Colonialism, only more hegemonically sophisticated

In terms of the issues raised in the above cited study from the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development... Well, first of all, when you plug this understanding of democracy promotion policies involved with the creation of a plethora of NGO's, starting with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983, into ongoing diatribes by mostly conservatives about the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, suddenly things start to make some sense. Those incessant calls for "change" and the efforts by this administration to put someone with views on the more extreme and aggressive end of the continuum regarding these policies into the U.S.'s seat in the United Nations and the lengths it went to do so becomes more than a peculiarity or a whim. The undoubted go ahead to force as much change on the institution as possible in favor of this elitist neoliberal project of promoting a polyarchic form of democracy begins to evoke a picture of how all these folks in those NGO's are working together with a relatively common spectrum of understanding of what they are looking to accomplish. One wishes to avoid thinking in terms of a conspiracy, and in reality it's not. It's only a conspiracy if one has some strange inkling to see it differently.

The label "realist," describing such policy professionals as James Baker, Henry Kissenger, or even Zbigniew Brzezinski, of Grand Chessboard fame, is really just a term for those in roughly the center of a spectrum of elites with relatively little variance in how they view the place of neoliberal globalization in this polyarchic democracy of ours, and of course it includes members of both parties. The now well recognized conservative neocons who have led this group with the strategies employed in Iraq, are just examples of extremist on that really rather narrow foreign policy spectrum. Their extremism is inspired by a vision of available military potential. And so they are the vibrantly creative ones who want to make certain that when the polyarchic so called "democracy" promotion policies of regime change don't work out as hoped, it can be backed up with the handy military that was left hanging around with nothing much to do after the cold war. And when it comes to using it, their Machiavellian training engages, using all the appropriate culturally imbedded arguments handily available to minimize resistance from a well indoctrinated and generally compliant population at home, as was done to overcome any potential resistance to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with accompanying bursts of feverous patriotism.

Again, recall that hegemony occurs when the elites who have agreed upon these policies, both internal and international, get the majority of a population to internalize the ideology, even to the extent of having a major sized group in the population well armed with talking points -- and with ready made charater assassination tools as one can notice applied with regularity here at Thom's for instance -- to argue for it with anyone who raises any disturbing questions; that's basically how hegemony works to instill polyarchic democracy in a world with increasingly disproportionate poor, but who unfortunately happen to be where resources necessary to the economic elements of neoliberalism happen to be. Coercion is when they have to enforce it at the point of a gun.

So if you look at the foreign policy evolution in the U.S., especially since the Truman Doctrine, which marked the beginning of the Cold War policies that began the distribution of what was to become our now empire of seven hundred and forty some bases, forty or fifty different intelligence agencies, you see that the CIA was a first version of under-the-major-media radar secret instruments -- therefore out of public consciousness -- coercive regime change tools. An early CIA coordinated regime change, for instance, was the democratic government in Iran in 1953. That had to be done because its democratic intention was decidedly not polyarchic as it was about to nationalize some corporate owned interests there, most concernedly the oil.

Eventually, naive and "subversive" elements in our own government (these have since been systematically categorized, labeled and smeared with such terms as "liberals," with the not accidental associations with socialism and communism and all the negatives imbedded in those knee jerk respondent inducing terms) revealed these tactics -- and it didn't help these polyarchs that occasional blowback would occur from CIA activities -- a certain amount of disturbance was created by that occasionally managed to hit key elements of public awareness, thereby raising concerns about this covert entity called the CIA. Undoubtedly all that consciousness raising that resulted in public suspicion, accomplished by these undemocratic "subversives," was enhanced by a general and growing public alarm as the catastrophic effects of the Vietnam War adventure slowly ebbed into public awareness. So with the Nixon presidential debacle and all that ensued around that, a policy shift of some sort was obviously put on the table -- someone's table somewhere, I suppose -- for consideration.

