Postmodernity, always according to Bauman, forced a change of religious discourse: life, which used to be grounded on certainty and human powerlessness, becomes one of uncertainty. Thus, the individual, who is unclear about her destiny, must now feel self-sufficienty. Why? Because that way there’s at least the appearance of being capable of effecting change in her life. If the changes that occur in her life (and which cause this uncertainty that is typical of postmodernity) are not subjected to the person’s control, they cease to be a human subject and people lose interest.

In practice, it’s a marketing strategy: religion must guarantee to us that “we can,” that “we’re capable,” that “we’ll achieve” our maximum potential, otherwise they cease to be relevant to us — death, the classical religious theme, has lost its luster, since it can’t be changed through human action.

I was reminded of this observation by Bauman — about the current need for a guarantee of individual self-sufficiency — with the beginning of the electoral campaigns in Brazil. A very common line of thought has predictably found its way back into political discourse: there are enough jobs, what we need is professional training.

The idea is analogous: if we say that there are no jobs, the problem is structural and very little can be done on an individual level to change the situation. By contrast, if “there are job openings, but people lack the required skill to fill them,” the individual becomes the center of the discussion. Unemployment is now not a systemic problem, but the exclusive problem of the unemployed. If they can’t leave their unemployed situation, it’s their fault, because they have all the tools to do so. They only have to want it.

Truth is that we have to want it and use the appropriate middlemen. In religion, you can reach salvation by wanting it — but don’t forget that God answers through our temple. In the neoliberal economy, you have to want it and find the right middlemen to provide you with jobs and abundance. In Brazil, ironically, these middlemen are the unions.

As Raúl Zibechi notes in The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, the main proponents of this neoliberal idea that we don’t lack jobs but training are the largest unions in the country: CUT (Unified Worker’s Central Union) and Força Sindical (Union Force), which also control the largest pension funds in the country.

To CUT and Força Sindical, the current system is extremely convenient, since they are wholly inserted in the Brazilian corporate capitalism. To them, it’s not a good idea to fight for a deep structural change; they want workers to try and insert themselves in the market through these unions, through their “training programs” (which, because of FAT — Worker’s Support Fund —, guarantee a steady flow of money from the government to these organizations), and trust their “propositive” rather than “combative” unionism. It’s not by chance that May Day celebrations in Brazil are marked not by protests but parties sponsored by unions.

This enthusiasm for training and professional qualification programs is quite convenient to businesses, specially large ones, which frequently advertise the fact that they have many “job openings” that can’t be filled for the lack of skilled workers. Government is always all too happy to propagandize the story, because that allows it to keep the current system intact, spend a lot of money in frankly irrelevant qualification programs, and afterwards state that that’s how “unemployment is fought,” at the same time that it elevates work requirements, cutting low-skill workers off. Businesses, on the other hand, get giddy when they find out they can externalize their costs, turning the responsibility to qualify workers over to the government, and eliminating the need of spending on capital, raising wages, or even shrinking their firm size in response to the lack of labor.

In 2014, as always, candidates are going to show up on your TV to say that you are able to realize your every dream, provided you want it really badly, because it all depends on you. Look for a nearby community college, qualification program, or union chapter.

The same way salvation depends on you (through church), your economic welfare is your problem. If you fail, it’s your fault.

But if you manage to get a stable job, with a carreer plan and benefits, thank the government and the unions. You wanted it, but they made it possible.

A new article by my friend Henia Belalia argues that immigrants’ rights should be understood in a context where migration is often forced by America’s destructive policies of imperialist intervention. At one point, the article examines the case of the Cañenguez family, which I also briefly discussed in last week’s blog. Ana Cañenguez and her family fled violence in El Salvador, and ICE is demanding they self-deport back to that nation. In her article, Henia examines how the violence in El Salvador is largely rooted in U.S. imperialism. She writes:

Today, nearly one quarter of El Salvador’s population lives and works in the United States. The economy, which once relied on its coffee exports, now depends on the remittances of its workers abroad who send money back to their family. This exchange is expedited by the fact that since 2001, their official currency is the dollar. In other words, every deportation of a Salvadorean worker in the United States has a direct negative impact on the economy of this small Central American nation.

