Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool People who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff. You're weekly reminder that whenever there are
Speaker 1: bad things happening, there are also cool people trying to
Speaker 1: stop those bad things, or morally complicated people trying to
Speaker 1: stop those bad things, or people I hate trying to
Speaker 1: stop those bad things. There's always people trying to stop
Speaker 1: the bad things. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
Speaker 1: for this series I'm doing right now, it's just me
Speaker 1: and you. You in this context is the microphone, but
Speaker 1: you're also the listener. Isn't that weird. I'm alone in
Speaker 1: a closet that's been sound treated, and yet you're here
Speaker 1: with me. It's so strange. I've been enjoying experimenting with
Speaker 1: these sort of scripted episodes as a way to break
Speaker 1: up the format, and I've like kind of had this
Speaker 1: idea of doing a particular series, and this is that series.
Speaker 1: It's the series that I wanted to do with no guest.
Speaker 1: Of course, we still have producers like our producer Sophie
Speaker 1: Lickterman and our audio engineer Eva hi Eva, and everyone
Speaker 1: who's listening has to say hi to Eva. You're not
Speaker 1: off the hook just because there's no guests saying it too.
Speaker 1: Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. Our
Speaker 1: topic these coming weeks is neoliberalism and the worldwide movement
Speaker 1: that worked successfully to stem its spread. It's a bit
Speaker 1: strange to think about nowadays because a core component of
Speaker 1: neoliberalism was a series of free trade agreements that broke
Speaker 1: down trade barriers between countries. Our problem right now, as
Speaker 1: I record this is essentially the opposite. The Trump administration
Speaker 1: has embraced trade war as a core policy. Tariffs are
Speaker 1: one of their primary weapons that they are using to
Speaker 1: make the rich richer. But you can also use free
Speaker 1: trade agreements to make the rich richer. It's really just
Speaker 1: about how you want to do it. They have so
Speaker 1: many options about green US All over, Neoliberalism seems well
Speaker 1: and truly dead, or at least taken a real long nap,
Speaker 1: and you can go up and poke it with a
Speaker 1: stick and be like, oh, it's totally just napping. And
Speaker 1: what was born from its corpse or you know, sleeping
Speaker 1: body who swear I'll wake up. Don't worry. Don't worry, liberals,
Speaker 1: it'll come back. What was born from neoliberalism's corpse seems
Speaker 1: even worse because it's fascism spoiler alert. That's what grew
Speaker 1: out of its corpse. It is easy then to look
Speaker 1: back and assume all those free trade agreements were good
Speaker 1: things because the fascists want to get rid of them.
Speaker 1: They were not good things. They did not help the
Speaker 1: poor of the developing nations or the developed nations. This
Speaker 1: series of episodes is going to take us on a
Speaker 1: winding course of their history that explains the horizontal shape
Speaker 1: of the global left during the turn of the millennium,
Speaker 1: and along the way we're going to talk mostly about
Speaker 1: the Zapatista, the indigenous bottom up leftists in Chiappus, Mexico
Speaker 1: who have carved out an impressive amount of autonomy from
Speaker 1: the state, as well as the Alter Globalization movement that
Speaker 1: brought together a global movement of farmers and punks and
Speaker 1: a thousand other types of people besides and ended, through creative,
Speaker 1: mostly nonviolent direct action, the spread of a neoliberal world order.
Speaker 1: These are some of the most successful movements in history
Speaker 1: and some of the most successful experiments with direct democracy
Speaker 1: and history at scale, but since none of them seize
Speaker 1: state power, their accomplishments are often overlooked. It was the
Speaker 1: Alter Globalization movement that swept me up into politics a
Speaker 1: couple decades ago. And we'll see how much I do
Speaker 1: or don't weave my own story into these episodes. This
Speaker 1: whole series is a bit ambitious, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to start with maybe even more than my usual
Speaker 1: fair share of content. We're going to start by talking
Speaker 1: about neoliberalism. What the fuck is neoliberalism. It's a word
Speaker 1: that gets tossed around a lot, which a lot of
Speaker 1: people assume they know it means. But many of the
Speaker 1: people who assume that they know what it means are
Speaker 1: wrong and are using it wrong. First and foremost, just
Speaker 1: think to yourself, neoliberalism has more or less nothing to
Speaker 1: do with being a liberal. They both come from the
Speaker 1: same root economic and political concepts, but they're really just different.
Speaker 1: It's a Venn diagram and not a circle. And they're
Speaker 1: not just different because one is neo, because one's the
Speaker 1: new of it. It is important to understand that political
Speaker 1: terminology is and has always been a mess. If you
Speaker 1: call yourself a Republican, for example, what you actually believe
Speaker 1: as a Republican depends on where and when you're living.
