By Fernando Buen Abad – May 25, 2021
It is a huge mistake to assume that neoliberalism is only a bourgeois canniness exclusive to the economic-financial field. It is a serious error that must be corrected immediately. Neoliberalism is, pathetically, an ideological ambush (in the sense of the “false consciousness” explained by Marx) developed to dispute and impose the “common sense” of certain capitalist interests in their imperial phase. Verbigracia: a shredding machine of acquired social rights; a demolisher of humanist principles of solidarity; a “human meat grinder” in labor, educational and health centers; it is a steamroller of institutions and a phenomenal machinery of humiliations, depressions and demoralization. All of this at the service of a sector dangerously unhinged by usury, the most toxic individualism and the supremacist meritocracy of the masters in alliance with their accomplices. A hell of corruption and crime that should be typified as its own historical stage of “crimes against humanity.” The explosive mixture of neoliberalism, Fake News and electoral processes is a highly sophisticated industry of social destruction.
One of the favorite instruments to camouflage the perversity of neoliberalism has been the “electoral processes” intoxicated by bourgeois democracy. Laws, institutions and mercenary formatted officials have been fabricated to convert into “legal” what is illegitimate and to sell it as a leap of modernity decorated with students trained for administrative and banking devices but without the minimum endowment of elementary respect to general culture. Pauper intelligence for mercantile efficiency. They call them “technocrats” and are proud of it.
This functional pattern to neoliberalism is attached with generous layers of supermarkets in bad taste and a whole inventory of fetishized merchandise turned into ethical, moral and aesthetic values in the religion of junk consumerism for junk mentalities. They call all of this, beaten with greed and canniness: success. And they pretend that, besides meekly financing it, we envy it, applaud it and pass it on to our offspring as if it were “a great treasure.” They want the proletariat to become executor, accomplice of the police and executioner of itself and at a distance. Big data.
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With this plan, they manufacture their repressive managers, used in different ways, who serve both to “manage” a bigger or smaller business, and to train them as “political candidates.” And we have had to suffer aberrant versions, (with antecedents, in military versions and their “civilian” accomplices) proto-neoliberal versions of the Condor Plan, embodying the monstrous list of such fools as Salinas de Gortari, Menem, Fujimori… and a no less monstrous list of intellectuals kneeling before the crumbs tossed to them by their masters. Verbigracia: Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Krause and their multiple packs of “journalists” who are a rented “accompanying fauna.” This is what we have had to swallow as “political normality” since the dictatorship of the “Washington Consensus” was imposed. Over a period of 40 years (1989) that has left us infiltrated by all kinds of reformist, opportunist, careerist and traitorous vermin that must be called out and permanently denounced for reasons of defense; a matter of life or death.
One of the most perfected and quoted jewels, in the globalized neoliberal paradise, are the massive operations of deception; Weapons of Mass Distortion that have proliferated with great speed and ubiquity. They move globally with the protection, the discursive unilateralism, the null trenches of reply and the masses of coryphaeus that repeat, simultaneously, any fiction that is disguised as news. Fake News at all hours, with diverse modalities, in discriminated schedules and profitable effects. With the blessing of neoliberal governments and a large audience anesthetized under the pleasures of deception that save you from having to think and immerse you into morbid emotions.
And meanwhile, when the people have found strength and ways to defeat neoliberalism, its corporate and governmental spawn, its ideological war machines disguised as “media,” overwhelm us by a planetary pandemic juicily exploited by neoliberalism. A pandemic that does not cease in the bourgeois abuse of humanity. Never has the greed of the financial sewers lashed out with such racist fury as they have done with vaccines and medical instruments to care for the billions of infected or dead. Capitalism exhibiting neoliberal nausea. Unmitigated.
How can we lift the human species from this overwhelming hell? How can we recover our strength and organized confidence to articulate the forces that the conjuncture demands in the current phase of the class struggle? At this time, the path appears to be from below. From the roots and the grassroots. With an organizational project that overcomes the old rigid formats of those parties and social movements intoxicated with reformist bureaucracy and isolationism, full of the intermediations of their leadership. Enough is enough.
The organizational capacities of the revolutionary leadership that are constantly being born in the heat of the social struggles are under examination. But what is urgently needed is a Revolution of Conscience simultaneously with the modification of the ideological and economic order of bourgeois private property. To organize in order not to remain again on the margins, gaining only peripheral powers but without touching a hair of the industry, the banks or the churches reconverted to neo-liberalism by the work and grace of the “dung of the devil.” So here we are. What is to be done?
It’s necessary to make the financing of neoliberalism transparent (a peoples’ audit), and of all the electoral processes in which it has infiltrated. The fortunes of all its henchmen must be investigated and the financing of fake news, of the owners of the (misnamed) “mass media” and of the intellectuals who supply ideological junk organized in “foundations,” NGO’s, forums and congresses constituted in neoliberal cathedrals of stupidity. All of this must be made thoroughly transparent. And this is urgent.
Featured image: File Photo
(Resumen Latinoamericano-English)
Fernando Buen Abad
Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez is Mexican by birth, (Mexico City, 1956) specialist in Philosophy of Image, Philosophy of Communication, Criticism of Culture, Aesthetics and Semiotics. He is a Film Director graduated from New York University, a Bachelor of Communication Sciences, a Master in Political Philosophy and a Doctor of Philosophy. Member of the Consultative Council of TeleSUR. Member of the World Association for Semiotic Studies. Member of the International Movement of Documentalists. Member of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity. Rector-founder of the University of Philosophy. He has taught postgraduate courses and conferences at various Latin American universities. He has obtained various distinctions for his intellectual work, including the Simón Bolívar National Journalism Prize awarded by the Venezuelan State. He is currently Director of the Sean MacBride University Center for Information and Communication and of the Institute of Culture and Communication of the National University of Lanús
