Upstream - [TEASER] The Liberal Virus

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

You can listen to the full episode "The Liberal Virus" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. Liberalism is a virus. It began to spread across Europe centuries ago and was later carried into other parts of the planet where it evolved and then returned back to Europe even more virulent than before. Liberalism, is, of course, used here in the philosophical sense, not in the sense that it is used in the United States’ electoral and political sense. Liberalism, for the most part, is synonymous with capitalism, and in this Patreon reading and analysis of the classic text, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, we go on a journey with the Egyptian and French Marxist, dependency theorist Samir Amin to explore the rise of liberalism and its implications for people and the planet.  In doing so, we explore the basic tenets of liberalism, how it elevates the economy above all else, how it distorts human relations and infects us with pure economism and an exchange value mindset. We take detours into Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, into postmodernism and how it has been deployed as an ideological weapon against Marxism, into U.S. electoral politics and how identity is utilized by the liberal class, into U.S. imperialism, world systems theory, and much, much more. Further resources: The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, by Samir Amin Related episodes: Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly  Palestine Pt. 11: Israel and the U.S. Empire w/ Max Ajl [UNLOCKED] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes Climate Leninism w/ Jodi Dean and Kai Heron The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins What is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Capitalist Realism with Carlee Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. I'm not. I'm actually in a really bad place right now. The United States. And because of the fact that I have working eyes and working ears, I've unfortunately been inundated with the same coconut-pilled memes as the rest of you, and just trying to make it through this election cycle without gouging out my eyes. It does just feel like particularly excruciating this time around, right? I think we're all in the same boat on that. So why don't I just introduce the episode for today?

We're doing another reading. This is one that I've been really excited to get to for a while. I'm going to read the introduction and first chapter of Samir Amin's The Liberal Virus, Permanent War and the Americanization of the world. So, Samir Amin was an Egyptian, French, Marxian economist, political scientist, and world systems analyst. And he is known for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism. And he's considered to be a pioneer of dependency theory, which, if you've been following along with our recent episodes, you'll be familiar with at least components

of dependency theory, particularly from our conversations with Jason Hickel and, most recently, our conversation with Musa Springer and Charisse Burden-Stelly on Walter Rodney's work. I first learned about Samir Amin fairly recently when I was reading one of Jason Hickle's papers and he referred to his work and I realized that one of Amin's books, The Liberal Virus, I'd seen its cover on Twitter before and it's a really memorable image with the you know the picture of the child sipping from a Coke can. That's the image that I'm going to use for this episode too.

As you know, we've been super dialed in on global perspectives on imperialism, and so I think this reading will be a great complement to what we've been exploring lately. As usual, I'll pop in here and there with commentary, but this text just really does speak for itself And when I first read this I was just underlining like every sentence It's really one of those books. So Okay, let's get into it. Here is the first couple of sections the introduction chapter one of the liberal virus by Samir Amin published in 2004.

Towards the end of the 20th century, a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the liberal virus. This virus made its appearance around the 16th century within the triangle described by Paris, London, Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless. Men whom the virus struck in preference to women not only became accustomed to it and

developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited. But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms. The virus appeared in Europe towards the end of the 20th century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries.

It provoked an epidemic that would have been fatal to the human race if it had not been for the most robust of the inhabitants of the old countries who survived the epidemic and finally were able to eradicate the disease. The virus caused among its victims a curious schizophrenia. Humans no longer lived as whole beings, organizing themselves to produce what is necessary to satisfy their needs, what the learned have called quote economic life. And simultaneously developing the institutions, the rules, and the customs that enable them to develop, what the same learned people have called, quote, political life, conscious that the two aspects

of social life are inseparable. Henceforth, they lived sometimes as homo economicus, abandoning to the, quote, market, the responsibility to regulate their, quote, quote economic life automatically, and sometimes as quote citizens, depositing in ballot boxes their choices for those who would have the responsibility to establish the rules of the game for their quote political life. The crises of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, now happily and definitively left behind, were articulated around the confusions and impasses provoked by this schizophrenia.

Reason, the true one, not the American one, finally caused it to disappear. Everyone survived, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans, and even Texans, who have much changed since and become human beings like the others. I have chosen this happy ending not through some incorrigible optimism but because in the other hypothesis, there would no longer be anyone left to write history. In that version, Fukuyama was right. Liberalism truly announced the end of history. All of humanity perished in the Holocaust.

The last survivors, the Texans, were organized into a wandering band and then immolated in turn on the orders of the chief of their sect, whom they had believed to be a charismatic figure. He too was named Bush. I imagine that the history of our epic will be written somewhat in these terms. In any case, it is in the same terms that I here propose to analyze Now that, my friends, is a fucking introduction. Really just such a powerful way to open a book, and you know, he mentions right off the bat Homo economicus. I encourage you all to check out our documentary on Homo economicus that we did a few years ago now, featuring none other than the amazing Matt Christman, who sadly has been struggling with the effects of a stroke that he had, I think about a year ago.

