Re: <nettime> Troll factories in some shitty St Petersburg office?

Part of the power ascribed to Neoliberalism is it's valorization in the theoretical abstractions of the left, which mirrors in many ways how capitalism is conceptualised as an all encompassing totality rather than a material process, historically and geographically located.

Terms like neoliberalism are a challenge but it is critical to locate it's intellectual developments and impacts in historical terms. The project of the Mont Pelerin Society, the works and influence of the Austrian school of economics are central intellectual pillars for the development of global networks of think tanks for the advocacy of 'free market' policy prescriptions.

In 'Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste' Phillip Mirowski uses data collected by Bernard Walpen on the growth of Mont Pelerin Affiliated Think Tanks which is outdated at this stage Fig. 2.1 https://imgur.com/a/aDoUj

You can also check out - The Atlas Network which boasts '475 free-market organizations in over 90 countries'

https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory

This is the result of concerted effort since the cold war to influence policy and it has had very real impacts. Heritage, Heartland, Cato have successfully influence policy in the US. Atlas is a broad church of free marketeers and includes neoliberals and libertarians. Some libertarian organisations maintain relationships with extreme right wing networks. It's hardly a coincidence that members of the Students for Liberty have repeatedly hosted 'alt right' speakers in universities in US and Europe in the name of 'free speech'. As Nancy MacLean puts it the neoliberal project is to put 'Democracy in chains' and I would say they are succeeding.

Mirowski defition of neoliberalism in his postface of the Road to Mont Pelerin was an eye opener for me.

https://www.google.ie/search?q=mirowski+defining+neoliberalism+postface&ie=utf-8

Bernard Walpens work on MPS is here -

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Bernhard+Walpen%3A+Die+offenen+Feinde+und+ihre+Gesellschaft&btnG=

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 9:02 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:23 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

This is the endgame of the neoliberal program for the total makeover of society, which began in the early Seventies with the Powell memo and the Trilateral Commission declaration on "too much democracy." I

Naw. Neoliberalism is not really an institution-conceived and -directed thing like you seem to think. To the extent that the term usefully describes anything, it would apply to a more or less improvised set of policy and political responses to both the economic downturn of 1973-82 and worldwide resistance and refusal. I know apres Harvey the left thing to do is draw a straight line from the Chicago School to Chile et al., as if all 'ruling elites' had to do was devise a program and administer it on the world. But that's bad history as well as bad theory and is closer to rightwing conspiricizing ("inter-elite conflicts") than Marxist analysis.

Does this bad theory matter ultimately? Probably not, but only because people resisting the current world tend to not care when intellectuals (or is it soothsayers?) notify them that the endgame is here. Just as the intellectual/philosophical reasonings behind neoliberalism came only after their policy tenets were implemented, so left conjunctural analysis tails popular movement, but usually does it poorly and misses the point.

It is remarkable, though, that you can write mellifluously about Russia and Trump and psy-ops etc., but end up not having a single word to say about the fact that the fascist US president and his coterie are working on many fronts with the Russian state and its offshoots on reviving a pan-Western traditionalism that is racist, sexist, antiqueer, and eugenicist. That stuff is less sexy than brainwashing is, but it hits people where they live and comprises the actual content that's being whispered into people's ears.

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