Days of Revolt: Neoliberalism as Utopianism

In this episode of teleSUR's Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and author John Ralston Saul discuss neoliberalism as an ideology, the breakdown of that ideology, and what comes next.
watch more on teleSUR www.telesurtv.net/english/inde...

[@CubicSugar]

"Corruption removes the ability to act." That's one of the better quotes I've heard in a while. If you boiled it down to one word, a dictionary could display the American flag with its definition.

[@hollywoodartchick9740]

That struck me also. Yes - it has been keeping our leaders, who always run on the promise to "fight" for our interests from actually doing so.

[@jabbermocky]

Superb! It's all here in plain English. Listen and think about all that is said by J R Saul and Chris Hedges. No bullshit whatsoever.

[@daddygad]

incredible interview... two thumbs enthusiastically up!!!

[@EmpireChris]

We are living in a world that is controlled by people who are only interested in power or money or both. Power is now in the hands of the corporations, government is quite incidental.

Neoliberalism? Well, it is easy. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Such a simple philosophy and the thing is... it works! The real question is: what can we do about it?

[@sherryburrows882]

Both 'neoliberalism' and 'fascism' describe a system in which the systems of economics and politics are controlled by the corporate structure. That has been true of this country for many years--at least since the days of Ike, who warned us about the military-industrial complex. Now we have private, for-profit systems of policing that are given billions of dollars worth of military firepower and carte blanche to use it. Their mission is protecting the property of the moneyed elites from the proles--you and me. The current police forces kill civilians with impunity, especially people of color. Any poor, disempowered person will do, however, to serve as an example to others and to make the point that "we have enough power to kill any of you--all of you if necessary--and there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it. The "mass incarceration" brought on by the "war on drugs," has always been a class war and a race war. Most of the victims have been young black and Latino men, but now we are running short of them and the new targeted class is women from the same socio-economic backgrounds. Of course, once both parents are locked up, who cares for the children? They grow up in the wholly broken foster care system, where virtually all--boys and girls--are molested by the time they are ten. There is only one hope of ending this class warfare and economic inequality without a long, involved, and bloody revolution in which the 1% is made afraid for their very survival. That is massive non-violent civil disobedience in which all manner of the poor, from white rural "right-wing" Trump supporters who were thrown overboard 30 years by the elites to immigrants who sneak into this country while our leaders look the other way, so they can provide a pool of exploited, poor, powerless workers. Socio-economic differences trump race, religion, ethnic differences, variations on jobs and amount of enslavement to the 1%. Wealthy black people are NOT treated the same way as poor black men who are busted, over and over, for ridiculous charges like possession of marijuana when neighboring states have legalized both recreational and medical marijuana. Fines, with interest if those fines are not able to pay them off immediately, amount in many jurisdictions to up to 60% of the income that cities, counties, and states depend upon to run their towns. Property forfeiture, another scam to keep those who are poor down and disempowered. The corporate state is the entity that controls all, and it controls governments through the simple expedient of buying wholesale any official who ever has to dial for dollars for an election campaign. Now all Rethugs are walking around with 'Sold" signs on their backs as well as most Dems. In fact, I think that presidents, senators, and representatives should be made to wear clothing like NASCAR drivers and jockeys do, with their corporate owners' names and logos emblazoned on them. That way at least we'd know who was owned by whom. John McCain could have had a lovely Western shirt, a la the Marlboro Man, but that had several photos of America's favorite firearms with the title "NRA" and maybe the amount that entity had paid for his soul. With Chump, it's a good thing he's a fat fuck or we wouldn't have room to post everyone who owns him. Obviously, the devil got whatever he used in places of a heart, soul, and/or mind long ago. That doesn't pre-empt the executives from Goldman-Sachs, the rest of Wall$treet, Big Pharma, Big Ag, and the rest of the corporate state that put money into his campaign war chest. Our campaign finance system is a laughingstock all over the world even among third-world countries where all the cops are on the take or dead. That we can't see it as organized, systemic corruption just describes our level of magical thinking.

[@joecoool100]

Chris, you should have done an hour with John.

[@garretttedeman]

Watching this is May, 2020... Omg! Amazing stuff. ...We all need to go back to learn again about the "Reforms of Solon" in Ancient Athens.

