Neoliberalism
or
neo-liberalism
is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with
laissez-faire
economic liberalism
and
free market
capitalism
.
- Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal economic policies have increasingly pervaded rich
democracies
. A list of such policies would include the following: enacting international trade agreements that strongly favor capital interests and constrain
democratic
policy making; deregulating
markets
(especially in the financial sector); tightening
bankruptcy
regulations and imposing harsher policies toward individual and state debtors; enhancing
intellectual property
protections; cutting
taxes
(especially on top incomes, capital income, and inheritance); retrenching the
welfare state
(especially replacing cash benefits with benefits conditioned on work); weakening antitrust enforcement; assaulting
labor unions
and laws protecting
workers
; reducing workers' pensions; delegating labor and trade disputes to private arbitrators; outsourcing public functions to private enterprise; and replacing
Keynesian economic policies
oriented to full employment with fiscal austerity. Taken together, these policies have had three principal effects. First, they have increased economic inequality and shifted the
distribution of income
from labor to capital, leading to stagnant wages for lower-tier workers, even as productivity has grown. Second, these policies have also constrained and undermined democracy, reducing its ability to respond to the needs and interests of ordinary people . . . Third, neoliberal policies have shifted economic and political power to private businesses, executives, and the very rich. More and more, these organizations and individuals govern everyone else.
- Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when
Europe
was less united, it was in many ways more
independent
. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of
integration
had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the
United States
, when the major European states were themselves
imperial powers
, whose
foreign policies
were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the
Second World War
, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like
De Gaulle
, but of
Adenauer
and
Mollet
, of
Eden
and
Heath
, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it.
Monnet
, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the
1970s
, something of this spirit lived on even in
Giscard
and
Schmidt
, as
Carter
discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the
1980s
, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a
postwar generation
, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the
Pax Americana
. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.
- Perry Anderson
, "Depicting Europe",
London Review of Books
(20 September 2007)
- The termination of the
Bretton Woods financial system
and the
collapse of the Soviet Union
followed in the wake of centuries of capital-driven
globalization
. Neoliberal capitalism has become the new paradigm of permanent growth. The implications of the neoliberal stage of capitalist marketization are enormous, as capitalism universalizes its rule, throws off "superfluous" and "injurious" constraints on "
free trade
," and increasingly realizes the goal of purity of function and purpose through the autonomization of the economy from society, so that the social is the economic. Over the last few decades,
Takis Fotopoulos
notes, "A neoliberal consensus has swept over the
advanced capitalist world
and has replaced the
social-democratic
consensus of the early
post-war period
." Not only have "
existing socialist societies
" been negated in the global triumph of capitalism, so too have social democracies and the bulk of institutional networks designed to protect individuals from the ravages of
privatization
and the relinquishment of responsibilities to people in need to case them into barbaric barrenness of the "survival-of-the-fittest."
- Steven Best
, "Introduction: Pathologies of Power and the Rise of the Global Industrial Complex", in Steven Best; Richard Kahn; Anthony J. Nocella II;
Peter McLaren
(eds.).
The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination
. 2011. p. xviii
- In the last three decades, neoliberalism and global
capitalism
have destroyed social democracies, widened
gaps between rich and poor
, dispossessed
farmers
, assaulted
indigenous peoples
, and marketized the entire world, all the while escalating the war on animals and intensifying the assault on every
ecosystem
on the
earth
as a whole.
- Steven Best
,
The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century
(2014) p. 160
- The scale of
the plague
is surprising, indeed shocking, but not its appearance. Nor the fact that
the U.S.
has the worst record in
responding
to the
crisis
. Scientists have been warning of a pandemic for years. [...] But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary
socioeconomic
order
.
Market
signals were clear: There’s no
profit
in
preventing
a future
catastrophe
. The government could have stepped in, but that’s barred by reigning doctrine: "Government is the problem,"
Reagan
told us with his sunny smile, meaning that decision-making has to be handed over even more fully to the business world, which is devoted to private profit and is free from influence by those who might be concerned with the
common good
. The years that followed injected a dose of neoliberal brutality to the unconstrained capitalist order and the twisted form of markets it constructs.
