Marta Russell

"In the second half of the twentieth century, the dominance of the mental health institution began to decline as the capitalist economy underwent restructuring. Economic stagnation and low profits, the fiscal crisis of the seventies, were met with Reaganomics, i.e., tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, an attack on labor, deregulation of health and safety regulations and cuts in state spending on education, welfare, and social programs, including those institutions housing people with mental illnesses.

Deinstitutionalization, as it related to those who had been labeled mentally ill, was a government policy change driven by cost-cutting motives. Spending by the fifty states on treatment for people with mental illness, for instance, was lower by a third in the nineties than it was in the fifties; fewer than half of Americans diagnosed with schizophrenia receive adequate services today. When the awful snake pits of neglect and abuse we called “mental institutions” were closed, necessary new structures and solutions...designed and run by disabled individuals themselves, were never put in place.

Instead, GOP revolutionaries of the 104th Congress, falsely blaming the deficit on the welfare state and entitlements, attacked the social safety net. The 1990’s crackdown on federal disability and welfare benefits and state reductions to General Relief and Medicaid further expanded the scope of damage to deinstitutionalized people who had been diagnosed with mental illness, many of whom found themselves destitute the moment they were discharged from the hospitals''.

Marta Russell

"A number of crucial issues are at stake in the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists. These have to do not simply with the legitimacy of the modern age,3 but with questions of rationality, truth, subjectivity, power, justice, morality, and the role of the aesthetic. A fruitful way of addressing the contrast between Habermas and the postmodernists on these issues is by distinguishing two fundamental ethical orientations operating behind their respective positions. These are centred around two different senses of responsibility: a responsibility to act vs a responsibility to otherness.4 While Habermas privileges the responsibility to act in the world in a normatively justified way, the postmodernists celebrate the responsibility to otherness...These two senses of responsibility are linked, in turn, to two different understandings of the primary function of language: language can be understood primarily in terms of its capacity to coordinate action (Habermas), or primarily in terms of its capacity to disclose the world (Heidegger and Derrida). The conception of language as action-coordinating goes hand in hand with the priority given to the first sense of responsibility (the responsibility to act), while the view of language as world-disclosing corresponds closely to the priority given to the second sense of responsibility (the responsibility to otherness). While the two senses of responsibility, and their associated conceptions of language, should not be seen as mutually exclusive/ it is indeed the case that they represent the polarities around which the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists has been conducted''.

“The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”

Michael Parenti

“Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor.

All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship - is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.”

 Michael Parenti

“Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.

"For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent...It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions," writes Herbert Schiller.”

Michael Parenti

SEoP

 

4.4 The System of Rights

Habermas argues that, alongside the principle of democracy, what he calls a “logical genesis of rights” arises from the “interpenetration” of the legal form and the discourse principle (D) (1992b [1996b: 121]). The argument is hard to follow. It begins from the premises of (D) and the form of modern law, and assumes that the idea of legitimate law presupposes that of a legal subject qua bearer of rights, no matter what the content of those specific rights is. The conclusion to the argument is a system of rights, of five different kinds.

1. Basic rights to the greatest possible measure of equal individual liberties.
2. Basic rights to membership in a voluntary association of consociates under law.
3. Basic rights to the actionability of rights arising from the legal protection of rights-holders.
4. Basic rights to the equal opportunity to participate in the processes of political will formation and the production of legitimate law.
5. Basic rights to living conditions that are socially, technologically, and ecologically safeguarded, insofar as this is necessary for citizens to exercise their civil rights 1–4 (1996b: 123–4).

The first three rights are supposed to arise theoretically from the application of the discourse principle to the form of law. These are rights that citizens must grant to one another if they are “legitimately to regulate their living together by means of positive law” (1992b [1996b: 126; 82; 118]). The next two—political and social rights—are practical and material enabling conditions that ensure the effectiveness of the first three rights. The first three rights, Habermas claims, are not specific rights, but what he calls “unsaturated placeholders” for specific rights that have to “be interpreted and given concrete shape” by actual citizens in response to determinate historical conditions (1992b [1996b: 125–6]). This is crucial to Habermas’s theory, because it purports to reconstruct the ability of citizens, from their perspective, to reciprocally grant one another the rights necessary for their common existence as consociates under law. That’s why he claims that he, unlike Rawls, doesn’t design “the basic norms of a well-ordered society on the drafting table”, and then apply them to society (1990d [1994: 101]). In that sense, just as discourse ethics leaves the validation of moral norms to participants in discourse, the discourse theory of law and democracy has to leave the political process of establishing a system of rights up to citizens themselves as much as possible. This is the sense in which Habermas claims the discourse theory of democratic legitimacy is “strictly procedural” and more modest than “normative political theory” à la Rawls (Habermas 1995: 117 & 132; Rawls 1995: 175–177). For all that, unlike in discourse ethics where neither (U) nor (D) have the status of valid moral norms, Habermas nonetheless derives a system of rights that for all the world resembles T. H. Marshall’s account of civic, political, and social rights, in his classic work of political sociology (Marshall 1950).

