The Mad
Violence of Casino Capitalism
By Henry Giroux
February 21, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Counterpunch"
-American
society is morally bankrupt and politically broken,
and its vision of the future appears utterly
dystopian. As the United States descends into the
dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism,
the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it
has become possible not only to foresee the death of
the essential principles of constitutional
democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt
once called the horror of dark times. The politics
of terror, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of
violence dominate America’s cultural apparatuses and
legitimate the ongoing militarization of public life
and American society.
Unchecked corporate power and a massive
commodification, infantilization, and
depoliticization of the polity have become the
totalitarian benchmarks defining American society.
In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal
modern-day capitalism, or what some might call
neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is
a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative
regime of oppression in which not only are the
social contract, civil liberties and the commons
under siege, but also the very notion of the
political, if not the planet itself. The dystopian
moment facing the United States, if not most of the
globe, can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention
“that it is easier to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on
to say that “We can now revise that and witness the
attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining
the end of the world.”1
One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is
through the ideological and affective spaces in
which the neoliberal subject is produced and
market-driven ideologies are normalized. Capitalism
has made a virtue out of self-interest and the
pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has
created a culture of shattered dreams and a
landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt
cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the
unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all
suggest a collective failure of will. These
shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know
how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about
repairing it.”[i]
Yet, there is a growing recognition that casino
capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and
form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come
to an end what we will experience in all probability
is the destruction of human life and the planet
itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on
the threat of ecological disaster from researchers
at the University of Washington, NASA, and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce
this dystopian possibility.2 The undermining of
public trust and public values has now given way to
a market-driven discourse that produces a society
that has lost any sense of democratic vision and
social purpose and in doing so resorts to state
terrorism, the criminalization of social problems,
and culture of cruelty. Institutions that were once
defined to protect and enhance human life now
function largely to punish and maim.
As Michael Yates points out throughout this book,
capitalism is devoid of any sense of social
responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire
to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes
global and politics remains local, ruling elites no
longer make political concessions to workers or any
other group that they either exploit or consider
disposable.
Security and crisis have become the new passwords
for imposing a culture of fear and for imposing what
Giorgio Agamben has called a permanent state of
yatesexception and a technology of government
repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of
crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police,
curtailing civil liberties, expanding the punishing
state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and
supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major
narratives that define the United States and give
rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense
of moral and political conviction, if not
accountability.
In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is
the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only
separates the rich from the poor, but also
increasingly relegates the middle and working
classes to the ranks of the precariat.
Concentrations of wealth and income generate power
for the financial elite and unchecked misery for
most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a
growing number of social pathologies.
Michael Yates in
The Great
Inequality
provides a road map for both understanding the
registers that produce inequality as well as the
magnitude of the problems it poses across a range of
commanding spheres extending from health care and
the political realm to the environment and
education. At the same time, he exposes the myths
that buttress the ideology of inequality. These
include an unchecked belief in boundless economic
growth, the notion that inequality is chosen freely
by individuals in the market place, and the
assumption that consumption is the road to
happiness. Unlike a range of recent books on
inequality, Yates goes beyond exposing the
mechanisms that drive inequality and the panoply of
commanding institutions that support it. He also
provides a number of strategies that challenge the
deep concentrations of wealth and power while
delivering a number of formative proposals that are
crucial for nurturing a radical imagination and the
social movements necessary to struggle for a society
that no longer equates capitalism with democracy.
As Yates makes clear throughout this book, money now
engulfs everything in this new age of disposability.
Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements
to counter the generated power of capitalists, the
result has been a startling increase in the
influence of predatory capitalism, along with
inequities in wealth, income, power, and
opportunity. Such power breeds more than
anti-democratic tendencies, it also imposes
constraints, rules, and prohibitions on the 99
percent whose choices are increasingly limited to
merely trying to survive. Capitalists are no longer
willing to compromise and have expanded their use of
power to dominate economic, political, and social
life. For Yates, it is all the more crucial to
understand how power works under the reign of global
capitalism in order to grasp the magnitude of
inequality, the myriad of factors that produce it,
and what might be done to change it.
Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 10.18.51 AM
Accompanying the rise of a savage form of capitalism
and the ever-expanding security state is the
emergence of new technologies and spaces of control.
One consequence is that labor power is increasing
produced by machines and robotic technologies which
serve to create “a large pool of more or less
unemployed people.” Moreover, as new technologies
produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is
being used as a repressive tool for collecting
“unlimited biometric and genetic information of all
of its citizens.”[iii]
The ongoing attack on the working class is matched
by new measures of repression and surveillance. This
new weaponized face of capitalism is particularly
ominous given the rise of the punishing state and
the transformation of the United States from a
democracy in progress to a fully developed
authoritarian society. Every act of protest is now
tainted, labeled by the government and mainstream
media as either treasonous or viewed as a potential
act of terrorism. For example, animal rights
activists are put on the terrorist list.
Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden are painted as
traitors. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement
are put under surveillance,[iv] all electronic
communication is now subject to government spying,
and academics who criticize government policy are
denied tenure or worse.
Under neoliberalism, public space is increasingly
converted into private space undermining those
sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of
social responsibility, while also serving to
transform citizenship into mostly an act of
consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of
crisis is used both to legitimate a system of
economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an
increasing process of depoliticization. Within this
fog of market induced paralysis, language is subject
to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a commodity,
and subject to the “tyranny of the
moment….emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized and
squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to
carry.”[v]
As the latest stage of predatory capitalism,
neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and
political project of restoring class power and
consolidating the rapid concentration of capital,
particularly financial capital.[vi] As a political
project it includes “the deregulation of finance,
privatization of public services, elimination and
curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks
on unions, and routine violations of labor
laws.”[vii] As an ideology, it casts all dimensions
of life in terms of market rationality, construes
profit making as the arbiter and essence of
democracy, consuming as the only operable form of
citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that
the market can both solve all problems and serve as
a model for structuring all social relations. As a
mode of governance, it produces identities,
subjects, and ways of life driven by a
survival-of-the fittest-ethic, grounded in the idea
of the free, possessive individual, and committed to
the right of ruling groups and institutions to
exercise power removed from matters of ethics and
social costs. As a policy and political project, it
is wedded to the privatization of public services,
the dismantling of the connection of private issues
and public problems, the selling off of state
functions, liberalization of trade in goods and
capital investment, the eradication of government
regulation of financial institutions and
corporations, the destruction of the welfare state
and unions, and the endless marketization and
commodification of society.
Nothing engenders the wrath of conservatives more
than the existence of the government providing a
universal safety net, especially one that works,
such as either Medicare or Social Security. As Yates
points out, government is viewed by capitalists as
an institution that gets in the way of capital. One
result is a weakening of social programs and
provisions. As Paul Krugman observes regarding the
ongoing conservative attacks on Medicare, “The real
reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare
has always been political: It’s the very idea of the
government providing a universal safety net that
they hate, and they hate it even more when such
programs are successful.”[viii] In opposition to
Krugman and other liberal economists, Michael Yates
argues rightly in this book that the issue is not
simply preserving Medicare but eliminating the
predatory system that disavows equality of wealth,
power, opportunity, and health care for everyone.
Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into
creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public
pedagogy in which individuals can only view
themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the
right to participate in the market, and supplant
issues of social responsibility for an unchecked
embrace of individualism and the belief that all
social relation be judged according to how they
further one’s individual needs and self-interests.
Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion
for the other have given way to the limiting orbits
of privatization and unrestrained self-interest,
just as it is has become increasingly difficult to
translate private troubles into larger social,
economic, and political considerations. One
consequence is that it has become more difficult for
people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony
and the widespread misery it produces for young
people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other
segments of society– now considered disposable under
neoliberal regimes which are governed by a
survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by
the ruling economic and political elite. Unable to
make their voices heard and lacking any viable
representation in the process makes clear the degree
to which the American public, in particular, are
suffering under a democratic deficit producing a
profound dissatisfaction that does not always
translate into an understanding of how neoliberal
capitalism has destroyed democracy or what it might
mean to understand and challenge its diverse
apparatuses of persuasion and power. Clearly, the
surge of popularity behind the presidential
candidacy of a buffoon such as Donald Trump
testifies to both a deep seated desire for change
and the forms it can take when emotion replaces
reason and any viable analysis of capitalism and its
effects seem to be absent from a popular
sensibility.
What Michael Yates makes clear in this incisive book
on inequality is that democratic values,
commitments, integrity, and struggles are under
assault from a wide range of sites in an age of
intensified violence and disposability. Throughout
the book he weaves a set of narratives and critiques
in which he lays bare the anti-democratic tendencies
that are on display in a growing age of lawlessness
and disposability. He not only makes clear that
inequality is not good for the economy, social
bonds, the environment, politics, and democracy,
Yates also argues that capitalism in the current
historical moment is marked by an age that thrives
on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an
alleged culture of criminality, and a massive system
of inequality that affects all aspects of society.
Worth repeating is that at the center of this book,
unlike so many others tackling inequality, is an
attempt to map a number of modalities that give
shape and purpose to widespread disparities in
wealth and income, including the underlying forces
behind inequality, how it works to secure class
power, how it undermines almost every viable
foundation needed for a sustainable democracy, and
what it might mean to develop a plan of action to
produce the radical imagination and corresponding
modes of agency and practice that can think and act
outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.
Unlike so many other economists such as Paul Krugman
and Joseph Stiglitz who address the issue of
inequality, Yates refuses the argument that the
system is simply out of whack and can be fixed. Nor
does he believe that capitalism can be described
only in terms of economic structures. Capitalism is
both a symbolic pathological economy that produces
particular dispositions, values, and identities as
well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and
economic structures. Yates goes even further arguing
that capitalism is not only about authoritarian
ideologies and structures, it is also about the
crisis of ideas, agency, and the failure of people
to react to the suffering of others and to the
conditions of their own oppression. Neoliberal
capitalism has no language for human suffering,
moral evaluation, and social responsibility.
Instead, it creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos
buttressed by a discourse that is morally
insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a
hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do
not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are
considered other by virtue of their race, class, and
ethnicity. Neoliberalism is the discourse of shadow
games, committed to highlighting corporate power and
making invisible the suffering of others, all the
while leaving those considered disposable in the
dark to fend for themselves.
Yates makes visible not only the economic
constraints that bear down on the poor and
disposable in the neoliberal age of precarity, he
also narrates the voices, conditions, hardships and
suffering workers have to endure in a variety of
occupations ranging from automobile workers and
cruise ship workers to those who work in restaurants
and as harvester on farms. He provides a number of
invaluable statistics that chart the injuries of
class and race under capitalism but rather than tell
a story with only statistics and mind boggling data,
he also provides stories that give flesh to the
statistics that mark a new historical conjuncture
and a wide range of hardships that render work for
most people hell and produce what has been called
the hidden injuries of class. Much of what he writes
is informed by a decade long research trip across
the United States in which he attempted to see
first-hand what the effects of capitalism have been
on peoples’ lives, the environment, work, unions,
and other crucial spheres that inform everyday life.
His keen eye is particularly riveting as he
describes his teaming up with Cesar Chavez and the
United Farm Workers in the 1970s and his growing
disappointment with a union that increasingly
betrayed its own principles.
For Yates, the capitalist system is corrupt,
malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism
leaves no room for the language of justice, the
social, or, for that matter, democracy itself. In
fact, one of its major attributes is to hide its
effects of power, racial injustice, militarized
state violence, domestic terrorism, and new forms of
disposability, especially regarding those
marginalized by class and race. The grotesque
inequalities produced by capitalism are too
powerful, deeply rooted in the social and economic
fabric, and unamenable to liberal reforms. Class
disparities constitute a machinery of social death,
a kind of zombie-like machine that drains life out
of most of the population poisoning both existing
and future generations.
