"If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their
word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly
looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so
forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a
miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a
majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness,
security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the
world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized,
semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic
system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment."
"It does often seem
that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem
the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make
capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing
the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human
imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual
creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world
revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or
perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were
to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the
imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an
alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one
political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the
capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone
had finally concluded no other system would be possible."
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