Speaker 1: If you're a Republican in Ireland, you might be a
Speaker 1: militant socialist. If you're a republican in nineteen thirty Spain,
Speaker 1: you might be one of the most diehard anti fascists
Speaker 1: to ever live. If you're a Republican in the US, well,
Speaker 1: in a nineteenth century you were vaguely progressive. During most
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century you were a conservative, and in
Speaker 1: the present era you're something closer to a fascist than
Speaker 1: you are to a traditional conservative. You simply cannot look
Speaker 1: at a political group and judge them based on the
Speaker 1: labels they use, or you'll wind up with nonsense, like
Speaker 1: the people who believe the National Socialist Party was leftist.
Speaker 1: Part of the problem is that world politics don't actually
Speaker 1: map well to a simple left right to dichotomy. Anarchists
Speaker 1: and stalinists are both leftists but believe in fundamentally opposing things.
Speaker 1: The nationalist right and the pro globalization right are fundamentally
Speaker 1: different things, as we're seeing now that the nationalist right
Speaker 1: is ascendant over the neoliberal right. Classical liberalism, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of the origin of the word liberalism.
Speaker 1: It's an old timey belief structure that basically says we
Speaker 1: should be free from government interference in most things, including
Speaker 1: our business dealings, and I'm not trying to downplay it
Speaker 1: is it is the belief structure that brings us capitalism.
Speaker 1: But when people talk about being a liberal in the
Speaker 1: US these days, they usually mean it in contrast to conservative,
Speaker 1: or if you're far enough left, they mean it in
Speaker 1: contrast to you know, progressive or leftist or radical. But
Speaker 1: in general it's liberal versus conservative, and so a liberal
Speaker 1: will tend towards believing in social liberty the freedom to
Speaker 1: have or not have a religion, for example, and is
Speaker 1: less specifically concerned about the economic stuff in capitalism. Though
Speaker 1: most liberals have been generally supportive of capitalism, that starting
Speaker 1: to change as well. The Cold War has been gone
Speaker 1: long enough that people are starting to actually have breathing
Speaker 1: room to critique capitalism, which is very nice neoliberal in
Speaker 1: contrast to being a liberal. It's the capitalism side of
Speaker 1: liberalism without any real thought given one way or another,
Speaker 1: to the personal side of it. Neoliberalism would ostensibly be like, sure,
Speaker 1: you can be gay or not believe in God, or
Speaker 1: believe in God or whatever. I guess, but that's not
Speaker 1: what neoliberalism is about at all. It is about capitalism.
Speaker 1: Neoliberalism is an ideology built around the spread of free
Speaker 1: market capitalism and how that needs to spread around the world,
Speaker 1: and not just in like a nice way, like hey,
Speaker 1: I have some beans, would you like to buy them?
Speaker 1: We should set it up so that you can buy
Speaker 1: the beans. You know. It's not a like Timu utopia.
Speaker 1: Maybe it is, but Timu is probably actually a dystopian. Instead,
Speaker 1: neoliberal is around using aggressive programs to gut the social
Speaker 1: services of various countries and specifically force places to privatize everything.
Speaker 1: Many many cultures around the world have ancient histories of
Speaker 1: keeping many things in public ownership. We've talked about this
Speaker 1: a lot on the show. It's almost like you find
Speaker 1: a place and you will find that the traditional structure
Speaker 1: for people to you know, work the land or whatever
Speaker 1: is essentially communal, and neoliberalism is like, nope, none of that.
Speaker 1: Everything's a business now. And look, I know it's a
Speaker 1: little early for an ad break, but how can I
Speaker 1: not use that as a transition to an ad break
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that's a business is this
Speaker 1: very podcast, and we are in the business of selling
Speaker 1: advertisers the time on our show, and here is that
Speaker 1: happening everyone feels great, everyone's having a good time, and
Speaker 1: we're back. Neoliberalism is absolutely not the only version of capitalism.
Speaker 1: It presents itself as the only version of capitalism. And
Speaker 1: I'm not even like trying to defend old timey capitalism,
Speaker 1: but like neoliberalism is, like, this is what capitalism is,
Speaker 1: and it's just not. It's only in the past fifty
Speaker 1: years or so that neoliberalism has gained much traction at all.
Speaker 1: Around the end of World War Two, as the world
Speaker 1: really decided to get settled into a nice, long, cozy
Speaker 1: cold war with proxy wars that are not cold, the
Speaker 1: dominant strain of capitalist politics was Knesyan politics. Kaynesyan politics
Speaker 1: comes from a nineteen thirty six book written by this
Speaker 1: British guy, John Maynard Keynes. The book is called so
Speaker 1: the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. And I
Speaker 1: will be honest with you, I am not an economist.
