Editor’s note: Leftists often see authoritarianism as a hallmark of conservative, right-wing, and fascist governments and organizations. But throughout history, there is an equally troubling trend of left-wing authoritarianism.
Today, this strain of politics is ascendant in the United States, where the use of censorship and violence to curtail political speech has become increasingly accepted and mainstream both among Democratic-party ideologues, media and tech elites, and the professional managerial class, and among college-educated “radical” leftists.
In today’s piece, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges discusses the normalization of “cancel culture” as a sign of increasing corporate control and the fading of liberal values that protected basic political expression. For a decade, Deep Green Resistance has been targeted by what Hedges describes as the “boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power.” The footsoldiers of cancel culture are, Hedges writes, “the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state.”
“Cancel culture is not the road to reform,” he concludes. “It is the road to tyranny.”
Elites and their courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins.
The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.
But Campbell was also, despite a slew of death threats he received from white segregationists, an unofficial chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He denounced and publicly fought the Klan’s racism, acts of terror and violence and marched with Black civil rights protestors in his native Mississippi, but he steadfastly refused to “cancel” white racists out of his life. He refused to demonize them as less than human. He insisted that this form of racism, while evil, was not as insidious as a capitalist system that perpetuated the economic misery and instability that pushed whites into the ranks of violent, racist organizations.
“During the civil rights movement, when we were developing strategies, someone usually said, ‘Call Will Campbell. Check with Will,’” Rep. John Lewis wrote in the introduction to the new edition of Campbell’s memoir “Brother to a Dragonfly,” one of the most important books I read as a seminarian. “Will knew that the tragedy of Southern history had fallen on our opponents as well as our allies … on George Wallace and Bull Connor as well as Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth. He saw that it had created the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That insight led Will to see racial healing and equity, pursued through courage, love, and faith as the path to spiritual liberation for all.”
Jimmy Carter wrote of Campbell that he “tore down the walls that separated white and black Southerners.” And because the Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton was doing the same thing in Chicago, the FBI — which, along with the CIA, is the de facto ally of the liberal elites in their war against Trump and his supporters — assassinated him.
When the town Campbell lived in decided the Klan should not be permitted to have a float in the Fourth of July parade Campbell did not object, as long as the gas and electric company was also barred. It was not only white racists that inflicted suffering on the innocent and the vulnerable, but institutions that place the sanctity of profit before human life.
“People can’t pay their gas and electric bills, the heat gets turned off and they freeze and sometimes die, especially if they are elderly,” he said. “This, too, is an act of terrorism.”
“Theirs you could see and deal with, and if they broke the law, you could punish them,” he said of the Klan. “But the larger culture that was, and still is, racist to the core is much more difficult to deal with and has a more sinister influence.”
Campbell would have reminded us that the demonization of the Trump supporters who stormed the capital is a terrible mistake. He would have reminded us that racial injustice will only be solved with economic justice. He would have called on us to reach out to those who do not think like us, do not speak like us, are ridiculed by polite society, but who suffer the same economic marginalization. He knew that the disparities of wealth, loss of status and hope for the future, coupled with prolonged social dislocation, generated the poisoned solidarity that give rise to groups such as the Klan or the Proud Boys.
We cannot heal wounds we refuse to acknowledge.
The Washington Post, which analyzed the public records of 125 defendants charged with taking part in the storming of the Capital on January 6, found that “nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.”
“The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public,” the Post found. “A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.”
“A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records,” the paper reported. “A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien. Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.”
We must acknowledge the tragedy of these lives, while at the same time condemning racism, hate and the lust for violence. We must grasp that our most perfidious enemy is not someone who is politically incorrect, even racist, but the corporations and a failed political and judicial system that callously sacrifices people, as well as the planet, on the altar of profit.
Like Campbell, much of my own family comes from the rural working class, many espousing prejudices my father, a Presbyterian minister, regularly condemned from the pulpit. Through a combination of luck and scholarships to elite schools, I got out. They never did. My grandfather, intellectually gifted, was forced to drop out of high school his senior year when his sister’s husband died. He had to work the farm to feed her children. If you are poor in America, you rarely get more than one chance. And many do not get one. He lost his.
The towns in Maine where my relatives come from have been devastated by the closures of mills and factories. There is little meaningful work. There is a smoldering anger caused by legitimate feelings of betrayal and entrapment. They live, like most working class Americans, lives of quiet desperation. This anger is often expressed in negative and destructive ways. But I have no right to dismiss them as irredeemable.
To understand is not to condone. But if the ruling elites, and their courtiers masquerading as journalists, continue to gleefully erase these people from the media landscape, to attack them as less than human, or as Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” while at the same time refusing to address the grotesque social inequality that has left them vulnerable and afraid, it will fuel ever greater levels of extremism and ever greater levels of state repression and censorship.
The cancel culture, a witch hunt by self-appointed moral arbiters of speech, has become the boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power — the military-industrial complex, lethal militarized police, the prison system, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies that make us the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, the fossil fuel industry, and a political and economic system captured by oligarchic power.
It is much easier to turn from these overwhelming battles to take down hapless figures who make verbal gaffes, those who fail to speak in the approved language or embrace the approved attitudes of the liberal elites. These purity tests have reached absurd and self-defeating levels, including the inquisitional bloodlust by 150 staff members of The New York Times demanding that management, which had already investigated and dealt with what at most was poor judgment made by the veteran reporter Don McNeil when he repeated a racist slur in a discussion about race, force him out of the paper, which management reluctantly did.
Too often the targets of the cancel culture are radicals, such as the feminists who run the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and who do not admit trans people because most of the girls and women in the shelter have been physically assaulted and traumatized by those with male bodies. None of the critics of these feminists spend ten or twelve hours a day in a shelter taking care of abused girls and women, many of whom were prostituted as children, but fire off screeds to attack them and cut their funding. The cancel culture, as the Canadian feminist Lee Lakeman says, is “the weaponization of ignorance.”
The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti-communism, were cancelled out of the culture. The well-financed Israel lobby is a master of the cancel culture, shutting down critics of the Israeli apartheid state and those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semites. The cancel culture fueled the persecution of Julian Assange, the censorship of WikiLeaks and the Silicon Valley algorithms that steer readers away from content, including my content, critical of imperial and corporate power.