And so in the 80's, under Reagan and his own very strong belief in neoliberal principles that came well packaged and presented to the national stage in the Oval Office, a shift was eventually made, they began looking for a more hegemonic based way of "promoting democracy" and the NED was born. Remember, here, that Saddam was actually a product of the pre NED, covert operation regime change period, and he was used, as of old, by the overlapping tactics of that period, while this shift to the new polyarchic policy making was beginning to find its way in the foreign policy tool box (interestingly this shift also appears coordinated with the beginnings of the unitary executive theory by some of the same conservatives whose area of interest in this case happened to be constitutional law). Note that by 1990, or so, Saddam was becoming a dinosaur in the U.S.'s previous foreign policy tool kit. Notice to that he happens to have headed a little oil rich country dead in the heart of the strategic ellipse. Note that there was a conveniently timed Gulf War I about that time, engaged as we all know for all the public reasons given, now the general historical record undoubtedly taught in high school classes, and with all this foreign policy forming, much of it in institutionally now in place, policy which has it's own implacable force that transcends the revolving door of politicians in the democratically elective arm of our own polyarchic political system, that gives it the "look" of a democracy. The result was all sorts of propagandistic tools to play with in the public media. Not the least of which would be the evolution of a replacement for the now diminished value of the fear of communism after the Soviet Union collapsed. That would be, of course, terrorism.

That sort of brings up this whole notion of nation states discussed in the document from the citation I started with. Nation states have been an evolving definition for several hundred years now, and they have been evolving in concert with a process known as colonialism. There's a correlation between colonialism and the globalization of Neoliberalism. But I don't recall anyone in my high school history classes making that clear to me. At any rate, nation states are still undergoing definitional processes, especially in the peripheries, and of course the ideal is to get them all in the form of polyarchic democracies with a group of revolving door elites switching back and forth between all the major power mechanisms, like the multinational collective economic entities, commonly called corporations, the militaries (which are now being privatized as corporations as well, a recent trend, but very exciting I suspect for the neoliberal polyarchs), and government bureaucracies. The end result of this transformation may very well be what William Harrison envisioned when he published his short story Rollerball Ball Murder in Esquire magazine. The 1975 movie Rollerball starring James Caan, depicts that story and the corporate world that had evolved by then -- which was set in 2018, eleven years from now. Hmmm. I wonder if this mess in Iraq has set things back any?

World Systems Analysis

In terms of world systems, I've been analyzing the whole of it now from an ecological model, rather than through economic theory, because it appears to me that a wide range of environmental problems are approaching an ecological crisis point, and economic theory does not provide us with sufficient tools to grasp the scope of the problem. Economists are simply unaware of the possible ways of valuing such things as complex eco systems and their stability in a systemically interactive and self regulating living biosphere. They may offer sophisticated statistical modeling capabilities, but the tool is practically useless without the proper data or frames of reference for that data.

An example of how such modeling has been seriously misused and construed by those who are both unaware of the science that goes into ecological modeling, and therefore unconcerned with how their statistics may misconstrue the meaning of the work of the scientists that developed it, is a 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, by a political scientist and statistician, Bjorn Lomborg.

Despite nearly unanimous criticism from the entire range of sciences he attempted to model, his rosy representation of the potential state of the environment and its future abilities to sustain the human socio-economic growth of what we are identifying as the developed nations in the past two hundred years, appeals strongly to the politicians and their economic experts, who may be our modern day priest hood, with their charts and graphs of economics correlated with the voodoo of the high priests in their temples, whose advice was sought by emperors and kings.

Despite The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty's report torching Bjorn's book as dishonest science, he became the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and with his skeptical views of environmentalists work, set about establishing the priorities time span for which of the many global problems should be tackled.

Above, I brought up the notion of levels of succession with what ecologists identify as r-selected species for low succession eco-systems and k-selected species for high succession eco-systems. I correlated the concept "species" with the different types of cultural adaptations that can be characterized as human societies. In that sense we can see, from studying ranges of societies through social sciences like anthropology, that human culture itself is an adaptive mechanism in the same way that genetic endowments of species are. Once we've analyzed the features, we find that the variation among societies can be categorized in terms of their eco niche features, much as we do species.

In discussion, I correlated the r-selected species with features of neoliberal capitalism-based societies. I'll offer one of the better write-ups on neoliberalism I've found on the web below to clarify what I mean by neoliberal capitalism.