Speaker 1: I spent way too long this week trying to and
Speaker 1: even sometimes succeeding, at learning the difference between mercantile capitalism
Speaker 1: versus classical economics versus Kenzian understandings versus neo classical versus
Speaker 1: neoliberal and I still could not tell you everything about
Speaker 1: the difference between classical and Knesy and understandings of like
Speaker 1: long run aggregate supply or whatever the fuck. I can
Speaker 1: tell you that Knesy and economics, the economics that was
Speaker 1: dominant during the World War two and afterwards for several decades,
Speaker 1: is pretty into government intervention in the markets. It's pretty
Speaker 1: much like, well, we want markets, and we want capitalism,
Speaker 1: but we want them to do what we want to do.
Speaker 1: We want the government to be in charge of capitalism,
Speaker 1: and so it would have more of an attempt to
Speaker 1: fight unemployment and things like that. Neoliberalism was the underdog
Speaker 1: ideology back then for decades. It took a really long
Speaker 1: time for it to gain popularity. They present this as
Speaker 1: this like natural evolution, where people just figured out it's better,
Speaker 1: but they did not luck their way onto the world stage. Instead,
Speaker 1: they spent all kinds of money. I read the transcript
Speaker 1: of a speech from someone pointing out that they spent
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of dollars developing think tanks and institutions
Speaker 1: and foundations and shit. To present the idea of neoliberalism
Speaker 1: as like the natural world order. They claim that unfettered
Speaker 1: capitalism is the natural way for humans to interact, and
Speaker 1: that indeed, the only moral way for people to act
Speaker 1: is in fierce competition with each other. This has been
Speaker 1: a key component of neoliberalism since probably the start, not
Speaker 1: just the competition thing, but that this is the natural thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, honestly kind of religious. It's really easy to
Speaker 1: point to an ideology don't like and be like, it's
Speaker 1: basically religion, and I do it every now and then.
Speaker 1: But that's because people structure their ideologies in similar ways
Speaker 1: as religion, and the two things are not as distinct
Speaker 1: as atheistic ideological adherents of the right or the left
Speaker 1: wants you to believe. Neoliberalism says that the market is
Speaker 1: the ultimate decider of well everything. This is part of
Speaker 1: why it's so at odds with any kind of nationalism.
Speaker 1: It basically hates the concept of government outside of desiring
Speaker 1: for there to be systems that can use violence to
Speaker 1: defend the private property of the wealthy, like in an
Speaker 1: ideal neoliberal situation. Literally, the government exists just to make
Speaker 1: sure that capitalism stays in charge, and that's the only
Speaker 1: thing it does. To quote the activist and author, the
Speaker 1: one who's transcript, I was talking about earlier Susan George.
Speaker 1: Neoliberalism says that quote, the economy should dictate its rules
Speaker 1: to society, not the other way around. Neoliberalism really got
Speaker 1: its start in England when returning villain of the Pod
Speaker 1: Margaret Thatcher aka the only bad Margaret. There's probably other
Speaker 1: bad Margarets too, but you know, she's the worst of them.
Speaker 1: I actually feel pretty confident about that because she's kind
Speaker 1: of one of the worst people who's ever lived in
Speaker 1: terms of just sheer destruction of environment, traditional ways of living, work,
Speaker 1: or protection people's lives. Bad Margaret just a real bad
Speaker 1: one in contrast to the best Margaret. Margaret Thatcher stepped
Speaker 1: onto the world stage in nineteen seventy one when she
Speaker 1: became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If you
Speaker 1: want to hear more about how she gutted the working
Speaker 1: class of England, smash unions, started bullshit wars and accidentally
Speaker 1: engendered a pretty sick punk scene. Listen to our episodes
Speaker 1: about the band Crass, and there's actually in those episodes
Speaker 1: some origin to what's going to become the ultra globalization
Speaker 1: movement that it's probably a thread we won't trace as
Speaker 1: much again during this time, So it's probably worth going
Speaker 1: and listening to whether or not you like the band Crass,
Speaker 1: because that's the fun thing about history stuff, is that, like,
Speaker 1: it's not me just listening to the band Crass, it's
Speaker 1: talking about all of the things that happened during that
Speaker 1: time in place that is pretty fundamental because this is
Speaker 1: where neoliberalism got its start. Anyway, Margaret Thatcher, her slogan
Speaker 1: was Tina Ti na there is no alternative, because yeah,
Speaker 1: neoliberals are not convinced that their way is the right way.
Speaker 1: They're convinced it's literally the only way. Before she took power,
Speaker 1: ten percent of people in Britain lived low the poverty line.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety six, it was one in four and
Speaker 1: one in three children. It's got a little better in
Speaker 1: the thirty five years since she left office. It is
Speaker 1: one in five now. So you know, bully to that,
Speaker 1: I don't know a bully to that means I'm trying
Speaker 1: to speak in British slang, but all I know is cheerio.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything British. Never mind, But don't worry.
Speaker 1: We don't just stay in the UK. America got its
Speaker 1: own neoliberal very shortly thereafter in Ronald Reagan and I
Speaker 1: probably know the eighties America slang rad I don't know.
