Neoliberal Nightmare

Neoliberal Nightmare

Environmentalism is greatly intertwined with economics. How can we continue to exist within Capitalism when it’s crushing our world?

by Sami Rosenblatt

Environmentalism meant nothing to me; until I realized it meant everything. I’ve always appreciated nature and its beauty. I was raised in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, so going beyond the paved streets into any type of greenery, coast or patch of clean, white snow struck me in contrast to the urban milieu. I thought trees were nice to look at, the grass was nice to sit in, and the earth-shattering sublime experience of strolling in Muir woods, or standing before the Grand Canyon was my birthright as an American, but none of these things were worth politicking over.

I didn’t have the facilities to place environmentalism in the context of the rest of our complicated world. To me, the world was already filled with so many maladieswhy would we worry about endangered trees when there were people starving, an AIDS pandemic, and wars on? I actually thought people focusing on climate change and environmental sciences were ignorant… It seemed to me like the kind of dreadlock-wearing, treehugging white people that would rather give time and money to forests than other causes were probably racist burnouts in disguise. I thought I was wise, and quite the humanitarian, for seeing things this way…It took me until college, where I first began to understand the dark underbelly of neoliberalism, to see that this was my internalized capitalism speaking. How foolish I was to not realize that starvation and wars and nearly every other ill of society has an underlying root in sustainability and environmentalism.

One of the first lessons I can ever remember learning in elementary school was a simple equation:

Land = PowerThe phrase was used to help explain a watered-down, age-appropriate version of colonialism for the specific context of studying the American Revolutionary war… Never could I have predicted the multitudes that this fragment contained. Truly, in every sense of the word, the land is power. Not in the colonial sense, where size matters or warm-water ports do, but in the sense that with a greater understanding of what the earth gives us, we can broaden our understanding of the interconnectedness (or quite frankly, the clusterfuck) of the maladies of our modern world and find the room in our hearts to care deeply and passionately about climate change, environmentalism and all that they encompass.

Neoliberalism, a form of capitalism that prioritizes a free-market gives a new meaning to the word freedom. Just as Neoliberals believe that economic success can penetrate class barriers, (also known as supply-side or trickle-down economics) Neoliberalism itself permeates the American experience, knitting itself deeply into the vast tapestry of our culture.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, author David Harvey argues that despite neoliberalism’s economic origins, its reverberant effects can be felt in all walks of society. He points specifically to how Neoliberalism challenges “divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart.”

Neoliberalism serves to create a new standard of society and what we can expect of the government and of the private sector, especially in regard to issues in ethics and sustainability. This emergent political and moral standard is responsible for the instance of (and our response to) the should-be abhorrent corporate behaviors that we have become accustomed to and bombarded by to the point of becoming almost compliant with. The mechanisms of globalization at work have made us blind to the despicable aspects of the corporate production process and corporate behavior.

On any given day, upon walking into any “fast-fashion” chain store like Zara, H&M or Forever 21, we’re pleased to see a “2-for-$20” deal. What (and who) we don’t see are the factory wage slaves who dyed the wool, the plantation wage slaves who produced the dye, the chemical waste being produced to make acid wash jeans, the water-footprint needed to make denim from indigo, or the fact that the fast-fashion company itself is probably paying its average, tax-paying sales associates minimum wage as it accrues large profits and pays hardly any taxes due to off shoring.

However, what arguably might be of more concern is that these practices are no longer shocking as much as they are expected or even worse– that we have become numb to them. We have become so embedded in commodity culture, that we even rely on it to self-soothe. Hyper-consumption distracts us from these pitfalls of society. We might not have affordable health care, higher education or pharmaceuticals but at the very least we can easily buy cheap goods in bulk on Amazon with our fingertips using exploitative Apple iPhones. As a structure of thought and ideology, Neoliberalism influences our conscious choices but has grown into our subconscious as an invisible hand shaping our culture. We fill our internal void, created by lack of spiritual wholesomeness exterior to commodities, by cramming it with material crap. Now, this is the part where you think I’m going to say that the solution to filling this spiritual void is to go out to nature, and surprise surprise, I’m not. Yes, I believe enjoying nature is an important part of enjoying life on our beautiful planet, and the subliminal power of it has certainly given me a sense of spiritual wholesomeness in my own life, but this again, is not the heart of environmentalism. There is more theory yet to be unpacked.

In the literature of business ethics, attention has been given to exploring the question of whether or not corporations are people, or if they can at least be morally responsible. To begin to wrestle with this greater question, a general approach is to first tackle the fundamentals of what it means to be a person, an agent, a patient and even what it means to be responsible at all. Dear God, I promise I won’t even attempt to unpack this in a fun, sexy and in-touch student-run zine. That’s just the appropriate jargon of theorists and philosophers who have been pondering these questions and moral quandaries for longer than I’ve been