Society has progressed. We’ve advanced on economic wealth, poverty reduction, gender equality, racial equality. These gains are side effects of economic growth, in general, driven by the rise of the bourgeoisie. People first gained wealth, and only then were they able to push for broader social reforms, for what we call progress.
This wealth creation has historically relied on exploitation. The drive to accumulate capital has necessitated oppression, labour exploitation in coal mines, the firing workers in favor of automation. To get rich, you need some kind of oppression, or some kind of misleading marketing strategy, or some kind of lie or deceit. At least in the short term, creative disruptions reduces opportunities, reduces freedom.1
The problem of primitive accumulation is that it reveals the exploitative and often violent origins of wealth. It’s not always literally violent, but it’s always sketchy. There’s a dialectical tension, where oppression and progress are in continuous opposition, producing societal change.
Neoliberal centrism is just shrugging our shoulders and saying “yeah … it is what it is”. We are all neoliberal centrists, both the Democrats and the Republicans. There is no alternative2. Just different ways to package it, one sophisticated and technocratic, the other populist and anti-elitist.
Footnotes
To create value, we build conglomerates whose business model revolves around running chains, like McDonald’s franchises or networks of elderly care facilities. The goal is to generate profits, often through cost-cutting measures like lowering wages. However, from a societal standpoint, there’s a paradox. We rely on these corporations to generate significant profits because, ultimately, these profits fund our pensions and savings. Many people’s pensions are invested in ETFs, and these funds hold substantial stakes in precisely such corporations. In this way, our retirement security, and all wealth creation, become tied to the profitability of companies that may operate in ways we otherwise criticize. There’s no solution except some kind of neoliberal muddling through. The left proposing a broader economic reform emphasizing improving quality of life, investing in sustainable industries, and creating a resilient economy that doesn’t rely solely on continuous productivity increases is not a viable solution. Neoliberal centrist muddling through is a solution, of course, just not one that satisfies people who want justice and fairness. Calls for a firm break with neoliberalism, I cannot see what that means in practice.↩︎
I have a real desire to identify alternatives which would be democratic, improve our collective well-being, make the world better, more just. But I’m very pessimistic, I just don’t see it, e.g., “to join an actual organization that does organizing, which is defined as working to persuade the not-persuaded”; to “go beyond small fixes”. It’s often said that it’s hard to imagine the world after capitalism, it’s also often assumed that to write a book or to meet with 35 fellow democratic socialists will do something. I find this implausible. We’d have to change human nature, live like Jesus or the Buddha. It’s implausible, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, we cannot just call for “firm breaks”, “firm breaks” would make us poorer, there’s a real fundamental tension never recognized.↩︎