In the end, this bullying will be used by social media platforms, which are integrated into the state security and surveillance organs, not to promote, as its supporters argue, civility, but ruthlessly silence dissidents, intellectuals, artists and independent journalism. Once you control what people say you control what they think.
This cancel culture is embraced by corporate media platforms where, as Glenn Greenwald writes, “teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s ‘media reporters’ (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s ‘disinformation space unit’ (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their ‘journalism’ to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention).”
Corporations know these moral purity tests are, for us, self-defeating. They know that by making the cancel culture legitimate — and for this reason I opposed locking Donald Trump out of his Twitter and other social media accounts — they can employ it to silence those who attack and expose the structures of corporate power and imperial crimes. The campaigns of moral absolutism widen the divides between liberals and the white working class, divisions that are crucial to maintaining the power of the corporate elites. The cancel culture is the fodder for the riveting and entertaining culture wars. It turns anti-politics into politics. Most importantly, the cancel culture deflects attention from the far more egregious institutionalized abuses of power. It is this smug, self-righteousness crusade that makes the liberal class so odious.
Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who created the comic strip “Kudzu,” which featured a Campbell-inspired character called Rev. Will B. Dunn, brought Campbell to speak at Harvard when I was there. Campbell’s message was met with a mixture of bewilderment and open hostility, which was fine with me as it meant the room swiftly emptied and the rest of the night Marlette, Campbell and I sat up late drinking whiskey and eating bologna sandwiches. Marlette was as iconoclastic and acerbically funny as Campbell. His cartoons, including one that showed Jesus on Good Friday carrying an electric chair instead of a cross and another that portrayed Jerry Falwell as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, provoked howls of protest from irate readers.
Campbell’s memoir, “Brother to a Dragonfly,” is not only beautifully written — Campbell was a close friend of Walker Percy, whose novels I also consumed — but filled with a humility and wisdom that liberals, who should spend less time in the self-referential rabbit hole of social media, have lost. He describes America, which routinely employs murder, torture, threats, blackmail and intimidation to crush all those who oppose it at home and abroad, as “a nation of Klansmen.” He refused to draw a moral line between the American empire, which many liberals defend, and the disenfranchised and angry whites that flock to racist groups such as the Klan or, years later, would support Trump. The architects of empire and the ruling capitalists who exploited workers, stymied democracy, orchestrated state repression, hoarded obscene levels of wealth and waged endless war were, he knew, the real enemy.
Campbell remembers watching a documentary by CBS called “The Ku Klux Klan: An Invisible Empire,” after which he was invited to address the audience. The film showed the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the castration of Judge Aaron in Alabama, and the deaths of the four young girls in the Birmingham Sunday school bombing. When the film showed a Klan recruit pivoting right when the drill master shouted, “Left face,” the audience erupted in “cheers, jeers, catcalls and guffaws.” Campbell writes that he “felt a sickening in my stomach.”
Those viewing the film were a group convened by the National Student Association and included New Left radicals of the sixties, representing Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron group, young white men and women who had led protests at campuses across the country, burned down buildings, coined the term “pigs” to refer to police. Many were from affluent families.
“They were students in or recent graduates of rich and leading colleges and universities,” he writes of the audience. “They were mean and tough but somehow, I sensed that there wasn’t a radical in the bunch. For if they were radical how could they laugh at a poor ignorant farmer who didn’t know his left hand from his right? If they had been radical they would have been weeping, asking what had produced him. And if they had been radical they would not have been sitting, soaking up a film produced for their edification and enjoyment by the Establishment of the establishment — CBS.”
Campbell, who was asked to address the group following the film, said: “My name is Will Campbell. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m a native of Mississippi. And I’m pro-Klansman because I’m pro-human being.”
Pandemonium erupted in the hall. He was shouted down as a “fascist pig” and a “Mississippi redneck.” Most walked out.
“Just four words uttered — ‘pro-Klansman Mississippi Baptist preacher,’ coupled with one visual image, white, had turned them into everything they thought the Ku Klux Klan to be — hostile, frustrated, angry, violent and irrational,” he writes. “And I was never able to explain to them that pro-Klansman is not the same as pro-Klan. That the former has to do with a person, the other with an ideology.”
“The same social forces which produced the Klan’s violence also produced the violence in Watts, Rochester and Harlem, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Nashville, Atlanta and Dayton, because they are all pieces of the same garment — social isolation, deprivation, economic conditions, rejections, working mothers, poor schools, bad diets, and all the rest,” Campbell writes.
And these social forces produced the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd and the storming of the Capitol by an enraged mob.
Campbell never asked any of the members of the Klan he knew to leave the organization for the same reason he never asked liberals to leave “the respectable and fashionable organizations or institutions of which they were a part and party, all of which, I was learning, were more truly racist than their Klan.”
This radical love was the core of Dr. Martin Luther King’s message. This love informed King’s steadfast nonviolence. It led him to denounce the Vietnam War and condemn the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And it saw him assassinated in Memphis when he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers for economic justice.
Campbell lived by his oft-quoted creed, “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.” Like King, he believed in the redemptive and transformative power of forgiveness.
The ruling elites and the courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins. They wallow in a sanctimonious arrogance, one made possible by their privilege, which masks their subservience to corporate power and their amorality. They do not battle social and economic injustice. They silence, with the enthusiastic assistance of the digital platforms in Silicon Valley, those who are crushed and deformed by systems of oppression and those who lack their finely developed politesse and deference to linguistic fashion. They are the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state. Cancel culture is not the road to reform. It is the road to tyranny.
This post provides a brief introduction to the current form of capitalism: neoliberalism. It includes sections on: neoliberal ideology; Governmentality – how neoliberalism governs, neoliberal government policies; how neoliberalism is a capitalist class project of domination; the history of neoliberalism in the twentieth century; and the three phase of neoliberalism in government since the 1980s.
