neoliberal agenda

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

John Judis, whose track record is unrivaled, is the ideal author to tackle the subject, and he has done a superb job, placing contemporary trends, including the rise of Donald Trump, in historical perspective. Judis demonstrates the crucial role of the 2008 recession both here and in Europe in discrediting the neoliberal agenda. This is must reading.” —Thomas Edsall, New York Times columnist “The Populist Explosion blends groundbreaking reporting with insightful scholarship in the best guide yet to the most important political phenomenon of our time.” —Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States “John Judis demonstrates again why he is one of America’s best political journalists.

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The working and middle classes, with some justification, believed they would have to pay the bulk of the taxes to support programs that they believed would primarily benefit minorities and the poor and not themselves. This opposition to spending (and to any tax increases thought to support it) was capsulized in a general opposition to “Washington” and to “big government.” Many Democrats initially resisted the neoliberal agenda, but attempts in the first two years of the Carter administration to strengthen labor law, progressive tax reform, consumer regulation, and campaign finance reform were beaten back by Republicans and the business lobbies. In addition, Democratic policy makers found themselves hamstrung by the combination of growing unemployment and inflation—the result in the latter case of rising energy and food prices.

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By the late 1970s, the Carter administration had acquiesced to supply-side business tax cuts and to a monetarist strategy of using high interest rates and rising unemployment to curb inflation. Over the next 12 years, Democrats, led by the “new Democrats,” would accept other key aspects of the neoliberal agenda, including trade pacts like NAFTA that eased foreign investment, deregulation of finance, and immigration measures to accommodate unskilled and later highly skilled guest workers. Democrats would continue to fight Republicans on some social spending measures and on income and inheritance tax changes, but once the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Democrats would be forced into uncomfortable compromises.

The Left Case Against the EU
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 17 Dec 2018

Contents Cover Copyright Acknowledgements 1 The European Union and the Left Fragmentation and retreat of democracy The challenge for the Left Notes 2 The Evolution of the EU: From Maastricht to Now Neoliberalism and hegemony in the EU – drawing on Hayek Neoliberalism and state monopoly over money Creating the euro: a lever of neoliberalism and conditional German hegemony The ‘architectural flaws’ of the euro The broader context of conditional German hegemony Notes 3 The Ascendancy of Germany and the Division of Europe A distinctive financialized economy The defeat of German labour in the 1990s The competitive advantage of Germany and the creation of the Southern periphery The unstable core of the EMU and the Central European periphery Notes 4 The Eurozone Crisis: Class Interests and Hegemonic Power The crisis erupts Imposing a neoliberal agenda An unstable and fraught equilibrium Notes 5 Greece in the Iron Trap of the Euro The proximate causes of the Greek crisis Long-term weaknesses of the Greek economy The lenders impose bail-outs and bring disaster Class and national interests in the Greek disaster The political débâcle of SYRIZA Notes 6 Seeking Democracy, Sovereignty, and Socialism Democracy and sovereignty in the EU, once again The impossibility of radical reform A class-based stance for the Left What is the Left to do?

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Unfortunately for the countries of the Southern periphery their possession of a common currency, the euro, meant that there were no foreign exchange rates that could fall. The Eurozone ‘sudden stop’ crisis acquired a peculiar and sinister form, forcing the economies and societies of the Southern periphery to take the full impact of the shock. The implications proved dramatic for workers and the poor as well as for interstate relations. Imposing a neoliberal agenda The response of the EU to the shock of 2010 transformed a crisis of capital flows, international trade, and external debt into an economic and social disaster for the periphery, especially in Greece. It affirmed the hold of neoliberalism across the EMU while also revealing the sharp side of German hegemony.

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The ESM is an unaccountable body, lacking entirely in democratic credentials, which commands substantial money funds, in the region of 500 billion euros, that are available for lending to countries in crisis. It has the power to impose severe ‘conditionality’ for the loans it makes, thus being able to impose a neoliberal agenda. By creating the ESM the EU could potentially develop its own IMF to act as the policing agent of neoliberal reform.11 Fourth, and crucially for growth and employment, debtor countries were obliged to achieve fiscal stability through the imposition of austerity, that is, by reducing public expenditure and raising taxes.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

Faced with social movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms it is supposed to uphold. In this situation, however, it can marshal one secret weapon: international competition and globalization can be used to discipline movements opposed to the neoliberal agenda within individual states. If that fails, then the state must resort to persuasion, propaganda or, when necessary, raw force and police power to suppress opposition to neoliberalism. This was precisely Polanyi’s fear: that the liberal (and by extension the neoliberal) utopian project could only ultimately be sustained by resort to authoritarianism.

