Dean gave a brilliant lecture on Monday night in New York, about trans politics on a neoliberal landscape, and of course I was up half the night thinking about these things. There are many fascinating angles from which to approach this topic, but here’s the one I want to talk about now:
Neoliberalism’s hallmarks are cooptation and incorporation, meaning that the words and ideas of resistance movements are frequently recast to become legitimizing tools for oppressive political agendas.Â
One simple-to-grasp example of this is LGBT organizations working to strengthen hate crimes legislation (or feminist organizations working to strengthen domestic violence legislation, etc), which in turn strengthens policing, the PIC, and the criminal legal system which are themselves major sites for violence against queer and trans people and women. Mainstream LGBT and anti-violence organizations use language about “safety” for women and queer people, but really mean safety for the privileged few who aren’t targets of policing and incarceration, and along the way queer liberation (and feminist) rhetoric gets used to enforce and legitimize racist tools of state violence.
So, one of the things I was thinking about while lying in bed the other night contemplating neoliberalism and cooptation was a book I’m reading, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which I highly recommend (although I’d love it more if it had a better critique of capitalism generally and of white supremacy). There are a million and one things to say about this book (which is all about neoliberalism), but there’s one small side point – about philanthropy, specifically the Ford Foundation – that I will share here because it’s relevant (and because I’m obsessed with philanthropy I guess).
Consider for a moment this horrifying series of events:
1) The Ford Foundation becomes a major funder of the neoliberal economists (led by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago) who shape and impose free market economic policies that lead to bloody coups in Latin America (and elsewhere), the rise of military dictatorships, and widespread human rights violations.
2) The Ford Motor Company (which today has no ties to the Ford Foundation, but did at the time) in Argentina, together with the junta, launches an attack on its employees who are attempting to organize for better conditions, kidnapping and torturing union leaders and setting up a detention facility on company premises.
3) The Ford Foundation then becomes a major funder of human rights work in Latin America, spending $30 million in the seventies and eighties to fund organizations working for peace.
That convoluted web of involvement kind of boggles the mind, right? Of course, in order not to expose itself as completely hypocritical, the foundation only funded organizations whose analysis of human rights violations was shallow enough to avoid challenging the economic policies that caused the torture and murder in the first place. Since these were the organizations receiving the most funding, the lack of connection between free market capitalism and the military terror apparatus became widespread in the human rights movement. Meanwhile, neoliberal economists were working hard to equate free markets with actual freedom and democracy – a bizarre and fake association that is still constantly reinforced by the media and everyone in power – so that institutions working for market freedom and organizations working for people’s freedom began to seem compatible and even share language and rhetoric.
I’d venture that another reason the Ford Foundation avoided supporting work that challenged the root causes of state terror is that it was literally invested in the success of neoliberal capitalism, since most major investors were profiting from the violent enforcement of structural adjustment policies all over the world, which is still true. So, Ford got to support, strengthen, profit from, and fund an economic system that kills and impoverishes millions of people while simultaneously growing to become the largest funder of the human rights movement in the world.
The Ford Foundation, incidentally, is known to many social justice organizers for having pulled funding from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence after they expressed solidarity with Palestine, which ultimately led INCITE! to launch the Revolution Will Not Be Funded conference and release the subsequent book that got us all talking about how the nonprofit industrial complex disrupts and manipulates movements by forcing them to be dependent on elite funders who are making money off of the success of the capitalist status quo. Also the Ford Foundation still funds lots and lots of social justice organizations that many of us know and love. There are many disturbing conclusions to be drawn from all this – this stuff is so insidious and complex I really can hardly stand it sometimes.
I wish this could just get posted all over the place:
“Meanwhile, neoliberal economists were working hard to equate free markets with actual freedom and democracy – a bizarre and fake association that is still constantly reinforced by the media and everyone in power.”
(This whole post is great. Love you and your marvelous writing.)
Interesting take on hate crimes/domestic violence legislation. I will have to mull that one over for awhile. I mean clearly no state is preferable and yes such legislation can disproportionately result in a greater policing of poor people of color. On the other hand, as a person of color who grew up poor, I was glad when the cops showed up to keep my father from killing my mother.