To understand this situation, it’s helpful to start with El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, which was to become the most costly U.S. intervention in Latin America.

The United States spent $1 million a day funding death squads and a far-right military government in efforts to ward off the spread of communism and “another Nicaragua.” As a result, the country was traumatized by massive human rights violations and the death of 75,000 people. But perhaps what really tipped the scales was the formation of U.S.-funded private development organizations like FUSADES, which furthered neoliberal programs inside the country. The United States has also meddled in elections and set preconditions for U.S. aid that incentivizes — one might say bribes — politicians to open up the country to foreign multinationals. The recent enactment of the public-private partnership law, for example, grants “the government the right to sell off natural resources, infrastructure and services to foreign multinationals.”

El Salvador has been torn apart, impoverished, and destabilized by violent intervention from the American state. Now, when people like Ana Cañenguez peacefully travel from El Salvador to America to support their families, the United States government seeks to use force to deport them and destroy their livelihoods. In other words, America’s policies of mass deportation are policies that re-victimize those who already face poverty and violence because of the American empire.

These policies of mass deportation are part of the larger prison industrial complex. As Henia explains, “The deportation quota is set at 400,000 a year, and the private-prison industry has a powerful vested interest in keeping detention centers filled. DHS has even conceded “detention bed mandates” to the for-profit industry, ensuring a certain number of migrants will be detained in order to maximize profits.” The same concentrated interest groups that profit off of mass incarceration and drug prohibition also profit from this border imperialism.

The prison-industrial complex and America’s military empire are mutually reinforcing pieces of a larger system of coercion. Let’s do all we can to understand this system, to build alternatives to it, and to resist it.

If this trailer is any indication, the plot for “The Purge 2: Anarchy” looks almost note-for-note the same as its predecessor.

The setting for both films is a future America, Norman-Rockwell-idyllic in almost every way: Poverty  cured, crime abolished. Government is big and invasive, but one really gets the sense that people care … except for one night a year, when all laws go unenforced and emergency services shut down. All crime is legal. Everyone can do whatever they want.

This 12-hour period is called “the Purge.” In the first film it was the setting for a rather bland and kind of problematic home invasion flick. Upper-class white protagonists, somewhat lower-class white antagonists, and  a black man on the run from the antagonists serving as maguffin.

The second movie seems to set up a similar dynamic: Nice white couple on a little drive (an hour before the Purge is scheduled to begin) find themselves stranded in The Bad Part Of Town when their car breaks down on the freeway. They’ll have to pit their wits against chaos and survive until sunrise against evil (probably Hispanic, were I to venture a guess) people on dirt bikes in this, the ultimate neoliberal argument against anarchism.

We live in the age of progressive co-option of radical politics. Occupy Wall Street, whatever else one might say about it, was initially a space for anti-authoritarians to emulate protests around the world: The Day of Rage, Tunisia, Egypt’s Tahrir Square. It became more of a networking and platform space for liberals like Michael Moore as time went on, but despite that, it still arguably influenced the public dialogue.

“The Purge: Anarchy” is the latest in a fairly new line of movies aimed at chastising liberals who marched and participated in Occupy alongside anarchists. It’s meant to reinforce the cultural narrative that anarchism is synonymous with chaos, and that those who dare call themselves anarchists want to assassinate people and throw bombs at mailboxes.

The movie will ignore entirely the reams of data sociologists have collected over the years, not to mention the example set by Occupy, suggesting that a stateless society, or even just a stateless pocket within society, will not devolve into chaos. A recent study performed by  Auckland University of Technology and Otago University in New Zealand discovered that when playground rules were abolished and children left essentially unsupervised during lunch and recess, chaos did not ensue. Surely grown adults can be trusted to behave as well as young children in a situation of statelessness?