Neoliberalism is a form of capitalism and liberalism. Neoliberalism is the most aggressive form of liberalism ever formulated. Liberals generally assume that being a “self-interested, competitive entrepreneur is the natural state for human beings, neoliberals know that it isn’t.” But the neoliberals still want people to behave that way. They achieve this by using the state and corporate power to make us act in that way, regardless of what most people want. [1]
Neoliberal ideology
Ideology can be defined as a set of assumptions about how society does and should work, it structures both what we think and how we act. Our world has competing truths, values, and theories, ideologies aim to favour some values over others and to legitimise certain theories or sets of meanings. Ideologies provide intellectual maps of the social world that establish relationships between individuals and groups versus the larger structure of power. They therefore play an essential role in maintaining the current power structure as fair and natural, or in challenging it by highlighting its injustices and pointing out the benefits of alternative power structures. [2] An ideology is most effectively when it denies its own existence and can pass itself off as the normal state of things or ‘common sense’ [3]
Jeremy Gilbert describes how it is difficult to differentiate between capitalism and neoliberalism:
“because neoliberalism is the most fanatically pro-capitalist ideology ever, and because it has become the default ideology of almost all actual capitalists, and certainly of almost all pro-capitalist political parties..it is important to differentiate between capitalism and neoliberalism because they are not the same thing – they are not the same KIND of thing. Capitalism is an economic practice. Neoliberalism is a philosophy about how societies in which that practice prevails should be managed, and a programme which is at least nominally informed that philosophy, or looks like it is.” [4]
Neoliberal ideology can be summarised as “a single global marketplace to the public, they portray globalizing markets in a positive light as an indispensable tool for the realization of a better world. Such market visions of globalization pervade public opinion and political choices in many parts of the world. Indeed, neoliberal decision-makers function as expert designers of an attractive ideological container for their market-friendly political agenda. Their ideological claims are laced with references to global economic interdependence rooted in the principles of free-market capitalism: global trade and financial markets, worldwide flows of goods, services, and labour, transnational corporations, offshore financial centres, and so on.” [5]
George Monbiot describes the ideology of neoliberalism as:
“Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.” [6]
Meritocracy is a key feature of neoliberal ideology. This promotes a “hierarchical and highly unequal set of social relations while claiming to offer individuals from all backgrounds an equal chance to compete for elite status.” [7] This is good propaganda for neoliberalism, but in fact social equality and social mobility have decreased since the 1970s. [8]
Mark Fisher describes the ‘capitalist realism’ of neoliberalism as: “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism…the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” [9]
Governmentality
A second dimension on neoliberalism is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘Governmentality’:
“certain modes of governance based on particular premises, logics, and power relations. A neoliberal governmentality is rooted in entrepreneurial values such as competitiveness, self-interest, and decentralization. It celebrates individual empowerment and the devolution of central state power to smaller localized units. Such a neoliberal mode of governance adopts the self-regulating free market as the model for proper government. Rather than operating along more traditional lines of pursuing the public good (rather than profits) by enhancing civil society and social justice, neoliberals call for the employment of governmental technologies that are taken from the world of business and commerce: mandatory development of ‘strategic plans’ and ‘risk-management’ schemes oriented toward the creation of ‘surpluses’; cost–benefit analyses and other efficiency calculations; the shrinking of political governance (so-called ‘best-practice governance’); the setting of quantitative targets; the close monitoring of outcomes; the creation of highly individualized, performance-based work plans; and the introduction of ‘rational choice’ models that internalize and thus normalize market-oriented behaviour. Neoliberal modes of governance encourage the transformation of bureaucratic mentalities into entrepreneurial identities where government workers see themselves no longer as public servants and guardians of a qualitatively defined ‘public good’ but as self-interested actors responsible to the market and contributing to the monetary success of slimmed-down state ‘enterprises’. In the early 1980s, a novel model of public administration known as ‘new public management’ took the world’s state bureaucracies by storm. Operationalizing the neoliberal mode of governance for public servants, it redefined citizens as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ and encouraged administrators to cultivate an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. If private enterprises must nurture innovation and enhance productivity in order to survive in the competitive marketplace, why shouldn’t government workers embrace neoliberal ideals to improve the public sector?” [10]
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes the ‘bureaucratic managerialism’ of neoliberalism. Bureaucracy has been decentralised so that we actively produce it ourselves through “continuing professional development, performance reviews, log books, not to mention the whole machine of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).” Workers are encouraged to be highly self critical, but are assured that there will not be any consequences from this self criticism. The demonising nature of having to self criticise, that will then be ignored. Assessments at work have changed from periodic to continuous: “Our status is never fully ratified; it is always up for review.” [11]
A set of government policies
Jeremy Gilbert describes the main aim of neoliberal government programmes as being the promotion of the interests of finance capital and the processes of financialisation above all other interests. [12] He lists neoliberalism’s policy agenda or ‘actually existing neoliberal’ as:
privatising public services
deregulating labour markets so workers have fewer rights and protections
attacking labour unions
cutting taxes on the rich
reducing public spending and welfare entitlements
forcing services in the public sector to behave, as much as possible, like competitive, profit-seeking business. [13]
Capitalist class project
Neoliberalism can be described as a project of the capitalist class to restore their own class power, following their loss of power through the middle of the twentieth century, during the Keynesian period of high public spending and a strong welfare state. There has also been a recomposition of the capitalist class, with finance capital now dominating over all other sectors. [14]
Neoliberalism can also be seen as a reaction by capitalist elites to the increase in democratic demands in the 1960s. This was followed by a crisis in the 1970s between the capitalists and labour movement. The neoliberal response to was to offer increased private consumption and easily accessible credit, which “re-asserted the supremacy of finance capital over both industrial capital and the rest of the population for the first time since the great crash of 1929”. [15]
At this point of crisis in the 1970s, the neoliberals had two ‘revolutionary goals’ to restore the profitability of capitalism. The first was to “re-organize capitalism on a universal, transnational scale and thus place global markets out of reach of the influence of national governments, making markets less subject to national-scale popular democratic demands and freeing corporations to exploit labor and the environment at will.” The second was to “apply global economics in a ‘race to the bottom’ competition between nations, creating ‘austerity societies’ of disempowered consumers at the expense of social groups and their ‘market-distorting’ demands. The formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 capped-off this revolutionary process of transferring economic power from nations—which ostensibly could be controlled democratically—to the much-less accountable global level.” [16]
A key function of neoliberal ideology is to “secure consent and generate political inertia precisely by enabling the experience of precarity and individualised impotence to be experienced as normal and inevitable.” Only a small number of people support neoliberal policies, namely the core neoliberal elite. For everyone else, neoliberal ideology aims “to console us that the sense of insecurity, of perpetual competition and individual isolation produced by neoliberal government is natural, because ‘that’s what life is really like’.” [17] Most people do not support neoliberalism, but as long as there is no viable alternative that wins broad popular support, then this results in a general ‘disaffected consent’ with the current system. [18]
In neoliberalism, capitalists have worked out the sweet spot to stop any serious challenge to their dominance: “as long as feeding one’s children (still the principal preoccupation of most adult humans, as it has been throughout history and before) remains an achievable but difficult task, then energies are likely to be devoted to the accomplishment of that goal: energies which cannot then be channelled into political activity of any kind. Where this objective becomes unachievable, populations are likely to resort to desperate, perhaps revolutionary, measures. Where it becomes too easily realised – as it did for the generation which came to maturity in the post-war years of social-democratic ascendancy – then capitalism is also likely to find itself subject to challenge by constituencies no longer intimidated by the immediate threat of destitution. Much of the neoliberal programme can be understood in terms of the efficacy and precision with which it engineers precisely the outcome of an economy and a society within which feeding their children and keeping them out of relative poverty remains an achievable but highly demanding task for most actors: actively producing insecurity and ‘precarity’ across the working population, without allowing the level of widespread desperation to pass critical thresholds. [19]
The making of neoliberalism
George Monbiot provides a good summary of the history of neoliberalism:
“The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism. In 1944 Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations. They created a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.