And of course, other guests on that episode as well. Homo economicus, the idea that we are economic man. And I also appreciate the reference to Francis Fukuyama, of course, famous for suggesting that the world ends with liberal democracy, right? That's the end of history, right? And the famous text of his, which I haven't read, but I've read a lot of analyses of it. Actually, the podcast, If Books Could Kill, do a really great tear down of that one. And then finally, I think I'm really kind of like amused by the references and throughout the book because he's writing this in 2004, all the references to Bush and the Bush administration. They seem dated now, right?

Like it's about 20 years ago, but it's quite a trip going back and reading texts from that period that include these analyses of these figures who we long ago sort of, I wouldn't say forgot, because like how do you fucking forget a million dead Iraqis, but you know, they have exited the public imaginary in many ways, except for the ghastly impacts of their policies and what they did. except for the ghastly impacts of their policies and what they did. And of course, been rehabilitated by liberals themselves, just like Trump will be in, you know, five, 10 years from now, if not sooner. Trump was always a darling of the liberals anyways, right?

He got his start on reality TV. So same with Vance, his presidential pick, a darling of liberals. So they love to scream about fascism, right? But when it actually comes to these, the fascists that are, according to them, prepared to carry out fascism, nothing but well wishes, please recover quickly from the assassination attempt. Let's invite them onto all of the morning shows and etc, etc, etc. And that's probably actually a pretty apt tangent to get us into Chapter 1, which is titled The Liberal, quote, liberal, vision of society. The general ideas which govern the dominant liberal version of the world are simple and may be summarized in the following terms. Social effectiveness is equated by the liberals with economic efficiency,

which, in turn, is confounded with the financial profitability of capital. These reductions express the dominance of the economic, a dominance characteristic of capitalism. The atrophied social thought derived from its dominance is, quote, ìeconomisticî and the extreme. Curiously, this reproach, wrongly directed at Marxism, in fact, characterizes capitalist liberalism. The development of the generalized market, the least regulated possible, and of democracy, are decreed to be complementary

to one another. The question of conflict between social interests, which are expressed through their interventions in the market, and social interests which give meaning and import to political democracy, is not even posed. Economics and politics do not form two dimensions of social reality, each having their own autonomy, operating in dialectical relationship. Capitalist economics in fact governs the political, whose creative potential it eliminates. Apparently, the most quote developed country, the one in which the political is actually

conceived and practiced entirely in the exclusive service of the economy, of capital in fact, obviously the United States, is held to be the best model for quote all. Its institutions and practices should be imitated by all those who hope to be contemporary with the world seen. There is no alternative to the proposed model, which is founded on the economic postulates, the identity of the market and democracy, and the subsumption of the political by the economic. The socialist option attempted in the Soviet Union and China demonstrated that it was both inefficient in economic terms and

anti-democratic in the political sphere. In other words, the propositions formulated above have the virtue of being quote eternal truths, the truths of quote reason, revealed by the unfolding of contemporary history. Their triumph is assured, particularly since the disappearance of the alternative, quote, socialist experiments. We will all truly arrive, as has been said, at the end of history. Historical reason has triumphed. This triumph means that we live in the best of all possible worlds, at least potentially, in the sense that it will be so when its founding ideas are accepted by everyone and put into practice everywhere.

All the defects of today's reality are due only to the fact that these eternal principles of reason are not yet put into practice in the societies that suffer from these deficiencies, particularly those in the societies that suffer from these deficiencies, particularly those in the Global South. The hegemonism of the United States, a normal expression of its avant-garde position in using reason, inevitably liberal, is thus both unavoidable and favorable to the progress of the whole of humanity. There is no quote American imperialism, only a noble leadership, benign or painless as the liberal American intellectuals qualify it.

These quote ideas are central to the liberal vision. In fact, as we will see in what follows, these ideas are nothing but nonsense, founded on a para-science, so-called pure economics, and an accompanying ideology, postmodernism. Quote, pure economics is not a theory of the real world, of really existing capitalism, but of an imaginary capitalism. It is not even a rigorous theory of the latter. The basis and development of the arguments do not deserve to be qualified as coherent. It is only a para-science, closer in fact to sorcery than to the natural sciences which it pretends to imitate. As for postmodernism, it only forms an accompanying discourse, calling upon us to act only within the limits of the liberal system, to quote,

adjust it. The reconstruction of a citizen politics demands that movements of resistance, protest and struggle against the real effects of the implementation of this system be freed from the liberal virus. Okay, so that was chapter one, I actually lied. I'm gonna be reading chapter one and two because I didn't realize that they were separate chapters and we're just kind of getting into this. I'm obviously not gonna stop at chapter one because chapter two is much longer and it actually fleshes a lot of this stuff out. So what we just went through was Samira means sort of depicting in really beautiful writing, the very dark nature of liberalism.

And one of the core foundations of liberalism is the subsuming of the political sphere within the economic sphere. So this is an idea that I first was introduced to by the political economist Karl Poli, in The Great Transformation, which is a book that was published in 1944. And in The Great Transformation, Polanyi talks a lot about how, for the vast majority of human existence, economics and what we think of as these economic transactions and the market, these were all embedded within these much broader social and cultural and ultimately political contexts.

