Adam Kotsko’s “Neoliberalism’s Demons”

“Neoliberalism is an attempt to impose a weird kind of moral order on the world, which promises limitless free choice but actually sets the vast majority of us up to fail.”

[blackagendareport.com]

How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

{This also helps us to make sense of the ways that Trump and other right-wing reactionaries are actually much more neoliberal than they want to let on. }

Combined with trickle down it has been very profitable for our representatives and the ruling class that own them.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

{I would not presume to tell activists how (or even whether) they should use my book. What I hope it provides, though, is first of all a language that captures the overlapping mechanisms that the neoliberal order uses to trap us, to “hook” us with its own destructive standards, and to get us to look at any bad outcome as somehow our own fault rather than a systemic problem.}

Well, this correlates with my previous statements on how aligning your movement with any realm of the establishment is futile. An issue well covered by this site (BAR) and (WSWS). It also results in very contradicted measures that set them up for backlash towards stated purpose.

For example. A couple of months ago I posted and article, I believe also from (BAR), on BLM that suggested there was a rift in the group where some were speaking about moving another direction. This might indicate that the establishment has successfully managed to diminish the group within compliance on one side while another side seeks new direction. The results basically resemble what I recognize in the difference between the struggles of the DSA and Marxist. Where the DSA speaks Marxism but always leads their followers back to being a compliant arm of the democratic party. The true sense of democracy found in Marxism can not be found in the DSA as its agenda is towards change in a party that suppresses its own democracy.

Any sense of activism that reverts from the grass roots level to survival by unifying with an establishment party, taking funding from corporations, often those corporations being your initial opposition, or ruling class foundations and NGO's, always leads to diminished and controlled accomplishments.

{We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?}

{By contrast, I aim to show that neoliberalism was always about reinforcing patriarchal, heterosexist white supremacy from the very start.}

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

{The result has been a world where we are more aware than ever of the pressing problems of white supremacy, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction—and yet the political-economic system seems ever more incapable of delivering the solutions that people need and demand.}