As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency. The neolibers stopped using the name for their ideology ‘neoliberalism’ in the 1950s.
In the post war period neoliberalism remained at the margins, despite its lavish funding. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high, and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets. But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain. After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world.” [20]
Phases of neoliberalism
There are a number of different perspectives on the phases of neoliberalism. [21] I believe there have been three phases of neoliberalism in government:
First-wave neoliberalism in the 1980s: Reaganomics and Thatcherism
The ‘New Right’ of Thatcher and Reagan in the US and UK implemented a basic neoliberal economic programme with a range of conservative social policies such as restoring traditional family values, increased military spending, a tough law and order agenda, and limiting multiculturalism. [22]
Second-wave neoliberalism in the 1990s: Clinton’s and Blair’s Third Way
The Blair and Clinton governments in the 1990s took a more centrist approach, that included the majority of neoliberalism combined with socially progressive policies. The governments supported private-sector-led economic growth, combined with the government providing a consistent level of social services to citizens. They also promoted equality for gay people and supported women in the labour market. [22]
The third phase of neoliberalism began with bailing out the banks following the 2008 financial crisis. This was followed by austerity – massive cuts to public services. Inequality has increased, life expectancy has declined or stagnated, living standards have dropped. All this has polarised politics with the election of authoritarian, right-wing, isolationist politicians.
Endnotes
Twenty-First Century Socialism, Jeremy Gilbert, 2020, page 27-8
This is an excerpt from a Deep Green Resistance training. In this presentation, DGR co-founder Lierre Keith compares liberalism with radicalism. Which one describes you?
This re-upload combines the previous videos that were split into three parts.
Excerpt from the book, “Deep Green Resistance,” chapter 3.
Can it be done? Can industrial civilization be stopped? Theoretically, any institution built by humans can be taken apart by humans. That seems obvious as a concept. But in the here and now, in the time frame left to our planet, what is feasible?
Here the left diverges. The faithful insist that Everything Will Be Okay. They play an emotional shell game of new technology, individual consumer choices, and hope as a moral duty. When all three shells turn up empty, the fall-back plan is an insistence in the belief that people can’t really kill the planet. There will be bacteria if nothing else, they urge, as if that should give solace to the drowning bears and the vanished snails. Meanwhile, the facts tell a different story. Methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, is escaping from both land and sea where up until now it was sequestered by being frozen. This could lead to “a catastrophic warming of the earth.” Catastrophic meaning a planet too hot for life—any life, all life. Kiss your mustard seed of bacteria good-bye: yes, we can kill the planet.
It’s a bankrupt approach regardless. Try this. Pretend that I have a knife and you don’t. Pretend I slice off one of your fingers, then another, then a third. When you object—and you will object, with all your might—I tell you that I’m not going to kill you, just change you. Joint by joint, I continue to disarticulate someone still alive, who will very soon be dead. When you protest for your life, I tell you that you’re not actually going to die, as there will surely be some bacteria remaining. Does that work for you?
One would hope that a looming mass extinction would compel us to seek something beyond emotional solace wrapped in pseudospiritual platitudes. But strategies for action are an affront to the faithful, who need to believe in individual action. This faith is really just liberalism writ large. One of the cardinal differences between liberals—those who insist that Everything Will Be Okay—and the truly radical is in their conception of the basic unit of society. This split is a continental divide. Liberals believe that a society is made up of individuals. Individualism is so sacrosanct that, in this view, being identified as a member of a group or class is an insult. But for radicals, society is made up of classes (economic ones in Marx’s original version) or any groups or castes. In the radical’s understanding, being a member of a group is not an affront. Far from it; identifying with a group is the first step toward political consciousness and ultimately effective political action.
A New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) spokesperson has instigated an online pact against yours truly. That might flatter me, if it weren’t so effective. It’s titled “Against Human Rights” – appropriately, since it exists specifically to help negate an individual woman’s rights to further education, a voice, and a livelihood. The pact (below) misrepresents my concerns about women‘s safety and the medicalisation of gender, and asks signatories to collaborate in withholding study, speaking and work opportunities from none other than myself.
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This pact was instigated just after I was banned from the Wellington Zinefest, a community hand-made book market; and just before I lost my job. The reason Wellington Zinefest gave me for their ban was that my work is critical of both prostitution, and gender identity politics, and this makes me “unsafe”. Supporters of this ban then trained their attention on the impressionable new manager at my work, making her nervous with allegations of “hate speech”. Her response to that peer pressure has given me enough material for a five-page personal grievance for workplace bullying. I chose to resign.
