"Programs like the New Deal, the GI Bill, or the UK’s vast program of counsel housing showcased Western governments not just as pillars of capitalist values but also as architects of quasi-communistic structures. Initiatives like the Works Progress Administration or the military itself demonstrated state capacity for collective organization on a mass scale.

The postwar boom lifted millions of regular (predominantly white) people into new middle-class lives typified by safety, social dignity, consumerism, creative opportunity, and rest. Advances in automation, building materials, and agriculture supported this transformation, which proved that governments could create powerful systems of public good overnight. By the 1960s, the children of those who had demonstrated this collective power dreamed of applying that capacity on a global scale, regardless of race, gender, and nationality.

Instead, we got nothing but scarcity.

In Acid Communism — a title that winks at our need to re-aestheticize everyday life, elevate our consciousness, and see through the paper tiger of capitalist realism — Fisher points to scarcity and artificial restriction as the primary generator of wealth for those in charge of the postwar order.

Inflation was the buzzword of the 2024 election, which was due in part to real scarcity — as were the various supply chain crisis during the pandemic, which made the richest Americans 40 percent richer. But corporations have also been price-gouging without consequence, creating a form of artificial scarcity that erodes the value of pay increases through inflation. Fisher identifies this pattern as a defining feature of neoliberal capitalism: “A system that generates artificial scarcity in order to produce real scarcity; a system that produces real scarcity in order to generate artificial scarcity.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/mark-fisher-neoliberalism-acid-communism/

#Capitalism #Neoliberalism #LateStageCapitalism #ArtificialScarcity #Abundance #CapitalismRealism

'Lets have a real conversation about Hamas' - Marc Lamont Hill

#Gaza #Israel #Genocide #SettlerColonialism #Palestine #NeoLiberalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKGokMjoMdg

Should people have a choice to attempt living outside of capitalism?

https://friendica.world/display/84b6ef2b-7367-76a9-0d13-12b031354204

#neoliberalism #anarchism #socialism #marxism #IWW #theory #communism #libertarianism #libertarian #corporatism #wobblies #materialism #dialectic #communalism
@yogthos @heretical_i

#ChrisHedges: Don’t Deify #JimmyCarter

"Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as #neoliberalism...

Carter fell under the disastrous influence of... national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski... Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it."

A VERY COMPLETE LIST of his crimes https://scheerpost.com/2024/12/30/chris-hedges-dont-deify-jimmy-carter/

Is it reasonable to allow the state to subsidize a few million unreliable, expensive private cars wrapped around super-computers and questionably benefiting only the wealthy and a few aspiring dictators?

I suggest prefigurative models accessible to everyone demonstrating pragmatic investment in a nationalized smart power grid; radically smarter roads, improved mass transit, and transit oriented community re-development that serves the nation as a whole!

Better for Billionaires
#RachelMaddow #Neoliberalism #CronyCapitalists #Oligarchy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9pznmBooVk

“The Czech is in the Mail”

by Another Angry Voice on Substack

“The [Labour] government has approved the sale of Royal Mail to #Czech #billionaire #Daniel #Křetínský, turning what was a not-for-profit public service just eleven years ago into a billionaire's plaything”

@UKLabour

https://open.substack.com/pub/anotherangryvoice/p/the-czech-is-in-the-mail?r=27oltk&utm_medium=ios

#Press #UK #RoyalMail #Privatization #NeoLiberalism #AssetStripping #Profiteering #Labour #Starmer #CorporateGreed #PublicUtilities #Water #Energy #Nuclear #ForeignOwnership

In case you hadn't noticed:

The twin goal of neoliberalism is to enrich the rich & punish the rest.

The cruelty aims to make us submit to being materially & psychologically enslaved & to lose all hope of regaining autonomy.

Hence, neoliberal govts set out to destroy all means of human connection in all possible spheres: economic, social, psychological.

Resistance entails doing the opposite of what these fascist neoliberals want.

#Neoliberalism #Fascism #Resistance #USPol #CdnPoli #UKPol .

won’t somebody think of the capitalist parasites 😢
https://www.dw.com/en/is-france-heading-for-an-economic-storm/a-70944682

#neoliberalism #France

the #lnp strategy should be attributed to Hitler’s Mein Kampf - where I think it’s outlined in detail. #auspol #neoliberalism #politics #strategy

We call a person who fights cancer in people an oncologist while branding people who fight cancer in society “radical left lunatics.” I think not. Capitalism is cancer. Trillion-dollar corporations and billionaires are tumours. So, with apologies to neoliberals and fascists everywhere, I prefer to think of myself as a social oncologist.

#politics #society #capitalism #cancer #fascism #neoliberalism #socialOncology

The US election is far from the first right wig wing recently, but it's one we really need to understand with brutal honesty.

Inflation has been hurting working people and scared many working class and middle class Americans. The situation is similar in Europe, where the left has lost election after election.

In the 80s socialism was a strong current in European politics. And in the USA, unions could look for protection from the democrats.

What has happened is a neo-liberal orthodoxy has taken over most leftist parties and socialist parties in Europe. The left used to be a voice for anti-capitalism, against neoliberalism, and a voice for protecting working class jobs and social benefits.

As 'socialist' parties, the Labour party and Democrats have abandoned this (in as much as they ever followed it) the predominant orthodoxy has been liberal economics with minimum protection for workers. Where parties were against NAFTA or trade liberalisation now these parties are the most enthusiastic neoliberals.

So is it surprising that workers across Europe and North America have abandoned parties that previously claimed to represent their views.

And is it surprising that the right has seen the opportunity and stolen the clothes of the left. And combined anti-neoliberal rhetoric with ethnonationalism, and managed to attract sections of the working and middle classes that normally are concerned with economic justice. People just don't trust the US Democrats, UK Labour or socialist parties on the European mainland any more.

#uspol #ukpol #ukpolitics #eu #europe #socialism #inflation #neoliberalism #economy

https://archive.ph/tVC69

"If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.

Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.

And that brings me back to the learned helplessness of the Democrats. The reason the anti-monopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of anti-politics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-the-democratic-partys-cult-of

#USA #Neoliberalism #DemocraticParty #Antitrust #Capitalism #Monopolies #Oligopolies

Hmmm... for the Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore the EU looks like a worrying socialist arrangement.... while for the Left in the UK, the EU is seen as a worryingly neoliberal arrangement.

These general political labels really don't seem to be doing the work they once did, do they?

#EU #neoliberalism #socialism

"In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump’s obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/

#USA #Trump #PresidentialElection2024 #DemocraticParty #Neoliberalism #Globalization