“Humanity in exile.”

Four decades of neoliberal reforms.

We first met Luka Filipović when he spoke this summer at a conference in Switzerland we have noted previously in these pages. We were immediately struck by the force and confidence with which Luka spoke. He filled the room as he delivered to his audience a remarkable series of insights into the pathologies of Western societies as these have accumulated under entrenched neoliberal regimes. Luka, an historian well-connected to Serbia’s sociological tradition, speaks in terms we, too, find profoundly useful in addressing our political, economic, and social realities. There is a subtle grasp of psychology evident in Luka’s thinking—individual and collective psychology, social psychology, the psychology at the core of our political economy.  

We are especially pleased to welcome Luka Filipović into The Floutist’s pages as this very fine and finely observed piece is his first appearance in an American publication. We publish an edited version of the speech he delivered at the Mut zur Ethik conference in Sirnach, Switzerland, in early September. 

—P. L.  

Luka Filipović

15 OCTOBER—In the early 1980s, global economic reforms started to lay structural foundations for the long-term historical process of reshaping the social reality of Western Europe and the United States. To this day, social science and humanities researchers remain engaged in a heated debate about the factors that might have influenced the fall of the welfare state in the countries of the Western bloc and the birth of neoliberal capitalism. Some look to the political crises of the 1970s and the emergence of new-age terrorism. By this I mean the terrorism we associate with all the phenomena of the post–World War II era, mostly with far right and far left groups, as during Italy’s “Years of Lead.” 

The argument here is that this new-age terror may have influenced the dominant opinions of the general public toward the ideas of the new right and old conservative politicians. Others claim that it was the reaction to the rapid social changes and cultural revolution of the 1960s that gave the reformist movements of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the advantage necessary to their rise to power. 

Both factors had a significant influence in this process, certainly. Yet it is important to note that the emergence of new extremist groups and the political crisis of the welfare state were later exaggerated beyond any realistic proportion by neoliberal propaganda. 

Turning this question another way, authors of historical studies from the U.S. and Western Europe have tended to neglect the possible role of the economic crises in the Soviet Union and the costly Afghanistan campaign, as well as splits among Eurocommunist and East Asian parties and Soviets, which crippled the hegemony of the Soviet party in the socialist world. The decline of the “red scare” in the West and the apparent victory of the U.S. in the global battle of ideologies may have contributed to the downfall of the welfare state, as much as fear of global ideological competition had contributed to its creation thirty years earlier. 

It is clear now, in any case, that welfare state was, for the West’s financial and political elites, merely a temporary sacrifice of profit until the long, undeclared war with the Soviet Union was won. 

One of the questions raised during the previously mentioned debate, and this has become very significant recently, concerns the costs of maintaining general employment, welfare policies, and big governments. Have these costs surpassed the continuously growing burden of maintaining police and military forces in the countries of the Western bloc? In other words, if institutions of enforcement serve to protect the new global order at home and abroad—by putting down new waves of riots and waging interventionist wars of never-before-seen material expense, do they also serve to prevent these societies, with their broken internal structures, from falling apart?

■

Sociological research has shown that various factors that contribute to social cohesion have been reduced significantly almost everywhere around the globe in the course of the past four decades. All the indicators of social inequality have risen dramatically since the early 1980s, especially in the aftermath of global economic crises. Possibly even more important in the breakdown of social cohesion is that, thanks to the existence of social media, the visibility of inequality has reached levels unprecedented in the entire history of mankind. 

A phenomenon much researched recently in the social sciences and humanities has been the creation of a modern precariat as a consequence of changes in labor legislation, trade monopolies acquired by international corporations, and the dismantling of the political power and social influence of labor unions all around the world. The disappearance of the welfare state’s general employment policies has increased unemployment dramatically and contributed to job insecurity around the world, especially in the centers of global financial power. And these centers have almost completely forsaken domestic manufacturing and once-powerful Western industries in favor of profitable production in countries with cheap resources and manual labor—and in favor, too, of tertiary-sector economies in which workers are easy to replace and almost utterly unable to organize themselves against the will of corporate bureaucracies.