So forgive me, but I have some bones to pick with the local liberal feminist scene.
I think feminism is in dire straits, and that is exemplified by my own situation, as well as other events we celebrate as successes. I would like to point the finger at whoever is ultimately, specifically responsible for manipulating women into the position we are in, on our turf; but that would take the kind of organised investigation I am not resourced for. All I can do is observe what we are doing in the name of “feminism”; consider who that is serving, what difference it is making, and compare that to the aims of feminism. Feminism is of course the movement to end rape and the systemic, sex-based oppression of women by men in power.
It looks to me like, in Wellington, “feminism” is in a state where it is insisted that women must be content with the routine and systemic pornification and commodification of our bodies. If we don’t like it, if we raise any issues with it – with the sex trade, or sex-based oppression – we’re treated with hostility. We are labelled prudes, not “sex positive” enough, blacklisted, and forced to recognise where our place is.
Women back-up dancers represent the male gaze in Ambition
The NZPC pact against me, if successful, is the kind of thing that could help put a woman on the street. This collaborative agreement to withhold opportunities from me is taking effect – I have lost my job – and whether or not I have other support, job prospects, or family behind me, is not of interest to NZPC or their followers. If I’m tracked closely enough (even my friends get text messages asking them, “how can you be friends with Renée?”) will I find another job in this city? This real-life pile-on has chances of real, destructive success. Indeed, that’s the appeal of witch hunts – they’re so easy to make effective. One woman rarely stands much chance against a mob.
If this pact did succeed in putting me on the street, I’d find what many women find: that the most readily available option to me, to sustain a livelihood, would be prostitution. This is not a far-fetched scenario, it happens all the time. That’s what keeps the industry alive – women are pushed out of options, and are left with that one.
Where would I go for support if it happened to me? To NZPC?
Magazine cover for Massive
Even the likes of Mike Hosking and Tony Veitch (a sports commentator who broke his partner’s back) don’t get this kind of treatment from liberals – pacts to cut off their options. I’m not comparing myself to these misogynists – but their example demonstrates who liberals truly get excited about hounding and destabilising. A Mike Hosking petition says, “We no longer wish to see or hear any more from Hosking on our TV screens” – nice and specific. I can’t even find a Veitch petition, and Veitch is still on air. Mine wants me indefinitely silenced – even though I have no platform – through an indefinite commitment to bad-mouthing.
In fact, Darkmatter performer Alok Vaid-Menon – a rape apologist and open misogynist, performed a slam poetry series earlier this year in Wellington. When I raised the issue of his public misogyny and rape and paedophilia justifications, I was told on no uncertain terms that I was not to speak about them, because Vaid-Menon is transgender. So he may have his global tour in spite of overt misogyny; I may not have my job, because of my feminist politics. Carwyn Walsh, the magazine editor who published this Massive cover also stayed in his job, while my public objection to it as offensive, was cited by the Wellington Zinefest committee as one of the reasons I was banned.
Again, the message is clear: I’m to know where my place is, as a woman.
Compare this to a lot of the other liberal feminist successes of late. They seem to almost be predicated on women flaunting some conformity to that very premise: we know where our place is. We, collectively, don’t mind being sexualised or pornified by men. We either aren’t aware of it, think it’s harmless, or we find it empowering and fun.
Hera Lindsay Bird, an incredible poet, rocketed to celebrity status this year with a stunning first book, creating her platform with an abundance of talent – and the poem Keats is dead so fuck me from behind.
City Gallery billboard
In 2015, the City Gallery placed this image, Gigi on their floor and on a Courtenay Place billboard. Regardless of her talent as a fine art photographer, the reproduction of pornography is one of Fiona Pardington’s major claims to fame. Local producer, beat-maker and musical powerhouse Estère just released an album in which the title track, Ambition, features “Magdelaine Lavirgin, bordello resident,” who “wants to be the United States President”.
There’s a “Free the Nipple” event coming up this month (“How far will you go for equality?”), asking women to get topless on Oriental Bay for gender equality, and that follows October’s Naked Girls Reading night. Both these events are international franchises. One guy told me he likes the idea of “Free the Nipple”, because he thinks it makes “porn redundant” – places it at his doorstep. There’s no shortage of leery commentary to be found about Free the Nipple from men online. That alone should make us question whether such events really bring about social change, and challenge to male power – or whether they co-opt feminist language to keep women in our place.
Women seem to be engaging in these events as activism because we somehow believe that normalising exposure of “the nipple” will help liberate “it” because men will become so accustomed to seeing female breasts in everyday settings, that they will no longer find them arousing, and then women will finally have the same privilege as men do to go topless. One of the problems with this notion is that it rests on the same habituation principle as pornography does, and the trajectory does not lead to liberation. What happens instead is that men are habituated and desensitised to the point of boredom, and then the game is lifted. In pornography, that means more explicit degradation and violence. Men did not used to like watching a woman being anally raped until she suffers rectal prolapse: they do now. It’s called “rosebudding”, and it’s the new trend.
The point is, that as long as power is still in men’s hands, and men are still buying women, using pornography, broadcasting misogyny, and capitalising from it all, while controlling every position and institution of influence there is – the habituation principle doesn’t work in women’s favour. If we are not taking power away, but we are taking more clothes off in more places, we are succumbing to the demands of men. If we are forcing or coercing other women to accept this status quo, we’re doing the patriarchy’s work for it, gratis.
The Art of Stripping is an exhibition that recently showed at Thistle Hall, offering nipple plaster castings. The exhibition showed art by women who strip in Wellington strip clubs, claiming to demonstrate how “women involved in sex work are all unique and complex people”, though the show was still geared toward ultimately leveraging women’s creativity to legitimise the sex trade. Free trial pole dance classes and burlesque shows are never lacking in Wellington, which normalise that trade too; then of course there’s the usual barrage of objectifying advertising and media, that all these “feminist” activities still insist on distinguishing themselves from. They’re meant to be more sophisticated, avant-garde, political and literary than low-brow mainstream objectification.