This ignorance is deliberate. The message: The state’s existence is not only necessary for certain functions, it’s vital for your survival. Does it matter that what “The Purge” depicts bears no resemblance to anarchism? No. All that matters is that moviegoers are scared enough for two hours into believing it.

Estos recortes tendrán un fuerte impacto en la vida de muchos estadounidenses. El New York Times reportó que “de acuerdo a la Oficina de Presupuesto del Congreso (CBO), cerca de cuatro millones de personas serán excluidas del programa alimentario a partir del año próximo. La oficina de presupuesto dijo que luego de eso, serán excluidas del programa alrededor de tres millones de personas al año.”

Pero mientras el gobierno recorta la ayuda para que los estadounidenses pobres puedan alimentarse, no hace nada para eliminar las intervenciones que mantienen a la gente trabajadora en condiciones de pobreza. A lo largo del país, las licencias de actividad económica incrementan los precios para los consumidores e impiden a los trabajadores auto-emplearse. Las ciudades a lo largo del país han cerrado tiendas de trenzado de cabello, furgonetas de comida, y otros pequeños negocios fundados frecuentemente por grupos económicamente vulnerables. En California, la policía conduce violentas operaciones encubiertas para arrestar gente que hace trabajos de pintura, carpintería y paisajismo sin licencia. Obtener las licencias requeridas requiere tiempo y dinero de los que la mayoría de la gente pobre carece.

Otras actividades a las que la gente pobre se dedica para ganarse la vida son criminalizadas al instante. La venta de drogas, de sexo y la mendicidad son formas pacíficas y voluntarias de tratar de obtener un medio de vida, pero la policía asalta, secuestra y encierra a la gente que se dedica a estos crímenes de supervivencia.

Existen muchas otras formas en las que el gobierno mantiene la pobreza estructural. Las barreras de entrada regulatorias son responsables de que menos personas puedan arrancar un negocio propio, aumentando la competencia por puestos de trabajo, lo que perpetúa un mercado laboral en el que los capitalistas tienen mucho más poder de negociación que los trabajadores. Las patentes y otras formas de escasez artificial incrementan los precios de todo tipo de bienes, incluyendo medicinas que salvan vidas. Y los robos históricos de tierras como los Cercamientos en Inglaterra han concentrado la riqueza en manos de capitalistas depredadores mientras se le impide a las masas el acceso a la tierra y la propiedad.

Estas intervenciones le rompen las piernas a los pobres, haciéndolos dependientes del estado de bienestar que les da las muletas. Pero luego los gobiernos tienen el poder de llevarse las muletas, que es exactamente lo que ahora está haciendo el congreso.

Este círculo vicioso de pobreza creado por el estado ocurre en todo el mundo. En Europa, particularmente en Grecia, las medidas de austeridad implementan recortes a la salud, las pensiones, los salarios y demás. Las protestas a lo largo de Europa han expresado el descontento de la gente al respecto. Los estados europeos han sido muy hábiles en el oficio de romperle las piernas a la gente y luego alcanzarles las muletas; más que el gobierno de Estados Unidos. Pero luego se llevaron las muletas mientras continúan rompiéndole las piernas a la gente. Un libro publicado recientemente por dos investigadores del sistema de salud pública sostiene que estas medidas de austeridad matan.

Los llamados tratados de «libre comercio» tienen consecuencias similares. El NAFTA permitió que empresas agroindustriales estadounidenses fuertemente subsidiadas inundaran los mercados de México con maíz, destruyendo el sustento de los granjeros mexicanos. La Organización Mundial del Comercio (OMC) ha desintegrado leyes laborales y medioambientales a lo largo del mundo en nombre del «libre comercio».

Pero los llamados tratados de «libre comercio» no se limitan a eliminar las intervenciones gubernamentales que actúan como muletas. Estos tratados fortalecen la capacidad de los estados para romper piernas. Requieren que los gobiernos restrinjan severamente el comercio, forzando monopolios artificiales conocidos como «propiedad intelectual».