[@Nomo_Popo]

Almost 5 years later and more relevant than ever

[@Achrononmaster]

After listening twice, I now think Saul is more elitist than I guess he'd care to admit. We do not need to give people more language, everyone already knows the language of justice. What's missing is moral conviction and spiritual courage --- that means good deeds, not just words. When one worker fails to defend another who has been abused, that's not a language problem, it's a moral conviction and meekness in action problem. You can't really know this until you experience it. When I stood up for colleagues against a mindless technocrat performance review point scoring system I was shunned and disciplined. A couple of years later I did not get my contract renewed, the relief I felt when I realised I did not have to work in that institution any more was enough to alleviate my grievances, but I still regret not having the support of my colleagues, because I know most of them agreed with me. They were too insecure to speak up and defend me. There was no lack of language, there was lack of awareness that technical rules can be a a veil for injustice. The USA in particular, but Canada too, as a general popular conception, have two pillars of their social foundation twisted around the wrong way: you can have both, you should have both, but dynamically Freedom does not come before Justice, it's the other way around.

[@hollywoodartchick9740]

Excellent illustration! Sorry you went thru that - me too! I think it happens to anyone with a conscience in the workplace. The ideal worker puts on blinders and hopes the axe never falls his direction.

[@lincolnpork9357]

" Saul is more elitist than I guess he'd care to admit. " -- he points out many valid flaws, but is vague on solutions; simply saying we have hundreds of past years experience to draw solutions from is inane, as is proposing a 'debt jubilee' , both applied to far different circumstances. I have no solution to offer either, and kudos to him and Hedges for at least airing an important discussion and maybe a critical mass can bring about a tipping point.

[@cheri238]

Look at us now in 2023.

[@rockyracoon941]

The truth is usually simple, and ideology has not always been used in a pejorative fashion, nor has the term propaganda. Five minutes into the show-the greatest obsfucation in our society today is the notion that the economic is somehow separate from the economic. That is why the classical study was Political Economy.

[@disgusting18]

Fabulous interview. More please.

[@GabrielCastellarTV]

Great job Chris. I learn so much!!

[@chrisyates2591]

Wonderful stuff. My first time listening to this great thinker.

[@kevinlawrence3105]

Thanks, Chris Hedges. I spread your books and videos among friends who can read.

[@BeefHamMan]

+kevin lawrence You have friends who can't read?

[@melfaulkner8262]

I really enjoyed this discussion

[@adamjzimmer]

great interview

[@domingodeanda233]

Thanks guys.

[@bryceford7248]

Chris, you need to interview Wendy Brown and McKenzie Wark as well!

[@Drforbin941]

Wow. The real news has certainly changed since then!

[@cheri238]

One has to read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," carefully. Thank you both for this discussion of history and world histories, philosophy, sciences, religious divisions since some say 3500 years hefore Chirst.The Gilgamesh Epic. Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristole, Aristotle taught Alexander the great. So many philosophers. American public was dummied down on purpose. Even our great colleges for our elites, unless one went and thought outside of the box. We have many that did such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and many others since. Mr. Chris Hedges, Howard Zinn, Professor Richard Wolff, Dr. Cornell West, Harold Bloom, DuBois, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, so many. For all those that have we are deeply appreciative. Change has to come in all areas of beauocracies now.

[@Victor-le5qm]

Things as they are cannot change until everyday people understand that their complacency fuels the power used against them.

[@curtislewis509]

We are indeed and this is such a great

[@2breal673]

PROPHETIC WORDS.

[@EroomYrrah]

Legions of experts to make a decision that the 'Old Man' or 'Old Lady' could make on their own.

[@TheUnspokenAlias]

A few disparate thoughts : - Reason did more than often eclipse humanism/humanity. To be more precise, "reasoning reason" ("la raison raisonnante", in French) did, in other words self-obsessed and self-sufficient reason turning in circles. Yet, a) one ought to remember reason was originally a reaction to absolutism, b) looking at the level of the public debate these days, one wonders if a little reason wouldn't be welcome to balance the overall folly... - What Chris calls 'idiocy' for lack of a better English word, French philosopher Stiegler calls 'bêtise', which is not 'bestiality', yet shares the same etymology. His theory is that contemporary Western societies are ruled, on various levels, by instilled pulsions, from a very early age on, that destroy our individual and collective ability to think and to transmit knowledge (even to our own children) in order to satisfy marketing, the individuals conditioned by these pulsions being more likely than not to give in to the beast inside. Before him, Debord had already analyzed the mechanisms by which our focus and attention are diverted through entertainement, in The Society Of The Spectacle. - The French E.N.A. (Ecole nationale d'Administration) is not a business school. In practice, it may have become one, but only because the climate is now 100% business-oriented. Should tomorrow's climate be different, it would adapt. It's as elitist and arrogant as the Ivy League colleges, but its purpose is (or at least was) to recruit the best elements within French society, whatever their social backgrounds, to train the future leaders of the Republic (with emphasis on the latter), in all possible domains. - 'Populism' is one of the technocrats' favorite words. Call someone - say Bernie Sanders - a populist, and all of a sudden it's as if he's walking in the footsteps of the worst dictators of the XXth century. Yet, a populist does not mislead... POPULISM (Oxford dictionary) * support for the concerns of ordinary people * the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people Populism is not demagoguery... - It is inept (my excuses to JRS) to compare Mussolini's State-centered synarchist corporatism to modern-day globalized nation-state-rejecting corporatism. For the same reasons, it's even more inept to declare their respective citizens are/were "basically driven by self-interest". - I don't know whether Chris is correcting himself when he mentions Richelieu after the Jesuits,or whether he's establishing a parallel. In the latter case, Richelieu's memoirs leave no doubt as to the cardinal's attitude towards the at his time highly persecuted "sect". Conniving though he may have been, which is a common trait with the Jesuits indeed, he was the right hand of the king, and, as such, could not possibly allow himself to be too receptive to a lobby whose primary aim it was to infiltrate and control centres of power.