Naked Girls Reading, an international campaign. Photo: Facebook event page
Estère’s Ambition music video, featuring Magdelaine Lavirgin (“bordello resident”) presents a telling commentary. Estère’s music has a rebellious, politicised, independent spirit. I Spy, for instance is a song about child poverty, inequality and the 1% caricatured through Baba Yaga imagery. To understand Estère’s punch is to know too that she can shake the world up from home in her pyjamas if she wants to: she makes music with a portable Music Production Centre called Lola, recording the slamming, for instance, of a cutlery drawer; the banging of a drumstick against a lampshade. Her search for rousing sound in her surrounds reminds me of the music company Stomp – except she is one woman.
Ambition presents Lavirgin as strident, not downtrodden. According to a meme Estère has made, “Emancipation of the afro” is one of Lavirgin’s campaigning platforms – she whips a blonde wig off at the video’s opening to liberate her afro by the end of the song, in a profound gesture of black liberation. Estère’s presence, spunk, creative integrity and production talent is jaw-dropping.
Estère’s Lavirgin is not a prostituted woman. She’s the “empowered sex worker” of liberal feminist mythology. She struts in a red cocktail dress pursued by figures in suits with cameras for heads that shine their lights on her. Presumably these camera-headed suits are pornographers, or perhaps they stand more abstractly for the male gaze; Lavirgin in any case, barely pays them notice. She’s just too sassy.
These pursuers eventually tear off their headgear and suits to reveal themselves as a group of women who then hoist up Lavirgin like a prize, decorate her with jewellery and fan her with star-spangled American flags in her presidential chair. To me, this video is a portrait and snapshot of the state of feminism in Wellington; the song a rather cutting anthem. It’s a depiction of the liberal feminists of Wellington and their downright worship of sex trade lobby spokespeople. The video contains vital motifs and messages about black liberation. Yet parallel to that, it tells a story of women, consciously or not, doing the patriarchy’s work for it: the promotion of pornography, and legitimising of prostitution.
It is possible to examine what really happens when a woman sex trade lobbyist – someone with vested interests in promoting the idea of “sex work” as “empowered” – gains access to the highest halls of power. It is not good news for women. Kat Banyard’s book Pimp State discusses how Alejandra Gil, a convicted sex trafficker, managed to lobby the U.N. and Amnesty International into developing policy of benefit to pimps and traffickers such as herself. She’d had a fifteen-year prison sentence for trafficking women and girls; it’s not hard to see why she’d want the sex trade legitimated. It doesn’t help the girls and women who are trafficked and prostituted; neither does our mainstreaming of this kind of lobbying.
Radio New Zealand seems in on this too. The Wireless published an article this year, about how “stigma” causes violence in prostitution (not pimps or johns), and RNZ did a terrible podcast on prostitution that was more like a lobby-produced advertorial.
It is worth considering too, that when Eleanor Catton (another magnificent creative and heroine of mine) won the Booker Prize, she did so for writing an 832-page novel in which the central protagonist is a prostituted woman, but rape is barely mentioned and prostitution hardly problematised.
I know that I will get in trouble with sisters for writing this; I’ll be accused of attacking women. I still think we need to be talking about the trends that might be keeping us “in our place”, keeping us immobile and unthreatening, while we enter a Trump-era of escalating violence, exploitation, attacks on reproductive rights, mass manipulation and hostility toward women.
With regard to that manipulation – consider that businessmen-pornographers have been grooming the market to make porn socially acceptable in the interests of capital gain since the 1950s. The first years of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, Bob Guccione’sPenthouse and Larry Flynt’s Hustleron the shelves saw these pornographers work hard to normalise porn. By the 90s, bunny merchandise was being consumed by women everywhere – the bunny branding everything from stationery to pyjama pants.
“It was a very different world,” says feminist writer Gail Dines, “after Hefner eroded the cultural, economic, and legal barriers to mass production and distribution of porn.” It is now even considered up for debate now whether pole dancing is the best after school activity for 8-year-olds.
How did this shift to the mainstream happen? The answer is simple: by design. What we see today is the result of years of careful strategising and marketing by the porn industry to sanitise its products… reconstructing porn as fun, edgy, chic, sexy, and hot. The more sanitised the industry became, the more it seeped into the pop culture and into our collective consciousness.
Free the Nipple, Naked Girls Reading – these are global franchises, they are not grassroots community events. Where this pressure and facilitation and support comes from to run them, we need to understand. We need to understand that this is part of the normalisation of pornography, prostitution and porn culture, which are absolutely and inextricably intertwined with male capital gain, male entitlement, rape culture, sexual violence and the notion of women as property. That notion is shared by conservatives and liberals alike. Both these political groups are male dominated. Both have ways of capturing and co-opting of feminist language and ideals to keep women “in our place”.
Radical feminist midwife MaryLou Singleton sums it up beautifully. “There is liberal patriarchy and there is conservative patriarchy,” she says,
but I agree with Sunsara Taylor, the founder of Stop Patriarchy, that between the pope and the pimp there is really no fundamental difference. But right now, our options are being set up so that you can either align with the ‘Pope Lobby’ or the ‘Pimp Lobby’.
This manipulation and recruiting of women into sex-trade promotion through liberal politics has been successful to the point that porn and sex are now for all intents and purposes, synonymous. As Dines states, if you are anti-porn, you get slapped with the label “anti-sex”. This shows to what extent women have had the wool pulled over our eyes. Our sexuality istheir industry.
I have a fantasy of my own: of women rejecting that colonisation of our bodies and sexuality. Of women no longer pulling punches. What if Estère’s powerful contribution to black liberation struggle was combined with a rejection of prostitution as a tool of women’s subordination? What if Lola really held the power to boot the Chow brothers – known abusers who capitalise from exploitation of women in Wellington – out of town? I think she does hold that power.
What if Hera Lindsay Bird used her stir-up, startle-power to expose anti-feminism in the literary world? What if Fiona Pardington photographed johns and pimps and brought their abuse to light in chiaroscuro, instead of re-photographing already exploited women? If Eleanor Catton, after being called an “ungrateful hua” on air, called for a cull of commercial radio misogynists? If Hadassah Grace used her writing talent, slam voice and powers of intimidation to get White Ribbon ambassadors to check their phallocentric campaigning, re-open Christchurch’s Rape Crisis centre, provide some actual analysis, and perhaps support free self defence for women?
