The Rise of Ethical Authoritarianism

TaimuRadiu · 14 de Ene, 2025

>… when you strip away the glitter, the lies, the incredibly well polished false promises and the manipulative half-truths, what all of this actually is, is Bogdanov’s Scientific Socialism - utilising Lenin’s New Economic Policy approach to economics.

You mean things that didn't work? NGOs have nothing at all to do with barely reintroduced capitalism anyway.

Alexander Thaut · 14 de Ene, 2025

Well folks, we're in a cyberpunk dystopia. I wonder what William Gibson thinks of that.

Drain Todger · 14 de Ene, 2025

Alexander Thaut dijo:
Well folks, we're in a cyberpunk dystopia. I wonder what William Gibson thinks of that.

We're basically just living through the plot of Deus Ex at this point.

Strix454 · 14 de Ene, 2025

Drain Todger dijo:
A key distinction in the corporatist model under fascism lies in the ownership of large enterprises, which communism prohibits. However, in practice, large enterprises in fascist regimes were tightly controlled by the state. Senior executives faced severe penalties for failing to comply with state directives,

The interesting historical observation is to examine the corporatist model created by the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s to the corporatist model under fascism. To look at how lager enterprises in the US were given legal monopolies in areas of business in exchange for becoming partners of the state. State in this case meaning the "democratic party" state.

And how this system persists to the present with the monopoly positions and state integration of various large tech companies.

Breadbassket · 14 de Ene, 2025

Strix454 dijo:
The interesting historical observation is to examine the corporatist model created by the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s to the corporatist model under fascism. To look at how lager enterprises in the US were given legal monopolies in areas of business in exchange for becoming partners of the state. State in this case meaning the "democratic party" state.

And how this system persists to the present with the monopoly positions and state integration of various large tech companies.

One must ask at what point does government-granted business cartels become something to vilify? Is it all bad or are only some aspects of it bad? The fascists of old picked their favorites and protected them from competition. Quite a few modern democracies on the other hand do the same for some industries and use their chosen businesses as ways to exploit legal loopholes.

I suppose at the very least the latter has the occasional trust-busting and the former doesn't, though that depends on who oversees such action and it can always be merely used as a threat to make sure private companies stay in line.

Strix454 · 14 de Ene, 2025

Breadbassket dijo:
One must ask at what point does government-granted business cartels become something to vilify?

In my case, I vilify them when they begin to act as the partners of one particular political party or ideology. They were bad within the historic American context based on the other assumption of the New Deal that the democratic party was THE ruling party and any other party was simply a token opposition.

Drain Todger · 14 de Ene, 2025

Strix454 dijo:
In my case, I vilify them when they begin to act as the partners of one particular political party or ideology. They were bad within the historic American context based on the other assumption of the New Deal that the democratic party was THE ruling party and any other party was simply a token opposition.

The duopoly in the US has an incentive to cozy up to big business for campaign funding and other perks. Big business, in turn, has an incentive to mirror their chosen party's politics as a form of quid pro quo. In the US, Silicon Valley is friends with the Democrats, and the Republicans are aligned with Big Oil, heavy industry, factories, et cetera.

Whenever the issue of Davos, the UN, the Club of Rome, and the Trilateral Commission pushing communitarian values on people is raised, people can't seem to decide if the boogeyman is communism or capitalism. This is all just bog-standard neoliberalism at work, though. The corpos are all-in on the dismantlement of our civil liberties and sovereignty, because they are run by rentier-aristocrats who expect to be exempt from the worst of it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/

7. Criticisms of Neoliberalism
This section covers criticisms of neoliberalism, but it leaves out a great many of them. The reason for this is that many of the most well-known criticisms of neoliberalism are simply criticisms of capitalism as such. Accordingly, this section focuses on criticisms aimed directly at neoliberalism.

7.1 Ethos Criticisms
Many criticize neoliberalism for structuring society around the market, commodifying market relations, and in general manipulating people into serving the ends of what is best for commerce or economic production. In this way, neoliberalism builds society around a cash nexus. But unlike full capitalism, neoliberalism does so in a covert way that takes serious scholarly work to demonstrate. Neoliberalism itself is not an ethos, as noted above, but neoliberalism might be seen to give rise to an excessively capitalist/transactional relationship between persons. While she rejects this characterization of neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte argues that it is often characterized as

an amoral economic ideology that subordinates all values to an economic rationality, (2019: 19)

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following a number of others, like Wendy Brown (2015). Here the analysis draws heavily on Foucault (2010) where neoliberalism is said to reduce practical rationality to economic considerations, where

there is no difference between the infraction of the highway code and a premeditated murder. (2015: 253–4)

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Indeed, one might make the more worrisome argument that neoliberalism leads not so much to selfish attitudes but towards bigoted, hierarchical, and traditional ones (Brown 2019: 7, 37).

7.2 Inequality
One central concern about neoliberalism is that, even if it boosts economic growth, it also increases economic inequality, which is problematic in several ways. Two kinds of inequality criticisms are generally offered. The more well-known are the empirical criticisms that neoliberal regimes lead to dangerous inequalities just from the data, such as Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital (2014), which holds that economic inequality is growing and is a threat to democracy, much as Martin Gilens’s (2014) work on inequality and the responsiveness of democratic policy-making to the richest 10%.

The other kind of critique of inequality under neoliberalism is derived from Rawls’s work. As is well-known, Rawls rejected welfare-state capitalism and a more robust form of capitalism which he called the system of natural liberty on the grounds that they do not satisfy Rawls’s two principles of justice (Rawls 2001; O’Neill and Williamson 2014). Rawls argued that even welfare-state capitalism cannot protect the value of political liberty or realize its priority (Rawls 1993 [2005]) because it allows for the accumulation of capital in too few hands, which leads to economic domination of politics, and shuts many people out of the goods of owning and operating at least some of the capital they need to enjoy the worth of their constitutional liberties.

Another kind of inequality that has been raised as a concern for neoliberal societies is the imbalance of political power within the firm between bosses and workers. Elizabeth Anderson (2019) has argued, for instance, that this is a form of tyrannical “private government” and that the institutions defended by neoliberals (though she does not use this term) are insufficient to equalize the freedoms of capitalists and workers.

7.3 Undermining Democracy
A very common criticism of neoliberalism is that it undermines democracy. This might be because high economic inequality undermines democracy, as Martin Gilens (2014) argues in Affluence and Influence and defended by Larry Bartels (2008 [2016]). Another way in which neoliberalism could undermine democracy is by prioritizing the protection of classical liberal economic liberties, like the right to private property. These can lead to restrictions on the ability of democratic citizens to choose to redistribute wealth. This problem is especially acute given Hayek’s favorable view of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Hayek hoped that Chile would become a democracy, but he believed that the Pinochet coup had allowed Chile to dodge the bullet of democratic socialism as advocated by Salvador Allende, Pinochet’s predecessor. There is a tension between the liberalism and the democratic commitments within neoliberalism that in practice tends to mean that democracy suffers.

7.4. Economic Irrationality
Neoliberal regimes rely heavily on market mechanisms, and neoliberals claim that markets are efficient or at least highly economically productive (neoliberals disagree about how to characterize and explain market productivity and efficiency). But behavioral economists (Kahneman 2013; Ariely 2010) have identified various biases in human reasoning that undermine the homo economicus model that neoliberals are said to use to model and predict economic development (though as shown above, neoliberals have a subtler relationship with homo economicus). See entry on bounded rationality.

7.5 Keynesian Rebuttals
Neoliberalism, as noted, arose in part in response to the dominance of Keynesian macro-economic policy. But Keynesians, most notably Paul Krugman (2012), have struck back by arguing that neoliberal criticisms of Keynesian policy fail. This is especially true because neoliberals often claimed that fiscal policy is ineffective stimulus vis-à-vis monetary stimulus. During the Great Recession, Krugman argued that the Federal Reserve had lowered interest rates so much that further monetary stimulus would fail, and so fiscal policy had to intervene.

Many of the criticisms of neoliberal regimes engaging in “austerity” during the Great Recession are based in an underlying Keynesian model, as the critics of government spending cuts during the Great Recession were often based on the idea that they hurt the economic prospects of the poor, whereas according to neoliberals, shrinking government spending during a recession is not harmful to the poor for a variety of reasons. See entry on philosophy of economics.