- It is tempting to cast the blame on
Trump
for the disastrous response to the crisis. But if we hope to avert future catastrophes, we must look beyond him. Trump came to office in a sick society, afflicted by 40 years of neoliberalism, with still deeper roots. [...] The neoliberal version of capitalism has been in force since Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher
, beginning shortly before. There should be no need to detail its grim consequences. Reagan's
generosity to
the
super-rich
is of direct relevance today as another
bailout
is in progress. Reagan quickly lifted the ban on
tax havens
and other devices to shift the
tax burden
to the public, and also authorized
stock buybacks
? a device to
inflate
stock values
and enrich
corporate
management
and the very
wealthy
(who own most of the stock) while undermining the
productive capacity
of the enterprise.
- The U.S.'s
privatized
for-profit health care system had long been an international
scandal
, with twice the per capita expenses of
other developed societies
and some of the worst outcomes. Neoliberal doctrine struck another blow, introducing business measures of efficiency: just-on-time service with no fat in the system. Any disruption and the system collapses. This is the world that
Trump
inherited, the target of his battering ram. [...] It seems that many
Americans
would prefer to spend more money as long as it doesn't go to taxes (incidentally killing tens of thousands of people annually). That’s a telling indication of the state of American democracy, as people experience it; and from another perspective, of the force of the doctrinal system crafted by business power and its intellectual servants. The neoliberal assault has intensified this pathological element of the national culture, but the roots go much deeper and are illustrated in many ways, a topic very much worth pursuing.
- In the West, I think a large part of what’s happening, a very large part, is the bitter, savage,
class war
that’s been conducted for the last 40 years. It’s called neoliberalism. It even has rhetoric about markets and so on. But that’s widely misleading. It’s basically savage class war. And it was understood by the leaders. It starts with Reagan and Thatcher. Their first moves in office were to attack, undermine the labor movement, opening the door for the corporate sector to enter with illegal strike-breaking efforts, organization efforts tolerated by the criminal state. That made sense. If you’re going to carry out a bitter, savage class war, better eliminate all the means of defense.
- And it’s gone on for the United States. We have measures of it. I’m sure you know that the Rand Corporation about a year ago came out with an estimate that about $50 trillion ? That’s not pennies ? $50 trillion had been transferred to the pockets of the top 1%, or to a fraction of them, mostly in the last 40 years of class war. Meanwhile, real wages have stagnated, and for mail workers, benefits have collapsed.
- Neoliberalism designates a particular strategy of class domination that uses the state to promote certain competitive dynamics for the benefit of the very rich. In
Dumenil's
and Levy's words, "Neoliberalism is a new stage of capitalism that emerged in the wake of the structural crisis of the
1970s
. It expresses the strategy of the capitalist classes in alliance with upper
management
, specifically financial managers, intending to strengthen their hegemony and expand it globally." Less a strategy for production than for the transfer of wealth to the very rich, neoliberalism places the "need of money . . . over those of production." Pursued through policies of
privatization
, deregulation, and
financialization
, and buttressed by an ideology of
private property
,
free markets
, and
free trade
, neoliberalism has entailed cuts in taxes for the rich and cuts in protections and benefits for workers and the poor, resulting in an exponential increase in inequality.
- We have preserved
social security
and the
welfare state
, but at the expense of
employment
. Neo-liberalism, which put the emphasis on the market, manifested itself in Europe by the policies led by
Margaret Thatcher
, who sometimes had good reasons to prise off the shackles which were condemning
British
society to decline. But [Thatcherite policies] fell into an excess of
laissez faire
.
- Jacques Delors
,
L'Unite d'un Homme
(November 1994), quoted in
The Times
(21 November 1994), p. 11
- The major capitalist countries faced a stark choice: deepen
socialistic
reform, public ownership and initiative, and invest in the still growing
Third World
to expand
demand
so as to keep growth going or, as the neoliberals in their think tanks bankrolled by capital and some
politicians
already converted to the new creed recommended, lift
postwar
restrictions on
capital
, now blamed for the
growth slowdown
, at home and campaign to lift them abroad. The former favoured working people the world over while the latter favoured capital and its comprador allies in the Third World. Capital won. Though union density and the political strength of the historic
parties
of labour and the
left
were at historic highs, the left was intellectually too weak to present viable alternatives. Over the post-war decades, non-Communist
working class
parties and organisations in the major capitalist countries ‘had no economic policy of their own’ and had focused only on ‘improving the condi- tions of their working-class constituencies’ through reliance ‘on a strong wealth- creating capitalist economy to finance their aims’ (Hobsbawm 1994, 272).
