Neoliberalism: Capitalism as Terrorism

Attempts to understand and explain capitalism serve the process of overcoming it. It is proven that capitalism is not fair to most people inhabiting the world because the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few human beings, some individuals and their families, to the detriment of the vast majority of the world's population, a large part of whom are in a state of starvation, implies processes of exploitation of human labor and misappropriation of universal heritage, including the intangible, marked by processes of social and political injustices to the extreme of violence.

In fact, the term "terrorism" is complex. It is an imprecise term and even inadvisable according to some theorists, as its use implies emotional aspects and a kind of compulsory accusation against the opponent. Thus, it is as if the term is not very objective when dealing with certain phenomena. In this way, the discourse of various States will often label the groups and acts of their opponents as "terrorists," treating these opponents as enemies while, at the same time, being capable of carrying out acts that will be defined as "state terrorism," placing the accusing State itself in a position of evident contradiction.

In any case, we can use a very basic definition to proceed with this exposition. Let us take terrorism as the promise of violence, the threat of its eruption at any moment, in a way that cannot be predicted or controlled. Terror is fundamentally the dominance of fear that generates violence in a political context. The violence that is carried out based on this promise, itself generating a mental and intersubjective climate, is what we can call terrorism.

In a climate of terrorism, people feel threatened. Threatened, they feel fear, and in feeling fear, they also feel hatred towards the object that is the "motivator" of that fear. Hatred against the "different" —be it foreigners, the poor, "blacks," "Muslims," "Jews," "communists," "leftists," people outside the standards of compulsory heterosexuality , and even those outside the standards of bodily plasticity (all those who fall outside the paradigm of bourgeois aesthetics applied to the body and clothing)—becomes inevitable in this process.

In other words, hatred is the expected effect in the climate of fear promoted and managed by the system that needs fear and that inflicts terror to produce fear. The vicious cycle is visible. It is natural that in this process terror is promoted against people who oppose the system that produces oppression. Terror is the intimidation tactic that tends to work for the purposes of power.

Thus, anyone critical of the system of terror is already a target of threats. In our time, there are many agents of what we can call voluntary terrorism, people who work for free for the digital terrorism machine of the internet, for example. People who operate trying to make critics give up remaining in the digital forum. Intolerance must be a rule of this digital terrorism practiced by paid militias, bots , volunteers, etc. Terrorism, in this case, is applied to all who think. Against teachers, intellectuals, and all people who may oppose the power-violence of terrorism through acts of language. There are those who are afraid to think because reflective thinking has become a threat.

Terror has always been a very effective political methodology for controlling insurgents and populations as a whole, who, as a mass, tend to respond very easily to their manipulators. It has also been used to control the "elites." The best-known example in history is the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, when the guillotine became the mechanism that imposed fear. Terror was used by revolutionaries, but it was soon adopted by the conservatives who governed after the fall of Robespierre.

I use this example to emphasize its character as a political methodology used by those in power. But there are many others. What women experienced in Europe at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century, the so-called "witch hunt," was also a methodology of terror. Persecution, threats to individuals, and ultimately, the generalized threat to everything and everyone is its characteristic.

Terrorism is not always blatant or sensationalized. For example, we can say that Jews in Nazi Germany lived under a regime of terror, that critics of the military dictatorship in Latin American countries lived under the control of threats, as we experience today in Brazil. Terrorism is also a climate within the press. Journalists working for media companies that serve dictatorships are afraid to go against their bosses, not only because of the threat of losing their jobs, but often because of far worse violence.

Ideology and terror

It is not difficult to understand terror as a political technology. The mental and concrete climate of fear, of the threat of violence, serves to maintain the ideology of the ruling power. Ideology is the most subtle part of terror, serving to control its acceptance on a mental and affective level. People are expected to be intellectually and emotionally aligned with the ideology, and if they are not, terror may become necessary, as in the extreme, the actual practice of violence and not just its threat.

Now, capitalism is an economic-political ideology. To function, it needs to be internalized mentally, psychically, and also physiotheologically.

We internalize this ideology in various ways. First, we are seduced. From childhood, we learn to enjoy the "consumer" lifestyle, which sounds pleasurable to us. Consumerism relies on the perpetual infantilization of people who want their desires fulfilled immediately and magically. Easily adopting the belief in a "flat earth" and similar theories is a sign of cognitive infantilization that satisfies many people at this time.