Speaker 1: Under neoliberalism, money fled the public sector and poured into
Speaker 1: the coffers of the wealthy. By design, public services were
Speaker 1: gutted and privatized. Unions were attacked on every front and
Speaker 1: in many cases destroyed. The first time I spent any
Speaker 1: time in West Virginia, I spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: talking union coal miners who had, you know, fought during
Speaker 1: the death of the coal mining unions in the eighties,
Speaker 1: and just like them describing how this culture that they
Speaker 1: had built up, you know, for generations that you know,
Speaker 1: coal mining's not the best thing that's ever happened for
Speaker 1: anyone involved, but at least they had built these incredible
Speaker 1: unions after an incredible amount of conflict, and they were
Speaker 1: just destroyed in the eighties. And it's so funny to
Speaker 1: me because then conservatives come in are like, well, we
Speaker 1: care about the coal miners. The liberals are trying to
Speaker 1: get rid of it, and you're like, motherfucker, all those
Speaker 1: coal miners used to be all liberal as hell, like
Speaker 1: progressive as hell. It was one of the most heavily
Speaker 1: unionized industries until you all destroyed it. Anyway, I'm not bitter.
Speaker 1: I am bitter. Unions were attacked on every front and
Speaker 1: in many cases destroyed. The strong welfare state that saw
Speaker 1: the West through the Cold War was beginning to disappear.
Speaker 1: So in an odd way, it was the working classes
Speaker 1: of the US and the UK that were the first
Speaker 1: to suffer under neoliberalism, at least as I've been able
Speaker 1: to track down. But don't worry. Soon it'll be destroying
Speaker 1: the entire world. But first, all of history needs to
Speaker 1: come to an end, at least if you ask the capitalists.
Speaker 1: The other thing the capitalists will say if you ask
Speaker 1: them is that you should buy the stuff that advertises
Speaker 1: on this show. Although I talk all this shit, but
Speaker 1: sometimes we get advertisements for like genuinely good things like
Speaker 1: get your flu shot, or go outside or don't talk
Speaker 1: to cops. So I don't know what if you had
Speaker 1: to use your own judgment instead of listening to what
Speaker 1: I said, and decided how you felt about these things,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be wild? And we're back. I promised you
Speaker 1: the end of history. See. The Cold War eventually ended famously.
Speaker 1: It came to an end when the Western liberal democracies
Speaker 1: won in nineteen ninety one with the collapse of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, or maybe in nineteen eighty nine with the
Speaker 1: fall of the Berlin Wall, and that, according to a
Speaker 1: popular idea at the time, was the end of history.
Speaker 1: There was this author and political scientist, an American named
Speaker 1: Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an essay in nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 1: called the End of History in an international relationships journal
Speaker 1: put out by a think tank. The journal is called
Speaker 1: The National Interest. Later, Fukiyama developed these ideas into a book,
Speaker 1: The End of History and the Last Man. And basically
Speaker 1: in this work he argues that, well, there's a one
Speaker 1: sentence quote by him that sums it up. Well, what
Speaker 1: we may be witnessing is not just the end of
Speaker 1: the Cold War or the passing of a particular period
Speaker 1: of history, but the end of history as such. That
Speaker 1: is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization
Speaker 1: of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Speaker 1: You will not be surprised to know that Fukuyama was
Speaker 1: a Reagan advisor, and for a while he was one
Speaker 1: of the principal theorists of neo conservativism. What's neoconservativism, You
Speaker 1: might ask, Surely that would be the opposite of neoliberalism, right,
Speaker 1: it is not, To be honest, the easiest way to
Speaker 1: understand neo conservativism is that it's sort of the militant
Speaker 1: wing of neoliberalism, or its militant cousin. This isn't quite true,
Speaker 1: and the two do have some differences, and there's people
Speaker 1: who would identify with one and not the other. Neoconservativism
Speaker 1: is the idea that we should use military terry force
Speaker 1: to spread western capitalist democracy. I actually think that it
Speaker 1: maybe started just as like we should spread western capitalist democracy,
Speaker 1: and the military force thing just sort of was a
Speaker 1: very logical extension of that. But neoliberalism is more concerned
Speaker 1: about spreading capitalism, but is more excited about free trade
Speaker 1: agreements than bombing places into accepting democracy, and neo conservatives
Speaker 1: are a bit more into strong government, specifically a strong
Speaker 1: defense sector, big government, guns and nothing else. All taxes
Speaker 1: go towards guns, but not fun ones for you and
Speaker 1: your friends. Does that sound familiar? It's because we live
Speaker 1: in a world that was created by neo conservativism and neoliberalism. Anyway,
Speaker 1: our guy Fukiyama, who declared the end of history, was
Speaker 1: a theorist of neo conservativism, but he actually balked once
Speaker 1: the second Bush started the Iraq War because he realized
Speaker 1: that neo conservativism just led to unrestrained militarism. I think
Speaker 1: he was kind of a true believer or biz. I
Speaker 1: think he's alive, you know, in like Western democracy rather
Speaker 1: than specifically like military supremacy. By two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: he endorsed Obama and believes in a strong welfare state
Speaker 1: as part of a liberal democracy. So he's actually not
Speaker 1: a neoliby either. But this idea the end of history,
Speaker 1: is more important to my story than its author's own
Speaker 1: political arc. History was over after the end of the
Speaker 1: Cold War. There was just this thing in the air
Speaker 1: that that's it, We're done. Nothing new is going to
Speaker 1: happen politically, and for a few years that felt almost true.