- The United States’ attempt to prolong the life of capitalism over
the last century
went through its phase of jeopardy during the Long Boom, where it was endangered by circumstances arising from a world of popular empowerment whose leading edge was
Communism
. It then entered its phase of futility under neoliberalism, as neoliberal policies failed to revive capitalism’s productive economy, financialising it instead and the capitalist world, led by the leading neoliberal countries, lost its centrality to the
world economy
. With the
pandemic
followed by the proxy war against
Russia
and the
New Cold War
against
China
, it appears to have entered a phase of perversity, where its efforts to extend capitalism’s life and hold on the world are proving counterproductive.
- The utterly shambolic
response
of
ruling elites
to the
coronavirus crisis
in both
Britain
and the US is symptomatic of neoliberalism ? of 40 years of profiteering, of grotesque
greed
, of
privatisation
of
public services
, of contempt for ordinary people and their
needs
. [...] The time has come to put an end to neoliberalism. This crisis is a radical opportunity. Another system is possible. Another system is a necessity.
- The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of 'spillover' or 'trickle' ? without using the name ? as the only solution to societal problems.
- The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of
economic liberalism
to what is now called "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is
not
... a synonym for
capitalism
. I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a
market based economy
. Neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme seeking to
deregulate
,
privatize
and basically pull back the role of the
state
, which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals, to entrepreneurship, to economic growth, and as a result markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of
inequality
,
as...
global corporations
searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas... [T]hey destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the
1980s
and 90s we had an escalating series of financial crises. In the
sterling crisis
, the
Asian financial crisis
,
Argentina
,
Russia
, and finally culminating in the big
American subprime crisis in 2008
. The... cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt... a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the
elites
that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes, and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies... [T]his had a direct impact on the rise of
populism
in subsequent years, both on the
right
and on the
left
.
- What neoliberalism has done since the
1970s
is it has created such economic misery, it has so accentuated levels of inequality, it has created such suffering, it has dismantled entire
towns
, it has concentrated
wealth
in the hands of the financial elite, and it has legitimated an enormous culture of
cruelty
. And it operates off the assumption that the market can solve all problems ? not simply in the economy, but in all of social life ? so it becomes a template and a model for all social relations. In doing so, it is at odds with any notion of the
welfare state
, any notion of
labor unions
, any notion of
workers’ rights
, and any notion of economic rights. It
privatizes
,
deregulates
, and
commodifies
everything. It sets up a series of competitive attitudes that degrades collaboration. It highlights self-interest at the expense of modes of solidarity. It so accentuates matters of inequitable relations in wealth and power that you have an enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the financial elite, and this is enacted by all kinds of policies that undermine the foundations of a
democracy
? all of its basic institutions, from the press, to public goods such as schools and media, to politics itself.
- Money
drives politics. We all know that now. But the other side of this is that it's not just an economic system, it’s also an ideological system. As an ideological system, what it generally does is three things that are pernicious and which set the groundwork for a kind of
right-wing populism
and a
fascist
politics. First, it operates off the assumption that all social problems are individual problems. Therefore whatever problems people face, the blame for those problems rests with themselves ? whether we’re talking about ecological disasters, about
poverty
, about
homelessness
, about ignorance and illiteracy, and so forth and so on. Secondly, in doing so it tends to depoliticize people, and by depoliticizing them it becomes very difficult for people ? operating under that notion of self-interest, a brutal form of competition, and this heightened notion of
rugged individualism
? to translate private troubles into larger systemic issues. Hence they find it very hard to understand the conditions in which they find themselves. Thirdly, it creates an enormous culture of ignorance.
