Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux [Giroux, Henry A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612058641
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Predatory Neoliberalism as a Global Force

Henry A. Giroux Interviewed by Michael Nevradakis for Dialogos

MICHAEL NEVRADAKIS: Let’s begin with a discussion about some topics you’ve spoken and written extensively about … neoliberalism and what you have described as “casino capitalism.” How have these ideas taken hold politically and intellectually across the world in recent years?

HENRY GIROUX: I think since the 1970s it’s been the predominant ideology, certainly in Western Europe and North America. As is well known, it raised havoc in Latin America, especially in Argentina and Chile and other states. It first gained momentum in Chile as a result of the Chicago Boys. Milton Friedman and that group went down there and basically used the Pinochet regime as a type of Petri dish to produce a whole series of policies. But I think if we look at this very specifically, we’re talking about a lot of things.

We’re talking about an ideology marked by the selling off of public goods to private interests; the attack on social provisions; the rise of the corporate state organized around privatization, free trade, and deregulation; the celebration of self-interests over social needs; the claim that government is the problem if it gets in the way of profits for the megacorporations and financial services; the investing in prisons rather than schools; the modeling of education after the culture of business; the insistence that exchange values are the only values worthy of consideration, the celebration of profit-making as the essence of democracy coupled with the utterly reductionist notion that consumption is the only applicable form of citizenship. But even more than that, neoliberal ideology upholds the notion that the market serves as a model for structuring all social relations: not just the economy, but the governing of all of social life.

I think that as a mode of governance, it is really quite dreadful because it tends to produce identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a kind of “survival of the fittest” ethic, grounded in the notion of the free, possessive individual and committed to the right of individual and ruling groups to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social cost.

That’s a key issue. I mean, this is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the 1 percent but also operates off the assumption that economics can divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn’t have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility, that these things get in the way. And I think the consequences of these policies across the globe have caused immense suffering, misery, and the spread of massive inequalities in wealth, power, and income. These massive dislocations have also produced serious mental health crises. We are witnessing a number of people who are committing suicide because they have lost their pensions, jobs, and dignity. We are witnessing a ruthless attack on the welfare state; we see the privatization of public services; the dismantling of the connection between private

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