Increasing costs and decreasing quality of education and health care services have provided an almost constant rise in a general feeling of insecurity, which has shown up in almost every social survey in the countries of the Western bloc over the last three decades. At the same time, something else we must note: Social standards of measuring achievement have moved further from individual happiness and establishing good relations within social communities toward acquiring social prestige and material possessions, creating unrealistic expectations that further contribute to feelings of insecurity. According to numerous sociological and psychological theories, the rise of collective fears, and individual feelings of insecurity, often lead to all sorts of social anomalies, primarily toward the breaking of social cohesion.

One key indicator of weakening social cohesion is alienation—the increasing distance between individuals, who find it hard to form social ties with others while suffering from the common phenomenon of “burn out” from work and holding onto increasingly unstable jobs within an insecure economic reality. While people are becoming more isolated from others and subsequently indifferent to collective concerns, the neoliberal right and left have both, in the course of the last forty years, promoted the narrative of “personal guilt”—individual responsibility—for the consequences of large-scale social problems. 

■

A long time ago, while conducting research for my master’s thesis on how the economic reforms of [French President] Emmanuel Macron had closed the circle started by [François] Mitterrand, I came to realize that the old Thatcherite idea, “There is no society, only individuals with the freedom of choice,” had become so commonly accepted in contemporary society that both right– and left-wing neoliberals today feel no need to emphasize it. 

Social surveys have also found a shocking lack of empathy and solidarity among communities in the U.S. and Western Europe, exactly at the time the dominant political narratives have begun to insist on inclusiveness and tolerance toward others. Subtle distinctions in definitions can often reveal commonly understood and yet unspoken differences between terms that we prefer to use: Inclusiveness does not necessary oblige solidarity or empathy, just as tolerance in the absolute sense means merely withholding action based on existing animosities, which are acknowledged by the very need for the usage of the term in question. Tolerance, indeed, does not have to mean understanding and accepting increasingly distant “others.”  

A question must be asked: Are we now, through ideological terminology, searching for exactly those things that we are in fact missing in our social reality? The need to define ideological terms prompts this question in that it arises only when certain notions have left the sphere of unspoken social consensus—the very frame of political and social thought. 

In his latest book, The exiled terms, Todor Kuljić, who is among the most internationally recognized Serbian sociologists of the previous and current century, explains how four decades of neoliberal reforms have influenced significant changes in the language we use to discuss ideology and politics, noting that all the terms previously connected to class inequalities, Marxist ideologies, and collective struggles of the working class have been systematically replaced with less critical, less “communist sounding” terms.

In sociology curricula, the terms “exploitation,” “revolution,” and even “humanism” have been almost completely forsaken, while we can see increased usage of words such as “transition,” “transformation,” and “social exclusion.” The term “transition,” a case in point, normalises poverty and corruption in countries that need to be convinced that they will be much better off when they adopt neoliberal economic models. 

The famous comedian George Carlin put forward a notion that there is a cultural tradition in the United States of constantly inventing new terms, and “exiling” the old-fashioned terms, which derives from the constant need to make the brutalities of everyday life more easily accommodated. “Americans have trouble facing the truth,” Carlin once said, “so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it.” If poor people used to live in slums, to cite one of Carlin’s standup routines, “now ‘the economically disadvantaged’ occupy ‘substandard housing’ in ‘inner cities.’” 

Anthropological studies have shown that this tendency has certain connections with the totemistic belief of the earliest human societies that, by changing the way we verbally identify a certain aspect of reality we can change the reality itself. It appears that this has never been more relevant than in the case of the modern culture of political correctness, which proposes that we accept social problems as consequences of our subconscious thoughts and/or individual actions, and try to solve them by changing the language we use to define them—while never searching for their material causes.

Professor Jordan Peterson has claimed that modern-day political culture developed in a manner in which the previously presumed need for objectivity was replaced with subjective feelings and perceptions, while the very understanding of material reality has been, through relativization, reduced to little more than an inconvenience that can be regulated by state legislation and group stigmatization. On the other hand, Slavoj Žižek holds that it is precisely the abandonment of the collective (ideas) for the individual (interests) that has led our increasingly globalized political culture down this path. The neoliberal, postmodern left has merely followed the neoliberal right of the eighties in the project of eliminating undesirable terminology related to physical, class, and social reality—depending on the preference of each—from the common frames of political debate, since a consensus on understanding material reality is the first and necessary condition of the collective political struggle.