- "Slow
violence
" refers to our public schools being increasingly defunded, transformed into
machines
for teaching to the test, and reimagined not as democratic public spheres designed to produced critical citizens, but workers willing to put up with boring work and labor abuses. As they’re increasingly defunded, it's then claimed that they’re failing, and that then becomes an excuse to either privatize them or turn them over to charter schools. In a sense what you have here is a central element of neoliberal ideology, which is an attack on the public good, an attack on any institution that supports the public good, and an attack on forms of pedagogy that teach students about the past, critical thinking, and provide them with the tools for informed decisions and engaged dialogue. In that sense, schools are a prime target
- One of the things that neoliberalism has done is it has taken notions that are really powerful and turned them around, basically hijacking them in ways that produce misery and suffering. Freedom doesn’t simply mean ‘freedom from’ in the traditional sense of the word, it also means the ‘freedom to’ do more than just survive or wallow in your own orbits of privatization. It means that you not only have political freedoms and individual freedoms ? you have economic freedoms, and social freedoms. You cannot live in a society and believe in elections (if you believe in that myth), or believe in being an agent, or believe that you can have power, or believe that you can influence events, if you’re hungry all of the time, if you have to make a choice between medicine and food, if time is no longer a luxury but it basically incapacitates you by virtue of not having the time to do anything to develop the capacities that would allow us to be political, social, and economic agents. Freedom has been utterly distorted under this authoritarian neoliberal machine because it is a notion of freedom that has been regressively individualized and refuses to acknowledge that you cannot talk about choices without at the same time talking about constraints, whether they be economic, political, or social.
- The arrival of the
COVID-19
pandemic in early 2020
, unfolding around the world as I write these words, will likely be remembered as an epochal shift. [...] Already, in the
state of emergency
that the crisis has unleashed, we are seeing extraordinary measures emerge that reveal that much of the neoliberal regime’s claims to necessity and austerity were transparent lies. The God-like market has fallen, again. In different places a variety of measures are being introduced that would have been unimaginable even weeks ago. These have included the suspension of rents and mortgages, the free provision of public transit, the deployment of basic incomes, a hiatus in debt payments, the commandeering of privatized hospitals and other once-public infrastructure for the public good, the liberation of incarcerated people, and governments compelling private industries to reorient production to common needs. We hear news of significant numbers of people
refusing to work
, taking
wildcat labor action
, and demanding their right to live in radical ways. In some places, the underhoused are
seizing vacant homes
. We are discovering, against the upside-down capitalist value paradigm which has enriched the few at the expense of the many, whose labor is truly valuable: care, service, and frontline public sector workers. There has been a proliferation of
grassroots
radical demands for policies of care and solidarity not only as emergency measures, but in perpetuity.
Right-wing
and capitalist
think-tanks
are panicking, fearful that half a century of careful ideological work to convince us of the necessity of neoliberalism ?? the transformation of our very souls ?? will be dispelled in the coming weeks and months. The sweet taste of
freedom
?? real, interdependent freedom, not the lonely freedom of the market ?? lingers on the palate like a long-forgotten memory, but quickly turns bitter when its nectar is withdrawn. If we do not defend these material and spiritual gains, capitalism will come for its revenge.
- I am a capitalist, and after a 30-year career in capitalism... I'm not just in the top one percent, I'm in the top .01 percent of all earners. Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer... How do we manage to grab an ever-increasing share of the economic pie every year? ... here's the dirty secret. There was a time in which the
economics
profession worked in the public interest, but in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires... We could choose to enact
economic policies
that raise
taxes
on the rich, regulate powerful
corporations
or raise
wages
for
workers
... But neoliberal economists would warn that all of these policies would be a terrible mistake, because raising taxes always kills economic growth, and any form of government
regulation
is inefficient, and raising wages always kills jobs.
Well, as a consequence of that thinking, over the last 30 years, in the USA alone, the top one percent has grown 21 trillion dollars richer while the bottom 50 percent have grown 900 billion dollars poorer, a pattern of widening inequality that has largely repeated itself across the world. And yet, as middle class families struggle to get by on wages that have not budged in about 40 years, neoliberal economists continue to warn that the only reasonable response to the painful dislocations of austerity and globalization is even more austerity and globalization.
- The purpose of the
corporation
is not merely to enrich shareholders. The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and
shareholders
. The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike.
Greed
is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a
sociopath
. And in an
economy
as dependent upon
cooperation
at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable
natural law
, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on
pseudoscience
.
- Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the
divine right of kings
and fascism’s belief in the
Ubermensch
. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global
oligarchic
elite?eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population?while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of
Thomas Piketty
’s “
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.
- A contradiction lies at the very centre of the neoliberal project. On a theoretical level, neoliberalism promises to bring about a purer form of democracy, unsullied by the tyranny of the state. Indeed, this claim serves as the model lodestar for neoliberal ideology - a banner under which it justifies radical market deregulation. But, in practice, it becomes clear that the opposite is true: that neoliberalism tends to
undermine
democracy and political freedom.