Wallerstein, along with Gunder Frank, provided what I consider an attractively sophisticated analysis of the evolution and spread of world capitalism with the intertwining of differentiated global societal relationships. That debate has evolved, now, in the Twenty First Century, to one that addresses limits to growth issues in very starkly real terms.

That issue might be phrased this way: The question for today is, given that one hundred years ago most nation state policy makers would probably have concluded the world could sustain several economic life spaces based on the capitalistic economies that were considered predominant, what can the globe sustain of the system we see evolving now? And the answer, now as then, depends on the issue of technology... but technology writ large, not as mere technique, but as the broad system of organizing the processes of providing material support for society."

I approach that question more consciously now, given my own study of environmental issues, in terms of recognizing that energy as the primary ingredient to the technology issue, as the transformation of energy in an eco-system is the primary ingredient to life. Most of the technology in the world has evolved in relation to fossil fuels. When the energy sources in a given eco-system are few, that is one way of identifying a low succession eco-system, and one that is unlikely to be balanced and stable.

The global economic system right now appears aimed at maximizing the technology involved with that low succession form of energy consumption. In essence, modern complex societies are designed to create the maximum instability in the biosphere. As this societal form expands into the remainder of the culturally undeveloped parts of the biosphere, it will increase the instability of the total set of ecological systems in the whole that is the biosphere that sustains life as we know it. I think whatever we want to consider about the notion of "economic life zones" is predicated on recognizing that. But it would seem to me that the globalizing neoliberal principles involved in the policymaking of the major developed nations are geared to allowing that recognition.

I would add a further suggestion and say that whether peak oil has already occurred, or whether it won't occur for a hundred years, the current neoliberal strategy of attempting to maximize a kind of democracy based on neoliberal principles is headed for the same kinds of unstable adaptational constraints characteristic with all r-selected species eco-systems.

So what is the core philosophy that drives this globalist trend towards a human version of an r-selected species? The latest term for it is Neoliberalism. The following offers a reasonably concise history and definition as a general working reference:

Neoliberalism

If Adam Smith returned and saw the more extreme aspects of neoliberalism, he would probably find them bizarre. Nevertheless, they derive from the ideas of early liberalism. The belief in the market, in market forces, has separated from the factual production of goods and services. It has become an end in itself, and this is one reason to speak of neoliberalism and not of liberalism.

A general characteristic of neoliberalism is the desire to intensify and expand the market, by increasing the number, frequency, repeatability, and formalisation of transactions. The ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and influencing every other transaction, with transactions occurring in an infinitely short time, and repeated at an infinitely fast rate. It is no surprise that extreme forms of neoliberalism, and especially cyberliberalism, overlap with semi-religious beliefs in the interconnectedness of the cosmos.
Some specific aspects of neoliberalism are:

• A new expansion in time and space of the market: although there has been a global-scale market economy for centuries, neoliberals find new areas of marketisation. This illustrates how neoliberalism differs from classic market liberalism. Adam Smith would not have believed that a free market was less of a free market, because the shops are closed in the middle of the night: expansion of trading hours is a typically neoliberal policy. For neoliberals a 23-hours economy is already unjustifiable: nothing less than 24-hours economy will satisfy them. They constantly expand the market at its margins.

• The emphasis on property, in classic and market liberalism, has been replaced by an emphasis on contract. In the time of Adam Smith, property conferred status in itself: he would find it strange that entrepreneurs sometimes own no fixed assets, and lease the means of production.

• Contract maximalisation is typically neoliberal: the privatisation of the British railway network, formerly run by one state-owned company, led to 30 000 new contracts. Most of these were probably generated by splitting services, which could have been included in block contracts. (A fanatic neoliberal would prefer not to buy a cup of coffee, but negotiate separately for each microlitre).

• The contract period is reduced, especially on the labour market, and so the frequency of contract is increased. A service contract, for instance for office cleaning, might be reduced from a one-year to a three-month contract, then to a one-month contract. Contracts of employment are shorter and shorter, in effect forcing the employee to re-apply for the job. This flexibilisation means a qualitatively different working life: many more job applications, spread throughout the working life. This was historically the norm in agriculture - day labour - but long-term labour contracts became standard after industrialisation.

• Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies.

