The
Struggle Against Dystopia
by Henry
A. Giroux
(Part IΙ)
Neoliberalism’s
disimagination machines, extending from schools to print, audio, and
screen cultures, are now used to serve the forces of ethical
tranquilization as they produce and legitimate endless degrading and
humiliating images of the poor, youthful protesters, and others
considered disposable. The public pedagogy and market-driven values
of neoliberalism constitute a war zone that suppresses any vestige of
critical thought while creating the conditions and policies for
expanding the boundaries of terminal exclusion. Viewed as unworthy of
civic inclusion, immigrants, youth, protesters and others deemed
alien or hostile to the mechanizations of privatization, consumption,
and commodification are erased from any viable historical and
political context. Such groups now fill the landscape of
neoliberalism’s dream world. Vast numbers of the American public
are now subject to repressive modes of power that criminalize their
behavior and relegates them to those public spaces that accelerate
their invisibility while exposing them to the harsh machinery of
social death.
The
neoliberal politics of disposability with its expanding machineries
of civic and social death, terminal exclusion, and zones of
abandonment constitute a new historical conjuncture and must be
addressed within the emergence of a ruthless form of casino
capitalism, which is constituted not only as an economic system but
also a pedagogical force rewriting the meaning of common sense,
agency, desire, and politics itself. The capitalist dream machine is
back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, hedge fund managers, and
major players in the financial service industries. In these new
landscapes of wealth, exclusion, and fraud, the commanding
institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a
winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state
while waging a counter revolution against the principles of social
citizenship and democracy.
Politics and
power are now on the side of lawlessness as is evident in the state’s
endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech, and the
most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national
security. Lawlessness wraps itself in repressive government policies
such as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act,
Military Commissions, and a host of other legal illegalities. These
would include the “right of the president “to order the
assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with
terrorists,” use secret evidence to detain individuals
indefinitely, develop a massive surveillance panoptican to monitor
every communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime,
employ state torture against those considered enemy combatants, and
block the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such
heinous crimes. The ruling corporate elites have made terror rational
and fear the modus operandi of politics.
Power in its
most repressive forms is now deployed not only by the police and
other forces of repression such as the 17 American intelligence
agencies but also through a predatory and commodified culture that
turns violence into entertainment, foreign aggression into a video
game, and domestic violence into goose-stepping celebration of
masculinity and the mad values of militarism. The mediaeval turn to
embracing forms of punishment that inflict pain on the psyches and
the bodies of young people, poor minorities, and immigrants, in
particular, is part of a larger immersion of society in public
spectacles of violence. Under the neo-Darwinian ethos of survival of
the fittest, the ultimate form of entertainment becomes the pain and
humiliation of others, especially those considered disposable and
powerless, who are no longer an object of compassion, but of ridicule
and amusement. Pleasure loses its emancipatory possibilities and
degenerates into a pathology in which misery is celebrated as a
source of fun. High octane violence and human suffering are now
considered consumer entertainment products designed to raise the
collective pleasure quotient. Brute force and savage killing replayed
over and over in the culture now function as part of an anti-immune
system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of
sadism that saps democracy of any political substance and moral
vitality, even as the body politic appears engaged in a process of
cannibalizing its own youth. It gets worse. The visibility of extreme
violence in films such as John Wick (2014) and The Equalizer (2014)
offer one of the few spaces amid the vacuity of a consumer culture
where Americans can feel anything anymore.
Needless to
say, extreme violence is more than a spectacle for upping the
pleasure quotient of those disengaged from politics; it is also part
of a punishing machine that spends more on putting poor minorities in
jail than educating them. As American society becomes more
militarized and “civil society organizes itself for the production
of violence,” the capillaries of militarization feed on and shape
social institutions extending from the schools to local police
forces. The police, in particular, have been turned into soldiers who
view the neighbourhoods in which they operate as war zones. Outfitted
with full riot gear, submachine guns, armoured vehicles, and other
lethal weapons imported from the battlefields of Iraq and Iran, their
mission is to assume battle-ready behaviour. Is it any wonder that
violence rather than painstaking neighbourhood police work and
community outreach and engagement becomes the norm for dealing with
alleged ‘criminals’, especially at a time when more and more
behaviours are being criminalised? Is it any wonder that the impact
of the rapid militarization of local police forces on poor black
communities is nothing short of terrifying and symptomatic of the
violence that takes place in advanced genocidal states? For instance,
according to a recent report produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement entitled Operation Ghetto Storm, “police officers,
security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed
at least 313 African-Americans in 2012…This means a black person
was killed by a security officer every 28 hours.” The report
suggests that ‘the real number could be much higher’. Michelle
Alexander adds to the racist nature of the punishing state by
pointing out that “There are more African American adults under
correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or
parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War
began.” Meanwhile the real violence used by the state against poor
minorities of color, women, immigrants, and low income adults barely
gets mentioned, except when it is so spectacularly visible and cruel
that it cannot be ignored as in the case of Eric Garner who was
choked him to death by a New York City policeman after he was
confronted for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.
