Fuck Neoliberalism

A great theme of Neoliberalism is the benefit of competition. Competition is the main tool in the neoliberal tool box, so they treat most problems like nails. Primary and secondary education doesn't benefit from competition and yet the focus is relentlessly on offering "choice". If people only have a choice, the arguments go, then the competition will improve the poorer schools. In fact it simply makes the poorer schools worse off.

This idea about competition is Victorian. It is evolution, but from Huxley rather than Darwin. It was Huxley who coined the term "survival of the fittest". This was part of a culture in which the British Empire systematically exploited its own people and the people of all the places it conquered. This created a huge class of people who never had to work for a living, including most Victorian intellectuals.

The rapacious Empire needed some kind of intellectual justification. Some moral justification came from Christianity and the accompanying white supremacy that continues to dog Christian Europe. But it was the atheistic intellectuals who provided the ongoing arguments for the present day bourgeoisie: Utilitarianism, Mercantilism, and economic Liberalism.

In fact Neoliberalism can be seen as a reaction against the rise of social liberalism in the post-war years, especially in America. As Lewis Powell puts it in his famous Memo to the American Chamber of Commerce (1971):

No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.

One of his big concerns was curbs on doing business to prevent them damaging the environment.

"Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to 'consumerism' or to the 'environment.'" - Lewis Powell, 1971 

The conservative businessmen of the USA did what Powell suggested, though many critics suggest that his memo is more descriptive than prescriptive. Conservative businessmen began to buy up the news media and appoint editors sympathetic to their cause; they bought chairs in business studies and founded universities which taught economic liberalism; they funded PhD programs; they founded think-tanks which employed the new PhDs to keep the conservative businessmen's message in the public eye and to lobby politicians; they spent billions lobbying politicians and employed armies of lawyers, psychologists, speech writers, and other graduates to shape their message for maximum effectiveness.