What if Free the Nipple was a women’s gathering, like the consciousness-raising, political gatherings of the 1970s? Like, if we all got bullied, banned and censored for talking sexual politics alone (fuck that)… what if we organised?
Stories of bloody, degrading violence associated with Canadian mining operations abroad sporadically land on Canadian news pages. HudBay Minerals, Goldcorp, Barrick Gold, Nevsun and Tahoe Resources are some of the bigger corporate names associated with this activity. Sometimes our attention is held for a moment, sometimes at a stretch. It usually depends on what solidarity networks and under-resourced support groups can sustain in their attempts to raise the issues and amplify the voices of those affected by one of Canada’s most globalized industries. But even they only tell us part of the story, as Todd Gordon and Jeffery Webber make painfully clear in their new book, The Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America (Fernwood Publishing, November 2016).
“Rather than a series of isolated incidents carried out by a few bad apples,” they write, “the extraordinary violence and social injustice accompanying the activities of Canadian capital in Latin America are systemic features of Canadian imperialism in the twenty-first century.” While not completely focused on mining, The Blood of Extraction examines a considerable range of mining conflicts in Central America and the northern Andes. Together with a careful review of government documents obtained under access to information requests, Gorden and Webber manage to provide a clear account of Canadian foreign policy at work to “ensure the expansion and protection of Canadian capital at the expense of local populations.”
Fortunately, the book is careful, as it must be in a region rich with creative community resistance and social movement organizing, not to present people as mere victims. Rather, by providing important context to the political economy in each country studied, and illustrating the truly vigorous social organization that this destructive development model has awoken, the authors are able to demonstrate the “dialectic of expansion and resistance.” With care, they also show how Canadian tactics become differentiated to capitalize on relations with governing regimes considered friendly to Canadian interests or to try to contain changes taking place in countries where the model of “militarized neoliberalism” is in dispute.
The spectacular expansion of “Canadian interests” in Latin America
We are frequently told Canadian mining investment is necessary to improve living standards in other countries. Gordon and Webber take a moment to spell out which “Canadian interests” are really at stake in Latin America—the principal region for Canadian direct investment abroad (CDIA) in the mining sector—and what it has looked like for at least two decades: “liberalization of capital flows, the rewriting of natural resource and financial sector rules, the privatization of public assets, and so on.”
Cumulative CDIA in the region jumped from $2.58 billion in stock in 1990 to $59.4 billion in 2013. These numbers are considerably underestimated, the authors note, since they do not include Canadian capital routed through tax havens. In comparison, U.S. direct investment in the region increased proportionately about a quarter as much over the same period. Despite having an economy one-tenth the size of the U.S., Canadian investment in Latin America and the Caribbean is about a quarter the value of U.S. investment, and most of it is in mining and banking.
Canadian mining investment abroad
To cite a few of the statistics from Gordon and Webber’s book, Latin America and the Caribbean now account for over half of Canadian mining assets abroad (worth $72.4 billion in 2014). Whereas Canadian companies operated two mines in the region in 1990, as of 2012 there were 80, with 48 more in stages of advanced development. In 2014, Northern Miner claimed that 62% of all producing mines in the region were owned by a company headquartered in Canada. This does not take into consideration that 90% of the mining companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges do not actually operate any mine, but rather focus their efforts on speculating on possible mineral finds. This means that, even if a mine is eventually controlled by another source of private capital, Canadian companies are very frequently the first face a community will see in the early stages of a mining project.
The results have been phenomenal “super-profits” for private companies like Barrick Gold, Goldcorp and Yamana, who netted a combined $2.8-billion windfall in 2012 from their operating mines, according to the authors. (Canadian mining companies earned a total of $19.3 billion that year.) Between 1998 and 2013, the authors calculate that these three companies averaged a 45% rate of profit on their operating mines when the Canadian economy’s average rate of profit was 11.8%.
Compare this to Canada’s miserly Latin American development aid expenditures of $187.7 million in in 2012—a good portion of this destined for training, infrastructure and legislative reform programs intended to support the Canadian mining sector. Or consider that the same year $2.8 billion was taken out of Latin America by three Canadian mining firms, remittances back to the region from migrants living in Canada totalled only $798 million (much more than Canadian aid).
Without spelling out the long-term social and environmental costs of these operations—costs that are externalized onto affected communities—or going into the problematic ways that private investment and Canadian aid can be used to condition local support for a mine project, Gordon and Webber posit that “super-profits” may be precisely the “Canadian interests” the government’s foreign policy apparatus is set up to defend—not authentic community development, lasting quality jobs or a reliable macroeconomic model.
State support for “militarized neoliberalism”
The argument that the role of the Canadian state is “to create the best possible conditions for the accumulation of profit” is central to Gordon and Webber’s book. From the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) down, Canadian agencies and foreign policy have been harnessed to justify “Canadian plunder of the wealth and resources of poorer and weaker countries.” Furthermore, they write, Canada has actively supported the advancement of “militarized neoliberalism” in the region, as country after country has returned to extractive industry, and export-driven and commodity-fuelled economic growth, which comes with high costs for affected-communities and other macroeconomic risks:
The extractive model of capitalism maturing in the Latin American context today does not only involve the imposition of a logic of accumulation by dispossession, pollution of the environment, reassertion of power of the region by multinational capital, and new forms of dependency. It also, necessarily and systematically involved what we call militarized neoliberalism: violence, fraud, corruption, and authoritarian practices on the part of militaries and security forces. In Latin America, this has involved murder, death threats, assaults and arbitrary detention against opponents of resource extraction.
The rapid and widespread granting of mining concessions across large swaths of territory (20% of landmass in some countries), regardless of who lives there or how they might value different lands, water or territory, has provoked hundreds of conflicts and powerful resistance from the community level upward. In reaction, and in order to guarantee foreign investment, in many parts of the region states have intensified the demonization and criminalization of land- and environment-defenders, while state armed forces have increased their powers, and para-state armed forces expanded their territorial control.
Far from being a countervailing force to this trend, the Canadian state has focused its aid, trade and diplomacy on those countries most aligned with its economic interests. It is not unusual to see public gestures of friendship or allegiance toward governments “that share [Canada’s] flexible attitude towards the protection of human rights,” such as Mexico, post-coup Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia. Meanwhile, Canada has used diverse tactics (in Venezuela and Ecuador, for example) to contain resistance and influence even modest reforms.
