Introduction: Visionary Evaluatives’ Perspectives Part 2: The Organization of These Volumes

To introduce these volumes, we must first—albeit briefly—explore were we have been, where we are, and where me might go from here, in terms of economics, social life, the state and struggles for liberation and human dignity. You know where we’re heading. And we’ll get there shortly. We promise. But let’s begin first with a vicious former Yankee actor, a cruel Pom and a touch of Arundhati Roy.

Roy (2004) has noted that modern democracies have existed long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to transform them. She went on to further note that the economic elites at the center of capitalism— neoliberal and otherwise—have specifically mastered techniques that allow them to infiltrate the everyday instruments of democracy; the “independent” judicial system, the “free” press, bodies of representative democracy (such as parliaments) and then to mold them to their needs and purposes. Roy was right. In its never-ending quest and need for expanding market share, increased profits and economic domination, capitalism must hide the realities of its regular functioning from us. Instead, capitalist elites— and their hegemonic servants—want us to see only the specific version of reality they organize for us. Neoliberal versions of capitalism and politics began in earnest in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power in the U.S. and UK, respectively, launching a counter-offensive to global workers’ advances at the time; front and center at this time were the people of color’s worker states from Cuba, Vietnam, and beyond. Imperialist states advanced their anti-worker agenda by taking capitalism to a new and heightened level inhumanity and savagery, while at the same time subtly backgrounding it and culturally interweaving it with notions of Western, representative, and legitimated democracy (Malott & Ford, 2015; Mészáros, 1995).