• New transaction-intensive markets are created on the model of the stock exchanges - electricity exchanges, telephone-minute exchanges. Typical for neoliberalism: there is no relationship between the growth in the number of transactions, and the underlying production.

• New forms of auction are another method of creating transaction-intensive markets. Radio frequency auctions, such as those for UMTS frequencies, are an example. They replaced previous methods of allocation, especially licensing - a traditional method of allocating access to scarce goods with no clear private owner. The complex forms of frequency spectrum auctions have only been developed in the last few years. Neoliberals now see them as the only valid method of making such allocations: they dismiss all other methods as 'beauty contests'.

• Artificial transactions are created, to increase the number and intensity of transactions. Large-scale derivative trading is a typically neoliberal phenomenon, although financial derivatives have existed for centuries. It is possible to trade options on shares: but it is also possible to create options on these options. This accumulation of transaction on transaction, is characteristic of neoliberalism. New derivatives are created, to be traded on the new exchanges - such as 'electricity futures'. There is no limit to this expansion, except computer power, which grows rapidly anyway.

• Automated trading, and the creation of virtual market-like structures, are neoliberal in the sense that they are an intensification of "transaction for transaction's sake". However, a world in which all entrepreneurial activity was automated would not be neoliberal, or liberal.

• This expansion of interactivity means that neoliberal societies are network societies, rather than the 'open societies', of classic liberals. Formal equality and 'access' are not enough for neoliberals: they must be used to create links to other members of the society. This attitude has been accurately labelled 'connectionist'.

• Because of contract expansionism, transaction costs play an increasing role in the neoliberal economy. All those 30 000 contracts at British Rail had to be drafted by lawyers, all the assessments have to be done by assessors. There is always some cost of competition, which increases as the intensity of transactions increases. Neoliberalism has reached the point where these costs threaten to overwhelm the existing economy, destroying any economic gains from technological change.

• The growth of the financial services sector is related to these neoliberal characteristics, rather than to any inherent shift to service economies. The entire sector is itself a transaction cost: it was almost non-existent in the centrally planned economies. In turn, it has created a huge demand for office space in the world's financial centres. The expansion of the sector and its office employment are in direct contradiction of propaganda about 'more efficiency and less bureaucracy' in the free market.

• The speed of trading is increased. Online market data is expensive, yet it is now available free with a 15-minute delay. The markets move so fast, that the data is worthless after 15 minutes: the companies can then give it away, as a form of advertising. Day-traders buy and sell shares in minutes. Automated trading programmes, where the computer is linked direct to the stock exchange system, do it in seconds, or less. It is this increased speed which has led to the huge nominal trading volumes on the international currency markets, many times the Gross World Product on a yearly basis.

• Certain functions arise which only exist inside a neoliberal free market - 'derivative professions'. A good example is the profession of psychological-test coach. The intensity of assessment has increased, and firms now regularly use psychological tests to select candidates, even for intermediate level jobs. So ambitious candidates pay for training, in how to pass these psychological tests. Competition in the neoliberal labour market itself creates the market for this service.

• The creation of sub-markets, typically within an enterprise. Sub-contracting is itself an old market practice, but was usually outside the firm. It is now standard practice for large companies to create competition among their constituent units. This practice is also capable of quasi-infinite extension, and its promotion is characteristic of neoliberalism. A few companies even required each individual employee to register as a business, and to compete with each other at the place of work. A large company can form literally millions of holdings, alliances and joint ventures, using such one-person firms as building blocks.

• Supplier maximalisation: this extends the range of enterprises that compete for each contract. The ideal would be that every enterprise competes for every contract offered, maximising competition and market forces. In the case of the labour market, the neoliberal ideal is the absolutely flexible and employable employee, who can (and does apply) for every vacancy. In reality, an individual can not perform every kind of work - but there is a real development towards non-specialised enterprises, especially in the producer services sector. In neoliberalism, instead of the traditional 'steel tycoon' or 'newspaper baron' there are enterprises which "globally link people and knowledge, and cultures" or "advise and implement solutions to management issues". (In fact these are quotes from the accountants Price Waterhouse, but you can not guess this from the descriptions).

