A Quote by Henry Giroux

Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something. — © Henry Giroux
Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.
There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.
Many of the Kuomintang elite in Taiwan have relatives among the ruling elite here on mainland China.
It turns out that we're actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we're really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we're in this process of publicizing it again.
What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.
The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
Socialism and communism are set up so that a select few elite get most of everything and the rest of society is equally miserable in poverty and oppression. So if you can be in the ruling party elite, socialism, communism, you've got it made. That's less than one half of one-tenth a percent of the population in those countries.
Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.
Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
Ruling elite have think tanks, they have research institutes, they've invaded universities, they've monopolized the cultural apparatuses.
If life is not a continuum, from conception to natural death, then all of us are potential victims if we fall out of favor with a ruling elite.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
One way to understand human progress is to look at how technology has made products and services - once reserved for the elite - progressively more accessible and affordable.
From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in math—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.
But we must not forget the effort undertaken by the ruling elite in Russia to manipulate Western politicians, businessmen as well as journalists. That's why [Vladimir] Putin's "fifth column" is that powerful in the West.
Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World
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