1. The relationship between neoliberalism and the state is broadly misunderstood by the left, which consequences that I think are absolutely disastrous. Neoliberalism isn't about shrinking the state in any absolute sense, it's about class power.

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2. In absolute terms neoliberalism has seen a massive increase in the size of the state, probably the funniest example is that after the USSR collapsed the number of bureaucrats in the Soviet bloc actually increased massively. Bu there's others.

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3. Means testing and neoliberal performance evaluations, for example, increase the raw size of the welfare apparatus but decrease the amount of services it provides. The NHS, for example, has evaded outright privatization at the expense of a

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4. proliferation of bureaucrats whose main job is decreasing the efficiency of the system and deflecting internal hospital problems onto hospital workers themselves, as The Great NHS Heist goes into at length.

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5. Means testing is another emblematic example of how this works, the bureaucracy created to deny people services and then employing social workers to help those same people evade the regulations the state put in place is absolutely enormous.

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6. But apart from total bureaucratization there's another very important component of neoliberalism that's seen as a reduction of the power of the state but is actually the exact opposite: the transition from the welfare state as the primary means

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7. of counter-insurgency to a direct reliance on the police, the prison system, and the military to do the same job. This requires us to take a few steps back. The welfare state is not, as conventionally suggested, a benevolent part of liberal

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8. democracy nor in any way socialism. As David Graeber pointed out, the origin of the welfare state is in Otto von Bismarck's explicit attempt to buy off the working class by setting up a bureaucratic, state run version of mutual aid societies

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9. that composed a core part of the power of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. This arrangement would be reprised again after WWII across the Europe and the Americas. In exchange for giving up any attempt to seize the means of production

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10. for themselves, (white, male) workers would be given access to a massive welfare state that would allow them access to middle class staples like home ownership and vacations. This arrangement was embedded into the very structure of the

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11. corporation itself, which was seen as a social organization balancing the demands of unions, management, and investors. It was this compromise that ended with neoliberalism and the realization by the ruling class that the power of the working

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12. class had essentially been shattered. In order to suppress the last remnants and maintain capitalist order, the neoliberals began a series of massive authoritarian campaign to expand the power of the surveillance state and the police, using

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13. the prison system to fill the role the welfare state had played in stemming revolts. This is the source of the War on Drugs and the massive intensification of the prison industrial complex, which contra the focus on the absolutely despicable

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14. private prison system is still run almost entirely through the state. The War on Terror likewise saw another ramp-up of the surveillance state and the army, which expanded at staggering rates even as neoliberal ideologues raved about slashing

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15. the size of the state. This surveillance/prison apparatus is enormously useful to the ruling class, it both consolidates their power and is cheaper than a full scale expansion of the welfare state, which allowed them to pocket the extra money

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16. and then turn the state into what essentially a massive debt collecting agency. This is where a lot of "class first" leftists completely misunderstand what neoliberalism is and come out in favor of shit like police unions and treating cops as

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17. workers. In reality the American police are essentially a state-backed, ultra-bureaucratic mafia, which supports itself indirectly through the ever increasing share of tax revenue it ammasses and directly through the collection of fines and

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18. civil asset forfeiture. In essence this is a band of incredibly racist armed robbers, who work arm in arm with real estate developers to carry out gentrification and take people's shit at gunpoint. They're the enforcement mechanism of the

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19. banking system, which likewise has begun to derive its profits from literally just taking shit from people at gunpoint. This is an UNPRECEDENTED expansion of state power. The threat of state violence pervades every moment of our existence.

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20. We are constantly being watched, being tracked, being attacked in the streets, being disappeared, and being murdered by agents of the state, and yet the "left" is full of tracts on the disappearance of the state. It's just wrong, neoliberalism

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21. is the totalization of the power of the state, it's the expansion of state violence into every conceivable sphere of human life, mirrored by the expansion of an extractive bureaucracy the left lacks the language to even talk about.

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22. The consequence is that the American social democrats that pass for a socialist movement in this country were caught completely off guard the moment a massive uprising against state violence began.

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23. Now obviously race plays a massive role in the white left's impotence in the face of the protests, and most class first "leftists" are just racist and like private property. But that's not the only factor here, even among non-white social

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24. democrats and factions that aren't overly racist the same problem persists. Part of that too is an unwillingness to deal with settler colonialism seriously but the conception of neoliberalism as anti-state has been profoundly damaging in a

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25. variety of ways that we really haven't really untangled yet, especially because one of the ways that neoliberalism perpetuates itself is by creating more of the very bureaucracy it's supposed to oppose and then using that as a justification

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26. for more bureaucracy, more state violence, and a deeper entrenchment of the power of the bourgeoisie.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed