Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

Opinion: Will Putinism lead to cyberwar? – The Madera Tribune

Weve all been following the war that is being waged in Ukraine, and it has become fashionable to refer to the devastation of the former Soviet satellite as Putins war. That is, perhaps, the most apt colloquialism, because it implies that the incursion into Ukraine is not the wish of the Russian people, but rather that of its president, who craves more power to complement his tremendous wealth.

As I watch the evening news on television and see images of wanton destruction and senseless killing of civilians, I ask myself a simple question which seems to elude a simple answer: Why?

If Russian troops could have simply marched in and claimed the territory for Russia, as they did in Crimea, in 2014, what would the ruling powers of Russia have gained? Even in that relatively bloodless coup, cost/reward calculations do not compute. As Yuval Noah Harari, Professor of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, points out in his brilliant 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Tourist resorts in the Crimea and decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk and Donetsk hardly balance the price of financing the war, and they certainly do not offset the costs of capital flight and international sanctions.

In the 21st Century, limited wars seem to be tolerated by the global economy. The recognition of a global economy began to take root in the 1970s with the publication of Immanuel Wallersteins world-system analysis, which posits that there is really only one economic system, and that is capitalism. At the time, this was best exemplified by the wealthy nations, notably those of North America and Western Europe, as well as Australia and Japan.

During the past 50 years, countries like China, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and a number of wealthy Middle-Eastern countries, like Dubai, have become members of the single, global economic system. The system is so pervasive that limited wars like Darfur (2003), the Libyan and Yemeni Civil Wars of 2011, or even the ISIL insurgency in Tunisia in 2015 dont disrupt the global economy.

So, the Russian take-over of Crimea, which drew very little resistance from the people of the area, many if not most of whom still maintained their allegiance to Russia, attracted little attention from the great powers of the world-wide economic system. And the fact that these limited wars had little impact on the amassed wealth of the oligarchs throughout the world may have at least some significance.

It has been documented that the wealth of the richest people in the world increased during the past decade, despite an estimated 46 limited wars in 2014, 43 in 2015, and 38 in 2016. Writing in 2018, Harari stated that Putin knew far better than anyone else that military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century, and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war.

Putins Russia is not Stalins Russia, nor is it the Russia over which Peter the Great ruled. It was greatly weakened by decades of communist ideology, the expenses of the Cold War, and a decade of being bogged down in Afghanistan, from which the United States should have learned a lesson. Since the Afghanistan debacle, Russias politico-economic reality has shifted from communism to Putinism.

Despite perceived alliances with China and North Korea, modern Russia largely stands alone, and it is ruled by the iron fist of Vladimir Putin. So far, Putin has been backed by a host of Russian oligarchs who have become fabulously wealthy in a supposedly communist society and socialist economy. What communist/socialist system would permit some people to have palaces with water-front views from which they would be able to admire their hundred-million-dollar yachts while working-class people struggle to get from paycheck to paycheck?

Russia, as the core of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century when heavy industry, fueled by a centralized economic system, produced trucks, tanks, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. But today, as Harari points out, information technology and biotechnology are more important than heavy industry, but Russia excels in neither. Its current economy relies overwhelmingly on natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas. The appeal of the USSR to poorer nations was based on the theoretical appeal of communism as much as the vast reach of the Red Army. In contrast, Putinism has little to offer to Cubans, Vietnamese, or even French intellectuals.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States detonated the first atomic bomb above Hiroshima and, three days later, the second over Nagasaki. The use of these now-primitive nuclear weapons caused the death of between 129,000 and 226,000 people mostly civilians. The devastating effects of nuclear warfare were understood worldwide, and at a visceral level.

Other powerful nations were working on developing the same destructive capabilities during WWII, and it wasnt long before they were successful. As Harari points out, It is no coincidence that ever since Hiroshima, superpowers have never fought one another directly, instead engaging in what (for them) were low-stakes conflicts. When I was in college, the professor who taught a class in social disorganization referred to this phenomenon as mutual deterrence.

War between superpowers which had nuclear capability became counterproductive. If A were to launch nuclear weapons at B, it was a foregone conclusion that B would retaliate, ensuring the destruction of both. In the 1960s, U.S.S.R. tried an end run, building missile bases in Cuba, a hitherto technologically low-level threat to U.S. security. It was only level-headed, yet forceful response on the part of the United States that averted a tragedy.

Since then, certainly wars have been fought, but the real focus of attention has been on financial and technological development. Consider this, those countries that lost WWII Germany, Italy, and Japan have experienced both economic and technological miracles. And none of these countries has developed nuclear weapons.

While concerns about the United States getting sucked into a hot war in Ukraine cannot be dismissed out of hand, it is hoped that the effect of nuclear mutual deterrence will hold. However, the fear in this third decade of the 21st century should be of cyberwarfare. Within milliseconds, such a conflict could be brought to California, or Illinois, or New York, shutting down airports, wreaking havoc on power grids, disrupting computer databases.

If such an attack were to be coordinated among an axis of potential enemies, like Russia, North Korea, and China, the effects would be so swift that cyber mutual deterrence might not be possible. And the war would be won not by destroying the enemy, but by disabling it.

While I sympathize with the people of Ukraine and I support our economic and materiel contributions, I hope that our leaders will avoid any breach of diplomacy that could draw us into either nuclear or cyber war, regardless of what combination of allies or enemies might develop. And I hope that Putin keeps it in mind that, while he has a militia with cyber competency, so do we. But the U.S. also has a huge civilian force of computer experts; that element is woefully lacking under Putinism.

Jim Glynn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology. He may be contacted at j_glynn@att.net.

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Opinion: Will Putinism lead to cyberwar? - The Madera Tribune

With new-look flag, Forward Blocs tiger takes the leap: Communism to Subhasism – The Indian Express

The All India Forward Bloc (AIFB), which was founded by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in 1939, recently decided to drop hammer and sickle from its flag, while retaining the iconic image of leaping tiger against a red background on it.

The decision has been taken as part of the AIFBs proposed move to return to its roots, marking an ideological shift from communism to Subhasism the party founders ideology of socialism according to the party leadership.

Netaji had himself selected the design of the AIFBs flag with a leaping tiger on a background of tricolour which was also the flag of the Azad Hind government. Subsequently, reflecting the influence of the communist ideology over it, the party inserted hammer and sickle and red background to its flag in 1949.

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Nearly 82 years after that event, the AIFB leadership has now decided to effect a change in the partys ideology, dispensing with globally-known icons of communism hammer and sickle while retaining the elements of leaping tiger and red backdrop on the flag.

The AIFBs West Bengal state secretary Naren Chatterjee said that the new party flag will be hoisted on July 22 the day 82 years ago, in 1939, when the partys first all-India session was held in Mumbai, where its constitution and programme were adopted. Subhas Chandra had resigned from the Congress presidentship on April 29, 1939, and on May 3, 1939, he declared the formation of the Forward Bloc.

Our National Council had a meeting at Bhubaneswar last week, where more than three hundred delegates were present and 46 delegates participated in the discussions. During the conclave, the

National Council decided to make these changes to our flag, Chatterjee told The Indian Express.

Asked why the party felt the need to redesign its flag now, Chatterjee said, A majority of our party leaders think that the concept of communist international has gone. Communists are moving towards a socialist position. Hammer and sickle have also become obsolete. Farmers now use cutter machines instead of sickles and workers also do not use hammers. So, we decided to shift towards the socialist approach from our communist position.

He said the party flag will retain the leaping tiger and red background since red colour symbolises the sacrifice of our martyrs and leaping tiger is the symbol of courage that was introduced by Netaji.

A section of the AIFB leaders, however, said there are some other reasons behind the move as well.

A senior party leader said, Forward Bloc has been part of the Left Front under the CPI(M) leadership for about four decades. This increased its dependence on the communist party. Hammer and sickle were introduced to the party flag at the Puri Congress in 1949. The upsurge of Soviet Union and other communist countries and the concept of communist international had probably driven our leadership towards it.

Chatterjee made it clear that Our party will now also shift from the communist ideology and grow only with the ideology of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

A section of the AIFB leaders believe that the move would help the party to gain a firmer footing in some states at a time when the Left parties have been losing their ground virtually everywhere across the country.

The AIFB has also shrunk in the country over the decades. Currently, the party does not have any legislator in West Bengal, with its vote share in various recent elections plummeting to barely 1-2 per cent in the state.

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With new-look flag, Forward Blocs tiger takes the leap: Communism to Subhasism - The Indian Express

Barbaric war against Ukraine underscores need for the memorial to the victims of communist Russia: Kolga, Grod and Klimkowski in the Star -…

This article originally appeared in the Star.

By Marcus Kolga, Paul Grod, and Ludwik Klimkowski, April 13, 2022

A recent edition of The Economist magazine, symbolically titled The Stalinization of Russia, has rightly termed Vladimir Putin a 21st century Stalin.

What is even more important to understand is that the primary driving ideological force behind Russias invasion of Ukraine is the glorification of the Soviet Union and its communist leadership, including Josef Stalin.

Russias war against Ukraine and its hostility toward the democratic West have their roots directly in Russias communist past, which is why it is important today to recognize communisms dark legacy and commemorate its victims.

The history of communism is the history of conquest and subjugation of independent peoples to the rule of a repressive centralized dictatorship. After the end of the First World War, Vladimir Lenin attempted to impose Moscows rule on the newly independent republics including Ukraine and Poland, with the aim of eventually carrying out a world revolution in the entirety of Europe and annihilating whole classes of people deemed counter-revolutionary.

Stalin continued this policy of colonial expansion, signing an agreement to carve up Europe and co-ordinate the start of the Second World War with Adolf Hitler in 1939. The agreement allowed Stalin to invade and annex the Baltic States, half of Poland, a portion of Romania, and he then invaded Finland. Stalins liberation of Central and Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation served as a template for Putins current barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where civilians faced mass murder, rape, looting and destruction by the Russian Soviet Red Army.

The nations that fell under Soviet communist rule were subjected to terror and devastating social and economic reorganization. In the name of a Marxist utopia, communist dictators abolished civil and property rights, confiscated homes, farms and businesses, conducted mass arrests, executions, deportations of undesirables and implemented a policy of systemic repressions.

Lenins Red Terror and class purges, Stalins genocide of the Ukrainian people (Holodomor), the Great Terror, the deadly collectivization of the farms, the mass deportations of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and others and the war crimes committed during the Second World War, such as the Katyn massacre of the Polish prisoners of war, are just some examples of Soviet communist crimes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the individuals and the organizations responsible for these crimes were never brought to justice in Russia and their victims were never officially recognized.

On the contrary, Putins government has been whitewashing Russias past and glorifying its communist leaders. Like Putin himself, much of his inner circle are in fact former functionaries of the KGB, the secret police that carried out mass executions during communist times. Putin and his advocates make it no secret that they aspire to resurrect the Soviet Union and see Stalin as their role model.

Given all this, it is not surprising that Putins Russia has culminated in invading Ukraine, an independent democratic state.

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism, A Land of Refuge is the only project in Canada that seeks to commemorate the tens of millions of victims of communism. It is a collaboration between many ethnic communities across Canada, whose members found refuge in our country after surviving the violence of communist rule in their homelands.

However, the memorial has faced many challenges and is still waiting to see the light of day, 14 years since its inception. Despite the expressions of support from federal politicians, the remaining stages to complete the project are again delayed.

A new act of abhorrent injustice is being committed today in Europe by Putins regime. It has claimed lives of thousands of victims and made millions flee their homes. It is time for the memorial to open to the public as a place to commemorate the victims, past and present.

Marcus Kolga is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Paul Grod is president of Ukrainian World Congress. Ludwik Klimkowski is chair of Tribute to Liberty, Memorial to the Victims of communism.

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Barbaric war against Ukraine underscores need for the memorial to the victims of communist Russia: Kolga, Grod and Klimkowski in the Star -...

Bringing Jesus to the Communist world: Why American Evangelicals cannot fully abandon their Kremlin ally – Milwaukee Independent

The backlash was fast and direct. Graham had not solicited prayers for Ukraine, some observers commented. And he had rarely called on believers to pray for U.S. President Joe Biden.

A significant subset of the U.S. evangelical community, particularly white conservatives, has been developing a political and emotional alliance with Russia for almost 20 years. Those American believers, including prominent figures such as Graham and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice see Russia, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church as protectors of the faith, standing against attacks on traditional and family values. At the center is Russias spate of anti-LGBTQ laws, which have become a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the United States.

Now, with Russia bombing churches and destroying cities in Ukraine, the most Protestant of the former Soviet Republics, American evangelical communities are divided. Most oppose Russias actions, especially because there is a strong evangelical church in Ukraine that is receiving attention and prayers from a range of evangelical leaders.

Nonetheless, a small group of the most conservative American evangelicals cannot quite break up with their long-term ally. The enthusiasm for Russia is embodied by Graham, who in 2015 famously visited Moscow, where he had a warm meeting with Putin.

On that trip, Putin reportedly explained that his mother had kept her Christian faith even under Communist rule. Graham in turn praised Putin for his support of Orthodox Christianity, contrasting Russias positive changes with the rise of atheistic secularism in the United States.

But it was not always so. Once upon a time, American evangelicals saw the Soviet Union and other communist countries as the worlds greatest threat to their faith.

They carried out dramatic and illegal activities, smuggling Bibles and other Christian literature across borders. And yet, today, Russia, still a country with low church attendance and little government tolerance for Protestant evangelism, has become a symbol of the conservative values that some American evangelicals proclaim.

Bible smuggling

Starting in the 1950s, but intensifying in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. and European evangelicals presented themselves as intimately linked to the Christians who were suffering at the hands of communist governments.

One evangelical group that emerged at this time was Open Doors, whose main aim was to work for persecuted Christians around the world. It was founded by Brother Andrew Van der Bijl, a Dutch pastor who smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Brother Andrew and other evangelicals argued that what Christians in communist countries really needed were Bibles reflecting how important personal Bible reading is in evangelical faith.

Brother Andrew turned the smuggling into anti-communist political theater. As he headed toward the border in a specially outfitted vehicle with a hidden compartment that might hold as many as 3,000 Bibles, he prayed. According to one ad that ran in Christian magazines, he said:

Lord, in my luggage I have forbidden Scriptures that I want to take to your children across the border. When you were on earth, you made blind eyes see. Now I pray, make seeing eyes blind. Do not let the guards see these things you do not want them to see.

Van der Bijls memoir, Gods Smuggler, became a bestseller when it was published in 1967.

Taking Jesus to the communist world

By the early 1970s, there were more than 30 Protestant organizations engaged in some sort of literature smuggling, and there was an intense, sometimes quite nasty, competition between groups.

Their work depended on their charismatic leaders, who often used sensationalist approaches for fundraising.

For example, in 1966, a Romanian pastor named Richard Wurmbrand appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committees Internal Security subcommittee, stripped to the waist and turned to display his deeply scarred back.

A Jewish convert and Lutheran minister, Wurmbrand had been imprisoned twice by the Romanian government for his activities as an underground minister before he finally escaped to the West in 1964.

Standing shirtless before U.S. senators and the national news media, Wurmbrand testified, My body represents Romania, my country, which has been tortured to a point that it can no longer weep. These marks on my body are my credentials.

The next year, Wurmbrand published his book, Tortured for Christ, which became a bestseller in the U.S. He founded his own activist organization, Jesus to the Communist World, which went on to engage in a good bit of attention-grabbing behavior.

In May 1979, for example, two 32-year-old men associated with the group flew their small plane over the Cuban coast, dropping 6,000 copies of a pamphlet written by Wurmbrand. After the Bible bombing, they lost their way in a storm and were forced to land in Cuba, where they were arrested and served 17 months in jail before being released.

As I describe in my book The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, critics hammered these groups for such provocative approaches and hardball fundraising. One leading figure in the Southern Baptist Convention complained that the practice of smuggling Bibles was creating problems for the whole Christian witness in communist areas.

Another Christian activist, however, admitted that the activist groups mix of faith and politics was hard to beat and had the ability to draw big bucks.

After communism: Islam and homosexuality

These days, there is little in the way of swashbuckling adventure to be had in confronting communists. But that does not mean an end to the evangelical focus on persecuted Christians.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, advocates turned their attention to the situation of Christians in Muslim-majority countries. Evangelicals in Europe and the U.S. increasingly focused on Islam as both a competitor and a threat. Putins war against Chechen militants in the 1990s, and his more recent intervention on behalf of Bashar al-Assads government in Syria, made him popular with Christian conservatives. Putin claimed to be protecting Christians while waging war against Islamic terrorism.

Meanwhile, Putins policies of cracking down on evangelism do not seem to overly bother some of his conservative evangelical allies. When Putin signed a Russian law in June 2016 that outlawed any sharing of ones faith in homes, online or anywhere else but recognized church buildings, some evangelicals were outraged, but others looked away.

This is in part because American evangelicals in the 2010s continued to see Putin as being willing to openly support Christians in what they saw as a global war on their faith. But the more immediately salient issue was Putins opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and nontraditional views of the family.

Graham was among those who waxed enthusiastically about Russias so-called gay propaganda law, which limits public material about nontraditional relationships. Others, such as the World Congress of Families and the Alliance Defending Freedom, have long been cultivating ties with Russian politicians as well as the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin allies on defensive

In the 21st century, then, the most conservative wing of evangelicals was not promoting its agenda by touting the number of Bibles transported across state lines, but rather on another kind of border crossing: the power of Putins reputation as a leader in the resurgent global right.

Now, the invasion of Ukraine has put Putins allies on the defensive. There are still those, including the QAnon-supporting 2020 Republican candidate for Congress Laura Witzke, who explained in March 2022 that she identifies more with Putins Christian values that I do with Joe Biden. But Graham himself emphasized to the Religion News Service that he does not support the war, and his humanitarian organization Samaritans Purse sent several teams to Ukraine to operate clinics and distribute relief.

For the moment, Putins status as the global rights moral vanguard is being severely tested, and the border-crossing advocates of traditional marriage may find themselves on the brink of divorce.

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Bringing Jesus to the Communist world: Why American Evangelicals cannot fully abandon their Kremlin ally - Milwaukee Independent

Has Neoliberalism Really Come to an End? – The Nation

The Berlin Wall opening in Berlin, Germany, on November, 1989. (Photo by Patrick Piel / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

The term neoliberalism is often used to condemn an array of economic policies associated with such ideas as deregulation, trickle-down economics, austerity, free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. As a political movement, neoliberalism is seen as experiencing its breakthrough 40 years ago with the election into office of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And since the 200708 financial crisis, an explosion of academic work and political activism has been devoted to explaining how neoliberalism is fundamentally to blame for the massive growth in inequality.

Yet Gary Gerstlein his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Eraargues that this understanding of neoliberalism struggles to explain why it has exerted such a profound influence on both the left and the right. Gerstlea professor of American history at the University of Cambridgethinks neoliberalism should be understood as a worldview that promises liberation by reconciling economic deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all.

Such a vision. as Gerstle relates, was able to attract such strange bedfellows as Steve Jobs and Barry Goldwater, Ralph Nader and Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. When seen as a worldview, Gerstle contends, neoliberalism can trace its origins just as much to the left, and in particular the New Left, as to the right. People across the political spectrum, including those aforementioned bedfellows, had a common goal: the end of a bureaucratized world.

Gerstles book explains the rise of the neoliberal order by placing it against the backdrop of the New Deal. He also explores the relationship between neoliberalisms rise and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he provocatively argues that, on account of the Iraq War, the Great Recession, a revitalized socialist movement, and the Trump presidency, the neoliberal order is crumbling.

But how does Gerstles understanding of neoliberalism stack up against rival interpretations of it? How are we to make sense of how the Democratic Party became captive to neoliberalism? And is the neoliberal age really coming to an end? The Nation spoke with Gerstle about these and other questions. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Over the last decade, few topics on the left have received more attention and stirred more debate than the subject of neoliberalism. Unlike some critics, you believe that neoliberalism is still a legitimate term of scholarly analysis in regard to understanding contemporary politicsrather than a pejorative, catch-all term others have deemed it. Why do you believe this is the case, and, in a nutshell, how do you define it?

Gary Gerstle: Neoliberalism is a creed that prizes free trade and the free movement of capital, people, and information. It celebrates deregulation as an economic good that results when governments are removed from interfering with markets. It valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse people. It hails globalization as a win-win proposition that both enriches the West and brings an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. It tolerates economic inequality and justifies the weakening of labor movements, welfare policies, and other impediments to free market capitalism in the name of economic growth robust enough to lift all boats. These core principles deeply shaped American politics across the last 50 years.

The label conservative is often attached to the aforementioned beliefs. But conservatism, in the classical sense of the term, connotes respect for tradition, deference to existing institutions, and the hierarchies that structure them, and suspicion of change. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, calls for unleashing capitalisms power, along with entrepreneurialism and other forms of risk-taking, and eliminating institutions that stand in the way.

Invoking neoliberalism allows us to shift the focus somewhat away from narratives that have dominated so much history writingwhite southerners, for example, seeking to maintain racial privilege in the era of civil rights, or evangelicals pushing back against womens, gay, and sexual liberation movementsand toward equally important stories that focus on venture capitalists, Wall Street modernizers, and information technology pioneers. That shift in emphasis, my book suggests, is overdue.

In my chapter on the 1990s, I discuss only briefly the culture wars that dominated headlines during the Clinton presidency but dissect at length the major legislative packages of those years that fundamentally restructured Americas information/communication systems and Wall Street. The Telecommunications Bill of 1996, for example, has profoundly shaped contemporary political economy. Yet the nature of that bill and the mechanisms facilitating collaboration between the hostile Clinton and Gingrich camps required to pass it are still shrouded in mystery. A focus on neoliberalism can help us to bring the economic transformation of the 1990s more into focus and to give it the kind of careful examination it deserves.

DSJ: Your understanding of neoliberalism goes against many of the dominant interpretations of it. For instance, many argue that what made neoliberalism new is that it broke with the old classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, which typically is associated with freeing markets from state regulation and interference. On this reading, the early neoliberals, perhaps most notably Friedrich Hayek, realized thatgiven mass enfranchisement, labor unions, and socialist partiesonly strong states could protect and shield free markets from democratic forces. However, you see a strong connection between classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Can you explain this connection, and why, if it is so strong, the term neoliberalism is even necessary?