[@larrysmith2636]

from divine right of kings to divine right of money changers. have a nice day?

[@lincolnpork9357]

I think the most important thing from this discussion is to make the Public aware to Hedges remark and Ralston's reply : "HEDGES: In all of your books, you focus on language and how the technocrat essentially creates or the specialist creates a system of language that is unintelligible to the outsider to lock them out. SAUL: And which--so, essentially you end up with these silos where you now have millions, let's say thousands and thousands and thousands of silos of impenetrable language controlled by small interest groups." No political correctness nor populist language referred to there, just exclusionary, elitist jargon. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fYC6ipmQqcyco6s

[@zhukhov]

Well done. More on how to fight and destroy the system?

[@bessadok]

+zhukhov Chris answered how to fight the system a thousand times over in other videos. Citizens strike stop serving corporate interests. Look up online back yard farmers trading their fruits and veggies in back yard gardens instead of pumping money into government subsidized corporations get arrested. Why? Because it is not ;regulated; by the FDA. Mind you, there is NOTHING that could had been grown without some dreadful chemical that's already in the food supply created by corporate giants which could endanger; human health. Government has given full immunity to generic drug makers in law suits so in return, 80% of insurance companies will ONLY fill generic drug prescriptions which poison millions of Americans with 0 legal recourse. Europeans realized this and banned 700 generic drugs, Please look up how Americans economically subsidize the cost of Prescription drugs for Western Europeans (socialized medicine) at the expense of the American debt slaves. The top 1% bleed Americans dry to the point they can afford the name brand drugs in order to sue any big pharma company who still has some sort of accountability. It's too late for Americans. Oh and Americans also subsidize the cost of text books for other countries. India, Philippines, UK. Please look that up too. 3 trillion in student debt is artificial inflated debt. Adam ruins everything explained in a show called Adam ruins everything 'voting' go ahead youtube it. Don't forget the segment Adam ruins everything 'gerrymandering'. 80% of Americans' votes do NOT count. He shows you how. It's on true tv. When these facts air on national television and people fail to act when there is no denying the corruption, explained in Layman's terms. That's it. :) Country is finished. Government is most afraid of HACKERS. Guns aren't going to beat the government. Hackers can. Why do you think 60 minutes did an episode about how Chinese hackers can fry US outdated electrical grid? Americans should had been marching in the streets to get rid of Wall street spectators long ago. stopped going to work and dedicated all their time to refusing to cooperate with the whores in congress. Collective disobedience. Any way, Americans are too far gone at this point, far too divided over race, intelligence, wedge issues like gay marriage to not sit down and realize EVERYONE other than American oligarchs are in the same boat.

[@yawnandjokeoh]

What's that song at the beginning?

[@dugfern]

This Saul guy really cares about the human condition. At the end this is our highest achievement as a species.

[@sidofate6921]

Whats the name of the Intro song?

[@nicktrice4921]