Speaker 1: The war was over and capitalism reigned over the field
Speaker 1: of the glorious dead soldiers of the Cold War. But
Speaker 1: it's worth understanding that by and large, excepting the last
Speaker 1: decade or so of the war, the sort of liberal democracy,
Speaker 1: the capitalist democracy that won the Cold War, was actually
Speaker 1: a bit economically progressive. It certainly emphasized a strong welfare state.
Speaker 1: One could even say, and it has been said, I
Speaker 1: believe multiple people in my long source list, that it
Speaker 1: was the welfare state that defeated the USSR. In a
Speaker 1: welfare state, anyone who can do so is self sufficient.
Speaker 1: Under capitalism, anyone who fails at that is kept from
Speaker 1: falling to rock bottom by a strong social safety net.
Speaker 1: While some people in the West did complain here and
Speaker 1: there about welfare being like halfway to socialism, the welfare
Speaker 1: state basically provided an essential pressure release valve that kept
Speaker 1: actual socialism, which involves workers owning the means of production,
Speaker 1: from taking hold among the disenfranchised of society. With actual
Speaker 1: socialism and ideological threat like during the Cold War, the
Speaker 1: welfare state did well as an alternative. You also have
Speaker 1: the social democracies like those in Northern Europe, which combined
Speaker 1: a strong welfare state with moderate attempts at actual public
Speaker 1: ownership of services. But after the Cold War, the welfare
Speaker 1: state and social democracy started to fall out of favor because, well,
Speaker 1: to borrow from the capitalist view of things, when capitalism
Speaker 1: itself had the ideological monopoly with no competition, it had
Speaker 1: no incentive to care for its customer citizen. When the
Speaker 1: Soviet States fell, capitalism and its roused and most corrupt
Speaker 1: form fled in to fill the vacuum. This is actually
Speaker 1: pretty specific evidence of how this was not a democratic process,
Speaker 1: because that's not what people wanted in the former Soviet States.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite authors and one of my favorite
Speaker 1: people to quote on this show is the anthropologist David Graeber.
Speaker 1: His ethnography of the Alter Globalization movement, direct Action and Ethnography,
Speaker 1: is one of my main sources for these episodes, and
Speaker 1: in that book he wrote quote, with st. Jallenism dead,
Speaker 1: most Marxists expected to see a renaissance of more humane
Speaker 1: forms of Marxism. Social democrats believed that they had finally
Speaker 1: won the argument with the revolutionary left and expected to
Speaker 1: shepherd the former subjects of the Soviet Bloc into their fold.
Speaker 1: A reasonable expectation since when polled, most of the population
Speaker 1: of Central and Eastern Europe said that they wanted to
Speaker 1: model their new economies on Sweden. Instead, they got shock
Speaker 1: therapy and the most savage form of unrestricted capitalism. End.
Speaker 1: So the end of the Cold War wasn't the beginning
Speaker 1: of peace. And prosperity, but the beginning of capitalism developing
Speaker 1: into an even more evil beast. The end of history
Speaker 1: had been announced. Liberal democracy is the final form of
Speaker 1: human organization. All that was left was to mop up
Speaker 1: the pieces on the board and to do the work
Speaker 1: of spreading capitalism and one specific understanding of democracy all
Speaker 1: over the globe. Co Of course, if you grew up
Speaker 1: entrenched in the winning side of the Cold War, you
Speaker 1: grew up being told that democracy and capitalism are synonyms.
Speaker 1: But nothing could be further from the truth. If you
Speaker 1: want to listen to me talk about one of the many,
Speaker 1: many other origins of democracy, including influencing our legal structures today,
Speaker 1: listen to my recent episode with kat Abogazala talking about
Speaker 1: the origins of English common law and the pre Roman
Speaker 1: indigenous traditions of the Britonic speaking Celts. So that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that the USSR was a bastion of freedom or
Speaker 1: anything either, just that more than one thing can be
Speaker 1: bad at once. So neoliberalism is all the rage among
Speaker 1: people who are rich and want to get richer. Now,
Speaker 1: the version of capitalism the neoliberals wanted to push all
Speaker 1: over the world is something called the Washington Consensus, much
Speaker 1: like how our End of History guy wound up distancing
Speaker 1: himself from the neo conservative movement that he helped build.