GG: Classical liberalism is thought to be an emancipatory movement seeking to remove the heavy hand of the state, in the form of monarchs and mercantilists, from civil society. Neoliberalism is thought to be a repressive movement that uses the state to enforce capitalist prerogatives on unruly democratic populations.

This dichotomy is overdrawn. We now know (from the excellent work of a generation of historians and political scientists) that governments were as necessary to construct and supervise markets in the 19th century (the era of classical liberalism) as they are today. Markets may emerge from what Adam Smith once described as the propensity of people to truck, barter, and exchange, but they can only flourish within a context of government-enforced rules. Laissez-faire is a political and economic project, not a condition of nature. It has always been thus.

By the same token, it is a mistake to treat neoliberals of the past half century as being exclusively concerned with order and domination, and with constraining (and sometimes undermining) democracy. In many of them a spirit of individualism and freedom reminiscent of classical liberalism still lives. This is especially true in the United States where, as Michel Foucault once observed, liberalism has always been everywhere, sprouting on the left as well as on the right, never confined to one party or school.

My book takes Foucaults insight as inspiration: It argues that neoliberalisms career has been marked as much by heterodoxy as orthodoxy, by its capacity to make individuals as different as tech hippies and Ronald Reagan, as dissimilar as Barry Goldwater and long-haired university students who wanted to bring down the system, feel as though they held the key to unlocking a future of untrammeled personal freedom.

Why not, then, call this aspiration toward freedom by its original name, liberalism? Because Roosevelt and his New Dealers stole the name from its free market advocates in the 1930s and imbued it with social democratic meaning. That theft qualifies as one of historys great terminological heists. Milton Friedman was forever dismayed by what he regarded as the corruption of the term liberalism. So was Friedrich Hayek. Both men refused the label conservative to describe their beliefs. The term neoliberal allowed them to affiliate with the classical liberal tradition they admired while separating themselves from the New Deal liberalism they despised.

DSJ: Another intervention you make is to argue that the bulk of the scholarship devoted to the international roots of neoliberalism, most notably that of the historian Quinn Slobodian, fails to reckon with the Soviet Union and of communism more generally. Given your interpretation that the fall of the Soviet Union played the major role in neoliberalisms rise, especially after the end of the Cold War, does this assume that neoliberalism needs something like a communist threat to be thwarted?

GG: Few international events in the 20th century matched the Russian Revolution of 1917 in importance. It had a huge effect on both world and American politics. In the United States from the 1920s through the 1980s, communism was regarded as a mortal threat to the American way of life. The power ofand the fear unleashed bythe communist threat is now largely forgotten. Few accounts of neoliberalism treat the fall of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 or the collapse of communism as capitalisms chief global antagonist as seminal events. But they were.

One consequence of communisms fall is obvious: It opened a large part of the worldRussia and eastern Europeto capitalist penetration. It also dramatically widened the willingness of China (still nominally a communist state) to experiment with capitalist economics. Capitalism became global in the 1990s in a way it had not been since prior to the First World War. The globalized and capitalistic world that dominated international affairs in the 1990s and 2000s is unimaginable apart from communisms collapse.

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Another consequence of communisms fall may be less obvious but is of equal importance: It removed what had been an imperative in America (and in Europe and elsewhere) for compromise between elites and the working classes. A nation once lost to communism would never be regained for the capitalist world (or so it was thought). The specter of communist advance impelled capitalist elites in advanced industrial countries, including the United States, to compromise with their class antagonists in ways they would not otherwise have done. A fear of communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order. American labor was strongest when the threat of global communism was greatest. The apogee of Americas welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. After 1991, the year of the Soviet Unions dissolution, the pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class vanished. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement marched in tandem with communisms collapse.

To argue for communisms importance is not meant to rehabilitate it as a political movement. Communism was an indefensible system of tyranny. Rather, it is meant to help us to understand the role that communism played in the century when it was a feared force, and then to call on us to reckon with the effects of its sudden and complete disappearance from international and national affairs.

The fall of communism manifested itself not just in the collapse of the Soviet Union but also in the erosion of the emancipatory dreams that had animated leftist movements for 200 years, since the days of the French Revolution. How could one sustain ones belief in revolution when the greatest experiment in socialist transformation had failed so spectacularly?

Some answered this question by moving away from socialist politics and pouring their emancipatory energies into liberation movements for women, for people of color, for gays. This was not true of leftists writing about neoliberalism, however, for whom capitalism and its evils were always front and center. But the full import of communisms collapse was not easy for anyone on the left to absorb or analyze.

