THE ROLE OF ART Post Covid - 2
HOW NEOLIBERALISM CONTROL OUR LIVES & review of DANCES WITH WOLVES
I believe that artists must have a minimal understanding of the economic/ideological system we live under, hence this continuation from the previous 2 articles.
WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?
It is an ideological subspecies of Capitalism. Neoliberalism has transformed industrial economies into financial economies. It has turned human relationships into chargeable commodities and transformed our homes, once a bastion of memories, into profit making investments.
Neoliberals have forced the closure of American and British factories so that cheaper labour in totalitarian and anti-union countries can produce more for less. This has led to the devastation of working class communities in the US and the UK as well as in many other countries, along with intense poverty, drug addiction and hopelessness.
As rich financiers do not reinvest in the developed world’s real economy, (because profits made in the financial and money markets are greater), and because our politicians refuse to tax them appropriately, there is a huge shortage of cash for modernisation and the creation of jobs. Meanwhile automation, robotic engineering and advanced computer networks are eroding potential jobs at an increasing rate, all of which imply the spread of unemployment and a dim future for most of our young.
Neoliberals endlessly repeat that markets are best left free and unfettered by taxes, regulations, and other invasive state controls because they, the business community (ie the rich and powerful) know best how to develop economies and create wealth that tickles down to everyone. A comment by Ronald Reagan which has yet to be proven true.
NEOLIBERAL FAILURE
This leaves me asking how then, with all their knowledge, did they destroy the banking system along with our jobs and create widespread homelessness in 2008? Why is it that in the US, and to a degree in the UK, wages have been frozen (relative to costs) at 1980 levels? Why, as the world has become richer, have the middle and working classes been impoverished
in the last 40 years? Why have neoliberal policies created slower growth, greater inequality, and social unrest in most countries it has infected? Those countries, whose corrupt leaders have been bribed into employing neoliberal policies, have either stagnated for 40 years (as in sub-Sahara Africa), or become poorer by up to 30% of their pre-neoliberal worth (as in South America).
China, Singapore and a few others, who refused to fall under the horses of the neoliberal juggernaut, have succeeded in growing their economies.
WHAT IT MEANS TO ACCEPT IT
If you wish to return to the same old, same old this would mean:
•that you want we the people to pay for the reconstruction of corporations who have continued to destroy our planet,
•that you accept that they may pay such low wages (while making huge profits) while we have to supplement low waged workers with our tax money;
•you want the reconstruction of government programmes and the reinstitution of the same institutions that have been used to supress, to steal from and to empty citizen’s lives;
•you want to support the rentier class who get ever richer over renting to us houses, shops, factories, plant and warehouses that drain our wealth into their pockets;
•you would support an endlessly growing economy and useless consumption which would continue to overuse the resources of the planet;
•you would accept that the corporations will advertise us into deafness and blindness to convince us to eat the poisonous over processed non-food commodities they offer us which are now understood to increasingly create diabetes, obesity, many forms of cancer, tooth decay, skeletal disintegration, cardiovascular disease and other forms of non-contagious degenerative diseases;
•you would accept that in the UK over 4 million children (in the 5th riches country in the world) will continue go to bed every night underfed,
•that workers will have to work 2 jobs to make ends meet and still have to be supported by tour ax money because corporations will not pay decent wages;
•you will still pay over 2.5 times the shop value for your food via taxes to clean up the mess corporations make of the environment as they produce their toxic products;
•that you will continue to ignore that your silence allows the rich to use our military to kill other people’s children in order to own and operate their oil wells, pipelines,harbours, railways and shipping lanes;
•you will continue to support the class who sold off and closed down our industries so they could destroy the unions, eradicate the so called people’s parties - as the labour party in the UK and the ‘Democratic’ Party in the US - and that as they reduce the ownership of the people by buying off at very low rates our water, air, rails, airports, roads,beautiful old libraries, civic building and parks for their new ownership of what were our commons;
•that you will vote in the very people who continually turn us against our neighbours so that the divisions amongst the people will confuse and weaken the political challenges against the rulers who own and control educational publishing and a lot of the educational institutions, the media and its control of advertising, popular culture and the 24/7/365 media news and therefore what we believe to be true?
