4 4 RIGHT-WING CALLS FOR AUSTERITY suggest more than a market-driven desire to punish the poor, working class, and middle class by distributing wealth upward to the 1 percent. They also point to a politics of disposability in which the social provisions, public spheres, and institutions that nourish democratic values and social relations are being rapidly dismantled, including public and higher education. Neoliberal austerity policies embody an ideology that produces zones of abandonment and forms of social and civil death while also infusing society with a culture of increasing hardship. Urged by powerful corporations, right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers, and conservative pundits to lower corporate taxes and cut social services, governments are slashing salaries, imposing onerous financial demands on the poor, and taking an ax to alleged entitlements such as job training, health care, workers’ rights, and retirement benefits. The foundations of economic and social stability that are part of the social contract—personal, political, and social rights—have been weakened, creating a great social malaise across populations in the United States and Europe. Dissent is now at the mercy of the surveillance state; collective bargaining rights are being undermined, especially in states ruled by right-wing governers such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin;1 quality health care is rationed out along class lines; massive inquality undermines almost every vestige of democracy; and meaningful work and wages are disappearing. All the while education is being defunded, spending on prisons is increasing, and the financial elite are being taxed less and less while their wealth and power increases exponentially.
The financial crisis has produced an especially onerous social malaise in countries such as Greece, Italy, and Ireland, “leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates.”2 For example, between 2007 and 2009, suicides motivated by the economic difficulties and austerity policies have increased among men in Greece “more than 24 percent,” in Ireland “suicides rose more than 16 percent,” and in Italy, suicides “increased 52 percent” by 2010.3 A more recent 2014 study in Social Science and Medicine found a direct link between spending cuts and increased suicide rates among Greek men, and a 2013 paper found a similar connection in Spain following the financial crisis.4 What these reports make clear is that the weapons of class warfare do not reside only in oppressive modes of state terrorism such as the militarization of the police, but also in policies that inflict misery, immiseration, and suffering on the vast majority of the population. By imposing such measures on Greece and other countries, the troika—the International Monetary Fund, European Union, and European Central Bank—unleashes a form of financial terrorism.5 The Greek people were brought to their knees under the imperatives of “a brutal austerity experiment imposed on Greece since 2010 [one that has] proved outstandingly counterproductive.”6
Capitalism has learned to create host organisms, and in the current historical conjuncture one of those organisms is young people, many of whom are jobless and forced to live under the burden of crushing debt.7 In the midst of growing gaps in wealth, income, and power, it is also the case that single mothers, immigrants, and poor minorities are being plunged into either low-paying jobs or a future without decent employment.8 The sick and elderly are increasingly faced with making a choice between food and medicine. Austerity now drives a social system in which the only value that matters is exchange value. For students, this means paying increased tuition that generates profits for banks and credit companies and allows the state to lower taxes on the rich and megacorporations.9
Under this regime of widening inequality that imposes enormous constraints on the choices people can make, austerity measures function as a set of hyper-punitive policies and practices that produce massive amounts of suffering, rob people of their dignity, and then humiliate them by suggesting that they bear sole responsibility for their plight.10 This is more than the scandal of a perverted form of neoliberal rationality; it is the precondition for an emerging authoritarian state with its proliferating extremist ideologies and its growing militarization and criminalization of all aspects of everyday life and social behavior.11 Richard D. Wolff has argued: “Austerity is yet another extreme burden imposed on the global economy by the capitalist crisis (in addition to the millions suffering unemployment, reduced global trade, etc.).”12 He is certainly right, but it is more than a burden imposed on the 99 percent. It is the latest stage of market warfare, class consolidation, and a ruthless grab for power waged on the part of the global financial elite, which is both heartless and indifferent to the mad violence and unchecked misery its neoliberal policies impose on much of humanity.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, “Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a ‘new and improved’ form—and what is destroyed is the self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied ‘host organisms’ into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.”13 Creative destruction armed with the death-dealing power of ruthless austerity measures benefits the financial elite and at the same time destroys the social state and lays the foundation for the punishing state, which now makes prison the default institution for those pushed out of the sanctuary of so-called democracy.14 Both neoliberal governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: they care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate, and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good.