Will new political movements emerge with the strength to compel a serious redistribution of wealth away from elites and toward the masses without reproducing the tyranny that became so intrinsic to communism? This is one of the key questions of our time.

DSJ: Lets transition a bit and talk about your notion of a political order. Can you explain this idea, and specifically in reference to your claim that political order entails the ability of [the] ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will. There is a way of reading your book, for instance, that would suggest that at the peak of the neoliberal order, Bill Clinton, rather than Ronald Reagan, did more to advance neoliberalism than anyone else. In what sense is this true?

GG: The phrase political order is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles. In the last hundred years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal order that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.

At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal order was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state capable of governing the economy in the public interest. The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government controls that were stymieing growth, innovation, and freedom.

Establishing a political order demands far more than winning an election or two. It requires deep-pocketed donors to invest in promising candidates over the long term, the establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs, a political party able to win over multiple electoral constituencies on a consistent basis, a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels (the Supreme Court) and across popular and print media, and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with a vision of the good life. Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front.

A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will. Thus, the Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower acquiesced to the core principles of the New Deal order in the 1950s, and the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton accepted the central principles of the neoliberal order in the 1990s. Acceptance is never complete; there are always points of tension and vulnerability in a polity as fissiparous as the American one. And yet, the success of a political order depends on its proficiency in shaping what broad majorities of elected officials and voters on both sides of the partisan divide regard as politically possible and desirable.

By the same token, losing the capacity to exercise ideological hegemony signals a political orders demise. In these moments of decline, political ideas and programs formerly regarded as radical, heterodox, or unworkable are able to move from the margins into the mainstream. This happened in the 1970s, when the breakup of the New Deal order allowed long scorned neoliberal ideas for reorganizing the economy to take root; and it happened again in the 2010s, when the coming apart of the neoliberal order opened up space for Trump-style authoritarianism and Sanders-style socialism to flourish.

In my book, I treat Reagan as the architect of the neoliberal order and Bill Clinton as a key facilitator of that orders 1990s triumph. The extent to which the Clinton administration signed on to neoliberal projects is rather stunning. In 1993, Clinton signed the NAFTA legislation turning all of North America into a single common market. In 1994, he endorsed the World Trade Organization as an instrument for implementing neoliberal principles internationally. In 1996, Clinton deregulated the telecommunication industry. Soon after, he did the same with the electrical generation industry. And, then, in 1999, he supported Congresss repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, the New Deal law that had done more than any other to end speculation, corruption, and the boom-bust cycle in Americas financial sector.

In effect, Clinton had become the Democratic version of Eisenhower, the president who arranged his partys acquiescence to the dominant political order.

DSJ: The young Bill Clinton, of course, has been depicted as a baby boomer who came of age during the heyday of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. You state throughout the book that the New Left provided neoliberalism with a gateway into the Democratic Party. Can you elaborate on this?

GG: If we acknowledge the way in which neoliberalism resuscitated emancipatory yearnings present in classical liberalism, we can begin to understand why certain sections of the New Left and the counterculture would have been drawn to its principles. New Leftists shared with neoliberals a disdain for what both groups regarded as the over-organization and bureaucratization of American society resulting from the New Deal. The New Left revolt against excessive regulation is apparent in Paul Goodmans cri de coeur, Growing Up Absurd (1960); in the 1962 Port Huron Statement that defined the early goals of the New Left; in the rhetoric that Mario Savio used to frame the ambitions of Berkeleys 1964 Free Speech movement (the New Lefts first moment of mass protest); in the early cybernetics movement that inspired the likes of Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs to associate the creation of the personal computer with the quest for individual freedom; and in the determination of Ralph Nader and his political allies to free the consumer from repressive corporate and government elites.

Freeing the individual and his or her consciousness from the grip of large, stultifying organizations; privileging disruption over order; celebrating cosmopolitanismand multiculturalismand the unexpected sorts of hybridities that emerge under these regimes: All of these beliefs, which marinated for years in the political and cultural milieux inspired by the New Left, meshed with neoliberal aspirations, and drew individuals from the left side of the political spectrum to portions of the neoliberal project.

DSJ: On account of the 200708 financial crisis, President Barack Obama chose a team of economic advisors made up of Wall Streets elite. They believed the best way to get the country through the crisis was to prioritize rescuing the banks. You write that even despite steering a $700 billion stimulus package to relieve the suffering of ordinary people, these efforts were not sufficient to imbue a recovery of the Main Street economy with a robustness that would rival the one already being felt on Wall Street. You explain that Obama embraced the dominant neoliberal ideology almost out of a sense of necessity. Indeed, Obama said that a more radical decision would have entailed violence to the social order. Of course, under Trump, a relief package for Covid was approved that was twice as large as Obamas. What was it about Obama that compelled him to save rather than to resist the neoliberal political order, especially given what happened after his presidency?