Para muchos bienes, esta intervención proteccionista enmascarada como «libre comercio» significa sólo rentabilidades más altas para los negocios privilegiados y precios más altos para los consumidores. Pero en lo que respecta al mercado de las medicinas, estos monopolios matan. Como dice Amy Goodman, «las más grandes compañías farmacéuticas, incluyendo a Pfizer y GlaxoSmithKline, al igual que los Estados Unidos, impidieron a decenas de millones de personas de países subdesarrollados recibir drogas genéricas contra el SIDA a precios razonables. Como resultado, millones de ellas murieron».

Nuevos tratados de comercio como el Acuerdo Estratégico Trans-Pacífico amenazan con expandir estos mortales privilegios monopólicos. En lugar de simplemente liberar el comercio, estos acuerdos utilizan el poder de los estados para aplastar a los productores de medicinas genéricas, privando a la gente pobre del mundo de medicinas que podrían salvarles las vida.

Hay personas que dicen que las políticas neoliberales de austeridad y «libre comercio» hacen al mercado más libre. Vaya chiste cruel. Esas políticas simplemente impiden al estado satisfacer las necesidades básicas de la gente a la que más ha hecho daño, mientras continúan o incluso expanden las intervenciones que los han sumergido en la pobreza.

Pero hay una mejor manera de hacer las cosas. Podemos resistir el estado y sus crueles políticas que atrapan a la gente en la pobreza. Podemos construir redes mutuales donde se atienda las necesidades de la gente sin dependencia de políticos plutocráticos y controles burocráticos. Podemos construir un mundo donde el estado no rompa piernas, reparta muletas, y luego le arranque violentamente esas muletas a sus víctimas.

Artículo original publicado por Nathan Goodman el 21 de septiembre de 2013.

Traducido del inglés por Federico Otero, editado por Alan Furth.

The liberal ideology in Europe today is confined to what can best be described as neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism has become the driving force of modern day European corporate capitalism. It provides markets for the functioning of capital-intensive industry by limiting competition to a small number of large firms through regulation, licensing and subsidy.

Both those on the left and the right will likely protest my robber-baron description of the European economy, arguing that most European countries in fact have extensive social safety nets. Whilst this is true one must realize that the welfare state is an essential cog in the corporate machine. In a free market corporations would be driven by competition to pay workers a higher wage so that they could organize healthcare themselves through cooperative efforts. Instead, by socializing the costs of social services to the taxpaying public, large businesses reduce the costs of their own internal functioning. Far from being generous, neo-liberals and social-democrats alike have learned to hand out crutches to those whose legs have been broken by the system they created.

Here lies the trap that has secretly been set for the classical-liberals. They can either choose to denounce the social safety net as system of anti-capitalist sentiment, thereby receiving the appropriate title of corporate lackeys. Or they can identify the social safety net as a set of necessary crutches that ameliorate the destructive tendencies of corporate privilege and monopoly which hide behind neo-liberalism.

I hope they choose the latter. For too long free market rhetoric has been used to prop up the power of corporate capitalism without paying attention to the intricate web of privilege on which it is based. Instead of joining hands with conservatives and getting rid of “hippie socialism” classical-liberals should call for an alliance with the radical left. Together the radical left and the classical liberals can rid Europe of the privileged political and economic elite.

Such an alliance has recurrently been sought by classical-liberals. One of the earliest of European classical liberals, Gustave de Molinari wrote in 1848:

“What is the common goal of economists [ed. Classical liberals] and socialists? Is it not a society where the production of all the goods necessary to the maintenance and embellishment of life shall be as abundant as possible, and where the distribution of these same goods among those who have created them through their labor shall be as just as possible? May not our common ideal, apart from all distinction of schools, be summarized in these two words: abundance and justice?”

