Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
5people
2015–2026years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- We need to stop painting with the wide brush of "capitalism" like this.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
- Oh goodness gracious, I misremembered it as "Slavery is freedom" from when I read the book 10 years ago. My, oh my, how careless of me.
I'm skeptical you can actually engage with any of my more substantials """stinkers""" and that's why you resorted to nitpicking. In any case, that line can be replaced with the general idea of the party's newspeak and doublethink in the book. In particular, the line "war is peace" from the slogan fits the bill. Instead of saying the party wants to maximize freedom, let's say it wanted to maximize peace. The party loves peace, in fact! There. I clarified the minor point you snagged on.
And for the more substantial points I described in the post, the most accessible scholarly source I've read is Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown [1]. Unfortunately, it's impossible reduce any lengthy political analysis to the point where it can be fit inside of an Internet comment.
- Curtis tried to make these statements on the downside of neoliberalism + postmodernism but I don't think he did a very good job based on the discussion on these films.
I think his work is just too stylized. He has such an interesting style that it overwhelms the message. I barely remember what his messaging is in films. Just the interesting visuals and ominous music.
If you read Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition together you will understand exactly what he is going for. As a film it doesn't really work that well though beyond a kind of depressing entertainment. The themes are too subtle and philosophical along with most people don't have the background knowledge to really make sense of his points.
- Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown
- Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
Summary
Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.
Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.
In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.
- Names and faces are unknown, but their instruments of directing and managing the "empire" are becoming more visible by each passing day. 2016 was a crazy year but there is that silver lining.
[p.s. edit]:
[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demosUndoing Democracy: Neoliberalism's Remaking of State and Subject This book is a theoretical consideration of the ways that neoliberalism, a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms, is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy. These elements include vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries. My argument is not merely that markets and money are corrupting or degrading democracy, that political institutions and outcomes are increasingly dominated by finance and corporate capital, or that democracy is being replaced by plutocracy -- rule by and for the rich. Rather, neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly /political/ character, meaning, and operation of democracy's constituent elements into /economic/ ones. Liberal democratic institutions, practices, and habits may not survive this conversion. Radical democratic dreams may not either. Thus. this book charts both a disturbing contemporary condition and the potential barrenness for future democratic projects contained in this troubled present. The institutions and principles aimed at securing democracy, the cultures required to nourish it, the energies needed to animate it, and the citizens practicing, caring for, or desiring it -- all these are challenged by neoliberalism's "economization" of political life and other heretofore noneconomic spheres and activities. - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, Ch. 1 /emphasis/ in the original.
