of of our world that yeah
that's i mean that's that's not a uncommon turn of phrase to describe stuff like this
yeah and and what i think is interesting about it though is that you know that conception of
the market of like every person is just like a pure like completely socially unbound like thing of capital that you oh well okay if you lose your
job here you can just move to another firm right so this makes sense inside of the context of wall
street because these people like like these wall street firms they have they have like like 30
turnover a year and so all these people are constantly being fired and shuffled onto the next job and fired and shuffled onto the next job.
And so,
you know,
they,
so they,
they,
they do,
they do this very common sort of fallacy thing where they assume that because this is the way that it works for them,
but this is the way it's going to work for everyone else.
And they,
they genuinely,
a lot of these people genuinely believe this.
They're like,
well,
okay,
so the things we're going to,
the things that we're about to do,
like,
you know,
when we destroy these workers entire lives,
when we,
you know, when we close their factories,
when we take their pensions,
when we literally destroy every community
and everything that's ever existed in their lives,
they're like, oh, they'll just pick themselves up
and go to another place and they'll be fine.
Because if you're a Wall Street finance ghoul,
like, yeah, that's what happens
when you get fired every three months.
And so these people these people
basically take control of of the entire corporate sector they do they do this very quickly by you
know they start this in the sort of early 80s and uh milliken the guy who comes up with the
junk bonds uh leveraged buyout scheme like he he goes jail for, I think, securities fraud.
They get him for fraud, but it doesn't matter.
A lot of those guys got
in trouble for securities fraud.
All of these people,
all of these people are just doing crime.
Even my finance standards.
This is how
the Action Park guy got kicked out
of Wall Street.
Doing all the same stuff.
And again, I want to point this out.
The stuff they're doing is so illegal that even the Reagan administration was like,
No, we have to prosecute you.
This is the Ronald Reagan Justice Department.
And they're like,
It was so much crime. Yeah, it's really bad and and you know the result
of this is just basically the total evisceration of of the working class just like as a movement
and you know all the left-wing parties are sort of reshaped by this and you know and you know
we've been focusing on on the u.s and uh and the here, but this is not the only place this happens.
And so one of the – this happens – this also starts happening in socialist states.
And we talked about this in more detail in our interview with Arnesa Kuzutra about Bosnia. One of the big things that Milosevic is doing in Yugoslavia when he takes power and he starts actually being a real political force in the 1980s is he starts doing basically all don't know if de-collectivization is quite the right word because Yugoslavia's economic system is complicated and weirder than the USSR's.
But he does this, and this is one of the things that starts Yugoslavia's death spiral because you have this enormous economic devastation from the increase in oil prices from the oil shock and then that gets paired with you know
the economic devastation from everyone losing their benefits people losing the pensions uh
these state-owned industries going under and getting privatized um the sort of like
collective ownership structures imploding and the the the product of this is that you know milosevic looks at this
and it's like okay how can i stay in power and his answer is just genocide on that it's just
genocide on nationalism and this sort of collapse of sort of state and social life is you know and
and the leaders at the top realizing that they can weaponize sort of nationalism is one of the
things that leads directly to the moslemyan genocide now towards the end of the 80s the
whole soviet bloc starts coming apart um yeah you know the berlin wall falls and eventually
you know the soviet union dissolves and the people who are trying to end the soviet union
the things that they want basically are like freedom of speech uh the ability to like
leave the country and basically like scandinavian style social democracy and it was like reasonable
requests coming from the soviet union yeah yeah i knew i mean these these people like you know
this is these you know like they they they they wanted to live in scavia, and instead they got, hey, welcome to the US, but even worse.
Yeah, that happens if you're not careful.
Yeah, it's really bad.
And what they get instead is just this enormous wave of privatizations.
The welfare state just vanishes.
And this causes basically like total societal collapse um like
one of my one of my professors and this this happens basically across the whole soviet block
one of my professors in college i think she was from bulgaria um she she told me about how during
the 90s like when she was growing up like she and her family would just the only thing they had to
eat was raw millet because there's no food. There's literally no food anywhere.
The entire economy is collapsed.
Nobody has any money.
And so, you know, it's like, well, okay,
everyone's just eating raw grain
because, you know, that's the only thing you can,
you have to survive.
And, you know, it's this,
it's literally so bad that in Russia,
it causes the single largest life expectancy drop
in post-World War Europe.
It's like, like, it's the life expectancy decreases by like four years because so many people die from this um you know and one of the one of the ways this happens is that there's the so the way they're
they're going to deal with like the state-owned industry thing is they they okay i've never been
able to figure this figure out if it was like they they actually took moray
rothbard's plan for this or if they just independently developed moray rothbard's plan
for for for dissolving state-owned industries which is give like everyone who worked in it a
share of the company and so they do this right and everyone has these shares but these shares
are just like paper and you can't eat this paper so a bunch of sort of like organized crime guys and
the people who've been you know like like the sort of the people who've been richer or like had been
sort of connected party people who were just like i'm just going to cash out start you know just
just going through cities and they're they'll you know they'll be like okay we'll give you a pair of
jeans like we'll give you some food if you give us their share and you know everyone people just
give up their shares and the result of this is that like just
every industry in russia immediately falls under the control of just just like absolutely psychotic
oligarchs and you know the the west is absolutely sharing this on that this this whole process is
engineered by just a bunch of just like pure neoliberal ghoul like harvard's like weird
harvard grads who get sent into russia and who
are like ah we're gonna we're gonna run the russian economy and we're gonna like fix everything and
they just just absolutely destroy it and you know the west has a thing that they're they're you know
they're they're cheering on this whole process they have this thing about how like ah everyone
has to do belt tightening and you're gonna suffer for a bit and it'll all be worth it and meanwhile Boris Yeltsin is just
completely drunk off his ass
like shelling the parliament with tanks
while like
the US press is cheering and
you know
the tragedy of this
is like it's not really like Russia
got like more free
you know like they still torture
and disappear anarchists in secret prisons free you know like they they still they still torture and disappeared anarchists and
secret prisons like you know they're still they still just like randomly assassinate political
dissidents with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit yeah they sure do yeah but you
know the the the the the big difference is that a bunch of harvard grads made an indescribable
amount of money and now no one has any pensions.
And there's this great Russian joke from this period that goes – it's talking about the communists.
Everything they ever told us about communism was a lie, but everything they ever told us about capitalism was absolutely true.
Yeah, that seems to be roughly accurate.
Yeah, it's basically true.
that seems to be roughly accurate yeah it's basically true and you know and in the the product of sort of neoliberalism coming to russia is that by by the end of the 90s russia is just
literally controlled by the mob and the these sort of monstrous oligarchs and putin's campaign
is like i'm better than the mob and i will bring the i will bring the mob and the oligarchs under
control and this is you know this is how putin takes power because and he has failed to live up to that promise to to be fair to be fair
the you are significantly less likely to just like randomly be kidnapped and ransomed not me
no i have i have written for a website he does not like i cannot that's true that's true
if you piss off putin yeah if you piss off putin
you might be held for ransom but it's like you know the number of random people who don't do
anything political who are just like randomly held for ransom did kind of go down a bit and like
that's yeah i mean all right all right you gotta hand it to putin okay i give him yeah well okay
the the the thing i'll hand to putin is that he restored the state's
monopoly on violence now that's not a good thing it's now the monopoly on violence is but he did
it yeah he well he did it and you know this this was the basis of sort of because his power and
political support was that and sort of nationalism and this is like you know and and there's always
this the sort of liberal line on Putin.
It's like, oh, he's an SKGB guy.
And like, oh, it's still communism again.
And it's like, no.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, no, no.
And this brings me back to the single thing that I need everyone to understand about neoliberalism, which is that neoliberalism does not decrease the size of the state.
Like, there were more bureaucrats now in the russian state than
there were under the soviet union no and it definitely in a different in order for it to
operate it definitely extends drastically that like the hands of the state in terms of like
like like military police law enforcement yeah like all those things in order to keep this weird
market driven thing alive you need to have a lot of like enforcement on people who don't
have but both people who like actually make money and then but mostly people who don't make very
much money uh yeah so it increases not only like the bureaucratic state but also like the enforcement
arm of the state yeah and i think that there's there's there's two interesting ways this happens
one is that well okay there's three ways it happens one
is that anytime someone says they're gonna they're gonna do deregulation like deregulation does not
mean that they're going to decrease the number of regulations there are what it means is that
uh the regulations are bad for this company and so they're they're going to they're going to add
more regulations in a way that is good for this company and the thing is this actually this you
know this net increases the size of the state right they're not like they're not like they're not decreasing the
number of laws or whatever no they're you know they're they're they're they're writing like
incredibly like in absolutely incomprehensible banking legislation that like lets banks charge
like interest rates that previously only organized crime could do and then there's there's another
aspect of this
which is that you know so the the the welfare that remains right you know becomes means tested
and you know that means that there's so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives you things
and then you have another bureaucracy on top of that that decides whether or not you should be
allowed to do the thing it puts you know there's this just this like process of abject
humiliation that you have to go to to receive anything yeah from the state and it's like that
sucks and then because that is so awful there's another layer of bureaucracy which is like social
workers and stuff whose job it is in large part is to help you bypass the the second layer of
bureaucracy so that creates another layer yeah there's there's there's so much yeah it is yeah
and but but this is you know this this is one of the things in the liberals do which is
okay so you know you you have you have you have your two doctrines right you have the thing they
actually believe which is enormous bureaucratic military state and then you have the thing they
claim to believe which is oh the state needs to be smaller uh the state needs to be decentralized
the state shouldn't interfere in the market and so whenever whenever like the things that they do get too bad they have this other thing
they can turn to to go oh yeah uh the reason there's too much bureaucracy is because the
state's getting involved too much elect us and we will get rid of the bureaucracy and you elect
them and they make the state bigger and you get you know you get this sort of perpetual cycle sexual cycle.
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I think the reason people get confused by this is that when people think of the state, right?
They think of the state as something that provides services.
You know, the quintessential thing a state does is build roads.
Roads. Yeah. services you know the quintessential thing a state does is build roads roads yeah and you know
we you know when we can talk about how like the u.s building roads probably doomed the entire
earth climate change oh yeah no like the way that we've done roads around cars and the type of
things we make roads yeah it's horrible but yeah it's awful yeah but but there's there's another
thing about roads which is interesting which is that roads are, you know, so the original reason why states built roads was so they can move armies around.
And this comes back to the core of what a state is, right?
There is nothing in the actual core definition of a state, which is basically it's a hierarchical localized monopoly on violence, right?
There's nothing in that that has that like says at all the
state has to do anything for you right like if if you know if if 200 guys with guns show up and
seize a place right they can create a state they don't have to give you anything the state is the
the fundamental core of the state is just a bunch of armed people who can order people around and you know but
people people sort of can people sort of confuse the two and the the neoliberalism's entire thing
is increasing the increasing the military you know the part of the state that takes things from you
at gunpoint and decreasing the part of the state that like gives you things and you know one of
the there's one of the other things that happens in this period is that labor increasingly stops being about making or doing anything and just becomes pure guard labor.
So, you know, the last big neoliberal project that doesn't really get talked about as a neoliberal project ever is that mass incarceration is a neoliberal project.
It started under Nixon and under Carter.
But, you know, so when Reagan takes office, the American prison population is about 329,000.
When he leaves office, he has basically doubled it to 627,000.
We have now more than doubled it again and you know it
basically it you know whenever you get a large neoliberal administration that they you know they
double it right uh it basically doubles again uh between between the clinton administration
you know it keeps accelerating and you know this is this is this is the other thing that that
neoliberalism brings in which is that okay so
neoliberalism produces this enormous population of people who don't have any jobs have no
opportunities whatsoever are just screwed so what do you do with them and the answer is slavery
and basically everywhere that you stay you see neoliberalism you see massive increases
into present population especially the u.s is is is the by far the worst example of this but this happens you know this happens basically across the world and what what what
you see is in place of you know this is this is one of the things that drives politics in in sort
of in rural regions in the u.s which is that you have these places that used to sort of have
industries used particularly like coal mining things like that and it gets replaced by prisons because prisons you know having a prison in your sort of rural
town is the only way to sort of ensure that you have a large economic base and so you know like
local local city councils are you know incredibly pro-prison because it's like oh well the prison
would bring you jobs and you know this means that okay so some of the people a lot of people who are prison guards are
just you know fascists but there's also people who are prison guards who normally would just be
workers yeah no absolutely yeah who have just been sort of you know there's nothing left right
and they're fighting you know uh mike davis talks about this they're fighting this just
incredibly desperate ferocious struggle to like stay in the places they love and stay with
their families and stay with their friends and stay with their communities and the only way they
can do this is you know by becoming part of this like just the neoliberal hell state and you know
they don't like it either but that's you know that's what neoliberalism is right is you no
longer have a job the only job available to you is picking up a gun and pointing it at someone who is exactly the same as you, except they've been thrown into the slavery part of the system instead of the people holding the guns at the slavery part of the system.
And one of the things that happens a lot, the people just really conflate about what neoliberalism is
is they confuse it with libertarianism yes and they're not the same thing and and it this this
is a this is a very confusing problem because well a the term neoliberal doesn't get used in
the u.s all that much no and when people use it they usually use it to mean something bad, and that's just about it.
Yeah, yeah. And also, another part of the problem is that even if you go into the Montpellierian Society, right?
Which is, you know, this is the arch-near-laboral institution.
It's just basically like a think tank generator.
There are libertarians in there.
There are anarcho-capitalists in in the montpelion society
and the montpelion society is fighting this sort of constant internal battle between the people who
actually believe the things that they say publicly like you actually believe you should have a small
state blah blah blah and the people who understand that that all the small state stuff is just like
stuff you tell the masses in order to get them to like slash welfare things while you just hire more cops
and probably the single biggest distinction between libertarians and and the neoliberals
is about border control now if if you listen to neoliberals on twitter or you listen to
or you listen to libertarians right uh capitalism is supposed to have open borders it's supposed to
be free movement of people etc etc etc um if you look at literally everything
every neoliberal government has ever done it's exactly the opposite it's they don't like that
yeah no yeah they hate it and you know the the this whole thing about like oh you need workers
to uh uh yeah if you if you let workers from other countries go into into the u.s like oh
they'll they'll decrease wages blah blah so the the period in which the u.s like oh they'll they'll decrease wages blah blah so the the period in which the
u.s like had strong unions and strong wages and stuff was the period where there was like basically
no militarization on the mexican border i mean there were some and you know there's there's a
build-up sort of during the vietnam war and i there there'd sort of been one uh back like around
the mexican revolution era but you know it's it's nothing it's
literally nothing like it is today today the u.s border is this just absolute hellscape um i mean
just like there's there's there's this enormous perimeter of the u.s border where just the
constitution doesn't apply where like the bill of rights just doesn't exist if if you're if you're
close enough to the border it's all suspended uh it's not entirely suspended but but basically the Border Patrol can just do whatever the fuck they want to you.
And this is how the Border Patrol was able to be deployed in Portland, right?
Because Portland's technically on the border, and so the Border Patrol's increased power is there.
And the actual goal is, so people are always going to move right and what the neoliberals figured out was that
you know these these these enormous migrant labor populations the the best way you can exploit them
is if they're just absolutely terrorized by just this you know an incredible sort of
ferociously hostile murderous just border regime run by fascists and it works like they they kill they
kill enormous numbers of people they do horrible things they put people in concentration camps
they sterilize people they like they they sexually assault children they they disappear people they
like steal people's babies and this is you know this is what neoliberalism is right this this is what neoliberalism is. This is what it actually is in practice.
This is the policy that is imposed by neoliberal states.
And I think I want to end on that,
and I want to end on a note about what the quintessential
sort of figure of neoliberalism is,
because I think in the neoliberalism is because i think you know in
the neoliberal's mind right the the the the quintessential neoliberal figure is like the
small entrepreneur who's like uh he's you know turned their own creativity and like harnessed
it into like the ability to create value and you know they're creating things for the world and
they're enriching themselves and i think a lot of leftists think of it as like,
the quintessential neoliberal is a Chicago School of Economics person.
Yeah.
And I want to suggest that the single quintessential neoliberal figure
is a riot cop.
And specifically, everyone by now knows what a
riot cop looks like right i i want everyone to go back and even even from from like 2001
look at what a riot police officer looks like in 2001 versus what they look like now and then go
back to even like the 1960s and look look at look at what those guys look like
yeah no looking at footage from the 60s and riot cops is like really depressing because you're like
i could take these guys yeah they're they're just wearing t-shirts yeah they're just guys it's it's
way more of a fair fight they have t-shirts and sticks we could have t-shirts and sticks that is
a that's like the orion the 60s, it sounds like.
Now, they also, in some cases, will be much more willing just to murder tons of people.
Now, there is that exception.
But, in like a big street brawl, it is, it is generally a bit of a fair fight.
Yeah, I mean, I will say also, 60s police love dogs.
They love like siccing dogs on people, which is really bad.
Yeah.
But yeah, I'm looking at the 2001 riot cops
and yeah, they are not nearly as robo-copy
as what they are now.
During the Chilean uprising in 2019,
I was talking to someone in Chile
and they were talking about how,
like they were describing it as like the
cops were just like like something out of teenage mutant ninja turtles like it was like fighting the
shredder they're there's yeah yeah they had these like even even even the lapd riot cops for the
1992 riots they're also still just wearing like yeah shirts like they just have they just have
colored shirts and one stick um yeah and now versus now they're
wearing their whatever dumb armor they have yeah but you know and this is this is you know this
this is this is if you want to trace the path of neoliberalism it's this it's a lot of the army
surplus stuff that like the police have gotten a lot of it's really scary a lot of it also sucks
like a lot of those atvs every like everyone who's
ever had to drive them hates them but you know like like my my like absolutely tiny dinky town
has a bear cat that and that shouldn't that shouldn't be no it shouldn't i know where it is
too i know where the bear cat is it's like there shouldn't be a bear cat yeah that doesn't make
sense my town is a tax cutout.
Like it's,
it's literally a tax carve out like that.
That's the reason.
That's the only reason it exists.
And it has a bear cat.
And like,
you know,
this is,
this is sort of the,
this is the consequence of,
of,
of what neoliberalism isn't.
Vicky Osterwell talked about this on,
on,
on the occupy episode,
but it's,
it's the cops become more like,
become more like the army.
The army becomes more like the cops. you know the the the result is this sort of panopticon
surveillance states where like if you and seven people stand on a sidewalk 16 cops will show up
yeah they've they've really uh excelled in making the capitalist realism doomer philosophy be almost like the base philosophy for
anyone who takes two seconds to think about the world that they live in yep and you know and this
has been really effective in a lot of ways but you know david graber point had pointed this out
which is that the problem with doing this is that you know okay so like the the enormous
amount of guard labor right the enormous amount of sort of prison guards like that's all unproductive
labor right you know you you you make you make some of that money back off the companies make
some of that money back off the slave labor right but like but that in general they're the guards
aren't adding anything they're not yeah they're not They're not producing any goods.
And not really much service either.
No.
And this is a problem, right?
Because neoliberalism is profit-driven.
And so what you have is that the system has a choice between either it functioning or it making it appear as if it's the only system.
And it chooses the latter basically every time.
That's the thing.
It's kind of profit-driven,
but honestly, the more that you've been talking,
I'm like, no, it's just about eliminating any alternative.
So it's not even profit-driven.
It's that it's forcing itself
to be the only acceptable option.
And that's how it gets so much of its power.
Yeah, but the problem with this is that all of that sort of ideological coercion only lasts as long as the police can hold the streets.
Which is...
Which is, they're good at it.
They are, but sometimes they're decent you know one of the story i want to end on is so there's you know there has been
in some with more varying degrees of success there has actually been resistance to neoliberalism
and there are places where people have won the people there are places where people have run
the imf out those people there's places where people have you know defeated coups where they've
like you know where they've where they've they where they've successfully sort of taken over the state.
There's places where – I mean, there's places like – we're going to talk about a couple things in Mexico.
But yeah, I mean, there's the Zapatistas who are constantly besieged but have carved out a territory in which they have totally defeated the Mexican – almost totally defeated the Mexican state.
in which they have, you know, like totally defeated the Mexican, almost totally defeated the Mexican state.
And I think one of the sort of forgotten incidents in the 2000s is this uprising in Oaxaca, where
there's an enormous sort of, a bunch of teachers are going on strike and, you know, Oaxaca's
teachers unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical.
And so, you know, one of the things they do is
they go into the city and they have
these giant protest tents that they
showed up. They have these giant camps.
And in 2006,
the police attack them.
And so they start attacking and the
teachers fight back.
This massive battle
erupts
just in the city.
And,
you know,
this is all the police attack at like three in the morning.
Right.
But they can't,
they,
there's not enough of them.
They clear teachers out and the teachers hold and they hold and they hold.
And the,
the city of Oaxaca wakes up to this just enormous battle in the streets between a bunch of just like teachers and the cops.
And when Oaxaca wakes up
they are just like what the fuck is this and you know they they join the teachers and they go fight
the cops and they they they're largely successful in like like they beat them they they drive they
drive the police from the city and you know and and for for for for several months the city is
basically under the control of these like direct democratic councils and like there are these
there are these things called they call them mega marshes which is a million people will do a march
to the streets and the police the police just can't stop them because you know there's a million
people and yeah that's yeah that's the only way that I've seen it be successful, whether it be just a sheer mass of people driving cops out of a police station or an entire city rallying behind people in Portland when the fence came.
It's like you need to have everybody to show up because they can fight 200 twink anarchists. Pretty easily, usually.
But when you have, like, all of
the moms and dads and regular people come up,
that is much more of a complicated
fight on, like, on
their end, because, yeah, we'll still have
the teenage frontliners throwing
shit at the cops, but when you have,
like, regular people
behind them, that creates the whole media
narrative to be something
totally different and it got the feds to back down in portland when trump really wanted that to not
happen and i think also the thing the thing that was incredible at oaxaca is it wasn't just people
sort of like standing behind them like really like tens of thousands of people just joined the fight
in in a way that you know like if you know if there's like joined the fight in a way that
if there's like 50,000 people in a city
throwing bricks at you
you either have to start shooting into the crowd or try to
hold them
even when you start shooting into the crowd
yeah they tried it and it didn't work
it was a disaster
the crowds grew larger
one of the things that happens is
the revolutionaries try to like,
they go to the radio station and are like,
okay, will you broadcast this?
The radio station says no.
And so they start seizing radio stations
all over the city.
Incredibly big.
Yeah.
And they had these bonfires at the edge of the city
where everyone sort of meets.
And they're sending radio messages
over the radio stations they've taken over
from barricade to barricade and you know eventually the police and like the like the the
mexican army shows up and at that point they're able to sort of retake the city and there's a
couple of other things happening in mexico at this point that are sort of this is giant sort of left
wing tide and the way that it gets stopped is that the Mexican army basically fully kicks off the drug war and they kill – I mean, I've seen numbers up to like 800,000 people in 10 years.
They basically genocide the indigenous population of Mexico.
And I think that's sort of a place to leave it because on the one hand –
Wow, what a heartwarming, hopeful note to end the show on.
Yeah, but I mean I think it is worth – it's worth thinking about.
One, it is possible to beat the police.
Two, the ruling class will literally bathe the entire country in blood.
Like they,
they will destroy their own country is different.
Um,
the way,
I mean,
this gets discussed in season one happened here,
but like the way the American military works,
I think they'll be less likely to do that.
Yeah.
Well,
I mean,
I,
I want,
I want to put this out.
Like,
so what the thing that the,
the,
the army doesn't directly murder people. What they do is what they do is. Yeah, well, I mean, I want to put this out. So the thing that the army
doesn't directly murder people,
what they do is basically, like,
they set off a bunch of fighting
between the cartels,
and the cartels fucking murder
enormous numbers of people.
We will happily murder each other,
but yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and also, you know,
I mean, it's also,
this is the thing
with the Mexican state. It's very, very difficult to tell where the cartels stop
and where the mexican army begins because a lot of them are the same thing and like
you know there's yeah but you know that's that's what neoliberalism is hopeful note to end on
and yeah just just to make the ending a bit better i i do want to say i i'm no longer gonna call
anyone uh neoliberal.
I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and nobody responded to it.
So it was sad.
So I'll say it now.
I'm only going to call them Thomas Anderson liberals.
That is what I'm calling them now.
And I'll make everyone wait two seconds to understand what's going on and then sigh and then motion to get me out of the room.
So thank you, Chris, for talking about Nihalaprom.
And
thank you all for joining us.
This has been It Could Happen Here.
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Join the Panopticon. Throw bricks at it.
It is pretty funny how they tricked everyone
into carrying around GPSs
wherever they go. It's pretty funny.
Yeah, it's pretty funny yeah
it's amazing it's like oh everyone everyone everyone my town is like oh we
can't get the vaccine they have microchips in it it's like you have a
phone they tricked us into carrying around speakers cameras and GPS's
everywhere they we go it is really funny. It's amazing. All right. Well, bye, everybody.
Goodbye.
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