Friday, July 7, 2017

The Politics of Abandonment


"Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion." - Henry Giroux

Armies of people are being excluded.  

Armies are being locked out of effective politics. And armies are becoming irrelevant to basic systems of production and consumption. Armies of people are surplus, their services no longer needed. These are armies of the rejected whose lifestyles are written off as as "backward". There are armies of souls whose basic needs are unmet. Already abandoned, they wait precariously for the next deluge, for the next catastrophe to sweep them away. This is the language of Naomi Klein.

The "politics of exclusion" can also be called neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies are the pernicious consequences of a growing casino capitalism, ravenously extracting resources from the productive sphere and sucking them down into puerile arenas of gaming and speculation.

This is much more than money being transferred from the many to the few. This is about infrastructure, basic services, and ways of life. 

Factories, stores, industries, cities, entire regions and whole cultures are all being sucked into a frothy nothingness as resources are forcefully clawed into the schemes of callous speculators. These edifices remain only as ruins, refuse, ghost towns, and wastelands traversed by the semblances of dazed zombies, the walking dead. This is not about "creative destruction" because production is being shriveled. This is dereliction and destruction for no reason but the vain benefit of a tiny few.

The unemployed and the uneducated have few recourses under neoliberalism. The need for unskilled labor has been steadily shrinking for half a century and it is still shrinking. Attribute this to a developing economy, but then look at the infrastructure of education.  It is being dismantled for the majority, increasingly replaced by the sham schooling of profit motivated scams. Armies of people are being abandoned. This is the language of Henry Giroux.

Under the neoliberalism of casino capitalism armies of people are no longer needed. Armies of people are considered expendable. This can be seen in growing wealth inequality. This can be seen in shrinking labor market participation. This can be seen in the epidemic of opioid abuse. And much more can be foreseen in proposals to hack at the safety net of Medicaid which funds far more than addiction treatment. Under unproductive casino capitalism, there is no need for the sick or the elderly.

The driving principle of neoliberalism goes far beyond exploitation: a concept which sufficed for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The vampiric dynamics of casino capitalism demand exclusion. It requires denying value to large swaths of the earth's population. Armies of people are being abandoned, locked out, and cursed into a zombie like condition where they are regarded as - and where they may feel themselves to be - the walking dead. This is the language of Henry Giroux.


Armies of people are being excluded

Armies of people are being abandoned.

We are armies of people unneeded and unwanted by a tiny (0.1%) idiot elite.


We are people.


We are armies.






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