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic structure, it is a philosophy. This is most visible in attitudes to society, the individual and employment. Neo-liberals tend to see the world in term of market metaphors. Referring to nations as companies is typically neoliberal, rather than liberal. In such a view Deutschland GmbH competes with Great Britain Ltd, BV Nederland, and USA Inc. However, when this is a view of nation states, it is as much a form of neo-nationalism as neoliberalism. It also looks back to the pre-liberal economic theory - mercantilism - which saw the countries of Europe as competing units. The mercantilists treated those kingdoms as large-scale versions of a private household, rather than as firms. Nevertheless, their view of world trade as a competition between nation-sized units, would be acceptable to modern neoliberals.

Competition for inward investment, on the other hand, was generally unknown until the late 19th century. This competition is often seen by activists as the core doctrine of neoliberalism, especially since the neo-mercantilist policies are easy to understand and very unpopular: wage cuts, less money for public services, less tax on the rich. The neo-mercantilist nation, in other words, behaves like a caricaturally mean and nasty capitalist. It is not relevant either for these policies, or for opposition to them, whether they have any effect at all. Perhaps investment decisions are not made on this basis, perhaps there is no real mobility of capital, perhaps no investor is interested in Argentina, for instance. But so long as the Argentine government believes that it should pursue certain polices to attract investors, then it will do so. So long as it believes that the 'SA Argentina' is a business firm, then it will run Argentina accordingly.

The market metaphor is not only applied among nations, but among cities and regions as well. In neoliberal regional policy, cities are selling themselves in a national and global marketplace of cities. They are considered equivalent to an entrepreneur selling a product, but the product is the city (or region) as a location for entrepreneurs. The successful 'sale' of the product is the decision of an entrepreneur to locate there, not simply the sale of land or factories. This view of cities as sub-firms within the fictive 'national firm' parallels the creation of sub-markets within real firms. The difference is, that those sub-markets really exist - neoliberal city governments, on the other hand, act primarily on a belief in a metaphor. Again, there is no hard evidence that the global marketplace of cities exists: for most economic sectors complete mobility of plant and labour is an illusion. Most firms can not simply move from city to city, across continents and ignoring language and cultural barriers, in pursuit of locational advantage. Here too, the neoliberalism is a philosophy, an attitude - rather than an economic reality. It has influenced European politics - the fear of this neoliberalism dominated the French campaign against the European Constitution. There is certainly a neoliberal lobby within the EU, represented by the Lisbon Council, although it sees the world in terms of competing trade blocks rather than competing cities or regions. However, it is not clear how a continent could be run as a business firm - even its inhabitants wanted that. (More on neoliberal economic geography below).

A good example of the underlying attitudes is the basic policy document of the city of Düsseldorf - the Leitbild, equivalent to a 'mission statement' in English. It was adopted in 1997, and is no longer online at the city website, but parts are quoted at St@ttbuch Düsseldorf...

Düsseldorf bekennt sich zum Prinzip des Wettbewerbs. Der Erfolg von Städten entscheidet sich im Wettbewerb nach innen und aussen. Düsseldorf will besser sein.
Wettbewerb ist treibende Kraft unseres gesellschaftlichen Systems. Im zusammenwachsenden Europa gilt dies in hohem Masse auch für die Beziehungen zwischen den Regionen, die als Wirtschaftsstandort, als Lebensraum für die Bürgerinnen und Bürger und als Kulturstandort miteinander konkurrieren. Sich hierzu bekennen heisst, den Wettbewerb aufnehmen und aktiv gestalten zu wollen.
Im Wettbewerb besteht nur, wer gut ist. Düsseldorf will Wettbewerb. Im Interesse der vielen Millionen Menschen des Lebens- und Wirtschaftsraums: Düsseldorf will besser sein.
...

Düsseldorf is committed to the principle of competition. The success of cities is decided by competition, internal and external. Düsseldorf wants to be better. Competition is the driving force of our social system. In a Europe which is becoming more integrated, this applies increasingly to the relations between regions. They compete with each other as investment location, as residential choice for the citizens, and in cultural activity. Our commitment means that we will actively and structurally enter into this competition. In a competitive world, only the good can survive. Düsseldorf wants to compete! In the name of the millions of people in our economic and residential region: Düsseldorf wants to be the best!