Prior to capitalism, there were many different ways in which economic activity occurred. A lot of the time, it was dictated through social relations, family relations. There were components to the way that societies arranged their economy that were completely dictated by much, much larger concerns. And I won't get into all of the specific different examples or details because I think it's a fairly straightforward idea. If you think about the way that Karl Polanyi talks about it in The Great Transformation is you have two circles, right? One is embedded

within the other. So imagine like a two-dimensional line drawing of an egg, right? Like you have the outer circle and then inside you have the yolk, which is also depicted as a circle. And for the vast majority of human existence, the larger circle was the social, cultural, political formations, human relations, right? That kind of thing. And the smaller circle was the economy, the way that we arrange our economic transactions. And at the advent of capitalism, and Amin would say liberalism, and Karl Polanyi really focuses a lot on markets when he talks about this, all of those different components, the panoply of components that we think of when we talk about capitalism, at the advent of that, those circles were inverted.

And what became dominant was the sort of transactional exchange component. And everything else was subsumed to that all of the different cultural, social and political. So one, one example is think about, and we just take this shit so for granted, but like in our current economic system, the way that we organize our economy, is it common for a boss to take into consideration the well-being of their employee when they provide a wage? Of course not. I mean, as long as the employee can eat and shelter themselves just enough so that they can get back to work, that's the only thing that they consider.

And there are some laws and stuff that dictate the minimum amount that they can be paid. And those laws are ridiculous, just as an aside, obviously, we know the United States is minimum wage is a joke. But the point here being that the economic transaction is dictated upon economic forces. Bosses don't consider whether you were tired and you wanted to sleep in that day, whether or not you can come into work. That's not a part of the equation. And you can sort of dial up to and think about this in terms of entire industries, right? Do industries give a flying fuck about species loss if this particular industry is an extractive industry of course not those are externalities so all of these other components that you can possibly think of spiritual familial.

Your soul your well being like relationships the earth. the earth, the beauty of just watching a starling murmuration, you know, like that shit doesn't matter. It's not at all a part of the equation. And it is really difficult for us oftentimes to get that because we've been so immersed and embedded in this specific way of configuring society that we take it for granted that the economic is dominant. And so that's what Amin is getting at in this opening chapter. And like I said, I'm definitely going to go on and read chapter two here because I thought that chapter one and chapter two were part of the same chapter. So let's get back into this. Chapter two, the ideological and paratheretical foundations of liberalism.

Section one, imaginary capitalism and the parathery of quote, pure economics. The concept of capitalism cannot be reduced to the quote generalized market. But instead, and just a quick aside on that, that's interesting that he says that because that is exactly what Polanyi does. And that's one of the big criticisms of Polanyi's work is that he thinks of capitalism really just focusing on the market elements of capitalism, which, of course, we know is just one component of capitalism, and in fact not even a definitional one. But let's get back to the book.

But instead situates the essence of capitalism precisely in power beyond the market. This reduction is found in the dominant Vulgate, which just means colloquial, substitutes the theory of an imaginary system governed by quote economic laws, the quote market, which would tend, if left to themselves, to produce a quote optimal equilibrium for the analysis of capitalism based on social relations and a politics through which these powers beyond the market are expressed. In really existing capitalism, class struggle, politics, the state, and the logics of capital accumulation are inseparable. Consequently, capitalism is by nature a regime in which the successive states of disequilibrium are products of social and political confrontations situated beyond the market.

The concepts proposed by the vulgar economics of liberalism, such as quote deregulation of the markets, have no reality. So-called deregulated markets are markets regulated by the forces of monopolies which are situated outside the market." So just a quick aside here, Amin is basically saying that there's no such thing as a deregulated market. Like if you were to sap the capitalist system of any state intervention in terms of trying to quote regulate how the market works.

If you didn't have these sort of like bureaucratic managerial components of capitalism that are embodied by the state intervening here and there on behalf of one capitalist or one capitalist industry or the other, you would have the formation. And this is what we see of gigantic monopolies. And we're going to cover this, I hope at some point, we're going to explore the text, the famous text by Lenin, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, in which he really sketches out, I think, in brilliant clarity, the way that capitalism moves into monopoly sort of naturally, right? Like it just happens and we see it starting very,

very early on in capitalism in the 19th century. And then it sort of, you know, continues on to the turn of the 20th century when you see all of these different, what used to be separate capitalist businesses merging into these trusts and these combines. And then you have the financial institutions doing the same thing, the banks. And then the banks and the corporations and businesses, they start to merge. So what you have is monopoly capitalism, which turns into imperialism as these gigantic entities begin to look for more and more places to extract, more and more labor to extract and exploit. And that leads to colonialism, it leads to neocolonialism, which has sort of been called the highest stage of imperialism. So that's a

text that we'll get into, I'm hoping, at some point in the coming months. But for now, I think the important point to take here is that Amin is really calling out the bullshit around this rhetoric around deregulation that we hear a lot of time from the libertarian side of the liberal spectrum. Okay, back to it. This was a clip from our Patreon episode, back to it. back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. Additionally, you'll be helping keep Upstream sustainable and

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