Žižek also claims that the phenomenon of New Age leftists striving toward zealous political correctness merely contributes to depriving formal and informal human relationships of what is the very essence of humanity. This is because following the increasingly strict standards of Newspeak, as Orwell would put it, necessarily increases the distance between people by making them focus on their differences, thus continuously reinforcing the same barriers neoliberal leftists wish to break free of, while, at the same time, leaving them unable to overcome the tensions of every-day interactions through humor and other forms of releasing the burdening contents of the individual and collective subconscious. 

Further, if we take into account the previously mentioned thesis of Professor Kuljić, we can also propose the question: To what extent is the modern neoliberal leftist obsession with political correctness a consequence of the absence of a language and terminology by which young people could articulate the actual causes of their fear and anger and the need to express political radicalism? Of course, leftists of this persuasion remain thoroughly within the existing frame of the globally dominant ideology and never challenge the economic and political system.

At the same time, neoliberal right-wing policies continue to insist on the previously discussed narrative of personal responsibility—or, rather, personal “guilt”—not for the problems of cultural inequalities, which their leftist counterparts remain unable to relate to their actual causes in material reality, but rather for the position of the individual in the new economic order. Now in social media we witness the rise of an entire generation of young conservatives who present success and failure in life—mostly defined by the acquisition of wealth rather than personal happiness—as a consequence of individual decisions and actions, entirely decontextualized and removed from one’s personal circumstances, class background, and social context. 

Unlike the previous authors of the self-help books from the early eighties, these new “life coaches” of the internet are heavily engaged in the relativization of ethics, with some going as far as to conclude that those who stay employed in times of low wages and worsening labor conditions, instead of risking their financial existence with private business gambles, have no one but themselves to blame for being exploited. Thus, in a perverted sense of logical framing, they arrive very close to an argument used by ancient Greek philosophers to justify slavery: “An Athenian would rather kill himself than become a slave.” 

Neoliberal leftists legitimize the unfair treatment of others for personal gain with the condition that you address respectfully the same people whom you are exploiting—and, as well, disregard solidarity as the core value of the left. Contrarily, the neoliberal right wing insists that participation in the hierarchy of social and economic power is a goal necessary to achieve and a matter of personal choice, and not at all of social reality. It is as though they, the neoliberal right wing, have forgotten with how much effort traditional conservatives tried to uphold the principles of ethics—even if many of those principles were not part of the initial humanist–Enlightenment agenda, or universal values as Immanuel Kant would define them, but served only to preserve position and ensure reproduction of the upper classes—as though there truly was no society anymore. 

Not even the Prussian militarists of the old German Empire ever went so far as to assert openly that there is no common good, not even a universal moral code, and that, rather, you should seek to enrich yourself at the expense of others just to prove your own capabilities to a society you don’t even believe in anymore. But modern-day conservatives have crossed this line by seducing today’s ever more fearful youth with the promises that, if they prove capable enough, they can assume the role of the oppressor themselves and exploit the weak, who deserve their fate for failing to seize the “boundless opportunities” of some neoliberal economic paradise.

Thus, prevalent neoliberal left– and right-wing ideologies have not just disregarded, fragmented, or redefined traditionally universalist principles of ethics; they have also forsaken many “core values”—an emphasis on collective solidarity or personal liberty, common wellbeing, or individual morality—which defined the differences between the significant left– and right-wing ideologies of the previous two centuries. Even more important, humanity has been almost completely exiled from the sphere of ideological priorities—in favor of politically correct formality in the case of the New Age left, or, in the case of the New Age right, in favor of a convenient indifference to social problems. The value of humanity, in the sense in which it was understood during the course of the 20^th century, will therefore have a hard time finding its way back into the ideological frames of the new world order. 

Luka Filipović, among the youngest Serbians ever to earn his doctorate, holds a Ph.D. awarded by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. He has published numerous articles regarding the history of labor movements, communist parties, neoliberal economic reforms, and political turmoil of the late 20^th century in Europe and Serbia. His book, Eurokomunizam i Jugoslavija 1968-1980, (Eurocommunism and Yugoslavia 1968–1980), is published this month by the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, where Filipović currently conducts his research.