Thursday, February 12, 2015

Patrick L. Smith — Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy

We should be considering the Greece and Ukraine crises together. If only the news media would allow that…
There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common. 
It is in search of a logical explanation of the illogic at work in these two crises that something else, something larger, emerges to bring them into a coherent whole. Washington has so many wars going now, none declared, one can hardly keep the list current. But the most sustained and havoc-wreaking of them is unreported. This is the war for neoliberal supremacy across the planet. Greece and Ukraine are best viewed as two hot fronts in this war, a sort of World War III none of us ever imagined.
Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein. The thought holds for two reasons. At its core it is profoundly undemocratic, never mind that the English and American variants of democracy are the mulch from which it arises. It is also unrelentingly absolutist: Because it is intimately related to the myth of America’s providential exception, neoliberalism can tolerate no alternative. Were another idea of political economy to flourish it would expose premodern myth as premodern myth.…
Good snapshot of the birth and development of liberalism from classical to progressive on one hand and neoliberal on the other. Smith is well-informed both about history and current affairs, and he summarizes the essentials.

Salon
Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy
Patrick L. Smith | International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992.

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