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On the one hand the neoliberal state is expected to take a back seat and simply set the stage for market functions, but on the other it is supposed to be activist in creating a good business climate and to behave as a competitive entity in global politics. In its latter role it has to work as a collective corporation, and this poses the problem of how to ensure citizen loyalty. Nationalism is an obvious answer, but this is profoundly antagonistic to the neoliberal agenda. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dilemma, for it was only through playing the nationalism card in the Falklands/Malvinas war and, even more significantly, in the campaign against economic integration with Europe, that she could win re-election and promote further neoliberal reforms internally. Again and again, be it within the European Union, in Mercosur (where Brazilian and Argentine nationalisms inhibit integration), in NAFTA, or in ASEAN, the nationalism required for the state to function effectively as a corporate and competitive entity in the world market gets in the way of market freedoms more generally. 2.

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Like the neoliberals that preceded them, the ‘neocons’ had long been nurturing their particular views on the social order, in universities (Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago being particularly influential) and well-funded think-tanks, and through influential publications (such as Commentary).20 US neoconservatives favour corporate power, private enterprise, and the restoration of class power. Neoconservatism is therefore entirely consistent with the neoliberal agenda of elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms. But it veers away from the principles of pure neoliberalism and has reshaped neoliberal practices in two fundamental respects: first, in its concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers.

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
by Silvia Federici
Published 4 Oct 2012

They also investigate the connection between warfare and the destruction of subsistence farming and, most importantly, the motivations behind the new global economy’s war against women. A running theme throughout the essays of Part Two is also the critique of the institutionalization of feminism and the reduction of feminist politics to instruments of the neoliberal agenda of the United Nations. For those of us who for years had stubbornly insisted on defining feminist autonomy as autonomy not just from men but from capital and the state, the gradual loss of initiative by the movement and its subsumption under the wings of the United Nations was a defeat, especially at a time when this institution was preparing to legitimize new wars by military and economic means.

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These policies have so undermined the reproduction of the populations of the “Third World” that even the World Bank has had to concede to having made mistakes.18 They have led to a level of poverty unprecedented in the postcolonial period, and have erased the most important achievement of the anticolonial struggle: the commitment by the new independent nation states to invest in the reproduction of the national proletariat. Massive cuts in government spending for social services, repeated currency devaluations, wage freezes, these are the core of the “structural adjustment programs” and the neoliberal agenda. We must also mention the ongoing land expropriations that are being carried out for the sake of the commercialization of agriculture, and the institution of a state of constant warfare.19 Endless wars, massacres, entire populations in flight from their lands and turned into refugees, famines: these are not only the consequences of a dramatic impoverishment that intensifies ethnic, political, and religious conflicts, as the media want us to believe.

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From this it follows that the economic and social condition of women cannot be improved without a struggle against capitalist globalization and the de-legitimization of the agencies and programs that sustain capital’s global expansion, starting with the IMF and the World Bank, and WTO. By contrast, any attempt to “empower” women by “gendering” these agencies is not only doomed to fail, but is bound to have a mystifying effect, allowing these agencies to co-opt the struggles that women are making against the neoliberal agenda and for the construction of a noncapitalist alternative.5 Globalization: An Attack on Reproduction To understand why globalization is a war against women we must read this process “politically,” as a strategy aiming to defeat workers’ “refusal of work” by means of the global expansion of the labor market.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.13 The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries, the paper argues: The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects. None of this is news to the victims of neoliberal economic policies in many poor, heavily indebted countries, but the IMF’s mea culpa rattled the cages of many a neoliberal academic and media institution.

