Authoritarian capitalism: What is the answer to this scourge?

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to op-ed essay by Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof, “At the Tiananmen massacre, a rescuer pleads to me: ‘Tell the world'!’”, June 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/tiananmen-square-protest.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage:

A painful lesson for many people globally: capitalism has revealed itself compatible with authoritarian government.

The socialism of centrally planned economies was not to blame, nor alone are charismatic strongman leaders or fascist social movements animated (as classically in Europe and Latin America) by opposition to socialism or a strong left.

Common opinion held that tolerance of greater inequality and poverty was worth the price of liberty and (representative) democracy. But everywhere now it is the worst of both worlds. Squalor and danger/risk + surveillance and policing, including social work and "mental health" care that is profitably controlling, or managerial. We could call it the neoliberal precarity therapeutic police state.

The challenge is to find ways to counter these developments that are driven by some positive vision of a post-capitalist or at least post-neoliberal world. We must reinvent democracy (which is not the same as liberty) and distribute the massive wealth accumulated from labor productivity to provide living and working conditions that are far freer, happier, smarter, and less precarious and barbaric.

Returning to a welfare state model; insisting on constitutional rights, or the nation-state idea; and communitarian appeals to "natural" collectivities or religious virtues--these solutions ignore too much.

We need political and ethical invention, beyond the figures of the laboring society and precarious self-managing cynic.