More than 40 years of experimentation with neoliberalism shows that it erodes the power of voters to decide the rules that govern the economic systems they inhabit.
It allows for the
colonization
of political forums by elite interests - a process known as political capture - and sets up new political forums, such as the
World Bank
, the
IMF
, and the
WTO
, that preclude democratic representation from the outset. Neoliberalism also tends to undermine national
sovereignty
, to the point where
parliaments
of putatively independent nations no longer have power over their own policy decisions, but are governed instead by foreign banks, the
US Treasury
, trade agreements, and undemocratic international institutions, all of which exercise a kind of invisible, remote-control power.
- People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally
free markets
, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of state intervention. The creation of a global '
free market
' required not only violent
coups
and
dictatorships
backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global
bureaucracy
? the
World Bank
, the
IMF
, the
WTO
and bilateral free-trade agreements ? with reams of new laws, backed up by the military power of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the
global south
has known ever since the
Opium Wars
in 1842, when
British gunboats
invaded
China
in order to knock down China's trade barriers,
free trade
has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and electoral democracy.
- Jason Hickel
,
The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets
(2018) p. 218
- Some people have the tendency to think of neoliberalism as a mistake ? an overtly-extreme version of capitalism that we should reject in favor of returning to the somewhat more humane version that prevailed in prior decades. But the shift to neoliberalism was not a mistake; it was driven by the growth imperative. In order to restore the rate of profit and keep capitalism afloat, governments had to shift away from social objectives (use-values) to focus instead on improving the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange-value). The interests of capital came to be internalized by the state, to the point where today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost completely collapsed. Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit ? to make humans and nature cheaper ? for the sake of
growth
.
- Jason Hickel
,
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
(2021), p. 95
- Neoliberalism, despite the claim by its adherents that it was simply an economic theory, was from its beginnings a class project articulated on behalf of the interests of capital.
- The central claim of today’s neoliberal economic orthodoxy is that all problems are caused by labor being too greedy, and putting its own living standards above the ideal of creating a wealthy rentier class to lord it over them.
The aim of cutting back credit is to reduce employment by bringing on a new recession, there by rolling wages back ? and also making working conditions much harsher, blocking labor unionization, and cutting back public programs on social spending.
- [Securing] resources for large-scale economic transformational change [...] can be achieved by a government committed to subordinating markets in money, goods and services to regulatory democracy [...]. 'Free-market' neoliberal economic policies that detach markets from society's oversight achieve the reverse. They are designed to subject markets to private, not public, democratic authority.
- In the 36 years of neoliberal politics, they sold off the public companies, the nation’s banks, the railroads, the mines, the ports, the airports. They also carried out
privatization
of the
electricity
and oil industries. And they didn’t stop, not even in relation to education and healthcare. The so-called structural reforms aimed to put
education
and
healthcare
on the market, as if they were goods for sale, with the goal so that those who wanted to study or get medical attention had to pay. Fortunately, the people said ‘Enough!’, and, in a democratic way, decided to change these politics and carry out a transformation. Also to confront the tremendous decay that we suffered. The corruption brought about a process of gradual degradation in all of the fields of public life.
- The very concept of collective responsibility for human well-being is under attack by neo-liberalism all over the world.
- Elizabeth Martinez
"IMMIGRANT BASHING ON THE RISE 1990-1994" in
De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century
(1998 and 2017)
- In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.
- Imagine if the people of the
Soviet Union
had never heard of
communism
. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
- By the mid-
twentieth century
, elites had to find ways to surmount the natural limitations to the basic and destructive imperative of the capitalist system?the imperative for unending growth and expansion?in order to continue the accumulation of vast wealth. They turned to the ideology of neoliberalism in a renewed drive for
laissez-faire
policies, in which government largely withdraws from "interfering" with the economy, leading to nearly unrestrained profit-taking. While capitalists were able to fend off or minimize government interventions proposed to create or improve the quality of life for countless humans, they were quite focused putting the power of the state to work to aggressively protect and advance their interests (i.e., "
corporate welfare
"). Through deregulation, tax breaks and the squandering of taxpayer dollars, large corporations and elites have flourished while masses around the world face harsh
austerity
programs. And in the United States, enormous public resources are diverted into the
military-industrial complex
and twenty-first century invasions and warfare.
- David Nibert
,
Animal Oppression and Capitalism.
