Greedy, Cruel, & Smug: The Petty Warlords of Neoliberalism (Part 1)

[O]verseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts.
 Martin Buber, I and Thou.

1: Whither Liberalism?

To make society… happy… it is requisite that great numbers… should be ignorant as well as poor.
Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees

In his counter-history of liberalism, Domenico Losurdo asks how it is possible that the Europeans and Euro-Americans who spoke most vehemently about the freedom and rights of the individual at the dawning of what we call liberalism, were also the people who defended, unto the death, their right to keep Black people as chattel slaves and their right to engage in genocide against Indigenous peoples in various colonial occupations. The discourse of freedom is applied to massive acts of dispossession and violence. What is going on here? what exactly, Losurdo asks, is “Liberalism”?

Essentially, Losurdo argues, Liberalism is a doctrine pertaining to a very specific form of freedom. This freedom was declared to be the inherent right of White men with property and it manifested in two primary ways:

1. It was freedom from the tyranny of those who sought to rule over them
   • notably, the aristocracy, the agents of the church, and also the governmental agents and growing legal codes of nascent nation states;
2. It was freedom to engage as despotic rulers over subaltern people
   • who they considered their property (largely Black folx—think racism);
   • who they considered subhuman and part of nature to be subdued or exterminated by whatever level of violence they deemed desirable (largely Indigenous folx—think colonialism);
   • AND who they considered uncivilized, immoral, idel, criminal, and frequently irredeemable even with the metropole or the heart of the empire (largely the rural and urban poor—think classism).

Thus, the Liberal is positioned between, and distinguished from, two other parties:

1. The Conservative who harkens back to more traditional forms of tyranny which were frequently antagonistic to the bourgeois, middleclass and small property owners;
2. The Radical who believes that freedom from tyranny also applies to subalterns, like Black folx in Haiti singing La Marseillaise while going into battle with the French

Thus, as many scholars have argued, the rise of Liberalism was a part and parcel of the rise of Capitalism. The two have been solidly intertwined over the course of their shared history. However, as autocratic imperialism and various forms of fascism have demonstrated, Capitalism can thrive without Liberalism, Liberalism, however, cannot thrive without Capitalism. Why? Because Liberalism is the political ideology of private property owners. It arose to prominence when the bourgeoisie betrayed the proletariat and the capitalists replaced the aristocrats. It has stayed true to that racialized class war on two fronts to this day.

Thus, the freedom praised by Liberalism is always the freedom of the property-hoarder over against both the dispossessed and any other authorities who might wish to interfere with the ability of the property-hoarders to take and privatize and hoard ever more.

2: And Neoliberalism?

Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.
~Margaret Thatcher

If you think, “holy hell, this is bananas!” you’re not wrong. Why, then, does this outrageous state of affairs continue to persist? Good question! To answer it, it helps to understand what happens when liberal capitalism evolves (like a Pokémon leveling up as it acquires more XP) into neoliberalism. As the dominant and still current iteration of racial capitalism, neoliberalism attempts to be an all-encompassing global apparatus focused on ideologically, materially, and antagonistically shaping human subjects and the institutions, structures, systems and groups they create. In this way, the morally celebrated hoarders of stolen wealth are legally enabled and economically required to plunder everyone else. The next question, then, is why do so many of those who are plundered go along with those doing the plundering?

This occurs because neoliberalism is both a political economy and an ideology. As an ideology, it exemplifies what Charles Taylor talks about when he discusses social imaginaries. Social imaginaries, according to Taylor, shape the ways in which everyday people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”

A critical component of any social imaginary, especially one that is used to justify a system wherein a very few people steal and hoard almost everything else from almost everyone else, relates to how people are taught to conceive of themselves. It is necessary, then, to examine the neoliberal subject. Who does neoliberalism tell us that we are? Or, more accurately, how does neoliberalism command, cajole, threaten, discipline, punish, and tempt us into conceiving of ourselves?