The neoliberal urban vision was adopted, without debate, by many city governments in the 1990's. At some point, a belief in 'competition by population structure' was incorporated - the idea that a successful city is inhabited only by successful people. This belief, nonsensical or not, has had an effect in a negative sense: some cities now pursue active policies aimed at relocating low-income households outside the city. In the Netherlands, a new law allows large cities to legally ban poor people, from certain areas, or from the entire city..

As you would expect from a complete philosophy, neoliberalism has answers to stereotypical philosophical questions such as "Why are we here" and "What should I do?". We are here for the market, and you should compete. Neo-liberals tend to believe that humans exist for the market, and not the other way around: certainly in the sense that it is good to participate in the market, and that those who do not participate have failed in some way. In personal ethics, the general neoliberal vision is that every human being is an entrepreneur managing their own life, and should act as such. Moral philosophers call this is a virtue ethic, where human beings compare their actions to the way an ideal type would act - in this case the ideal entrepreneur. Individuals who choose their friends, hobbies, sports, and partners, to maximise their status with future employers, are ethically neoliberal. This attitude - not unusual among ambitious students - is unknown in any pre-existing moral philosophy, and is absent from early liberalism. Such social actions are not necessarily monetarised, but they represent an extension of the market principle into non-economic area of life - again typical for neoliberalism.

The idea of employability is characteristically neoliberal. It means that neoliberals see it as a moral duty of human beings, to arrange their lives to maximise their advantage on the labour market. Paying for plastic surgery to improve employability (almost entirely by women) is a typical neoliberal phenomenon - one of those which would surprise Adam Smith.
Eileen Bradbury, a psychologist who advises surgeons at the Alexandra Hospital in Cheadle, Cheshire, said she was particularly worried that Jenna wanted the operation so that she could be successful. "That is a very disturbing belief for a 15-year-old girl to have, and also a false one," she said. "I have seen women coming for surgery who work in television and they say they have to have it done or they won't get the work. I usually go along with that because it is probably true".

Guardian: Parents defend breast implants for girl, 15.

In practice many 'workfare neoliberals' also believe that there is a separate category of people, who can not participate fully in the market. Workfare ideologies condemn this underclass to a service function for those who are fully market-compatible. Note however, that by recognising a non-market underclass, neoliberals undermine their own claims about the universal applicability of market principles.

The general ethical precept of neoliberalism can be summarised approximately as:

• "act in conformity with market forces"

• "within this limit, act also to maximise the opportunity for others to conform to the market forces generated by your action"

• "hold no other goals"

If everyone lives by such entrepreneurial precepts, then a world will come into existence in which not just goods and services, but all human and social life, is the product of conformity to market forces. More than traditional market liberals, neoliberals therefore have a quasi-heroic attitude to the entrepreneur, and to engagement in the market. A 1998 speech by German entrepreneur Jost Stollmann is typical: his neoliberal ideas played a prominent role in the national elections in Germany in that year. Stollmann includes his personal moral philosophy, such as it is...

Ich möchte die Lust und Bewunderung unternehmerischen Erfolgs in den Augen der jungen Menschen sehen. Ich möchte den Stolz und den Zuspruch der Eltern spüren, wenn sich Sohn oder Tochter tatenvoll in das Abenteuer Selbständigkeit stürzen.
....so gut sein, wie wir nur können - getreu der bewährten Formel, die ich während meiner Zeit in Amerika verstehen gelernt habe: 'BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE' Jost Stollmann

The idea that everyone should be an entrepreneur is distinctly neoliberal. Early liberals never expected the majority of the population to own property, let alone run a business. (The participation of the poor in the market was limited to accepting any work they were offered). The practices on the flexibilised labour market would seem strange to the early liberals. For instance, individuals set up a one-person employment agency with one person on the books, themselves - partly for tax reasons, but also to meet the ideal of the entrepreneur. Policy to increase the number of entrepreneurs is typically neoliberal, although ironically it must be implemented by the State. A classic market-liberal would not say that a free market is less of a free market, because only 10% of the population are entrepreneurs. For neoliberals it is not sufficient that there is a market: there must be nothing which is not market.

the neoliberalism joke
Marxist: "The workers have nothing to sell but their labour power"
Neoliberal: "I offer courses on How to Sell Your Labour Power Like A Shark"

