Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability

[xchrom]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22958-neoliberalism-and-the-machinery-of-disposability



Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone. Americans now live in a society in which almost everyone is spied on, considered a potential terrorist, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. The state of exception has become normalized. Moreover, as society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long-abandoned welfare state hollowed out to serve the interest of global markets, the collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility toward those who are vulnerable or in need of care is now viewed as a scourge or pathology.

What has emerged in this new historical conjuncture is an intensification of the practice of disposability in which more and more individuals and groups are now considered excess, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. Moreover, this politics of disappearance has been strengthened by a fundamental intensification of increasing depoliticization, conducted largely through new modes of spying and the smothering, if not all-embracing, market-driven power of commodification and consumption.

Citizens are now reduced to data, consumers, and commodities and as such inhabit identities in which they increasingly "become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition."[1] Within this machinery of social death, not only does moral blindness prevail on the part of the financial elite, but the inner worlds of the oppressed are constantly being remade under the force of economic pressures and a culture of fear. According to João Biehl, as the realpolitik of disposability "comes into sharp visibility . . . tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes, [that] thrive on the "energies of the dead," who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law."[2]

Economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have argued that we are in a new Gilded Age, one that mimics a time when robber barons and strikebreakers ruled, and the government and economy were controlled by a cabal that was rich, powerful and ruthless.[3] And, of course, blacks, women and the working class were told to mind their place in a society controlled by the rich. What is often missing in these analyses is that what is new in the second Gilded Age is not just about the moral sanctioning of greed, the corruption of politics by big money, and the ruthlessness of class power.

[polichick]

1. And it continues... "What is unique is the rise of a brutal punishing-incarceration state...

that imposes its power on the dispossessed, the emergence of a surveillance state that spies on and suppresses dissenters, the emergence of vast cultural apparatuses that colonize subjectivity in the interests of the market, and a political class that is uninterested in political concessions and appears immune from control by nation states. The second Gilded Age is really a more brutal form of authoritarianism driven by what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a "death-saturated age," in which matters of violence, survival and trauma now infuse everyday life."


Interesting and sad - especially the part about young people. k&r

[Puzzledtraveller]

5. Any checks against this have been effectively neutralized

Part of my job is helping people register to vote if they have not yet registered. You would be surprised at how many people I ask do not know if they are, do not know which party they are registered for if they are, do not know what the parties are, do not know what party the president is in as my most commonly asked question is "what party is Obama in?" I'm a SNAP and Medicaid caseworker. When you add blind support with ignorance you have unchecked power regardless of which team has the ball IMO.

[MsLeopard]

6. Wow, that's depressing

But it's what 35 years of making Americans incapable of critical thinking gets you - and what the oligarchs depend on in order to keep us docile and accepting of the unacceptable. We right and truly f*cked.

[marmar]

2. k/r

[Junkdrawer]

3. They continue to saw off the branch upon which they sit....

and as my family and I are on a branch connected to the one being sawed, I'm of mixed minds about this.

[Puzzledtraveller]

4. k&r