The politics of disposability has gone mainstream as
more and more individuals and groups are now
considered surplus and vulnerable, consigned to
zones of abandonment, surveillance, and
incarceration. At one level, the expansive politics
of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers
of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden
students, the increasingly harsh treatment of
immigrants, the racism that fuels the
school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing attack on
public servants. On another level, the politics of
disposability has produced a culture of lawlessness
and cruelty evident by the increasing rollback of
voting rights, the war waged against women’s
reproductive rights, laws that discriminate against
gays, the rise of the surveillance state, and the
growing militarization of local police forces. Yates
argues convincingly that there is a desperate need
for a new language for politics, solidarity, shared
responsibilities, and democracy itself. Yates sees
in the now largely departed Occupy Movement an
example of a movement that used a new discourse and
set of slogans to highlight inequality, make class
inequities visible, and to showcase the workings of
power in the hands of the financial elite. For
Yates, Occupy provided a strategy that can be and is
being emulated by a number of groups, especially
those emerging in the black community in opposition
to police violence. Such a strategy begins by asking
what a real democracy looks like and how does it
compare to the current society in which we live. One
precondition for individual and social agency is
that the horizons for change must transcend the
parameters of the existing society, and the future
must be configured in such a way as to not mimic the
present.
What is remarkable about
The Great Inequality
is that Yates does not simply provide a critique of
capitalism in its old and new forms, he also
provides a discourse of possibility developed around
a number of suggested policies and practices
designed to not reform capitalism but to abolish it.
This is a book that follows in the manner of Dr.
Martin Luther King’s call to break the silence. In
it Yates functions as a moral witness in reporting
on the hardships and suffering produced by grotesque
forms of inequality. As such, he reveals the dark
threats that capitalism in its ruthlessly updated
versions poses to the planet. Yet, his narrative is
never far from either hope or a sense that there is
a larger public for whom his testimony matters and
that such a public is capable of collective
resistance. The Great Inequality also serves to
enliven the ethical imagination, and speak out for
those populations now considered outcast and
voiceless. Yates provides a furious reading of
inequality and the larger structure of capitalism.
In doing so he exhibits a keen and incisive
intellect along with a welcomed sense of righteous
fury.
Notes.
[i] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, (New York, N.Y.:
The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 12.
[ii] Giorgio Agamben, “The Security State and a
theory of destituent power,” Philosophers for
Change, (February 25, 2014). Online:
http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/02/25/the-security-state-and-a-theory-of-destituent-power/
[iii] Ibid., Agamben, “The Security State and a
theory of destituent power,”
[iv] George Joseph, “Exclusive: feds regularly
monitored black lives matter since ferguson,”
Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/;
Deirdre Fulton, “Exposed: Big Brother Targets Black
Lives:Government spying can be an ‘effective way to
chill protest movements,’ warns Center for
Constitutional Rights,” CommonDreams (July 24,
2015). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/24/exposed-big-brother-targets-black-lives
[v] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral
Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid
Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p.
46.
[vi] I have taken up the issue of neoliberalism
extensively in Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror
of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008) . See
also, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Manfred
B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very
Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The
Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2011). Henry A. Giroux, Twilight
of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Henry A.
Giroux, and in Against the Violence of Organized
Forgetting: Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2014);
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s
Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books 2015).
[vii] Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the
Significance of Political Slogans,” Counterpunch,
(February 27, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/
[viii] Paul Krugman, “Zombies Against Medicare,” New
York Times (July 27, 2015). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0
This essay is excerpted from the introduction to The
Great Inequality by Michael D. Yates. |
Click for
Spanish,
German,
Dutch,
Danish,
French,
translation- Note-
Translation may take a
moment to load.
What's your response?
-
Scroll down to add / read comments
Please
read our
Comment Policy
before posting -
It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH.
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.
|
| |
|