Speaker 1: The Washington Consensus, Guy John Williamson wound up pretty sad
Speaker 1: about how directly his ideas were tied to neoliberalism and
Speaker 1: economic imperialism and walked back a bunch of his own
Speaker 1: points in retrospect in a very defensive and kind of
Speaker 1: amusing way. Basically, he put together a list of ten
Speaker 1: points to say, this is what Washington DC economists largely
Speaker 1: think is the plan for all countries. I e. It's
Speaker 1: the Washington Consensus, and it's a list of things like
Speaker 1: privatize everything and remove economic regulation, and poor countries have
Speaker 1: to tighten their belts and be more fiscally responsible, and
Speaker 1: property rights must be enforced. The organizations most heavily involved
Speaker 1: in spreading neoliberalism are the International Monetary Fund in the
Speaker 1: World Bank, which both started back in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: They both exist to try and keep international trade flowing,
Speaker 1: and both ostensibly work to help their member nations become
Speaker 1: more economically active and wealthier, and the difference between them
Speaker 1: is annoying. I'll just say that I have read many
Speaker 1: articles about the difference between them, and they work hand
Speaker 1: in hand. Is honestly the easiest way to think about it.
Speaker 1: To skip ahead a little, I was a teenager living
Speaker 1: near DC during some of the protests against the World
Speaker 1: Bank and the IMF in the year two thousand and
Speaker 1: I had no idea what any of that shit was.
Speaker 1: I remember I was on the Metro in DC, where
Speaker 1: I've been off to a youth Pride day. I thought
Speaker 1: I was straight and I was just a good ally.
Speaker 1: I spent most of my time organizing LGBT stuff. What
Speaker 1: a surprise. Anyway, I took the Metro into DC to
Speaker 1: go to youth Pride Day and it was the same
Speaker 1: day as a sixteen, the April sixteenth protests in DC
Speaker 1: against all this shit, all the neoliberal world order, and
Speaker 1: the train car was full of alter globalization protesters, and
Speaker 1: there's this woman dressed up like a faery and she
Speaker 1: comes over and it's like, hey, are you kids going
Speaker 1: to the protest against the IMF? And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: what's that? And at least as I remember it, what
Speaker 1: she said was they loan money to developing nations, but
Speaker 1: it's bad. And I remember I was like sixteen. I
Speaker 1: remember just thinking like, man, fuck off, lady, Like that's
Speaker 1: not a like. I was not convinced by this argument.
Speaker 1: Two years later, I would get arrested at a protest
Speaker 1: in DC against the IMF and the World Bank. I
Speaker 1: think how we talk about these things matters because you
Speaker 1: can tell a version of the IMF and the World Bank,
Speaker 1: and you still can. They're still around. You can go
Speaker 1: to their websites and read their history like I did
Speaker 1: while researching this episode, and they're just like, oh, we're
Speaker 1: like saviors of the poor. Basically the world exists because
Speaker 1: of us. But that's not true, right, And so I
Speaker 1: don't want to just tell you the IMF loans money
Speaker 1: to developing nations and it's bad. Though, in all fairness
Speaker 1: to the fairy on the Metro, it is factually correct.
Speaker 1: They do loan money to developing nations, and it is bad.
Speaker 1: The IMF loans money to developing nations the same way
Speaker 1: the mafia loans you money to start a business, except
Speaker 1: actually the mafia is probably a lot nicer because I think,
Speaker 1: as long as you pay on time, it probably works
Speaker 1: out alright. Obviously, I've seen a lot of movies where
Speaker 1: it doesn't work out all right, But you know, loans
Speaker 1: from the IMF actually look an awful lot more like
Speaker 1: every bit of folklore you've ever read about making a
Speaker 1: deal with a literal devil at a crossroads somewhere. In
Speaker 1: order to pay back these loans, countries are forced to
Speaker 1: restructure themselves and to be more economically productive, but not
Speaker 1: productive for themselves, but for the purpose of paying back
Speaker 1: these predatory loans. It's more like, Oh, you want to
Speaker 1: pay me back, You're gonna have to work how many
Speaker 1: hours a day? Well, how many you got? And social services,
Speaker 1: environmental protections, and labor rights all gone austerity measures for everyone.
Speaker 1: These were called structural adjustment programs, so they didn't even
Speaker 1: have to elect neoliberals. With these new democracies that they're
Speaker 1: blowing people up into having, right, they literally can force
Speaker 1: all kinds of even sort of socialist politicians into accepting
Speaker 1: these structural adjustment programs. I don't know whether we're going
Speaker 1: to get into that more on the show or not,
Speaker 1: but that's happened time and time again. It's actually one
Speaker 1: of the major problems with using electoral politics and developing
Speaker 1: nations to confront these issues is that the issues actually
Speaker 1: aren't coming from the developing nations, and there are examples
Speaker 1: of people successfully defaulting on loans and things like that.
