If Chait’s right, and Marxism is the theory that only the oppressed should have political rights, then it’s certainly at least as accurate to say Liberalism is the theory that only the oppressors should have political rights.Quotes from Kant, Hume and Rousseau to that effect. Turns out that the Enlightenment wasn't all that enlightened.
Neoliberalism’s abiding passion was always to destroy socialism, but in practice it may have ended up with far more of the technocratic elements of ‘actually existing’ state socialism than its ideologues could ever imagine (as I discuss here). When one considers our current predicament, in which our social and private lives are subjected to relentless quantification and optimization, the following prediction looks prescient: “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory”.
This was in fact expressed as an optimistic vision of what a good society might look like in the future. And the visionary was none other than Vladimir Lenin.Open Democracy