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By doing so, we, or they, were ‘bamboozled’ into allowing a small financial elite to create colossal quantities of private wealth while burdening the world with debt, volatility, crises and rising rates of inequality. Somewhat belatedly, the IMF in 2016 echoed the views of Professors Rey and Bhagwati outlined above, and issued a partial mea culpa in a paper titled ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’ In it, IMF staff argued that the neoliberal agenda – a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies – rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.13 The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries, the paper argues: The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

In the United Kingdom, following the rise of coercive-state, Thatcherism and the barbarism of subsequent neoliberal governmental reform programmes, we now see the true consequences of this desire to transform us all into little one-person corporations. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, the capitalist promotion of self-sufficiency and individual entrepreneurship no longer bothers to evoke the euphemisms of ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘freedom’ that characterised 1990s neoliberal agenda. No, this is now about fear. You are on your own – but you still have to pay your taxes! Even Foucault fails – or perhaps refuses – to apprehend the grinding concrete reality that the birth of biopower actually implies. The real world behind the gloss of the ‘entrepreneur’ is actually sanctioned poverty, insecurity, precarity and an impossible life-structure designed to absorb the externalities of rich corporations and the neoliberal state.

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Self-reliance is a basic requisite of neoliberal exploitation, since it is (a) the domain in which negative externalities are placed and (b) the ‘human resource’ that takes up the slack of an unworkable socio-economic paradigm. However, on the other hand, managers are constantly worried about this autonomy being directed towards non-exploitative ends, to the point where they are automatically hostile towards it. In the end, managerialism seeks to stamp out the very resource that it and the neoliberal agenda relies upon to get things done. There is a second reason why managerialism thrives on conflict. Most organizations do not really need the excessive and pointless amount of management activity that accumulates over time. Thus, managers constantly seek out ways to justify their own existence (e.g. by creating useless work for others) and engage in power-display rituals lest the owners of the means of production realize that much management is inherently needless and obstructive when applied to most jobs.

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Many of the large-scale ‘business ethics’ programmes crafted by the neoliberal enterprise draw upon the idiom of work and employment as a key moment of justification. For example, when a large retailing business is forced to explain its irresponsible practices to governmental regulators, it also seeks to embolden the ideology of work at the heart of the neoliberal agenda. We are an ethical enterprise, so leave us unregulated and we will create jobs and invest in positive economic initiatives for the betterment of all. The ideology of work is buttressed by a broader complex that implicitly reflects the logic of production in a wide array of synaptic institutional relationships.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
by Justin McGuirk
Published 15 Feb 2014

Instead of the market value of housing, Turner was asserting its ‘use value’. Most significantly of all, Turner took the view, long before it was fashionable, that the slums were sites of resourcefulness and creativity. As we shall see, this was a position that would later backfire when the World Bank used it to support a neoliberal agenda that effectively relieved governments of the duty to address the housing problem at all. However, before that turn of events, Lima’s barriadas still seemed full of promise. They became such a touchstone that the critic Charles Jencks included the barriadas on his map of twentieth-century architectural movements, next to Archigram and the Metabolists.

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But just when policy-makers were throwing their hands up, they were offered a lifeline in the form of a new liberal economic ideology. From the late 1980s onwards, with the Washington Consensus spreading south through the arm-twisting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the neoliberal agenda took control. Government’s job was to cut spending, privatise, and let the housing market regulate itself. In effect, Turner’s argument for self-determination was turned on its head by politicians who, now relieved of housing obligations, no longer had to pick up the ruinous bill. And as the economy boomed, the effects were supposed to ‘trickle down’ to the poor.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

The means by which this was achieved were diverse, from physical confrontation and combat,44 to using legislation to undermine solidarity and industrial action, to embracing shifts in production and distribution that compromised union power (such as disaggregating supply chains), to re-engineering public opinion and consent around a broadly neoliberal agenda of individual freedom and ‘negative solidarity’. The latter denotes more than mere indifference to worker agitations – it is the fostering of an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, a declining pension pot), then everyone else must as well.

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Numerous members of what would become Thatcher’s administration passed through the IEA during the 1960s and 1970s.40 The outcome of the IEA’s efforts was not only to subtly transform the economic discourse in Britain, but also to naturalise two particular policies: the necessity of attacking trade union power, and the imperative of monetary stability. The former would purportedly let markets freely adapt to changing economic circumstances, while the latter would provide the basic price stability needed for a healthy capitalist economy. In the United States, too, think tanks and academic research groups were built to push for a broadly neoliberal agenda, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute being two of the most notable.41 The MIPR aimed to redefine political common sense by writing books on neoliberal economics that were intended for a popular audience, some of which eventually sold over 500,000 copies. Other books, such as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, laid the foundations for the policy shift which today identifies welfare dependency rather than poverty itself as the central social problem.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

It kept large-scale capital expenditure off the books, replacing those bigger sums with far smaller annual payments, though the latter would in the end cost far more than any direct upfront payment. If there lay the financial logic of the scheme, such as it was, critics on the left also saw ‘a neoliberal agenda designed to open up the provision and management of public services to the private sector’.36 Broadwcilk, Pendleton Estate, Salford In 2008, 93 per cent of Pendleton’s housing stock was still council-owned. The ‘target position’ – outlined in the ‘Benefits Realisation Plan’ behind ‘Creating a New Pendleton’ one year later – was to fashion ‘a mixed tenure residential area’.

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New completions plummeted and the £1.5 billion boost to housing investment announced that year was largely dedicated to the rescue of a private market in crisis. Readers should come to their own judgement about New Labour’s record in office but housing policy and achievement does offer an excellent yardstick. Even as it pursued its generally progressive social ends, New Labour undoubtedly pursued a broadly neoliberal agenda, one that gave economic primacy to the market and its disciplines, one which privileged private finance and the profit motive over public investment. Its social housing policies which rested in essence in a diffuse but pervasive belief in competitiveness – personal and institutional – afford one of the clearest illustrations of this overarching belief-system and, to many, will suggest its limitations.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story
by Arundhati Roy
Published 5 May 2014

Pablo Neruda, “Standard Oil Company,” in Canto General, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 176. 35. For further analysis of the Gates Foundation’s involvement in privatizing education, coupled with drastic reductions in government spending, see Jeff Bale and Sara Knopp, “Obama’s Neoliberal Agenda for Public Education,” in Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). 36. Joan Roelofs, “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism,” Monthly Review 47, no. 4 (September 1995): 16. 37. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003). 38.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

Even if substantial changes were on the table, they might be expected (given conventional understandings of Sixties sanctimony) to take the form of new commitments to the parts of the old program that worked well, like civil rights and environmental legislation, the reform of programs with mixed but generally positive results, like welfare, and renewed commitments to the fiscal restraint and investment priorities that had worked in the 1950s and 1960s but seemed in danger of lapsing. The seemingly least likely choice was what actually happened, a heterodox revolution that took the worst elements of older programs and combined them into a bizarre “neoliberal” agenda that featured an economy simultaneously laissez-faire and heavily dependent on state spending and occasional federal bailouts; a conservative government, yet one with radical ideals; a rhetoric of probity, but a policy of total fiscal and other indiscipline; Republicans overseeing government bloat while Democrats promoted free trade and the “end of welfare as we know it.”

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More importantly, for decades, the economy grew and delivered mass prosperity despite (for the neoliberals) or because of (for everyone else) a government that operated a social safety net, invested heavily in physical and educational infrastructure, tolerated labor organizations, intervened in trade, stimulated the economy from time to time, and maintained reasonable budget discipline including through high taxes. For years, no influential politician embraced the full neoliberal agenda, nor did citizens demand such. Only in two areas, fiscal responsibility and a strong dollar, did conservative ideas retain any real sway, with generally good results. World War II made balanced budgets impossible, but the following twenty years saw a concerted attempt to reduce deficits and bring down debt.

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So liberalism, neo-and otherwise, had to bide its time as a theory waiting for an audience. Before the 1970s, there was only one credible attempt to advance anything like liberalism, and then only in its Jurassic form. The failure of that campaign suggested the future compromises necessary to get the rest of the neoliberal agenda in place. The 1964 presidential race, between Johnson and Goldwater, provided the forum. In dramatic contrast to Johnson, Goldwater had no patience for any of the government programs or fiscal indiscipline that had despoiled the capitalist landscape. He said as much in his election-year book, The Conscience of a Conservative.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

There is some ambiguity in neoliberal thinking over the role of other non-market institutions, such as family and community. For some, these provide a useful adjunct to markets; for others they are a source of inefficiency and would be better off for being incorporated within markets. The privatisation and outsourcing of industries and services owned by public authorities have been among the hallmarks of the neoliberal agenda. By privatisation one means the full transfer to private ownership of the activity in question. Under outsourcing the activity remains publicly owned, but its performance is contracted out to private profit-making firms or other non-state organisations, the public authority becoming the customer instead of the provider.