Speaker 1: But overall, basically all of these people would get voted
Speaker 1: into office on a like to hell with the IMF,
Speaker 1: we want economic prosperity for ourselves and no structural adjustment programs,
Speaker 1: and then like within a year they're all like, well,
Speaker 1: the rest of the world has a really big stick,
Speaker 1: and so austerity for everyone. This is comparable to the
Speaker 1: system that has left Haiti one of the poorest countries
Speaker 1: on Earth after the Haitian Revolution throughout the slavers and
Speaker 1: broke the country off from France. Listen to our episodes
Speaker 1: about that the Western powers impose so much interest bearing
Speaker 1: debt onto the place that its wealth has poured out
Speaker 1: of the country ever since. You basically always have to
Speaker 1: remember that when communities or nations are poor, it is
Speaker 1: not because they don't produce wealth, but because that wealth
Speaker 1: is extracted. It is for this reason that neoliberalism is
Speaker 1: seen as a fundamentally colonial enterprise, a neo colonialism, if
Speaker 1: you will. In poor communities here in the States, you
Speaker 1: can physically see the institutions that extract value from them
Speaker 1: like take a chain start. If you go and spend
Speaker 1: your money at a McDonald's or whatever, whatever community you're in,
Speaker 1: that money now leaves that community unless the people at
Speaker 1: the very top also live in that community, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes jobs, but literally it wouldn't be worth it
Speaker 1: for the chain store if people working those jobs didn't
Speaker 1: produce more value, then you give them, right. This is
Speaker 1: the sort of basis of well Marxist understandings of the world.
Speaker 1: But also just like the way that the modern capitalist
Speaker 1: system works is that like, if you make two dollars
Speaker 1: worth of stuff an hour, the boss can give you
Speaker 1: a dollar and you go home with a dollar, and
Speaker 1: the boss goes home with a dollar, and so the
Speaker 1: boss gets a dollar or the owner really is a
Speaker 1: better way to think of this than the boss, you know.
Speaker 1: And then if you have ten employees, the boss is
Speaker 1: now making ten dollars and et cetera. Right, And so
Speaker 1: chain stores extract wealth no matter how many jobs they
Speaker 1: put into an area, they extract wealth from an area.
Speaker 1: You can also see other institutions that extract value from
Speaker 1: poor neighborhood. It's like ones that keep people trapped in
Speaker 1: a cycle of debt, like payday loan sharks and the
Speaker 1: cash bail system of the prison industrial complex. And when
Speaker 1: you've stripped away a regent's social safety net, and I
Speaker 1: could be talking about a country, or I could be
Speaker 1: talking about an impoverish neighborhood in America, people become desperate.
Speaker 1: And that's where soft power comes in the USAID, which
Speaker 1: is because in the news a lot I now know
Speaker 1: it's called USAID. I would have called it USAID because
Speaker 1: it looks like USAID and it's AID. But anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: the USAID that is currently being stripped away was a
Speaker 1: big part of this soft power, as were a ton
Speaker 1: of other non governmental organizations or NGOs within the States.
Speaker 1: You could talk about nonprofits doing the same thing in
Speaker 1: poor neighborhoods. Not all NGOs and nonprofits participate in soft power,
Speaker 1: but plenty you do. Because when you remove a country's
Speaker 1: ability to be economically productive internally and force them to
Speaker 1: provide you with things instead, you can show up and
Speaker 1: be their savior and make them reliant on you simply
Speaker 1: by keeping them from starving to death. Whereas actual economic
Speaker 1: justice is about reversing the flows of economic extraction. And
Speaker 1: if you want to see a really sweet example that
Speaker 1: I've actually never done episodes about directly here in the
Speaker 1: United States. I want to push people towards it's technically
Speaker 1: a nonprofit, I believe. I want to push people to
Speaker 1: look towards something called Seed Commons, which I think we
Speaker 1: talked about. Actually we did talk about this a bit
Speaker 1: in the Argentinian Worker Cooperative episode. Basically, a lot of
Speaker 1: what I understand about reversing economic extraction comes from some
Speaker 1: of the thinkers who work at this organization called Seed
Speaker 1: Commons that helps build worker cooperatives in all kinds of
Speaker 1: places and does so specifically to say, like our communities,
Speaker 1: you know, it's largely run by people of color. Our
Speaker 1: communities create wealth and then that wealth is extracted from us.
Speaker 1: But by creating worker cooperatives, we not only build workplace democracy,
Speaker 1: but we also keep money and what we produce within
Speaker 1: our own neighborhoods and we enrich that and we stop
Speaker 1: economic extraction. And it's not even about like isolation either.