First, the neoliberal subject is taught to believe that self-interest and rationality are two sides of the same coin. The world, and every domain within it, is understood to be a market dominated by scarcity (i.e., there is not enough for everyone), and so there will inevitably be winners and losers. In such an agonistic world, it is reasonable to be selfish and competitive. In fact, in such a world it is irresponsible to be otherwise.

Second, as a competitive individual, the neoliberal subject is defined less as an entrepreneur and more as an enterprise. As Foucault famously stated in The Birth of Biopolitics, the “homo economicus of neoliberalism” is an “entrepreneur of himself.” The worker of liberal capitalism—who is still a partner (albeit an unequal one) in a process of economic exchange (hence, the original power of unions)—is transformed into the entrepreneur of neoliberalism who now must market their own self as a small enterprise (which is why the precariat has increasingly replaced the proletariat). In this context, I must relate to myself as a business. A business, it bears repeating, that has to competitively market itself to gain advantages over any others who are also marketing themselves in this way. Thus, as an enterprise, the neoliberal subject seeks to continually improve upon their efficiency, marketability, competitiveness, attractiveness, productivity, and purposefulness. Consequently, under neoliberalism, one is not so much exploited by bosses as taught to exploit oneself. The self conceived of as a project, the self that is always being improved upon—made better, made healthier, made more productive—is, in fact, a self that is experiencing a greater degree of subjection (or subjugation) than what has come before. As Byung-Chul Han states: “Self-optimization… amounts to total self-exploitation” (emphasis added).

Third, what this amounts to is defining one’s core self as human capital. As Wendy Brown observes:

human capital is both our “is” and our “ought”—what we are said to be, and what we should be, and what the rationality makes us into through its norms and construction of environments.

All areas of life—including many areas previously considered non-economic—are now subjected to the logic of the market (for example, even rest becomes something we learn to do more efficiently so that we can be more productive at work—yippee!). Within neoliberalism, your value as a human being is defined by how much human capital you have accrued, how swiftly you have accrued it, how cleverly and efficiently you have invested in it, how many other investors in yourself you have attracted with it, and how much you have maximized your use of it (i.e. your use of yourself by yourself and others).

The reverse side of this is that if one is not investing in their human capital then one is deteriorating into human waste. This relates back to my earlier remark that taking responsibility for oneself (within neoliberalism) means accepting the reasonableness of self-interest and competition. If you fail to thrive, that’s your fault. And because that’s your fault, you deserve to be discarded and thrown away when you fail (and believing this, as Han notes in Psychopolitics, is part of the reason why “the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression”). Only you are responsible for you and if that feels harsh, well, according to the social imaginary of neoliberalism, it’s a harsh world out there. Nothing personal, just business.

Finally, then, it is only to this neoliberal subject that freedom is granted. It is the freedom of this neoliberal subject that is valorised and defended. As Milton Friedman explicitly states in Capitalism and Freedom:

Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals. We do not believe in freedom for madmen or children. The necessity of drawing a line between responsible individuals and others is inescapable… Paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible.

For Friedman, the sovereignty of the free market guarantees the freedom of the responsible individual. Only a free market can, according to Friedman, create “unanimity among responsible individuals” which is, simultaneously, a “unanimity without conformity.” Thus, any other authorities—notably those who are situated in places of political, state-based power—need to be subjected to market rule. As Friedman says, “[t]o the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.” Further:

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom?”

Note, then, how this is a continuation of the model of freedom created by OG Liberals (slave owners like George Washington and poorhouse and prison-designers like Jeremy Bentham). Thus, while the primary (numbered) premises remain the same, the secondary (bullet) premises are updated:

1. Neoliberal markets and enterprises (including the neoliberal subject-as-enterprise) pursue freedom from the tyranny of those who seek to rule over them
   • Now understood primarily as governmental agencies, protectionist legal systems, and various permutations of social democracy, communism, or Indigenous approaches to land;
2. Neoliberal markets and enterprise have the freedom to engage as despotic rulers over subaltern people
   • Understood either as irresponsible and irrational people who refuse to accede to the superior rationality of neoliberalism who are treated with the disciplinary force of paternalism; or
   • Those who fail or squander their potential to maximize their human capital and who are subsequently and rightly discarded as human waste (although extractive “waste management” economies are built around these surplus populations so that others—largely those driving the non-profit industrial complex—can still profit from their abandonment).