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Hence in the UK one finds regulatory agencies covering most privatised industries, and certainly all utilities. Dominant firms have developed in the telecommunications, energy and water sectors partly because of the strong presence of network externalities, so competition remains oligopolistic. Although a call for deregulation is a fundamental part of the neoliberal agenda, in reality it produces a major increase in regulation, but with a changed purpose. In theory neoliberal regulation would only work out what a market would look like if there could be one, not introduce other policy goals. For example, neoliberal regulation of radio and television should be concerned solely with monitoring price behaviour, not with such issues as ensuring political balance or restricting pornographic or violent content.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation,” it stated.44 Amazingly, Blanchard wrote that the IMF was largely blind to determining the role of their own economists when implementing its toxic medicine: “The short-term effects of fiscal policy on economic activity are only one of the many factors that need to be considered in determining the appropriate pace of fiscal consolidation for any single country.” In other words, there was a human cost to policies drafted in the halls of power. If history was any guide, it was hard to imagine the IMF departing from the neoliberal agenda embedded in its DNA. The message was clear, if backers of austerity cared to listen: impose brutal policies at your peril. The EU had never been less popular in Greece, or in many other nations across Europe, and the prospect of a united continent far into the future remained less than guaranteed (or even desirable): too many citizens suffered at the hands of Brussels bureaucrats.45 Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen argued that Greece was undergoing “economic ethnic cleansing”—a tactic that allows the downtrodden to be ignored and shunned in the name of renewed growth.46 Opposition to an auction of national assets was strong.

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He offered a story about former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide wanting capable Swiss instructors to train the Haitian police, but being told by the Americans that, because of some long-forgotten agreement dating from 1980, Washington had to be asked to approve such a plan. Needless to say, it was rejected. Chalmers placed Haiti’s dilemma in a global context. “We are unable to develop our own models of development and have to get international funding for the neoliberal agenda,” he told me. “It’s a way to show capitalism that we’re willing to work with you, but you’re actually destroying our own economy and agriculture.” Chalmers continued: “Haiti is one of the countries they call a ‘failed state.’ Since 1915, it’s been about how Haiti will please the United States, but there are alternatives to industrial parks.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

‘There are many tax abatements, and I have to fight for revenue to serve mentally ill people. This is not a sport.’ ‘Competitive’ tax-cutting has become like a mania. ‘There’s a circular discussion going on here. Cutting taxes is good. Why? Because it’s “competitive”. Why is “competitive” good? Because it means lower taxes!’ That plays into the neoliberal agenda that doesn’t like the common good. The notion of being a human that merits some reasonable standard has been totally dismantled. And it’s getting worse.’ This game is spreading across the United States. One of the bleakest recent stories concerns Amazon, which in 2017 announced plans to build a second headquarters and asked cities to submit bids with incentive packages.

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In 2009, a month before his country assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his finance minister Anders Borg declared, ‘the Lisbon Agenda, with only a year remaining before it is to be evaluated, has been a failure’. See ‘Sweden admits Lisbon Agenda “failure”’, Euractiv.com, 3 June 2009. 32. The European Parliament, a bolshier but weaker European institution which often tries to push back against the Commission’s neoliberal agenda, declared in December 2015 that it ‘regrets that the Commission chose not to use the ordinary legislative procedure for the decisions regarding National Competitiveness Boards’. 33. Singapore enjoys a package that is as unrepeatable as Luxembourg’s. Its economic model is heavily statist, with 90 per cent of housing stock government-owned, rents tightly controlled and strong social democratic policies.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that Asian wisdom traditions have been subject to colonization and commodification since the eighteenth century, producing a highly individualistic spirituality, perfectly accommodated to dominant cultural values and requiring no substantive change in lifestyle.18 Such an individualistic spirituality is clearly linked with the neoliberal agenda of privatization, especially when masked by the ambiguous language used in mindfulness. Market forces are already exploiting the momentum of the mindfulness movement, reorienting its goals to a highly circumscribed individual realm. Privatized mindfulness practice is easily coopted and confined to what Carrette and King describe as an “accommodationist” orientation that seeks to “pacify feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress.”19 However, a commitment to a privatized and psychologized mindfulness is political.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

