Avid critics blind to lure of neoliberalism

There’s a young fellow, until recently a university student, who describes himself as an “entrepreneur” with his own “brand”. There should be something to celebrate about the young man’s initiative.

Except at the best of times the fellow remains terribly oppressed by his ideological obsessions and at worst he seems confused. I noticed these obsessions in a conversation during his third year at university.

In that conversation he proclaimed neoliberalism as the greatest of evils. I nodded in agreement, with a wry smile, and since we were in a scholarly environment I asked him to explain neoliberalism. He was unable to do so. I asked him if he had looked at the policies and principles of what had become known as the Washington Consensus. He said he had not. I then asked, more bluntly, why he thought neoliberalism was bad. He named a professor who, he said, had told him that neoliberalism was bad. At some point in the exchange the student also dropped in the word “imperialism”.

Here, I thought, was a fine example of how lecturers and professors tend to confuse brainwashing with developing critical minds. Of course, this brainwashing applies also to education about free-market fundamentalism. As it goes, most introductory courses in mainstream economics usually lead to accepting market orthodoxy. Such brainwashing completely avoids meaningful discussion on political economy, especially all those social, historical, cultural or linguistic elements that make up the world. It contributes to the belief that “the economy” is something physically detached from the lives of people. In the case of the young entrepreneur’s professor, this brainwashing causes us to imagine that all the ills of the world were caused by a single factor and can therefore be solved with a single solution. This gives scant regard for myriad cultural and historical shifts or beliefs and values for which people would kill or die.

And so, whenever I track the young man’s progress and reflect on his obsessions, I am reminded of the damage our schooling system has contributed to the miseducation of our youth. Once the young people are in a university class they are understandably bewildered and vulnerable. This is when they are most malleable and gullible and when they can be manipulated into believing anything their lecturers tell them.

It does not help, of course, that many students refuse to read more than one or two pages. There are many demonstrable instances when students want to know, exactly, what their exams will cover, what, precisely, they should know in order to pass and why they need to read something that will not be in the exams.

This attitude may be generational. These days it seems young people would rather be glued to their smartphones than read an essay, let alone an entire book. A couple of years ago I had a discussion with a student who passed a three-year degree yet admitted she had not read a single book while at university.

This attitude may also have to do with society in general. We live in what the geographer David Harvey described as an “insane and deeply troubling world”. There are two things that stand out, at least in my mind, in this troubled world. One may be associated with South African politics today and the other has to do with neoliberalism’s shape shifting to retain its power and influence by insisting that everyone can be an “entrepreneur” and that every success is based on effective “branding”.

In SA, there is the suggestion that some graduates may have acquired qualifications in higher education, notwithstanding diabolically poor grades and evidence of plagiarising. This pass rate, lowered because of political pressure, is the equivalent of “social promotion” — the passing of pupils to a higher grade whether or not they can read, write or show an understanding of the coursework and required literature. In this sense, it is good enough to say in exams what the lecturer wants to hear. The professor says neoliberalism is wrong, and the student gets a pass for repeating it with no sense of what it actually means. This brings me back to the young entrepreneur. It is rather ironic that he opposes neoliberalism but has come to represent that ideology’s most recent incarnation: the belief that individuals have to be managed the way corporations are managed. In this respect, individuals, as corporations, have to market themselves through effective branding. Part of the genesis of branding is to give personality to consumer products or companies.

We have arrived, now, at the rather perverse notion that individuals, like the young entrepreneur, have to imagine themselves as objects with personality.

So much, then, for the criticism of economic orthodoxy and its late 20th century ideological expression — neoliberalism.

BRAINWASHING CAUSES US TO IMAGINE ALL THE ILLS OF THE WORLD WERE CAUSED BY A SINGLE FACTOR AND CAN BE SOLVED WITH A SINGLE SOLUTION