The
authoritarian state empties politics of all vestiges of democracy
given that the decisions that shape all aspects of the commanding
institutions of society are now made largely in private, behind
closed doors by the anonymous financial elite, corporate CEOs, rich
bankers, the unassailable leaders of the military-industrial complex,
and other kingpins of the neoliberal state. At the same time,
valuable resources and wealth are extracted from the commons in order
to maximize the profits of the rich while the public is treated to a
range of distractions and diversions that extend from “military
shock and awe overseas” to the banalities of a commodified culture
industry and celebrity obsessed culture that short-circuits thought
and infantilizes everything it touches. In the end, as Chomsky points
out this amounts to an attempt by a massive public relations industry
and various mainstream cultural apparatuses “to undermine democracy
by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”
Neoliberal
authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday
life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its
head and normalizes a culture of fear, war, and exploitation. Even as
markets unravel and neoliberalism causes increased misery, “the
broader political and social consensus remains in place” suggesting
that the economic crisis is not matched by a similar crisis in
consciousness, ideas, language, and values. Underlying the rise of
the authoritarian state and the forces that hide in the shadows is a
hidden politics indebted to promoting crippling forms of historical
and social amnesia. The new authoritarianism is strongly indebted to
what Orwell once called a “protective stupidity” that corrupts
political life and divest language of its critical content.
Yet, even as
the claims and promises of a neoliberal utopia have been transformed
into a Dickensian nightmare as the United States, and increasingly
Canada, succumb to the pathologies of political corruption, the
redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the 1 percent, the
rise of the surveillance state, and the use of the criminal justice
system as a way of dealing with social problems, Orwell’s dark
fantasy of a fascist future continues without massive opposition.
Domestic terrorism now functions to punish young people whenever they
exercise the right of dissent, protesting peacefully, or just being
targeted because they are minorities of class and color and
considered a threat and in some cases disposable, as was recently
evident in the killing by a white policemen of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri.
The
emergence of the warrior cop and the surveillance state go hand in
hand and are indicative not only of state-sanctioned racism but also
of the rise of the authoritarian state and the dismantling of civil
liberties. Brutality mixed with attacks on freedom of dissent and
peaceful protest prompts memories of past savage regimes such as the
dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. The events in
Ferguson speak to a history of violence in United States that
Americans have chosen to forget at their own risk. Historical amnesia
takes a toll. For instance, amid the growing intensity of state
terrorism, violence becomes the DNA of a society that not only has a
history of forgetting, but also refuses to deal with larger
structural issues such as massive inequality in wealth and power, a
government that now unapologetically serves the rich and powerful
corporate interests, the growing militarization of everyday life,
while elevating the power of money to an organising principle of
governance. What all of this suggests is a dismantling of what Hannah
Arendt called “the prime importance of the political.”
Underlying
the carnage caused by neoliberal capitalism is a free market ideology
in which individuals are cut off from the common good along with any
sense of compassion for the other. Economic Darwinism individualizes
the social by shredding social bonds that are not commodified and in
doing so depoliticizes, atomizes, and infantilizes the broader
public. All problems are now defined as a problem of faulty character
and a lack of individual resilience and responsibility. At the same
time, freedom is reduced to consumerism and a modern day version of
narcissism becomes the only guiding principle for living one’s
life. Only under such circumstances can a book titled Selfish written
by the vacuous Kim Kardashian and filled with 2000 selfies be
published and celebrated in the mainstream media, mirroring a deeply
disturbing principle of the larger society. What is crucial to
recognize is that the central issues of power and politics can lead
to cynicism and despair if casino capitalism is not addressed as a
system of social relations that diminishes—through its cultural
politics, modes of commodification, and market pedagogies—the
capacities and possibilities of individuals and groups to move beyond
the vicissitudes of necessity and survival in order to fully
participate in exercising some control over the myriad forces that
shape their daily lives.
What exists
in the United States today and increasingly in Canada is
fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of power
removed from accountability of any kind, and this poses a dangerous
and calamitous threat to democracy itself, because such power is
difficult to understand, analyze, and counter. The collapse of the
public into the private, the depoliticization of the citizenry in the
face of an egregious celebrity culture, and the disabling of
education as a critical public sphere makes it easier for neoliberal
capital with its hatred of democracy and celebration of the market to
render its ideologies, values, and practices as a matter of common
sense, removed from critical inquiry and dissent.
With
privatization comes a kind of collective amnesia about the potential
democratic role of government, the importance of the social contract,
and the importance of public values. For instance, war, intelligence
operations, prisons, schools, transportation systems, and a range of
other operations once considered public have been outsourced or
simply handed over to private contractors who are removed from any
sense of civic and political accountability. The social contract and
the institutions that give it meaning have been transformed into
entitlements administered and colonized by largely the corporate
interests and the financial elite. Policy is no longer being written
by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies
concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public
transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial
areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega
corporations. How else to explain the weak deregulation policies
following the economic crisis of 2007 or the lack of a public option
in Obama’s health care policies? Or, for that matter, the more
serious retreat from any viable notion of the political imagination
that “requires long-term organizing—e.g., single-payer health
care, universally free public higher education and public
transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income security.”
The liberal center has moved to the right on these issues while the
left has become largely absent and ineffective. Yet the fight for
developing a radical democracy must continue on a domestic and global
scale.
Source:
Read
also:
Well, this is a case in which
reality exceed imagination. I bet that Rod Serling, the creator of
the famous series “The Twilight Zone” couldn’t imagine such
a scenario. And neither George Orwell could probably ever imagine,
that one day, people would have the devices which describe in his
famous book “1984” inside their houses, but they would press
the button on their own will, due to their brain addiction,
without actually anyone to enforce them to do it. That through the
propaganda and the psychological terror, people would elect
governments-servants of the systemic establishment through false
democratic processes, leading themselves to deeper poverty and
enslavement. That people would even reproduce the propaganda,
although they would stop believe to the mouthpieces speaking
through the devices.
Generations of pragmatists grow
with cliches like "this is the best society we can have",
or, "humans are what they are and will never change".
Thus, ethic, in many cases, ends to be a kind of luxury and
replaced by a crude economic pragmatism and an extreme cynicism.
[...] The concept of Liberty itself tends to disappear
permanently inside increasingly militarized societies of private
armies.
|
Comments
Post a Comment