neoliberal playbook:

(1) Degrade public health by underfunding and corruption,
(2) watch it fail in a very public test, and
(3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can go directly to coercion!

05/10/2021

 

 left’s favorite floating signifier: neoliberalism.[Vulgar Marxism].

To grease the wheels of accumulation, every president from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush helped build out a new model of governance that
cut corporate taxes,
dismantled welfare,
deregulated industry,
broke labor power, and
promoted financialization.

This is the original meaning of what is now the left’s favorite floating signifier: neoliberalism. In George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, a preacher explains the emergence of the undead by intoning: “When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” Well, when there is no more labor to profitably exploit in the periphery, capital will deepen exploitation in the core. If capitalism is a vampire that “only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” as Marx described it, then neoliberalism is a zombie, returning to feast on the flesh of loved ones after picking the bones of strangers clean.