Canada’s ‘whole-of-government’ approach in Honduras
One of the more detailed examples in Blood of Extraction of Canadian imperialism in Central America covers Canada’s role in Honduras following the military-backed coup in June 2009. Documents obtained from access to information requests provide new revelations and new clarity into how Canadian authorities tried to take advantage of the political opportunities afforded by the coup to push forward measures that favour big business. Once again, though other economic sectors are discussed, mining takes centre stage.
After the terrible experience of affected communities with Goldcorp’s San Martin mine (from the year 2000 onward), Hondurans successfully put a moratorium on all new mining permits pending legal reforms promised by former president José Manuel Zelaya. On the eve of the 2009 coup, a legislative proposal was awaiting debate that would have banned open-pit mining and the use of certain toxic substances in mineral processing, while also making community consent binding on whether or not mining could take place at all. The debate never happened.
Instead, shortly after the coup, and once a president more friendly to “Canadian interests” was in place following a questionable election, the Canadian lobby for a new mining law went into high gear. A key goal for the Canadian government, according to an embassy memo, was “[to facilitate] private sector discussions with the new government in order to promote a comprehensive mining code to give clarity and certainty to our investments.” Another embassy record said that mining executives were happy to assist with the writing of a new mining law that would be “comparable to what is working in other jurisdictions” and developed with a resource person with whom their “ideologies aligned.”
In a highly authoritarian and repressive context, and under the deceptive banner of corporate social responsibility, the Canadian Embassy—with support from Canadian ministerial visits, a Honduran delegation to the annual meeting of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), and overseas development aid to pay for technical support—managed to get the desired law passed in early 2013, lifting the moratorium. Then, in June 2014, with full support from Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons and the Senate, Canada ratified a free trade agreement with Honduras, effectively declaring that “Honduras, despite its political problems, is a legitimate destination for foreign capital,” write Gordon and Webber.
Contrary to the prevailing theory in Canada that sustaining and increasing economic and political engagement with such a country will lead to improved human rights, the social and economic indicators in Honduras have gotten worse. Since 2010, the authors note, Honduras has the worst income distribution of any country in Latin America (it is the most unequal region in the world). Poverty and extreme poverty rates are up by 13.2% and 26.3%, respectively, after having fallen under Zelaya by 7.7% and 20.9%. Compounding this, Honduras is now the deadliest place to fight for Indigenous autonomy, land, the environment, the rule of law, or just about any other social good.
A strategy of containment in Correa’s Ecuador
In contrast to how Canada has more strongly aligned itself with Latin American regimes openly supportive of militarized neoliberalism, the experience in Ecuador under the administration of President Rafael Correa illustrates how Canada considers “any government that does not conform to the norms of neoliberal policy, and which stretches, however modestly, the narrow structures of liberal democracy…a threat to democracy as such.”
In the chapter on Ecuador, Gordon and Webber provide a detailed account of Canada’s “whole-of-government” approach to containing modest reforms advanced by Correa and undermining the opposition of affected communities and social movements to opening the country to large-scale mining. A critical moment in this process occurred in mid-2008, when a constitutional-level decree was issued in response to local and national mobilizations against mining. The Mining Mandate would have extinguished most or all of the mining concessions that had been granted in the country without prior consultation with affected communities, or that overlapped with water supplies or protected areas, among other criteria. It also set in place a short timeline for the development of a new mining law.
The Canadian embassy immediately went to work. Meetings between Canadian industry and Ecuadorian officials, including the president, were set up to ensure a privileged seat at talks over the new mining law. Gordon and Webber’s review of documents obtained under access to information requests further reveals that the embassy even helped organize pro-mining demonstrations together with industry and the Ecuadorian government. Embassy records describe their intention “to create sympathy and support from the people” as part of a “a pro-image campaign,” which included “an aggressive advertisement campaign, in favour of the development of mining in Ecuador.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors, industry threatened to bring international arbitration against Ecuador under a Canada–Ecuador investor protection agreement (which a couple of investors eventually did).
Ultimately, the authors conclude, Canadian diplomacy “played no small part” in ensuring that the Mining Mandate was never applied to most Canadian-owned projects, and that a relatively acceptable new mining law was passed in early 2009. While embassy documents show the Canadian government considered the law useful enough to “open the sector to commercial mining,” it was still not business-friendly enough, particularly because of the higher rents the state hoped to reap from the sector. As a result, the embassy kept up the pressure, including using the threat of withholding badly needed funds for infrastructure projects until mining company concerns were addressed and dialogue opened up with all Canadian companies.
Not discussed in The Blood of Extraction, we also know the pressure from Canadian industry continued for many more years, eventually achieving reforms, in 2013, that weakened environmental requirements and the tax and royalty regime in Ecuador. Meanwhile, as the door opened to the mining industry, mining-affected communities and supporting organizations were feeling the walls of political and social organizing space cave in, as they faced persistent legal persecution and demonization from the state itself, while the serious negative impacts of the country’s first open-pit copper mine started to be felt.
Canada’s “cruel hypocrisy”
The Blood of Extraction is a helpful portrait of “the drivers behind Canadian foreign policy.” Gordon and Webber lay bear “a systematic, predictable, and repeated pattern of behaviour on the part of Canadian capital and the Canadian state in the region,” along with its systemic and almost predictable harms to the lives, wellbeing and desired futures of Indigenous peoples, communities and even whole populations. They call it Canada’s “cruel hypocrisy.”
The problem is not Goldcorp or HudBay Minerals, Tahoe Resources or Nevsun. These companies are all symptoms of a system on overdrive, fuelling the overexploitation of land, communities, workers and nature to fill the pockets of a small transnational elite based principally in the Global North. If we cannot see how deeply enmeshed Canadian capital is with the Canadian state—how “Canadian interests” are considered met when Canadian-based companies are making super-profits, even through violent destruction—we cannot get a sense of how thoroughly things need to change.
Jen Moore is the Latin America Program Coordinator at Mining Watch Canada, working to support communities, organizations and networks in the region struggling with mining conflicts.