7.6 Trickle-Down Economics
One common charge against neoliberalism is its false promise of “trickle-down” benefits of economic growth to the poor from the rich (Quiggin 2012). Strictly speaking, trickle-down economics is not a genuine school of economic thought, nor would Hayek, Friedman, or Buchanan have accepted that description of their views. They did argue that all would benefit from the prosperity brought about through the free market, but this was not necessarily because the rich would benefit first. Hayek (1960 [2011]) argued that there is a kind of trickle-down effect for the prices of goods and services, where luxuries for the rich become commonalities for the poor because manufacturers figure out how to lower prices to broaden market penetration over time. And indeed, it is standard in mainstream economics to hold that as businesses accumulate capital, they can afford to pay their workers more and so can bid workers away from other companies. That process often involves increasing wages, so more capital in the hands of the rich can lead to higher wages for the poor through fairly ordinary causal channels. All the same, many neoliberal officials promised gains for the poor that did not often materialize.

7.7 Libertarian Criticisms
Neoliberalism and libertarianism are distinct, if related views. And in some respects, the neoliberals were libertarian under some conditions. Indeed, Buchanan thought anarchy was the morally best regime, even if it was infeasible in practice. But it is still common for libertarians to criticize more moderate libertarians for allowing any redistribution of wealth, such as Murray Rothbard (1973, 1982 [2002]), Robert Nozick (1974), or for prioritizing democracy over more epistocratic or elite-leaning forms of political decision-making, such as Jason Brennan (2016).

7.8 Colonialist Criticisms
It is common in some circles to argue that neoliberal regimes are colonialist in character, though in an unusually direct way. The thought is that neoliberalism was adopted by regimes in the Anglophone world and in much of Western Europe, and that this formed an international elite consensus about how economies around the world should be run. This led to a “Washington Consensus” that caused policy interventions that interfered with the democratic governance of developing nations, increased inequality, and made the poor worse off. For comprehensive discussion, see Whyte (2019: chapters 3–5).

7.9 Populist/Nationalist Criticisms
It is increasingly common for right-wing populists to criticize neoliberal policy on the grounds that it emphasizes free trade and free immigration lead to a range of deleterious consequences, from the shrinking of the industrial base of rich democratic countries like the United States, such as that advanced by Patrick Deneen (2019). A stronger form of this concern is that allowing immigrants from different cultures to acquire citizenship within a country will harm or degrade the culture and politics of that country.

7.10 Feminist Criticisms
Some, like Nancy Fraser (2017), worry that neoliberalism has co-opted feminism by making the feminist ideal into one that serves as a kind of false market-based meritocracy, where the aim of feminism is, for instance, that woman who has well-paying career, and at its highest ideal, female entrepreneurship and becoming CEOs of a company. This left feminism unable to attend to the needs and interests of women who neoliberalism has harmed. See entry on feminist perspectives on globalization.

7.11 Remaining Criticisms
Neoliberalism is subject to other objections, but many resemble problems for other liberal democratic theories, such as the conflict between liberal rights (however understood) and democracy—the “procedure-substance” dispute in the deliberative democracy literature, as well as how any sufficiently liberal approach to associational freedom takes the freedom of marginalized groups seriously given the prospect for local oppression. Neoliberals have diverse conceptions of freedom, though typically negative, with all the standard criticisms those views invite. And, then, to the extent that neoliberalism like Hayek and Buchanan adopt a contractarian framework for justifying institutions, their defenses will inherit all the difficulties with contractarianism.

wtfNeedSignUp · 14 de Ene, 2025

Drain Todger dijo:
The warning is clear: vigilance is imperative. The public must scrutinize the origins, motives, and applications of these ethical frameworks and demand accountability from those who wield power in their name. Without resistance, the world risks descending into a system of global control, where ethics serve not as a guide to justice but as a mechanism for subjugation.

This is the biggest fail of the article and others like it. Vigilance doesn't help shit, at best you could flip the parties and make the elites go one step backwards in gaming the system, but the only true cure is violence.

The Rise of Ethical Authoritarianism - Communism never quit, they just started calling it communitarianism instead

TaimuRadiu

Kaiserin

Alexander Thaut

Viva Venezuela!

Drain Todger

ACKNOWLEDGE // SUBMIT

Strix454

Breadbassket

Strix454

Drain Todger

ACKNOWLEDGE // SUBMIT

7. Criticisms of Neoliberalism

7.1 Ethos Criticisms

7.2 Inequality

7.3 Undermining Democracy

7.4. Economic Irrationality

7.5 Keynesian Rebuttals

7.6 Trickle-Down Economics

7.7 Libertarian Criticisms

7.8 Colonialist Criticisms

7.9 Populist/Nationalist Criticisms

7.10 Feminist Criticisms

7.11 Remaining Criticisms

wtfNeedSignUp

The Rise of Ethical Authoritarianism - Communism never quit, they just started calling it communitarianism instead