Neoliberal Capitalism Will Never Center You
The most popular social movements of the Democratic Party in the 21st century have been those that center the oppressed: Gay rights, trans inclusion, Black Lives Matter, the pro-choice movement, and in a sense, the 2008 Obama campaign have all been built around the social liberation of oppressed groups. 2017 has already seen the largest organized protest in American history in the Women’s March, and mass spontaneous demonstrations in defense of the rights of non-citizens with the Airport Protests.
It’s important to not diminish the absolutely essential nature of these defenses and affirmations of human dignity. But victories on these issues may never be truly won while they are debated within the framework of a political-economic system that centers the cis-hetero, evangelical, rich, adult, white, native-born, and male.
Power in this country has traditionally been vested in a body that fulfills all of those criteria. Adjacency to that identity is adjacency to the power of the state, and distance is inevitably accompanied by marginalization and oppression. This helps explain why poorer white evangelical men and rich white women are so often conservative even when it would seem to go against their material interests: their existence occupies a space closer to the center of power than others. To some extent, be it the promotion of white, Christian identity or the wealth delivered by capital control, the state serves to promote their position even as it oppresses them in some other fashion.
There is no theoretical capitalist opposition to inclusion. In fact, more equal opportunity is good for the economy as it maximizes the potential value of the labor being exploited: more workers who are happy and healthy and well-educated expands the productive capacity of society. But capitalism does not occur in a vacuum. It is controlled and proselytized by people seeking to maximize their power — and in a capitalist system, wealth is economic power, and economic power is the key that unlocks all other forms of power.
So in a system where the power is concentrated in a tiny minority, those not in that minority are at the mercy of those who are. When those in power despise the Other, the system despises the Other. When economic elites wished to use black people as free labor, they constructed such a system, and it took more than a million deaths to destroy that system. When workers had the temerity to ask for fair wages, humane treatment, or control over the value of their labor, companies hired private armies or used the power of the state to keep them in line: coal miners in Colorado and West Virginia, railroad workers in Pennsylvania, sugar cane harvesters in Louisiana. If there is a buck to be made from your suffering, capitalism will make it, and fight relentlessly and with deadly force to protect its profit.
Within this system, we have a powerful subset of elites who subscribe to the surface politics of inclusion, but choose foremost to protect the capitalist system of economics. We call this political view “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism exists in both major parties, but it has its hands clutched firmly around the empty heart and withered spine of the Democratic Party: covering naked capitalism with limited gestures and empty rhetoric.
Neoliberals use identity politics as a shield and a bludgeon; on every question where they claim the moral high ground, socialism offers a fuller, more intersectional analysis and better solutions.
There is a reason for this: neoliberal solutions are tied to the framework of capitalism. When we look at neoliberal policies, the profit motive is invariably present. Universal education is a cornerstone of modern civilization, but the neoliberal policy is to redirect money from public schools to less-accountable, for-profit charter schools, and to charge students tens of thousands of dollars to attend “public” universities. Universal healthcare is seen by most civilized nations as a sacred right; the Democratic Party used its mandate to legislate a market-based system without a public option, leaving millions paying insurance companies for healthcare too expensive to use and American life expectancy declining for the first time in decades.
The list of ruinous neoliberal policies goes on: privatized prisons that profit from the slave labor of the inmates and from the government which disproportionately punishes racial minorities; the “reform” of Welfare that was launched off racial hate and fear that took money from poor families and converted social spending into easily-diverted block grants; the military-industrial complex which spends billions on weapons of death and contrives conflicts in which to use them; the elimination of banking regulations that allowed the rich to prey on the poor and end up with even more wealth after crashing the global economy.
When politicians talk very seriously about The Threat Posed By Climate Change but do nothing to protect the environment that will impede economic growth, or put their faith in some eventual technological solution, this is neoliberal capitalism. When Cory Booker defends Bain Capital — a company that profited by eliminating jobs and destroying worker power — from criticism by his own party’s sitting President, or when Hillary Clinton’s State Department bullies Haiti into resisting raising the minimum wage for women making clothing to 61 cents per hour, this is neoliberal capitalism. When the Supreme Court defends the right of a corporation to have a religious belief over the right of a woman to control her body, this is neoliberal capitalism. The liberalism is always secondary to the capitalism, in its service or silent in turn when required by those controlling capital.
Neoliberalism will tolerate differences, and even celebrate diversity, but it will never willingly give people control of the economic value they create through their labor or release them from the oppression required to maintain that control. It does not care about you, it does not empower you. It will never liberate you. Only socialism can do that.
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