GG: The election of Barack Obama in 2008 unleashed all kinds of hopes for the countrys future. Fourteen years later, we have the advantage of historical perspective. That perspective tells us (or me, in any case), that Obama is best seen as the last president of the neoliberal order, not the first president of a post-racial, progressive age.

To handle the economic crisis, Obama turned to a team of advisors, including Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Michael Froman, quite similar in policy orientation to the Rubin team that had overseen the Democratic Partys assent to the neoliberal order in the 1990s. They decided not to punish the large banks whose misdeeds had brought on the crisis but to focus instead on restoring them to financial health and security as quickly as possible. Thus, no banks were nationalized or broken up, and no bankers were sent to jail for their misdeeds. There was not even a public shaming that would have occurred had banking executives been forced to run the gauntlet of congressional hearings.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans were losing their jobs and their homes. The gap between rich and poor widened during Obamas first term, with the income of the top 1 percent of American income earners increasing by more than 30 percent while the bottom 99 percent had to settle for a raise too small to matter. Main Street Americans noticed that elites had been restored to financial health and security while they had not.

By temperament, Obama was a cautious man. Moreover, the burden of restoring to health a shattered global financial system was immense. But the more important point to make here is a different one: namely, that the neoliberal order was still hegemonic, constraining Obamas sense of the choices available to him.

DSJ: There is a big debate on the left today regarding the question of whether the neoliberal age is coming to an end. Trump, the rise of Bernie Sanders, Bidens Build Back Better Act, Chinas rise, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine can all be used in various ways to defend this view. You agree with this perspective. What are your essential reasons for doing so?

GG: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were inconsequential political figures during the orders 1990s heyday. That the two became in the 2010s the two most dynamic forces in American political life provides the best evidence that the neoliberal order was losing its hold. It was no longer constraining political choice.

Other evidence for the neoliberal orders fracturing can be gleaned from a brief look at the erosion of support for four key planks of the neoliberal freedom agenda: the free movement of goods, people, information, and capital.

On the free movement of goods: During the neoliberal heyday, protectionism was a dirty word, not to be uttered by those pursuing high political office. Now it is favored by many on the right as well as on the left.

On the free movement of people: Thirty-five million people came to America between the 1960s and 2000s. Now the talk is all about walls and borders.

On the free movement of information: The instantaneous transmission of vast amounts of data and opinion to every corner of the world had been crucial to neoliberalisms globalizing project. Now China, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are seeking to insulate their information systems from international contamination.

On the free movement of capital: This freedom has been the one most resistant to controls. But the actions recently taken by Western governments against Russia as well as against its oligarchs living abroadfreeing or seizing assets, denying the state and its people the opportunity to move money from one country to another or to convert their funds from one currency to anotherconstitute a major strike against that freedom.

Day by day, now, a new world is taking shape. Elements of neoliberalism will survive this transition. But neoliberalism as a political order is finished.

DSJ: Doesnt Bidens lackluster presidency give you reason to reconsider your prediction?

GG: An administration that has sought to enact the most far-reaching set of social programs since the New Deal should not be described as lacking in luster. It has lacked political powerits majority in the Senate hanging, as we all know, by (a Joe Manchin) thread. Biden himself may be lacking in personal luster, but we should resist the temptationever present in our social media ageto judge a leader exclusively by superficial characteristics. Biden has real strengths. He grasps the significance of this historical moment. He has assembled a good team. He has opened his administration to the left in ways that few previous Democratic administrations have done. The patchy record of his legislative achievements to date has less to do with his own limitations than with a set of tough circumstances that would bedevil even the best Democratic president imaginable: not just slim majorities in Congress but an opposition party that has become scandalously indifferent to the welfare of American democracy and a virus that everywhere in the world has eluded the best-intentioned efforts to subdue it. These are difficult times in which to govern.

Biden may fail. If he does, would it mean that an argument for the fall of the neoliberal order should be reconsidered? Not at all. A rising political order centering on Trump-style authoritarianism would mark the end of the neoliberal order just as surely as one centered on Biden-style progressivism. The United States may also be in the midst of an extended period of dysfunction that will forestall the establishment of a new political order, left or right. But one thing is clear: the neoliberal heyday has passed. In the 1990s and 2000s, America was unabashed in its celebration of free markets, of a globalizing world without borders, and of an era of personal freedom powered by the IT revolution. We no longer live in that world.

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Has Neoliberalism Really Come to an End? - The Nation