CHOICES
Or do you want people first, people not profits? Do you want new rules and institutions controlled by us, or their old institutions, rules and established oppressive institutions controlled by them?
•Do you want sensible, non-poisonous agriculture; or a return to using endless poisons on the land, caught by the breeze and carried by the rains into our water supplies, while all the time it covers our crops and is transmitted to us by the processed foods we eat?
•Do you want third rate, always late medicine or the best in the world for free?
The list of poisoning, unnecessary incarceration, poor education, lying media and politicians,oppressive institutions, the destruction of youth clubs and services, libraries, the slow uncaring dismantling and wear on our sewage systems, roads and rail, and most of our infrastructure is endless but day by day it is real.
•Do you want continually raised invisible taxes on your income while huge handouts of our tax money goes to corporations and the very wealthy?
All the above and much more is what this pernicious, vengeful and uncaring ruling class ideology has done to impoverish the working and middle classes while making the rich even more rich.
WHAT DO YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT?
You can have all the above by being quiet in this coming post-covid period, or you can learn to say ‘No’ and to resist until the force and resolve of the people is simply to great to resist.
Meanwhile, the neoliberals want our state-owned goods and services to be privatized into their hands. They want all regulations squashed (conceded to the financial industries previous to 2008, which led to the collapse).
•Do you really want your local water quality and safety determined by self-interested corporations?
•Do you really want hospital corporations determining who can and can’t operate on you?
•Do you really want an even more privatised justice system?
•Do you really want food corporations determining what you can safely eat?
etc, etc, etc,.
They want minimum investment in infrastructure unless their corporations financially benefit, as for instance in ‘the war against drugs” (read as the war against young black men) and their huge contacts for building and running giant penitentiaries (where cheap labour is contracted out to corporations). They want the dismantling of the welfare state so the undeserving (read ‘oppressed’)must stand on their own two feet.
NEOLIBERAL INHUMANITY
As neoliberals new normal disdains and dismisses those who are not wealthy;
they are revulsed by the idea that they must share their wealth in the form of taxes
to build infrastructure, pay for education, and help the poor, ill and elderly.
They are disgusted by the very concept of equality, fairness, kindness and anything that could be considered humanitarian. And they insist that the only thing of value is financial wealth, and that community bonds, intellectual development, education, the arts and beauty are not a part of what they count as having value.
By the determination of sociologists and psychologists, neoliberals are not dissimilar to murders in that they are sociopaths, incapable of connecting the outcome of events with their own actions.
The neoliberals understand the need to control what people assume to be given truths, to control how people form new goals and aspirations. In particular, they wish to convince people that greed is good, that consumption (destruction), as the major part of one’s identity is more important than how we, as producers (creators), relate to our communities. They especially want to convince us that our individual ‘Me’ is more important than our collective ‘We’, and that for self-understanding,individual psychology is more important than our communal history.
With all their control over the internet, education, educational publishing,
the popular culture’s creation and dissemination, and the 24/7/365 news which they select, edit and present to us, they try to convince us that the so-called ‘free market’ must be even more free, that the economy is run on the basis of science (not true), that decisions are made by wise (mostly) men who are superior to us,
and that those decisions are for our own good, although beyond our understanding (not true).
ELITISM
The reality is that all economic policies are made by small handfuls of very wealthy people and their intellectual think tank pawns, (for instance the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Heritage Foundation, Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade) who are used to writing governmental policy both in the US and in the UK.
How then have people survived? Neoliberals invented the credit card which some people could have (to fuel a consumer boom, bad for individuals) allowing them to increase consumption (good for corporations, bad for individuals) while paying huge amounts of interest (good for banks, bad for individuals) and becoming mindlessly tantalized by gadgets (Xbox – good for distraction, bad for individuals)
and mindlessly entertained by their popular culture (box sets – good for brain washing, bad for individuals).