Speaker 1: It's just literally about not getting ripped off. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: you should go watch their videos and learn more about them. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this economic extractive process, the idea that like, oh well,
Speaker 1: sure you could produce wealth for yourself, but instead you
Speaker 1: have to produce wealth for us. Is exactly what genocided
Speaker 1: the Irish in the nineteenth century in the so called
Speaker 1: potato famine. There was no potato famin. I mean, yes,
Speaker 1: there was a potato blight that happened, right. I actually
Speaker 1: managed to recreate the potato famine that sounds really bad
Speaker 1: at my own house last year because I grew a
Speaker 1: lot of potatoes and they all got the potato blight
Speaker 1: that I think my friend was explaining is the actual
Speaker 1: potato blite of what destroyed everything like these all my
Speaker 1: potatoes came out bad, with like bugs in them and stuff.
Speaker 1: My sweet potatoes came out okay, because actually the thing
Speaker 1: that solves this is growing a diversity of crops. And
Speaker 1: the Irish were quite capable of growing non potato food,
Speaker 1: but the English were forcing them to export that stuff
Speaker 1: because it was a colony. And the soft power that
Speaker 1: England sent in return was like nearly an edible corn
Speaker 1: and shit like that. And Ireland still doesn't have the
Speaker 1: same population it did before this genocide. So I don't
Speaker 1: like the system of economic extraction very much. You might
Speaker 1: have figured that out by now. So history has ended
Speaker 1: and neoliberalism is sweeping the globe, and country after country
Speaker 1: is watching its public sector privatized and its labor rights demolished,
Speaker 1: and its natural resources extracted and shipped off to the
Speaker 1: global North. But people didn't like that. And some of
Speaker 1: those people, well, they'd been fighting regular colonialism for about
Speaker 1: five hundred years, so they knew a thing or two
Speaker 1: about fighting this neo colonialism them too, And they lived
Speaker 1: in Chiappus, Mexico. And they are going to rip open
Speaker 1: a wound in neoliberalism for everyone to see and for
Speaker 1: everyone to pour through. And they're called the Zapatistas. And
Speaker 1: we'll start talking about them on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the whoops All Context episode. But
Speaker 1: don't worry. It's not a whopsal context series. It's just
Speaker 1: a whipsal context episode. And I don't know if I
Speaker 1: have any plugs. I might just plug seed comments again.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna plug worker cooperatives. Like people when they think
Speaker 1: of cooperatives, they're like, oh, you know, they often think
Speaker 1: of customer cooperatives, right, like when you go to a
Speaker 1: grocery store and it costs too much money, which actually
Speaker 1: doesn't even need to be the way that that kind
Speaker 1: of cooperative works either that. We did a whole series
Speaker 1: of those with food historian Ren Awrye talking about the
Speaker 1: history of food cooperatives. But fire your boss, or if
Speaker 1: you're the boss, sell your business to your employees and
Speaker 1: become one equal with them. Worker cooperatives are they even
Speaker 1: are fairly competitive economically, But that's like kind of less
Speaker 1: the important thing. We get told every day of our
Speaker 1: life that we're supposedly, you know, in the liberal world order,
Speaker 1: we're in charge of ourselves, but we are not. Because
Speaker 1: we go to work and democracy stops at the door
Speaker 1: to your office, and you have a boss, and you
Speaker 1: have an obligation to produce more value for your boss
Speaker 1: than they give you back. You are personally economically extracted
Speaker 1: from and that sucks. And one of the ways to
Speaker 1: stop that is by building worker cooperatives. And building it
Speaker 1: is a fantastic way to build worker power. Unions are great,
Speaker 1: but I am far more interested in creating our own things.
Speaker 1: So that's my pitch for worker cooperatives. Oh, I could
Speaker 1: turn that into a pitch for my own worker cooperative.
Speaker 1: I am part of an anarchist publishing cooperative called Strangers
Speaker 1: in a Tangle Wilderness, and we put out a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff, books and zines. We mail out a zine
Speaker 1: every single month to our Patreon backers at ten dollars
Speaker 1: or more a month, and it could be all kinds
Speaker 1: of things. The most recent one that I got in
Speaker 1: the mail from us I'm not in charge of this part,
Speaker 1: is called I Don't Know. It's about how to throw
Speaker 1: DIY parties and shows and stuff. But we also do
Speaker 1: like fiction, and we do poetry, and we do all
Speaker 1: kinds of how to's and fun things. And we have
Speaker 1: a bunch of different podcasts. We have one that I
Speaker 1: am a co host of called Live Like the World
Speaker 1: Is Dying about individual and community preparedness. We have one
Speaker 1: called The Spectacle, which is for people who love movies
Speaker 1: and hate cops. And we have one called Strangers and
Speaker 1: Entangled Wlderness, which is actually the monthly zine read to
Speaker 1: you by a voice actor and then an interview with
Speaker 1: the person who creates it. And so you can check
Speaker 1: out all that stuff. Almost everything we do is available
Speaker 1: for free as well. Books we make available digitally as
Speaker 1: cheap as we can. We have some audio books and
Speaker 1: including some of my own books, Strangers, Entangled, Wilderness, That's
Speaker 1: My Plug, a Order Cooperative, and see you Wednesday. Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
Speaker 1: our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.