How Neoliberalism Tricked The Working Class

Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, authors of "Hegemony Now," talk about how neoliberalism increases private luxuries while decreasing democratic power.

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Our argument and our account are that there's a sort of convergence between the various sets of interests. so there are the finance capitalists the kind of Leading Edge of which are the Venture capitalists that we talked about. The growing tech industry also has certain political institutions. One of the things we're interested in is the fact that at the same time as all this is emerging over the 80s and 90s, you get the emergence of this professional political class you know? The people who are in the states are the people who are most obviously represented by the Democratic Leadership Council. You know the people who are going to end up running the Democratic party. The people who are going to end up producing the kind of Clinton policy agenda. And so all of these sets of interests we would say sort of converge around the project of what we call kind of actually existing neoliberalism. You know we make that distinction because you know a lot of the scholarship on neoliberalism as Alex said earlier think is primarily interested in the idea that there's this lineage of ideas that starts with think tanks in the 1930s and it gets picked up by these networks of kind of influences and academics and then somehow it gets picked up by people like Reagan. And it becomes part of the kind of governing ideology. And our argument is all kinds of true but really I mean if you compare what people like Hayek are actually calling for and you can compare it to what actually happens even under Reagan then under Clinton then under Bush and Obama then what actually happens isn't really dependent on what Hayek thinks should happen. Or Milton Friedman thought it should happen. but what actually happens is what is good for this particular cluster of interest. Because it's a particular set of material interests. You've got these Finance capitalists who've been waiting for decades for some way of liberating themselves on regulation suppressing organized labor suppressing wages. You've got big you've got the tech people. Well, I think we have to recognize our kind of distinctiveness and they kind of mean they are different you know? Zuckerberg is different from finance capitalism because he does actually do something. And he writes on code you know. He produces it. They are kind of different, they are distinctive and they have their roots in MIT and Stanford and they have their own kind of history. And this killer professional political class emerged mainly because you know that most of the policy agendas that these guys want to promote do not really have very broad popular support you know? Most people you look at opinion polls you look at attitude surveys you know most people even in even in the United States people if you say to them do you think it's a good idea to tax the rich less than the poor to suppress you labor unions to really suppress political democracy like in the interests of corporate profitability most people are going to say no. We don't think that's a good idea.