Ultimately all decisions are made in their own favour and against ours. The decisions are political because they define the life of society, families and individuals. They are neither necessary nor inevitable and as Covid has shown us, we are in fact naturally helpful to our brothers and sisters, we are naturally communal and deeply miss our contacts, that the low paid workers are invaluable to the nature of our societies, that much of our lives are defined by our community, that religion and race are meaningless when it comes to questions of life and death, and the future may look upon the neoliberal past as a tragic moral haemorrhage in human history.
RECLAIMING YOUR HUMANITY
Many of us can now see what the economist Ha-Joon Chang referred to as the need for individuals to claim their own economic citizenship, to take power back from the self-interested and replace it with a humanistic communal morality with kindness at the centre of every political, economic, social and cultural decision inside a pro-active community based in real democratic principals.
If it weren’t for people’s resistance against the bankers, industrialists and land owners of the past, and against the present worst of humanity in the neoliberals, we would still have slavery, indentured servants, children working in mines and factories, no national health system,no support for the poor and unemployed, woman without the vote and continually in the control of fathers and husbands, no public libraries or education, and we will continue to have an increase in surveillance, the continued evisceration of the middle and working classes, the continuance of unending wars, and therefore, our young killing other people’s young, the increased para-militarization of the police, the on-going destruction of the earth’s ecology, the ever-increasing imprisonment of black and brown people, the lowering of educational standards, the alienation of experts, scientists, intellectuals and artists, (those who manifest plurality by offering alternative ideas and views while reminding us of our humanity).
It’s your choice. Do you want to return to the comatose world of the murderous and destructive Neoliberal new normal or do you want a better future?
If the former, I believe you should accept the fact that you will probably be signing the death certificates for many of you grandchildren.
It’s your choice. Stand up and join hands with others or return to your sleepwalking, but don’t bother to think of yourself as an artist - perhaps as a decorator, an entertainer on one of their cruise liners,or a propagandist for their false stories.
NEXT INSTALMENT
For artists to understand how to use their voice and indeed what their voice may be, they need to think more about their power and role in society and the role of art in the transformation of society.
REVIEW: Kevin Costner’s 4 hour re-release of DANCES WITH WOLVES
Last week, across two evenings, I watched the renewed 4 hour director’s cut of DANCES WITH WOLVES (free on Amazon Prime), starring and directed by Kevin Costner. Of the many dramas and documentaries I watch, it was a film that had stayed with me for years, but I couldn’t remember why until I watched it again in this worthwhile recut of the original.
STONE AGE VS MECHANIZED ‘CIVILIZATION’
With the inclusion of additional scenes, Costner elaborated on the village life of the Sioux tribe and the brutal mendacity of the American invaders. It’s a study of Western expansion into areas of Stone Age tribes, not unlike Britain’s incursions into India, Africa and Southeast Asia, and Spanish and Portuguese incursions into Mexico, Central and South America, and of course Brazil’s destruction of the Amazon rainforest peoples today. Costner stays on the side of rightfully revealing, action by action the horrors preformed of the US Army against innocent people (shades of Vietnam) but he also gives a 19th century view of a man who had been driven mad in the intense battles of the American Civil War, considered one of the most violent conflicts in history. It was a precursor, in tactical terms, of World War I.
WISDOM VS BRUTALITY
His character witnesses the kindness and wisdom of the tribal people while being appalled by their moments of brutal violence. Of course, it opens questions about what we are as human beings. Were we better off as the brutal but free and innocent hunter gatherers, or now as oppressed and alienated automatons in a world of competitive nation states with their own cunning brutality?
THE DISCOURSE VS THE LEVIATHAN
These arguments go back to the 18th century and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s DISCOURSE in which he argued that the development of agriculture and claims of ownership over land which all people has previously owned, destroyed freedom; and Thomas Hobbes’ LEVIATHAN, in which he wrote that post agricultural civilization’s creation of nation states with their absolute power, were needed to keep order over brutish mankind.
SELF DISCOVERY
In DANCES WITH WOLVES we watch as the main character, traumatized by his role in the Civil War, reverts in part to his primordial self and in that he discovers freedom, an ability to love and recognises who he actually is. All of this revealed within a sensitivity to landscape, light and other animals that also asks questions about how can we tolerate what we are doing to ourselves, other species and the earth. Definitely worth watching.