The American classical-liberal movement, libertarianism, also has a long history of forming alliances with the left rather than with conservatives or neo-liberals. Famous libertarian Murray Rothbard worked together with the New Left in the 1960s. His economic critique of the corporate state, based on the work of classical-liberal Ludwig von Mises, provided for much common ground with the New Left. Even though libertarians and the New Left disagreed over certain economic issues they saw eye to eye on issues like corporatism and war. This agreement could not be found with the conservatives and neo-liberals on the right.

So we will see what path the EPIL will follow. Will they aim for corporate capitalism freed from the chains of a social safety net and the regulation that keeps its initial privilege in check? Or will they realize that true laissez-faire involves not the dominance of capital intensive corporations but instead a competitive economy of equals?

It might turn out that supra-national politics do not allow for the radical second option. If so, I urge classical-liberals to re-evaluate the use of politics. Instead the true route to liberty might bypass parliamentary politics altogether in favor of direct action and building alternative institutions much like the anarchists who trace back their history to the classical-liberals of the 19th century.

These cuts will impact many Americans. The New York Times reports, “According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly four million people would be removed from the food stamp program under the House bill starting next year. The budget office said after that, about three million a year would be cut off from the program.”

But while government cuts back on helping poor Americans afford food, they are not letting up on their numerous interventions that keep poor and working people impoverished. Across the country, occupational licensing laws raise prices for consumers and prevent workers from pursuing self-employment. Cities across the country have shut down hair braiders, food trucks, and other small businesses frequently founded by members of economically vulnerable groups. In California, police conduct violent sting operations to arrest people doing unlicensed house painting, carpentry, and landscaping. Gaining the required licenses requires time and money that most poor and working people just don’t have.

Other ways poor people try to make a living are outright criminalized. Drug dealing, sex work, and panhandling are all peaceful and voluntary ways of attempting to make a living, but police assault, kidnap, and cage people who engage in these survival crimes.

There are plenty of other ways that government maintains structural poverty. Regulatory barriers to entry mean that fewer people can start businesses, creating greater competition for jobs and thus a labor market where capitalists have more power than workers. Patents and other forms of artificial scarcity raise prices for all sorts of goods, including essential lifesaving medicines. And historical land thefts like the Enclosures have concentrated wealth in the hands of predatory capitalists while depriving the masses of access to land and property.

These interventions break the poor’s legs. So they become dependent upon state welfare to hand them crutches. But then governments have the power to take those crutches away, which is precisely what Congress is doing.

This vicious state-created cycle of poverty happens worldwide. In Europe, particularly Greece, austerity measures mean cuts to healthcare, pensions, wages and more. Protesters across Europe have expressed their outrage at these austerity measures. European states have been excellent at breaking their people’s legs and handing out even more crutches than the U.S. government. But then they took away the crutches while the leg breaking continued. A recent book by two public health researchers argues that these austerity measures kill.

So-called “free trade” agreements have similar consequences. NAFTA allowed heavily subsidized American agribusiness companies to flood Mexico’s markets with corn, destroying the livelihoods of Mexican farmers. The World Trade Organization has gutted environmental and labor laws across the globe in the name of “free trade.”

But so-called “free trade” agreements do not merely eliminate government interventions that can act as crutches. These agreements expand the state’s leg breaking. They require governments to harshly restrict trade by enforcing artificial monopolies known as “intellectual property.”

For many goods, this protectionist intervention masquerading as “free trade” just means higher profits for privileged businesses and higher prices for consumers. But when it comes to medicine, these monopolies kill. As Amy Goodman puts it, “major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as the United States, prevented tens of millions of people in the developing world from receiving affordable generic AIDS drugs. Millions died as a result.”

New trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership threaten to further expand these deadly monopoly privileges. Rather than simply freeing trade, these agreements use state power to crush generic drug producers and deprive poor people around the world of lifesaving medicine.

Some people say that neoliberal policies like austerity and “free trade” agreements make the market freer. This is a cruel joke. These policies simply stop the state from providing basic needs for the people it has hurt most, while continuing or even expanding the interventions that have kept them in poverty.