The stories that now dominate the European and North American landscape are not about economic reform, despite how they may be framed. Instead, the stories peddle what stands for common sense among market and religious fundamentalists in a number of mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the disadvantaged, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter-ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; and ongoing condemnations of unions, social provisions, Medicaid expansion, and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endlessly repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone and everything they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions at home forced into unemployment, underemployment, foreclosure, poverty, or prison.15
Right-wing appeals to austerity provide the rationale for slash-and-burn policies intended to deprive government-financed social and educational programs of the funds needed to enable them to work, if not survive. This is particularly obvious in the United States, though it is even worse in countries such as Portugal, Ireland, and Greece. Along with health care funding cutbacks, public transportation, Medicare, food stamp programs for low-income children, a host of other social provisions are being defunded as part of a larger scheme to dismantle and privatize all public services, goods, and spheres. The passion for public values has given way to the ruthless quest for profits and the elevation of self-interest over the common good. The educational goal of expanding the capacity for critical thought and the outer limits of the imagination has given way to the instrumental desert of a mind-deadening audit culture. We cannot forget that the deficit argument and austerity policies advocated in its name are a form of class warfare designed largely for the state to be able to redirect revenue in support of the commanding institutions of the corporate-military-industrial complex and away from higher education, health care, jobs programs, workers’ pensions, and other crucial public services and social protections. Of course, the larger goal is to maintain the ongoing consolidation of class power in the hands of the 1 percent.
I argue that austerity measures also serve another purpose conducive to the interest of the financial elite. Such measures go hand-in-hand with ideologies, policies, and practices that depoliticize large portions of the population, particularly those who are homeless or have lost their homes, are unemployed or tied to low-paying jobs, are experiencing devastating poverty, suffering under the weight of strangulating debt, or struggling just to survive. For example, in Greece where austerity policies have been aggressively implemented, belt-tightening measures have left millions in misery while leaving the resources and lifestyles of the rich untouched. The unemployment rate in Greece hovers around 27 percent, and “suicides have shot up. Cars sit abandoned in the streets. People sift garbage looking for food [and] about 900,000 of the more than 1.3 million who are out of work have not had a paycheck in more than two years, experts say.”16 The famed economist Thomas Piketty states that the austerity measures imposed upon Greece have resulted in a colossal humanitarian crisis: “40 percent of children now live in poverty, infant mortality is skyrocketing and youth unemployment is close to 50 percent.”17 Throughout Greece, people now inhabit what might be called zones of abandonment, spaces defined by the need to simply survive. These are spaces inhabited by people who lack viable employment, adequate food, health care, and sustainable pensions.
As of June 2015, Greece’s creditors—the troika referenced above—are insisting that Greece impose severe tax hikes and pension cuts in order to secure much needed loans. The level of cruelty behind such policies seems unimaginable in the twenty-first century. For example, according to political economist C. J. Polychroniou, “If this proposal for overhauling the nation’s pension system were to be accepted by the Greek government, it would mean that a person who today receives a monthly pension for the amount of, say, 500 euros [$560]—close to 50 percent of Greek pensioners receive pensions below the official poverty line—would be deprived of nearly 200 euros [$223].”18 Similar problems face Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, and to a lesser degree the United States.
Politically paralyzed under the ideological fog of a hyper-individualism that insists that all problems are the responsibility of the same individuals who are victimized by larger systemic and structural forces, it is difficult for people to embrace any understanding of the common good, let alone recognize that the private troubles that plague their lives are connected to larger social issues. Without this crucial awareness, there is little motivating individuals to launch a vigorous campaign in defense of the social contract. Nothing will change without many people together acknowledging the necessity of engaging in collective action to dismantle the neoliberal system of violence and cruelty, which to some degree the Greeks have done, though they were betrayed by the July 2015 compromise of the Syriza government with the troika, especially since the final agreement imposed conditions much worse than those suggested before the Greek referendum.19 For all intents and purposes, Greece is now run by the bankers and financial elite of Europe.