As with Liberalism, the freedom praised by neoliberalism is, yet again, the freedom of the property-hoarder over against both the dispossessed and any other authorities who might wish to interfere with the ability of the property-hoarders to take and claim and privatize and hoard ever more. Consequently, while the state was useful in moving the bourgeoisie, the propertied classes, to the centre of society at the origins of Liberalism, by the late 20^th-century the state had become an impediment to the growth of individual treasure hoards. Thus, the market replaced the state and the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population now steals and possesses almost 50% of the worlds wealth and has managed to further steal almost two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020.

3: But the Government Bureaucrats, Themselves, Are Neoliberals Now!

“Well,” you might say, “that’s also bananas!” And it is! However, since the late 1970s—when the capitalist war on labour power (and other more radical movements) produced “The Great Inflation”—neoliberals have slowly but surely taken over all so-called Western governments. This resulted in massive shocks produced by Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney in the USA, Britain and Canada. People fought back against these harms, but by the end of the ‘90s, with the rise of New Labour, the New Left, and the New Democrats, neoliberalism became hegemonic because the dominant factions on both sides of the political divide embraced it and further entrenched it. Thus, Clinton (USA, elected 1992), Blair (Britain, elected 1997), and Chretien (Canada, elected 1993) all deepened the neoliberal project begun by their predecessors, even though they were elected because much of the electorate was harmed by that project and wanted their government to do better and otherwise.

However, what became increasingly apparent through a series of burst bubbles, market shocks, market failures, and bailouts, was that neoliberalism (much like classical liberalism) did not believe in a true laissez-faire variant of capitalism. Neoliberalism wanted small government when it came to the social safety net, but it needed and still needs big government when it comes to defending capitalism, and the expansion of laws, police powers, and the expropriation and privatization of every commons. This strategically inconsistent application of laissez-faire, creates a world where the hoarders of stolen wealth are allowed to do whatever they want to get richer (it’s good for the economy!) but the impoverished are increasingly boxed-out, enclosed, abandoned, and incarcerated. Laissez-faire means asset managers are allowed to accumulate residential properties and leave them empty, but if those who have been forcibly deprived of housing and shelter try to move into those spaces, laissez-faire means the police, municipal bylaw enforcement officers, and corporate security guards are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to do to make sure the spaces stay uninhabited.

Much of this trajectory was made abundantly clear in Trump’s selection of Elon Musk to oversee the newly created Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the USA (efficiency, as I’ve already stated, being one of the core tenets of neoliberalism). DOGE doesn’t exist to “fix” the government—it exists to break it irreparably so that no person or institution will be able to interfere with the ability of the stolen property hoarders to do whatever they want, whenever they want, with whomever they want. It is not contradictory, within the trajectory I have been mapping, to show that government is both being broken down at the same time as the authority of military police forces, and other state-based violence workers, are being expanded. Again, these are the two sides of Liberal freedom at play: people who hoard vast amounts of stolen property do not want anybody else to rule over them and they want the ability to do whatever they want to those who have less than them.

DOGE, of course, is only the most egregious and extreme manifestation of what governmental bureaucrats have been doing under neoliberalism. Sell off what you can, gut the budgets and slash the staffing of the rest, make it shitty and inefficient and then talk about how for-profit management is so much better than government at running things (like hospitals, like prisons, like “natural resources,” like essential structures like roads or bridges or cable lines) and then engage in public-private-partnerships, or sell-off and privatize even more things, and then continue the process ad nauseum.