There’s a better way. We the people can resist the state and its cruel policies that trap people in poverty. We can build mutual aid networks so that people’s needs are met without dependency on plutocratic politicians and control freak bureaucrats. We can build a world where the state doesn’t break legs, hand out crutches, and then yank those crutches out from under its victims.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Neoliberalismo te Rompe las Piernas y te Roba las Muletas.

Confieso que mi primera reacción a la noticia de la muerte de Margaret Thatcher fue echar un bostezo. Después de todo, había pasado mucho tiempo desde que le hubiese hecho algo a cualquier persona, para bien o para mal. Pero después de presenciar el triste espectáculo de ancianos reaccionarios en el Instituto Adam Smith y la Fundación Heritage que sueñan con meterse dentro del ataúd de Thatcher para ser enterrados vivos con ella, y de la gente de Mother Jones que deberían saber de lo que están hablando al referirse a sus políticas como “extremismo de libre mercado,” pues me siento obligado a escribir algo.

Como prueba de que Thatcher “trajo la libertad económica a Gran Bretaña” (Reason, 8 de abril de 2013), Ira Stoll menciona su privatización de las industrias estatales, la reducción de la tasa impositiva máxima, y el aumento del impuesto al valor agregado que “desplazó la carga fiscal al consumo en lugar de los ingresos “.

Jim DeMint de la Fundación Heritage, alaba a Thatcher no sólo por su asalto al Gran Gobierno (“DeMint on Lady Thatcher, Freedom’s Champion”, 8 de abril de 2013), sino por ser socio firme de Estados Unidos en la lucha por la propagación mundial de la libertad.

Larry Kudlow – el ridículo gurú económico de CNBC que probablemente no se quita los zapatos de vestir ni los calcetines con liga nisiquera cuando se pone íntimo con su esposa – dijo que la “‘Libertad’ fue siempre su santo y seña” (“Thatcher, Freedom and Free Markets”, 8 de abril de 2013).

Bueno, hasta aquí la publicidad. ¿Cuál es la realidad?

“La libre empresa” y la “responsabilidad individual” están tan lejos de toda relación al capitalismo neoliberal, que no me cuesta imaginar una enorme obra arquitectónicas totalitaria en Londres, ciudad principal de Pista de Aterrizaje 1, con “Ministerio de Libre Empresa y Responsabilidad Individual” escrito en su fachada con letras de 10 pisos de altura.

La revolución neoliberal resultó en poca o ninguna reducción general en el tamaño del gobierno. El neoliberalismo es sólo otra forma de intervención del Estado capitalista, con acumulación de capital “privado” a expensas del contribuyente. A pesar de toda la retórica en contra del gran estado, el neoliberalismo necesita mantener en la práctica niveles masivos de gasto público para comprar el exceso de producción de la economía corporativa y utilizar el exceso de capacidad. Para las élites que llevaron a cabo la revolución, Thatcher fue sólo un tonto útil, una manera de empaquetar su agenda estatista en el sano imaginario del liberalismo decimonónico.

La inocua frase “desplazamiento de la carga fiscal de los ingresos al consumo” cubre una multitud de pecados libertarios. A pesar de que ella bajó la tasa impositiva máxima del 83% al 60%, redujo la tasa básica sólo del 33% al 30% – y eliminó del todo la tasa base del 25% para las clases bajas. Ella casi duplicó el IVA del 8% al 15%, e hizo que el regresivo regresivo impuesto de capitación se convirtiera en la principal fuente de ingresos para los gobiernos locales. Así que lo que en realidad hizo no fue tanto reducir la carga fiscal, sino trasladarla de la rentabilidad sobre el capital y la riqueza acumulada a los rendimientos del trabajo.

¿Y qué hay con la alabada “privatización” que Maggie  hizo de las industrias estatales? Puede que la “privatización” Neoliberal  de la actividad gubernamental deje una mayor parte de las funciones estatales bajo dirección nominalmente privada – pero operando dentro de una red de protecciones, ventajas y subvenciones en gran parte definidas por el Estado.

