I discuss neo-feudalism at CK a fair amount. Okay, a lot.

Going forward, I want to explore how Neo-feudalism came to be our reality. My decades of research have convinced me that this was no accident; shaped by benign, external forces. No, it was a very conscious plan from the beginning, involving a host of individual, corporate and intellectual actors. Economic, political, ideological, cultural, educational, legal and religious theories, all played their part in the great reversal: from a more democratic and egalitarian society, to more plutocratic and concentrated one.

“Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.”

The Empire Strikes Back, is going to be a hugely complex series of posts examining how the neo-feudal plan was hatched and carried out. And, like any good crime drama, the narrative begins in the middle of the action–the 1960’s.

The 1960’s, featured student protest in academia, antiwar protest against US foreign policy, and consumer protest against corporate power. Worse still for established authority, was the moral protest occurring in religion. Especially problematic was liberation theology. Liberation theology is a political movement in Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions.

That’s where we’re going to start.