Austerity measures not only individualize social issues, they also produce massive disparities in wealth, income, and power that impose constraints on people’s well-being, freedom, and choices, while serving to undermine any faith in government, politics, and democracy itself. The distrust of public values and egalitarian approaches to governance—coupled with wariness, if not disdain, for group solidarities and compassion for the Other—promotes a dislike of community engagement, social trust, and democratic public spheres. Austerity policies produce neither a world with safety nets nor the social and political formations necessary to embrace democratic forms of solidarity. Clinging “fiercely to neoliberal ideals of untrammeled individualism and self-reliance,” many young people not only embrace therapeutic models of selfhood but develop a deep distrust, if not resentment, of any notion of the social and shun obligations to others.20
Austerity measures purposely accentuate the shark-like relations emphasized by the economic Darwinism of neoliberalism, and in doing so emphasize a world of competitive hyperactive individualism in which asking for help or receiving it is viewed as a pathological condition. The notion that one should rely only on one’s self—and celebrate self-reliance and resilience to the point of excluding anything or anyone else—functions largely to privatize social problems and depoliticize those who buy into such a logic. The danger here is that the sense of atomization and powerlessness that neoliberalism produces also makes people prone to extremist politics. That is, distrust of the social contract, government, democratic values, and class-based solidarities also nourishes the conditions that give birth to extremist groups who demonize immigrants, push a strident nationalism, and appeal to calls for racial purity as a way of addressing the misery many people are experiencing, all the while deflecting attention away from the poisonous violence produced by neoliberalism and ways in which it can be confronted and challenged through a host of democratic approaches that reject austerity as a tool of reform.21
By eroding the middle class and punishing working-class and poor minorities, neoliberal policies make it that much more difficult for radical movements to emerge, and consequently politics gets drained of any hope for a democratic future. In the midst of a culture of mere survival and the normalization of violence, thoughtlessness prevails as time is focused largely on the need to simply stay alive. Under such circumstances, time becomes a luxury, making it difficult for individuals to reflect at length, think critically, grapple with complex problems, and resist neoliberal notions of citizenship, which define citizens largely as consumers. As time is transformed into a deprivation for many people, critical thought withers, citizenship is reduced to an empty voting exercise, and democracy is reduced to the limiting and depoliticizing parameters of a hyper-consumerism, a raging effort to privatize everything, and an ongoing concentration of power by the upper 1 percent. Under such circumstances, democracy is emptied of any substance, and politics falls prey not only to a reactionary cynicism, but also to a slew of antidemocratic demands on the part of right-wing extremists. These include an attack on immigrants, unions, public servants, and those made vulnerable because they lack the material resources to be able to survive in a consumer based society. What becomes clear is that austerity signals a terrifying new horizon of politics, one in which the conditions that produce the curse of totalitarianism become more and more evident. As democratic values are erased, public spheres eliminated, and the common good gives way to casino capitalism, what emerges is the dark side of authoritarianism. This dark side of politics constitutes the waging of a counterrevolution on the part of the new extremists and is evident in the United States in the corporate control of all the commanding institutions of society, the militarization of everyday life, and the ongoing production of a culture of misery and hardship enforced by the corporate state and financial elite. Economics drives politics and the concentrated power of the financial elite wages a war on the ideals of democracy and those individuals, movements, and institutions that defend it.