There is therefore no distinction between a market economy and a market society in neoliberalism. With the attitudes and ethics set out above, there is only market: market society, market culture, market values, market persons marketing themselves to other market persons. In a sense neoliberalism has returned to the position of early liberalism - which also combined culture, values and ethics with economics. But neoliberalism brings a far more intensive 'market' - replacing not only traditional social forms, but also the concept of private life. At the same time this 'market' is increasingly remote from the necessity of production, which was so real for the early liberals - when there were still regular famines in Europe. In fact it is so remote from the existing cultural perception of a 'market', that it would perhaps be better to use some other word.

Finally, neoliberalism has become associated with specific cultures (especially US culture) and a specific language (English). This is not surprising: Anglo-American liberalism had the most influence on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as ideology is not tied to any culture or language. It is true that a single global language would facilitate free trade - but that could be Esperanto, as well as English. In practice, the promotion of the English language, neoliberal policies, and pro-American foreign policy, usually go together: this was especially true in Central and Eastern Europe.

I would suggest that free market ideology may be more of a religion designed to overcome, in a fundamentalist way, questions raised to the eco-sanity of that economic philosophy, which in that sense "almost" puts it in the category of a religion.

Neoliberalism and Global Democracy Promotion

The "common sense" free trade promotion of the neoliberal argument often ignores the larger issues, the reality that this system actually does impose certain structural problems on the peripheral countries (developing's another term) in an increasingly globalized economy, with ramifications that do not work themselves out nicely in the so called free market that is paradoxically imposed. So I always take the phrase "free market" with a couple of pounds of salt. Besides the positive value laden argument implied in arguments that lean towards the general positive impacts these adjustments have on these peripheral nations, like bringing them into the modernized, so-called "developed" world, the structural adjustment aspects of it have a almost incalculably huge affects on the individuals in these peripheral countries while this takes place. And this generally has gone on without a by your leave from them. As the policies that had promoted this process have revealed these problems, foreign policy itself went through a transformation since the Reagan era, and the institution of a government sponsored NGO known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In conjunction with this new policy supporting tool, we've witnessed the revival of a Wilsonian era-like policy of sharing the benefits of U.S. exceptionalism with the under priveleged of the planet as it's come about over the past twenty some years. Polyarchy, a word for this form of democracy promoting policy, has been described by number of scholars, prominent among them is William I. Robinson. His 1996 book: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony offers an extensive and scholarly analysis.

For instance, the conveniently structured conditionalities of the so called "modernization" loans by the policy making elites of the globalized economy have certain logical requirements, and it's through them that this economic ideology is designed to implement free market programs and policies (privatization and deregulations). In the process one major characteristic emerges, and that's a national debt, which occurs through loans from the World Bank and the IMF, and which must be paid in equivalent dollars. That monetary part is one of the keys to getting this globalized free market transformation to work in peripheral countries.

Note that the the U.S. manufactures the dollars, world trade is not accidently based on those dollars, and the loans are made in dollars. The countries in debt don't manufacture dollars, so they have to get the dollars to pay off their debt some other way.

How do they get those dollars to pay off their debt? That's where the conveniently available multinational corporations come in. Among the processes that begin are privitization of national resources, including water and so forth. Industrial agriculture is implemented, peasants move off the lands to clutter the hillsides of growing cities with their shacks, and maybe some get lucky and become laborers so their country can sell products on the global market for dollars.

How does that affect the social organizations in place? In fairly dramatic ways -- socially and stucturally. That's why it's called "structural adjustment." None of that has much to do with individual initiative among the human baggage these nations contain, and all the rest of this crap about free choice and market forces acting like rewards in our big rat maze here in the U.S., that supposedly stimulates people to improve themselves through education and entrepreneurial innovation in this giant ponzi scheme that now has ever more wealth accumulating to ever fewer. In other words, everything that's involved in the "common sense" of this "integrated" and "sociological" propaganda that goes along with globalization.

