Contesting the Global Order by Gregory P. Williams;

Author:Gregory P. Williams; [Williams;, Gregory P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438479675
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2020-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

We Must Change Our Expectations, Not Give In

Anderson was unlike Wallerstein in that his thoughts on the relative stability of global capitalism depended on the strength of anticapitalist organizations. Whether such groups came in the form of nationalist revolutionaries, political parties, or other anticapitalist organizations, Anderson believed that people were necessary for the dismantling of capitalism (at least in the near term). Though not a supporter of the one-party regimes in Eastern Europe, Anderson became more pessimistic after the fall of the communist parties. He watched as the free market swept over Eastern Europe virtually overnight. He did not share Wallerstein’s sentiment that Moscow had been part of the capitalist system all along. The following decade of capitalist advancement—geographically, culturally, ideologically—only cemented his pessimism about the future. For him, the greatest disappointment of the 1990s, however, was that too many of his fellow intellectuals seemed to have given up.

The Right’s great asset was that it had developed a portrait of the world that was accessible to the wider public. Right intellectuals such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Thomas Friedman, and Francis Fukuyama, expressed their views in a confident and readable style.41 Inspired by the likes of Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and Friedrich von Hayek, conservatives wrote about the benefits of social order, supported neoliberal economics, and desired to slow the spread of popular sovereignty.42 Anderson did not think much of the quality of their ideas. (Of his conservative contemporaries, only Fukuyama was difficult to take on.)43 Nonetheless, these intellectuals, Anderson warned, were not marginal thinkers: even though they received less academic attention than centrists (or even some leftists), the Right had the ear of power.44

Furthermore, in Anderson’s opinion, the Right had a willing and captive audience ready to devour its message. The culture of uncritical consumerism, spread via television and computers, primed the public for promotions of free market capitalism.45 He believed consumerism was dangerous because it was promoted as a form of utopianism, with no room for thinking about noncapitalist utopias or realities. The utopia of consumerism, or “virtualized utopia,”46 told the public that the current reality was the best of all possible realities, a message easily summarized:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.