The turn to authoritarian capitalism is on the rise globally and can be found in “Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and Chinese President Xi Jinping.”22 The principles of authoritarian capitalism are also on full display in the austerity policies pushed without apology by Republican Party extremists and their Democratic Party cohorts in the United States. Channeling Ayn Rand, right-wing politicians such as Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio argue for the most extreme austerity policies, asserting a twisted logic that attributes moral weakness and greediness to the debased characters of citizens who struggle for financial support and social provisions in the age of austerity.23 Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush amplified the austerity logic by asserting that the crisis of unemployment could be fixed, in part, by insisting that “people need to work longer hours.”24 Bush ignores economic data that makes clear that “Americans overall work longer hours on average than peers in many other rich industrialized nations.”25 He also appears clueless by not acknowledging that what the United States lacks are meaningful jobs, not unproductive workers. In this discourse, hardworking Americans and their money must be protected from all the dissipated others. It is not surprising that austerity measures find their ideological legitimation in the notion that self-interest is the foundational element of agency and that self-sufficiency, however illusory, is the highest civic virtue. Margaret Thatcher’s selfish insistence that “there is no such thing as society” when coupled with an aggressive assault on all things public and social does more than disparage democracy: it becomes a blueprint for the rise of fascism. Even liberals such as Paul Krugman are sounding the alarm in the midst of rising inequality and the emergence of extremist ideologies, circumstances that are ripe for the return of the totalitarian values that gave birth to the horrors of Fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1930s.26
Austerity measures within the existing configurations of power represent the undercurrent of a new form of authoritarianism—one that refuses political concessions and has no allegiances except to power and capital. There is no hope in trying to reform neoliberal capitalism, because it is broken and will simply adapt in response to any partial reform strategy. Nor is there any hope in believing that the Democratic Party can be used to fix the system, given that the rich liberal elite fund it. As Bill Blunden reminded me in a personal correspondence, “the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements—[Democrats] quack like progressives but answer to billionaires.” John Stauber gets it right in arguing that the financialization of American society is, among other things, a money machine for the Democratic Party and that the latter’s notion of reform is dead on arrival. Any notion that the rich elite, the 1 percent, are going to fund “radical, democratic, social and economic change” is as disingenuous as it delusional.27 What is one to make of a political party that claims to be the umbrella for a progressive reform movement when, as Michael Hudson points out, “the supposedly liberal Democrats [in 2015] are in the lead for scaling back pension funding, Social Security and labor protection in general”?28
Neoliberal capitalism is parasitic and sociopathic, and it needs to be replaced by a form of radical democracy that refuses to equate capitalism with democracy. These may be dark times, but the drumbeat of resistance is growing among workers, the poor, minorities, young people, artists, educators, and others. The key is to form social movements and political parties that have a comprehensive view of politics and struggle and are imbued with the spirit of collective resistance and the promise of a radical democracy. The cycle of brutality, suffering, and cruelty in which we are now caught appears overwhelming in light of the normalization of the intolerable violence produced by the politics of austerity and neoliberalism. The realms of imagination that might lead to a new vocabulary of struggle, politics, and hope appear in short supply. Yet, even as time is running out, the struggle has to be waged. What has been produced by humans, however inhuman and powerful, can be undone. In spite of what the apostles of casino capitalism would have us believe, history is open and far from frozen in the alleged politics of economic Darwinism.
The stakes in this battle are high because the struggle is not simply against austerity measures, but the institutions and economic order that produce them. One place to begin such a struggle is with a new sense of politics driven by a notion of educated hope. Hope turns radical when it exposes the violence of neoliberalism—acts of state and corporate aggression against democracy, humanity, and ecological stability itself. Hope has to make the workings of power visible, and then it has to offer thoughtful critiques of this machinery of death. But hope must do more than critique, dismantle, and expose the ideologies, values, institutions, and social relations that are pushing so many countries today into authoritarianism, austerity, violence, and war. Hope must and can energize and mobilize groups, neighborhoods, communities, campuses, and networks of people to articulate and advance insurgent discourses in the movement toward developing a broader insurrectional democracy. Hope is an important political and subjective register that enables people not only to think beyond the neoliberal austerity machine—the chronic and intergenerational injustices deeply structured into all levels of society—but also to advance forms of egalitarian community that celebrate the voices, well-being, inherent dignity, and participation of each person as an integral thread in the ever-evolving fabric of a living, radical democracy. Hope only matters when it turns outward, confronts the obstacles in its path, and provides points of identification that people find meaningful so that they choose to become critical agents capable of engaging in transformative collective action.
The financialization of neoliberal societies thrives on a cruel, hyper-individualistic, survival-of-the fittest ethic. This is the ethic of barbarians, the thoughtless and cruel financial elite. While fear and state violence may be two of their weapons, the politics of austerity is one of the strongest forms of control in their arsenal because it imposes a poverty of mind and body that leads to not just a crisis of agency but its death. It is time to take social change seriously by imagining a future beyond the austerity policies and power relations that produce the misery and violence of a neoliberal social order. It is also time for human beings to discover something about the potential of individual and social agency, a sense of which can inspire, energize, educate, and challenge with the full force of social movements those undemocratic forces that make a mockery of social, economic, and political justice. As Pierre Bourdieu once argued, the time is right for the collective production of realist utopias, and with that opportunity comes the need to act with passion, courage, and conviction.