Later we will learn that there are prices to pay in the ideology of production and servitude to the owners of the means of production. It is the phase in which one has to work, collaborate, obey. In this phase, harassment comes into play. When our desires cannot be fulfilled, we have to learn to accept. We are then harassed daily by advertising, by television, by the duty to collaborate, to do, to buy, to profit, and to spend. The great harassment is practiced on the basis of advertising logic . We do not see the process of harassment because the presence of advertising in our lives has been naturalized. Everywhere we are condemned to it.

Before proceeding, I would like to make it clear that I am not simply speaking against advertising, nor against advertising as a field of work, in the sense of advocating its elimination. It is also necessary to clarify that it is possible for adults and cautious individuals to control the levels of advertising in their lives. We cannot forget, however, that not everyone is an adult, much less cautious.

There's a level that goes beyond harassment; it's intimidation. When a bank manager calls asking you to buy insurance and you're afraid not to, afraid of losing some benefit or the respect and potential help of said manager, you're already moving from harassment to intimidation. It's also good to remember that harassment isn't just something sexual. Harassment is any form of pressure that leaves us no alternative but to give in or suffer the consequences.

The price of vision

Here I'll give the example of cinema: if we go to the cinema today, we buy a ticket to see a film and, before the film, we are forced to watch advertisements. We are forced to watch them, even if we didn't pay to see them. However, it's not free as it pretends to be. It charges for our viewing time. In the media world, viewing time has a price. On television, the audience defines levels of advertising investment in programs and time slots that are financialized precisely based on viewership. On platforms like YouTube, the condition of viewing is obvious for the presence of advertising. This means that it is an industry and a market in which production and consumption, as well as profit, are generated by those who seem to be just having fun. But it is also about the fact, never disclosed, that our gaze has a price. That the hours spent in front of screens involve capital. People's eyes are being assaulted at every moment.

The right not to be invaded, not to be harassed by propaganda, is what is at stake in our time.

This world of visual production, with its scheme of misappropriating our vision and our bodies, serves to help us think about the entirety of production. Whether it's digital production, by the digital slaves of our time—those who have voluntarily been "captured" in the great machine of the internet and networks (in addition to those who profit from it, taking advantage of the machine)—or analog production, all are subject to the owners of the means of production of capital.

Where does terrorism lie? In its inescapable character, which also defines it as a form of totalitarianism. In the realm of digital life, terrorism lies in the threat that we will be erased, eliminated from life if we are not integrated into the internet, Facebook, or social networks. In the realm of analog life, terrorism lies in the peremptory prohibition of disagreeing, criticizing, or imagining another possible world. Therefore, using clichés such as "communism," "Marxism," "leftism," "feminism," "gender ideology," "pedophilia," and other clichés with negative content, as threats, as factors that produce fear, is part of the diffuse terrorism of capitalism.

The production of lies and defamation campaigns using fake news generates a climate of fear and insecurity in naive people – those who believe, for example, that communists are ready to "eat little children" or other bizarre clichés – before reaching the point of assassinating undesirable democratic leaders such as indigenous people, community leaders, or, to cite the example that moves the world, a leader like Marielle Franco.

Terrorism is part of the totalitarian and authoritarian character of capitalism which, in its neoliberal form, does not allow for difference. It does not allow for democracy and, at the same time, needs to create a climate of disorientation so that no one is able to question the unjust state of economic relations. Capitalism is terrorism as pure psychopower.

Nature

Finally, it must be said that the destructive exploitation of nature is also an aspect that is part of the history of capitalism and that we must consider when calculating the current actions of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the historical form assumed by current capitalism as a political ideology with terrorist characteristics. The destruction of nature—of forests through deforestation, of rivers and seas through pollution, of the subsoil through metal exploitation, of the soil through the abuse of pesticides, and of non-human species through all the aforementioned factors—also threatens the entire human species with extinction, in a boomerang effect.

Capitalism reveals itself as extremism the moment it allows limitless exploitation and anything-goes attitudes in all spheres of action under the guise of a free market. Nothing escapes it. Nature has always been exploited, and the history of capitalism is intertwined with its destruction. But the threat against nature – in the context of so many specific catastrophes and the great climate catastrophe to come – is part of the terror practices that plague the world today and that are hidden at all costs by those interested in pure profit and pure capital.

From this perspective, nature is daily disregarded as a fundamental factor in our lives, and all leaders who fail to take responsibility for this know that they are participating in the destruction of the world.

Text previously published in Revista Cult, by Marcia Tiburi, on November 27, 2019.