(2017) p. xvi
- Just as in
the 1930s
, world
capitalism
, as it had existed until then, had reached a dead-end, and the need for it to be altered for the sake of preserving the
system
itself, was emphasised by many perceptive
bourgeois
thinkers, exactly in a similar manner
contemporary world capitalism
too has reached
a dead-end
and cannot continue as before. [...] The ruling formation in India, however, is totally
oblivious
of the world conjuncture. The dead-end of neo-liberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis, is
invisible
to our
Hindutva
brigade. Not only is the
Modi
government
still wedded to the neo-liberal agenda in general, but it has not even deviated from this agenda in the midst of the acute
humanitarian crisis
unleashed by
the pandemic
and its own mindless
response
to it. [...] But following the same track as was being followed in the "last four decades" and not recognising the dead-end of neo-liberalism, also means remaining stuck in that dead-end, which in turn would mean even greater recourse to
authoritarian
-
fascistic
measures and even more odious attempts to promote a communal divide. The working people will have to struggle against this entire endeavour and to show the way out of the dead-end of neo-liberalism.
- The idea of the
rule of law
lies at the heart of the neo-liberal view of the nature and role of the state. More than this, however, it is the deep fault line that divides neo-liberalism and social democracy and, for that matter, more radical forms of socialism. On the neo-liberal view social democracy and socialism are outside the rule of law. On the face of it, this might seem to be rather an arcane point.
- Raymond Plant,
The Neo-liberal State
(2010), p. 5
- Despite powerful mobilizations that brought them to power, the
progressive
administrations in
Argentina
,
Bolivia
,
Ecuador
, and
Venezuela
discovered that structural constraints closed off the possibilities for systemic change. Two decades of neoliberalism had so transformed the class structure of these countries that the social base of
Pink Tide
governments, while militant, had little economic leverage against capital. Backed primarily by workers in the informal economy and marginalized communities,
left-wing
governments simply lacked the leverage to challenge ruling classes.
- This response was surprising not only because of its scale but also because it contradicted the conventional narrative of
economic history
since the
1970s
. The decades prior to the crisis had been dominated by the idea of a “market revolution” and the rollback of state interventionism.
Government
and
regulation
continued, of course, but they were delegated to “independent” agencies, emblematically the “independent central banks,” whose job was to ensure discipline, regularity and
predictability
. Politics and discretionary action were the enemies of good governance. The balance of power was hardwired into the normality of the new regime of
deflationary
globalization
, what
Ben Bernanke
euphemistically referred to as the “
great moderation
.” The question that hung over the dispensation of “neoliberalism” was whether the same rules applied to everyone or whether the truth was that there were rules for some and discretion for others. The
events of 2008
massively confirmed the suspicion raised by America’s selective interventions in the emerging market crises of the 1990s and following the dot-com crisis of the early 2000s. In fact, neoliberalism’s regime of restraint and
discipline
operated under a proviso. In the event of a major financial crisis that threatened “systemic” interests, it turned out that we lived in an age not of limited but of big government, of massive executive action, of interventionism that had more in common with military operations or emergency medicine than with law-bound governance. And this revealed an essential but disconcerting truth, the repression of which had shaped the entire development of economic policy since the 1970s. The foundations of the modern monetary system are irreducibly political.
- Adam Tooze
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
(2018)
- My third thesis is that the meshing of workfare and prisonfare partakes of the making of the neoliberal state. Economists have propounded a conception of neoliberalism that equates it with the rule of the “free market” and the coming of “small government” and, by and large, other social scientists have adopted that conception. The problem is that it captures the ideology of neoliberalism, not its reality. The comparative sociology of actually existing neoliberalism reveals that it involves everywhere the building of an erection of a Centaur-state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom. Then neoliberal Leviathan practices laissez faire et laissez passer toward corporations and the upper class, at the level of the causes of inequality. But it is fiercely interventionist and
authoritarian
when it comes to dealing with the destructive consequences of economic deregulation for those at the lower end of the class and status spectrum. This is because the imposition of market discipline is not a smooth, self-propelling process, it meets with recalcitrance and triggers resistance; it translates into diffusing social instability and turbulence among the lower class; and it practically undermines the authority of the state. So it requires institutional contraptions that will anchor and support it, among them an enlarged and energetic penal institution.
- The alliance’s
expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious
military-industrial complex
that underpins much of its economy and society.