Fuck Neoliberalism
by Simon Springer
PM Press, 2021; 240 pages; $24
Reviewed by Patrick Mackenzie
In How Will Capitalism End? German sociologist Wolfgang Streek writes, “before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.” Now having been revealed as something of a zombie in the years since the 2008 financial crisis — precipitated by morally suspect financial practices — the latest iteration of capitalism, that is neoliberal capitalism, has been revealed as a massive fraud, equally arbitrary and rigged. Indeed there is a person behind the velvet curtain and it’s the re-animated rotting corpse of Milton Friedman and his shitty ideas. predictably, the cracks in the neoliberal facade have only become more apparent during the CoVID-19 pandemic: decades of austerity politics and the underfunding if not outright dismantling of public goods and services have left many countries (USA, I’m pointing at you) utterly unprepared to fight a pandemic, resulting in unnecessary deaths and wrecked economies. And yet the commitment to neoliberal policies remains strong among the ruling class and their political proxies.
Perhaps a reason why the decaying body of neoliberalism can’t be removed is because such an obviously crass worldview has been given “intellectual” legitimacy by the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. He along with the Mont Pelerin Society, among others, gave academic credibility, and the sheen of respectability that goes along with it, to what is fundamentally, at best, magical thinking.
So it’s appropriate that a salvo of sorts against the depravity of neoliberalism should be fired from the ivory towers of the academy itself. That’s right, Fuck Neoliberalism began life as a short academic paper delivered “as a conference talk in San Francisco for the annual American Association of Geographers meeting in April 2016.” The paper was immediately met with hostility. With a title like Fuck Neoliberalism, and presented to a bunch of snooty academics, it had to be a joke, right? A week after presenting Fuck Neoliberalism, Simon Springer, the geographer who wrote the paper was upbraided by his department chair at the university he worked at in Australia. Two years later, Fuck Neoliberalism was discovered by several prominent right-wing bloggers whose predictable hysterical hyperbolic outrage “stirred up a hornet’s nest of hate” in Springer’s direction. Even Canada’s own mediocre, pearl-clutching, reactionary columnist Margaret Wente got in on the action, defending the “academic freedom” of charlatans like Jordan Peterson while laughably claiming, with typical moral indignation, that students needed to be protected “from the likes of Prof. Springer, whose brand of rubbish is depressingly common at our institutions of higher learning.” (You really have to hand it to conservatives: they’re nothing if not consistent in their hypocrisy. but as Singer puts it in the introduction, “irony is not the strong suit of the political right.”)
As for Fuck Neoliberalism itself, it clocks in at a mere eight pages. To be fair to the paper’s critics, the title suggests a certain flippancy on behalf of the author — but a deeper reading reveals a paper that is indeed academically serious in its condemnation of an economic and social order that is not only unjust and unequal, but is psychopathic and ecocidal.
Since its appearance five years ago, Fuck Neoliberalism has taken on a life of its own. Despite the shit-storm the paper generated on the right, an equal if not greater number of leftist academics and activists have embraced its “emancipatory potential.” At least twenty people approached Singer and asked to translate Fuck Neoliberalism into their respective languages. The result is a 229-page book of translations with each translation prefaced by the translator’s motivations (in English), as well as their experiences of neoliberalism and why they felt it had to be eliminated as a global political and economic model.
As if anticipating the vitriol of the right, Singer defends his repeated use of the noun, verb, and adjective, Fuck, thusly: “Why should we be more worried about using profanity than we are about the actual vile discourse of neoliberalism itself? I decided I wanted to transgress, to upset, and to offend, precisely because we ought to be offended by neoliberalism.”
The stench of carrion will not abide. It’s time to bury the corpse folks.