So I was doing a little research the other night into this polyarchic version of democracy promotion that William I. Robinson has introduced in respect the geopolitical strategy that's been developed in the U.S. since the Truman Doctrine. Though I'd consider the policy a much larger continuum, I pick the Truman Doctrine as a significant point because it is a historical marker for the beginning of the Cold War, and the U.S. Foreign policy that evolved from there with a marked growth of the military industrial complex, the much more energetically pursued strategic use of the military bases in the world that formed the basis for the current U.S. empire of seven hundred plus bases with our forty to fifty different intelligence agencies designed to keep track of almost everything of significance both domestically and internationally to these policies.

I've been aware that democracy promotion was an element of foreign policy, but I'd never looked closely at what that entailed, and now that I have, it's been quite revealing about the details of this general notion I've been developing about U.S. geopolitical strategising. It of course relates to the current notion of democracy promotion going on in Iraq, and I discovered a number of studies generated by these polyarchically oriented NGOs about democratizing the Middle East done not too long before 911.

As I see it, this democratizing project is like the proverbial ether that connects the universe together, in that these combined projects connect the formal structural strategies of U.S. geopolitics and economic globalization represented by the multinational arm, with the human beings in the countries, all of them including the baggage that gets disrupted when their little plots of farmland get commercialized and they go to collect in the cities, and so forth. It's much more involved than military support of an autocratic regime (coercive tactic) or diplomatic relations. What it boils down to is developing the much more effective hegemonic layer of control needed to stabilize the necessarily disruptive globalization process by setting up the needed institutions that the population will engage in once they've been disrupted, and thus through group participation, become behaviorally adapted to the globalized version of neoliberal economic. When that doesn't work they groups can always be labeled "terrorists" and dealt with in that prescribed manner. Very interesting polyarchic strategy. Especially in light of the notion of a revolving door of elites at the upper echelons of government, which revolves between corporations, top posts in the Executive Branch directed bureaucracy, and the military. And of course whenever possible, they get themselves elected. Both Bushes are examples, and of course Cheney with his own revolving door connection to Haliburton. Cheney and Rumsfeld are a kind of team, but that's for a later discussion perhaps.

A Proliferation of NGO's

Here is a brief description of Robinson's book from Amazon (see the above link to the book), I offer it as a way of connecting what I found in my search just as a way to emphasize the elements of this change in foreign policy from CIA undercover coercion to NGO based persuasion since the Reagan era, because I argue that it underlies and interconnects a lot of layers in this very complex effort I am undertaking to understand our world today, and offers some of the basic structural reasons for making sense of how our very own government has the U.S. military in Iraq, in the Middle East and why it may not be so easy for our elected officials to find a way out:

Not everybody sees it in such rosy terms, of course, but the efforts to portray those who criticise it in the worst light also harkens back over the past twenty years or so to a remarkable new era of "character assassination" against all other forms of liberalism other than this neoliberalistic project, and we find this defamatory assault in all sorts of forms that came out of that era marking its reaction to the peace loving participatory democracy folks of the Sixties and Seventies. Here is something that caught my eye in one search, mainly because of its title:

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

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So a number of NGO's worth mentioning, and I'll start with the most recently created I could find (2000), the Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD).

Here's what I find interesting. Walter Raymond Jr. joined the CIA in 1952. He was in the CIA throughout it's period of covert operations, some of which got so far out of hand by the seventies that the CIA had nearly discredited itself as a legitimate foreign policy tool of our very own polyarchic democracy in the international community. Beginning in the 1980s, policymakers under Reagan began experimenting with strategies of "promoting democracy." It started with a propaganda campaign called Project Truth, which evolved into Project Democracy, and Walter Raymond, the CIA man, was involved in the first steps of that, out of which emerged The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its sub foundations, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enteprise (CIPE), and lo and behold, the AFl-CIO's Solidarity Center (ACILS). Pretty much the same elites revolve through the upper echelons of all of them. When the CCD was created in 2000, Walter Raymond was put in charge of that. He died of cancer in 2003, or he may still be in charge. Of the first five top people on its staff I looked at, four were in the upper echelons of the NED.

Here's a brief description of this latest democracy promoting NGO from a site that tries to keep tabs on all these NGOs:

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And then yet another level of organization emerged in my search:

World Movement for Democracy (WMD) (?!! so that's where they are)

It calls itself the Big Tent.

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