4: Bringing it Home to London, Ontario

The examples coming from the United States today are especially obvious and egregious but the same ideology, methodology, and objectives are operative across scales in the so-called West. In fact, the neoliberal career bureaucrats who run most municipalities to the benefit of land thieves, real estate hoarders, and “businesspeople doing business things,” all tend to follow the same playbook.

For example, in London, ON, the 2024 municipal budget gave $672,000,000.00 to the police over four years. Amongst other things, this money will be used to build a local “cop city” as well as purchase weapon upgrades, like a second military-grade Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV) which costs $492,000.00, and a drone along with its operating system which costs a total of $466,000.00. The largest municipal tax hike since 2000 was required in order to facilitate funding the police (the London Police Services Board paid a high-profile Public Relations firm $104,000.00 to assist with getting this budget increase approved, although this only came out well after the fact).

Meanwhile, social services have had their supports dramatically reduced. For example, in May 2024, City Council voted against given a mere $138,000 to SafeSpace London and this resulted in the closure of the only daytime and nighttime space run by current and former sex workers for current and former sex workers. Then, in April 2025, the City voted to remove porta-potties from large encampments and voted to stop providing weekly meals at those encampments, because they felt that providing half a dozen toilets to people who had nowhere else to go was too big of an expensive. (Services are also frequently defunded because they are said to be inefficient—i.e., “if you’re doing your job right, then why are there still so many homeless people here?”—but this fails to reckon with the all-too-obvious-but-seldom-mentioned-or-treated-as-fact observation that for every 10 people who move from a tent to housing, another 40 people have been made homeless in order to feed the greed of the rich.)

And still at the same time as this assault on urban campers was occurring, the City was lobbied by real estate developers to expand the boundaries of the city. The developers had bought up large swathes of land around the city for very low prices (because they were not within the city boundaries they did not qualify for infrastructural support from the city). Then the developers got the city to expand the boundaries (at first the city, based on their own research, proposed expanding the boundaries a little bit but the developers were unhappy with this proposal and so they got the city to hire their consultant and then the city approved a larger expansion). With the newly expanded boundaries, the land purchased for a low price because it did not have infrastructural support form the city was transformed into land that did receive infrastructural support from the city. Thus, the assets of the developers increased in monetary value by (literally) billions of dollars due to a single vote made by city council.

So what do we see here?

1. Billions of dollars fabricated almost out of thin air and given to millionaires (who became millionaires by taking and hoarding that which was given for all of us to share);
2. Hundreds of millions of dollars given to the police (who protect the treasure hoards, assets and frequently vacant properties of the rich);
3. Hundred of thousands of dollars being taken away from social services (they already get hardly anything—so, it seems that municipal bureaucrats operate like the “wicked ruler” mentioned by a certain Palestinian resistance fighter who was crucified two thousand years ago—those who have been given much will receive more and those who have been given little will have even that taken away).

Thus, even in London, ON (pop: ~425,000), we see the two sides of neo/liberal freedom being operationalised via the managers who run the City on behalf of the rich. Managers, it should be noted, who are not elected by the public but who are career bureaucrats, who climb the ladder based on their ability to connect with other local “power players,” and who craft the very smart looking reports presented to City Council members in order to steer the city in the direction that best serves those who have plenty of money and capital and who want a whole lot more.

5: The Political is Personal—Bridge to Part 2

All of this analysis is pretty uncontroversial in academic circles. Even bougie Liberal scholars will probably find themselves nodding along to a good portion of this critique (especially as it pertains to neoliberalism). However, things rapidly become awkward when this critical lens is applied to agencies and individual bosses or bureaucrats who are situated at hubs of power within our local networks. It’s as if people think that critical theory is useful and brilliant when it is applied “somewhere over there” or in a very abstract manner. But they then forget all about it—or fight vigourously against it!—when it is applied directly to our local context, where it actually matters and has the potential to make a real difference in the lives of those who are oppressed, dispossessed, colonized, and abandoned here. It is this point that will be explored in more detail in “Part 2” of this series.