The Zombie Doctrine (Neoliberalism)
(this is a month old, I know, ancient history on the internet, but it's still an amazing read)
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/15/neoliberalism-zombie-doctrine-root-all-our-problems
It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It may work to some extent in a market that has only a few options for any given product. If "the market" consists of only Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, and a few others, a large enough sample of consumers can eventually try them all and decide which ones they like and which are the "losers." But when the market consists of tens or hundreds or thousands of different choices there is no way enough consumers are going to try them all in order to meaningfully sort out the "winners" from the "losers."
Some people have been using Tide laundry detergent for 40 years, and unless something obvious happens to change their perception of it a lot of them are likely to simply keep buying and using it. Those consumers aren't helping to sort out anything, and that may be pretty common.
Internet product ratings can help sort things out but you never how many of the ratings are done by paid PR people or friends and family of somebody who works at the manufacturer and wants them to "win."
Consumer magazine ratings can help, but for some products they may not be able to include all the choices available, especially if new products are coming to market all the time making their ratings outdated fairly quickly.
Never being especially materialistic myself, it probably wouldn't bother me too much if the only option I had was to shop in a government-run store that did not exist to maximize profits but rather to provide a few different choices of quality goods and services at a reasonable price. In the past I've even suggested that maybe the federal government should buy Walmart and run it like a "civilian PX;" a "public option" for everyday shopping. No shareholders to please or hotshot executives to grotesquely overcompensate; all employees make at least a living wage.