National politicians may more or less, to various degrees, indeed be incidental- but politics is alive and well; and the new statesmen of our era are not to be found in the State Houses of any given nation, no matter how influential they seem- but among the scions of the global college of multinational, corporate "movers and shakers". Not to mention the monolithic backers and guarantors of both- the fiat-based central bankers, and their unsurprisingly opaque shareholders. Neoliberalism, and it's emissaries, have endeavored, more or less (in concert bordering on conspiracy): to discredit, distort, and subvert the economic and political prowess of the nation-state so as to install a new paradigm of political practice- what is called "globalism". All that individual nation-states have dreamed of, and ruthlessly pursued, in bloody succession and endless tumult since antiquity- namely limitless growth and security up to and including outright world domination- has been more closely and completely achieved by the successors of the nation-state-centered, Westphalian paradigm- i.e the corporate gods of job creation and thought-leadership that we see today at the helms of the great multinational conglomerations, astutely and obsequiously-attended by their retinue of NGOs, think-tanks, consultants, lawyers, and politicians - who all work together for their own selfish gain, despite their inherent mistrust of each other. These new "merchants who are the great men of our world" (to paraphrase the Bible) have discovered methods of- in a synergistic manner, both openly and covertly- subverting the integrity and sovereignty of every society on earth, whether they are open or closed, authoritarian or democratic; and this shadowy fraternity of economic behemoths know better than anyone else how to parasitize and organize their hosts into a global agglomeration for their own ends. One could even call what we are seeing coalesce out of the murky and inchoate chessboard of corporate geopolitics an emergent "global government", centered around an unstable axis of Western and Eastern factions (or should I say, "pretenders to the throne"). Profit is their raison d'être. Deception and misdirection, as well as transnational and intra-national triangulation, are their preferred methods of operation. Blatant oppression, repression, and aggression are used only when their preferred modi operandi are thwarted- or simply cheaper and more expedient (as we see in the Third World). This is the future. What are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? Is global political stability and our species' survival more important than the upward mobility, rights, and even survival of the vast underclass of billions of human beings scrambling for economic security and demanding a place at the table of our global masters? As above, so below. It's about adaptability and survivability from the top to the bottom. That's why the multitudes of us at the bottom of the global pyramid should consider organizing- because, "if you're not seated at the table, you are on the menu". And- for what it's worth- I, personally, believe that life, community, and dignity are worth fighting for. They're really all we have to fight for...

[@IXPrometheusXI]

So it's like five minutes in and he's saying neoliberalism has "nothing to do" with classical liberalism. He said that neoliberalism is a form of religion and kinda made it sound like it being an ideology distinguishes it from... Whatever he's about to say. Then he goes on to conflate the working class with the lumpen. I'm getting confused. Who is this guy?

[@IXPrometheusXI]

Oh oh oh, I'm 8 minutes in and now he's talking like Burke and Smith are being coopted by neoliberals. This dudes just a liberal and he's trying to sell us on the idea that liberalism has been "corrupted" by some kind of cult. Calling my shot.

[@BlackMenTakingOurCommunityBack]

👍🏾👍🏾

[@alexdimic5864]

There still no collapse!

[@ominousMIDI]

It was funny, in a horrible kind of way, that Saul's bit about pickpockets and misdirection so perfectly encompassed Hillary Clinton's defense of her ties to Wall Street in the last debate. "Hey, everyone, remember terrorism, and 9/11?" You'd better check your wallet...

[@peacejen8732]

Pray this Evil will come down . I lived tru it . I saw it with my own eye's .

[@paulcleverley4499]

😥😥😥😥😥😥

[@SlabCityLibertarianAssembly]

"Not to be too bleek...bawt" Guillotines...*wink wink* lmao. I feel you. It's the only rational solution for those that live in reality and not some fantastical childrens play land.

[@alexdimic5864]

Parasitical Elite is the proper term!

[@richardburt9812]

This guy seems like a ghost returned from a 1960s sociology department. Same critique of expertise. Jargon criticized by Adorno long before that. There really is no ideology to counter the neoliberalneoconservative ideology that prevails now because it is empty. It's ideology without ideas.

[@terriej123]

And now we have Trump.

[@_x__q]

Hmm, Palpatine is pretty sharp.

[@rockyracoon941]

The necessity for a post capitalist world is long overdue. Otherwise, the result will be mutual ruination of all.

[@tomnanD3]

Neoconservatives have nothing to do with conservatism?

[@alipiofernandes1]

Democracy is what Aristotle said it is a demagogy.

[@IXPrometheusXI]

Yawn. I'm not really interested in some old white Canadian dude telling me that we need to return to traditional systems and values. If I wanted that I'd listen to Jordan Peterson. Especially disinterested in the part where he, a writer, waxes poetic about how vitally important words and writers are while clutching his pearls about freedom of expression. Also, can we stop acting like the average person is an idiot? People aren't stupid just bc they can't speak like Cicero.

[@IXPrometheusXI]

@Thrunabulax pfff, I hate to break it to you, but I'm a communist and I hate Jordan Peterson. I'm about as far from a right-wing troll as you can get. I just don't like this guy, but go ahead and ignore criticism like everybody on "your side" is immune from it.

[@IXPrometheusXI]

@Thrunabulax Well I wasn't really talking about globalization. I also don't think globalization is inevitable, so. Anyway, what I was really talking about is that this guy, whatever his actual merits, sounds like a pompous dork.

[@geoffreynhill2833]

PROPHETIC