I have been slowly making my way through the Shock Doctrine as well. Ford’s “philanthropy” is, to put it mildly, terrifying. They fund this lovely thing called the Center for Social Development at the School of Social Work at Washington University in St Louis. The CSD was founded by Dr. Michael Sherraden who was the pioneer of so-called “asset theory”. Essentially, Sherraden came up with the idea that the problem with poor people is that they can’t manage their money well and they don’t have access to the stock market via 401k’s. So, he came up with the idea of the Individual Development Account (IDA). His vision is for the government to provide every child a certain amount of money at birth that would be placed into something akin to the 401k. The only way to access that money later in life is if one (a) used it to pay for college, (b) used it to buy a house, (c)used it to purchase other “assets”. Ford loved this idea so much they funded the CSD in perpetuity. Sherraden was praised for developing a method of “wealth redistribution” that appealed to conservatives because it required personal responsibility in the form of managing one’s portfolio (?), and liberals supposedly liked it because it supposedly redistributed the wealth.
Well, clearly these IDA’s were viewed by Ford as a means to finish off what’s left of the emaciated welfare state. The amount of money to be given to each child is pathetically small (can’t remember how much at the moment), but since it was in the stock market it would *obviously* grow exponentially and be a substantial sum of money. Hillary Clinton was touting this program on the campaign trail, and it made my blood run cold. Anyhow, these days the social work school at Wash U is ranked #1 in the country, and one can now get an MSW at Wash U with a concentration in….I shit you not….”social entrepreneurship”. What. the. FUCK? I never expected the non-profit types to reach the point where they felt comfortable enough to broadcast their intentions to profit of off misery w/o experiencing the slightest bit of cognitive dissonance (or shame, to be quite frank).
Given the present economic downturn, one would hope the public would not be receptive to such an overt attempt by Ford and its academic lackeys to find a rationale for completely eliminating those evil entitlement programs like Medicare that the state just can’t seem to afford (“hey, it’s not our fault you can’t get medical care, b/c you just didn’t invest properly or the stock market crashed”). Yet the military industrial complex is one entitlement program that always seems flush with cash.
Funny that.
I haven’t finished Klein’s book, but I was surprised to hear you state that she doesn’t provide a strong critique of capitalism. Maybe I’m projecting my own values onto the text, but I thought her discussion about the Chicago Boys and their role in “re-booting” Chile with Pinochet contained was an inherent critique of capitalism. Certainly the entire discipline of economics was presented for what it is: a formal system of apologetics for capitalism and imperialism.
Again, though, I have a long way to go before finishing the book.
Excellent blog. You write some very thought provoking stuff. 🙂
Elián M.
Elian,
Thanks so much for your awesome comment! That stuff about IDAs is so horrifying-yet-typical, as part of the big move we’ve been seeing for a while towards privatizing everything and justifying it with rhetoric about personal responsibility. And your thinking about this stuff is so perceptive.
I don’t mean to invalidate people’s personal experiences by making broad claims about the way systems work – I know lots of people have had experiences with cops that actually have contributed to safety, and not only white wealthy people. I just mean to point out that the overall, cumulative effect of the policing/criminal-legal/prison systems is not actually to protect people from violence, but to protect property and enforce the status quo – and that the main targets of that are overwhelmingly people who already experience the most violence and oppression.
And re: The Shock Doctrine – I loved Klein’s critique of neoliberalism, but I did feel like it was mostly an indictment of that specific type of capitalism rather than capitalism in general. There are points where she seems to be arguing for a more regulated, Keynesian form of capitalism as a solution, which was less visionary than I would have liked (or would have expected from other stuff I’ve read of hers). But I agree that depending on what your politics already are, it’s possible to read a broad critique of capitalism into her discussion. And I can’t stop thinking about that chapter about Chile! How is it possible that neoliberal economists can still get away with speaking sincerely about democracy and freedom?
I loved hearing your thoughts and I really really hope that you contribute more to Enough!
Tyrone
I am certainly not defending the police state by any means! After getting clubbed in the head, beaten, and thrown in jail for daring to participate in “unpermitted” anti-war/anti-capitalist/anti-globalization actions, I hate the cops with an intensity I cannot articulate. There is much truth to the chant that often erupts during clashes with police: “The army for the rich”.
RE: Shock doctrine- I can see how one could view the solutions Klein offers as being Keynesian (based on what I’ve read thus far). As you mentioned, her previous work has been rather ardently anti-capitalist, so I probably assumed that she was conducting her analysis in the Shock Doctrine with a similar framework, or perhaps I just read between the lines and saw things that weren’t actually there.
Anyhow, love the blog…Enough is now on my blogroll 🙂
Elián