4.5 Objections to Between Facts and Norms

Joshua Cohen objects that the principle of discourse does not amount to a requirement of equal liberty, and that nothing so rich as Habermas’s scheme of individual liberties follows solely from the application of the discourse principle to the legal form (Cohen 1999: 393, 398). He objects even while acknowledging that the various rights are not yet saturated: they are not yet specific, historically and socially determinate rights. But contra Cohen, on Habermas’s account, legal form, or modern “form of law” is a richer idea than the mere rule of law, and refers to a complex of features that law has in a modern constitutional democratic state. As Baynes and Zurn point out, Habermas’s theory reconstructs the way that, via the discourse principle, the form of law in modern—that is, post-traditional and post-conventional—societies functions to compensate for the loss of shared traditions, and relieves the burden on citizens to reach reasoned agreement with one another and thereby coordinate their actions (Baynes 2016: 166: Zurn 2011).

"In his 1978-79 lectures, concluding just weeks before Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Foucault offered a strikingly prescient analysis of neoliberalism that was yet to emerge. In this analysis, he excavates the fundamental concepts which structure what has, forty years later, become the dominant reality. What is striking is that he treats neoliberalism not as an economic theory, but as a mode of governing — “governing” in the sense of constituting a particular form of subject. Foucault is adamant that neoliberalism is not simply a return to earlier forms of economic organisation such as laissez faire. Rather than simply having a limited role in the market economy, the state must now model itself on the economy. Neoliberalism seeks to redraw the boundary between the economy and politics by generalising the economic form throughout society. As the market becomes experienced as part of a natural order, government’s task is to attend closely to discern its complex and subtle mechanisms and avoid interference which would distort them.

According to Friedrich Hayek, economic processes are a “spontaneous order” which, like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, we cannot fully comprehend. Since he rules out political intervention in the processes of this spontaneous order as dangerous interference, he thinks we have no alternative but to simply submit to the imperatives of the market. Hayek’s work, which many regard as a founding theoretical underpinning of neoliberalism, purports to eschew the conflict of politics in favour of what he saw as the harmonious and mutually beneficial social relations of the market. The influential Chicago School economist, Milton Friedman, developed Hayek’s free market ideas into what he regarded as an objective and value-free science.

While avoiding state governance, neoliberalism uses it to extend competition throughout social life, by opening up areas regulated by non-market forms of social governance to market imperatives. In this vein, Gary Becker, who succeeded Friedman at Chicago, argued that it was possible to generalise the economic form of the market throughout society to include relationships not usually subject to monetary exchange. Becker’s most striking example is the mother/child relationship. Here Becker treats the time the mother spends with the child, as well as the quality of care, as an investment that constitutes human capital. Investment in the child’s human capital produces a return when the child grows to maturity and receives wages. Economic rationality eventually becomes the rationality of all human action.

With some important differences, Foucault’s account of neoliberalism dovetails into Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the “colonisation of the lifeworld”. Habermas relies on a distinction between the “lifeworld” which co-ordinates actions and integrates society by “communicative action” where reasons can be demanded and given, and “systems” like the market economy which co-ordinate societies by a chain of consequences “behind our backs”. Habermas’s claim is that systems have broken loose of the legitimation we once gave them and have turned back to “colonise” or restructure our communicative competencies. We could say that as a form of social reality, the reality of the market economy has become so dominant that we have forgotten that, unlike the natural processes climate science describes, it is our invention.

The extension of the rationality of the market throughout society forges a new type of subject. Making competition the dominant principle for guiding human behaviour means that subjects lose guarantees of protection by the state. With labour transformed into human capital and workers into entrepreneurs competing with other entrepreneurs, neoliberal governance entails the production of a particular type of subject. By slotting into already provided social roles that set social subjects against each other, subjects are constituted as self-interested and atomistic, continually calculating to avoid risk and maximise individual gain. By the sort of circular causation described by Gunnar Myrdal, the habits and inclinations of these subjects are produced while, at the same time, they maintain and extend the system that produces them. As Foucault says, “modern power fashions, observes, knows and multiplies itself on the basis of its own effects.”

If power and knowledge can only be understood together, it is surely the science of economics that provides the knowledge component of neoliberal governmentality. In an endless looping between description and prescription, neoliberal economics, aspiring to the status of a science, constructs the subject that it, at the same time, claims to discover. This subject supposedly negotiates the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on economic knowledge and strict calculation. Society becomes a game in which self-interested, atomised individuals compete for maximal economic returns".

John McIntyre