Image by Peg Hunter via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Nov 10, 2018
David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at City University of New York and author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism argues with Chris Hedges that Neoliberalism, the manta of the global corporate elites, has created the worst income inequality in American history.
From the archives:
Chris Hedges and David Harvey: The Ideology of Neoliberalism is a Con, Part 2
Ellen Brown: The Unsustainable Burden of Student Debt
Chris Hedges: Late Stage Capitalism Is Killing America, Parts 1-3
Brendan M. Cooney’s Law of Value Series: Part 1: Introduction + Marx Quiz
Chris Hedges: Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble of Africa
85 Billionaires and the Better Half by Michael Parenti
The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner
Chris Hedges and David Harvey: Enough is Enough of This Capitalist Fraud
What is Wage Slavery? by The Anti-Social Socialist
David Harvey: What is Neoliberalism? + Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason
The Injustice and Crime of Extreme Inequality by Graham Peebles
David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism + The Contradictions of Capitalism
Neoliberalism: The Economic Model: Origins, Theory, Definition (2005)
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But I disagree with the statement that “… neoliberalism, the mant[r]a of the global corporate elites, has created the worst income inequality in American history.” I think that what Hedges and Harvey actually were saying is that =capitalism= has created the worst =inequality=. Inequality grows as a consequence of capitalism, so naturally it is larger in later stages of capitalism. Capitalism donned its neoliberal attire as a response to the fact that people had begun awakening from simpler lies, and that too is a consequence of being in later stages of capitalism. So the fact that the inequality is getting worse, and the fact that the attire is now neoliberal, are not caused by each other, but are both caused by the same continued evolutionary process.
So that’s what I think Hedges and Harvey meant. But I’d disagree even with that. They seem to blame capitalism, which is only a few hundred years old, but I think that the tendency of inequality to increase began with the institution of private property 10000 years ago — see my “trade increases inequality” mentioned in my previous comment here. Thom Hartmann wrote in https://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/theres-nothing-normal-abo_b_32532.html that there have only been three times when inequality decreased. And I think he praised Keynesian economics too highly. FDR’s New Deal made things materially a little better for the working class, but it did not give them an inch of additional power over the political or economic system; that system remained a plutocracy.
So, as I understood the video (and correct me if I’m wrong), capitalism has always been sold as a con game, a pack of lies, but the style or fashion of the lies changes from one era to another. And neoliberalism is a recent fashion in the lies. (Just like, for instance, impressionism is one fashion in painting.)
By the way, Hedges and Harvey agreed at one point in the discussion that the “freedom of the market” produces increasing inequality, because treating people as equals does not have equal consequences for people who were not already equals. They say that Marx said such a thing; I wish someone could =point=out=for=me= where Marx said it (chapter and verse), so that I can start referring to it as part of Marx’s theory. It’s pretty close to my own very simple economic “theory” that I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get feedback on for over a year. My theory can be summarized in one sentence (trade increases inequality because the trader in the stronger bargaining position gets a bigger profit); my essay at https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/trade-increases-inequality/ just explains that sentence in more detail because the sentence doesn’t seem to be as obvious to most people as it is to me. Instead of telling me that I’m right, or telling me some simple reason that my simple theory is wrong, people keep telling me to look at long and very complicated theories, which I just don’t understand.