Lo mismo sucede con el resto de la mal llamada agenda del “estado mínimo”. Los recortes en gastos sociales son más que compensados por otras formas de subsidios (incluyendo “Defensa”) para sufragar los gastos de funcionamiento de la empresa corporativa. Los acuerdos comerciales neoliberales incluyen un marco legal (por ejemplo, los llamados “derechos de propiedad intelectual”) diseñados principalmente para proteger a las grandes empresas frente al mercado. La “desregulación” es en realidad re-regulación – un cambio de la actividad estatal hacia una dirección más pro-corporativa.

El odio Thatcher hacia el Gran Gobierno al parecer no se extendió al uso de dominio eminente para dar paso a las carreteras subsidiadas, como lo demuestra el asedio y la posterior demolición de Wanstonia para dar paso a su amado M11, parte de lo que llamó el “mayor programa de construcción de carreteras desde los romanos.” Pero los subsidios a la cultura del automóvil y a los costos de los grandes negocios de transporte marítimo de larga distancia, rara vez se cuentan como parte del Gran Gobierno.

Lo que la gente como Stoll quiere decir con “libertad económica” se puede ver a partir de la estúpida afirmación que la dictadura de Pinochet en Chile era malo para la libertad personal, pero “bueno para la libertad económica”.

Los que descartan la supresión forzosa de Pinochet del derecho de los trabajadores a asociarse y organizarse como irrelevante para la “libertad económica”, aunque parezca mentira, son las mismas personas que hacen de la libertad de los capitalistas para comprar, vender y poseer los medios de producción, la característica que define al “capitalismo de libre mercado. ”

La agenda de “libertad económica” de Pinochet incluía explícitamente, como componente principal, la liquidación violenta del movimiento obrero. Sus soldados visitaban fábricas y pedían a los administradores señalar activistas laborales para su posterior tortura y “desaparición”. ¿De qué clase de “libertad económica” estamos hablando cuando la policía secreta del estado aterroriza a toda la población con el fin de reducir el poder de negociación de los trabajadores, de manera que el clima de negocios sea propicio para la inversión de capital?

Que Madsen Pirie, directora del Instituto Adam Smith enfatice constante el número comparativo de “días perdidos por huelgas” antes y después de la subida de la Dama de Hierro al poder (“She was a giant among men”, 8 de abril de 2013) sugiere que comparte la idea de Pinochet sobre la “libertad económica”.

En cuanto a la defensa de Thatcher de los “valores y libertades fundamentales para nuestra forma de vida” de la que Stoll hace tanta alharaca, no hay mucho que decir. Al ser cuestionada por un reportero sobre la inutilidad de la penalización de drogas (“Incluso mi chofer fuma marihuana”), Ella respondió: “Dime quién es. Haré que lo arresten”. Al igual que su homólogo Reagan en los Estados Unidos, Thatcher inauguró un deslizamiento hacia el estatismo policial que perduró durante los próximos treinta años, así como la erosión a las limitaciones de búsqueda e incautación irrazonable y a otras garantías del procesales de derecho común, sobre las que construyeron Tony Blair y Gordon Brown.

La solidaridad de Thatcher con los Estados Unidos en “la causa global por la libertad”, como la llama DeMint, es una frase que sólo tiene sentido si se interpretan con la ayuda del Diccionario de Neolengua. Thatcher fue uno de las amigas más fieles e incansables de los torturadores, los dictadores militares y escuadrones de la muerte que el mundo haya conocido – con tal de que fuesen enemigos de la Unión Soviética y limitaran su terror a sindicalistas y activistas de reforma agraria.

En resumen, como defensora de la “libertad económica” y cualquier otro tipo de libertad, y como promotora de la “libre empresa” y la “responsabilidad individual”, Margaret Thatcher fue un fraude total y absoluto. Y la psicótica adulación de sus seguidores de culto es nada menos que repugnante.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 9 de abril de 2013.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.