And Britain with its centuries old record of innovation, enterprise, and international reach, can be one of its greatest winners.”22 This enduring faith in the global knowledge-driven economy to create upward mobility for Western workers, reflected the extent to which governments bought into a neoliberal agenda. To question the theology of the free market or the idea that it could destroy the opportunity bargain was almost a heresy. It is therefore not surprising that faith in human capital to resolve economic and social problems retains a powerful hold on American public policy. As President Barack Obama reaffirmed, “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a pre-requisite.”23 Naked Capitalism The promise of a hi-tech future of highly paid knowledge workers was pivotal to the creation of a neoliberal opportunity bargain, which left individuals responsible for their employability through educational achievement and commitment to career development.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

Company pensions, where they still exist, have increasingly been transformed from “defined benefit” to “defined contribution,” making them far less generous and reliable. The corporate world has also adopted a more hostile attitude toward unions, taking steps that have made it more difficult for workers to organize and to defend themselves. These substantial changes are part of what’s been dubbed “the neoliberal agenda” — a set of policies based on flimsy pseudo-theories that boil down to the simplistic notion that the private sector is inherently good and the public sector is inherently bad. The result has been a massive transfer of society’s resources from ordinary people to a small set of wealthy individuals and corporations.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

The results are unmistakable: these policies have led to a massive shift in income and wealth from the bulk of society to the already-privileged few. Yet, strikingly, this dramatic rise in inequality – coming right after the most egalitarian era in modern Western history – has not led to an overthrow of the neoliberal agenda. There have been plenty of challenges to that agenda, plenty of brilliant critiques, but the agenda has not yet been rejected. The neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the last three decades continues to guide policy in the Anglo-American countries, perpetuating and aggravating levels of inequality that are already extreme by the standards of the developed world.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

The new economics is certainly a reaction against the narrow form of globalization that has gripped the planet, a combination of global deregulation of capital, a moral vacuum at the heart of the economic system, and a process whereby the powers and resources of nation states are handed over to monopolistic global corporations. This has been described as the ‘neoliberal’ agenda, though there is nothing very new and certainly nothing liberal about it, and its failures are increasingly obvious. But it is not just a reaction against globalization. In practice, the ‘new economics’, which has been emerging over the past three decades, has been as much a reaction against the results of the previous consensus, which drew on aspects of Keynes – the inflation, centralization and narrow measurements of success – as it has been against modern corporate globalization.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

Over this coming decade the distinction between winners and losers is going to be sharper than ever, and more visible than ever, and I say again that this will be a truly global theme—I don’t think there is a society anywhere in the world where this issue will not be acted out. The main economic model that has been used by international institutions over the last three decades is a set of policies that I’ve been calling neoliberalism. These policies have been effective at growing GDP, and equally or more effective at growing inequality. By now, the neoliberal agenda has taken us to a place where, for many people in the developed world, life offers the prospect of an interminable squeeze on prospects and living standards. The good years of open-ended, more or less frictionless growth that we in the developed world have all, broadly speaking, enjoyed since the end of the Second World War are over.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

It was a powerful message, and the polling shows that Thatcher’s victory came on the back of the switched allegiances of many low-income voters. This populist rhetoric was, of course, the thin end of the neoliberal wedge. Thatcher knew that there was little public support for the most important elements of the neoliberal agenda, so she hid her commitments to privatisation and deregulation in the small print. In fact, even those policies that Thatcher did advertise — from going to battle with the unions to reducing the size of the state — were no more popular amongst voters in 1979 than they had been in 1974.27 The lesson of Thatcher’s period in opposition is the importance of extended crises in eroding support for the status quo.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

That we find it difficult is evidence of the need for more practice. Greed A simple term for individualism. And one of the seven deadly sins. Along with hate and delusion, one of the three roots of 226 ALPHABETICAL QUICK TOUR suffering according to Buddhist philosophy. Greed is the motivation that drives the neoliberal agenda. The opposite of empathy. Would it be simplistic or concise to say that overcoming greed is the secret to wellbeing in the Anthropocene, and everything else in this book is just detail? Greenwash Prevalent, sometimes through wishful thinking, and sometimes deliberate. The easiest way for an environmental consultancy to make a living is to collude in this, and even if you don’t intend to, it is hard to know when you have been sucked in.

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City
by Tony Roshan Samara
Published 12 Jun 2011

These are not the only recent conflicts that we can tie to underdevelopment—as evidenced by the spate of xenophobic violence that roiled the city in 2008 and the alleged link between local operatives allied with the African National Congress (ANC) and attacks on organized shack-dwellers from the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban the next year—but they are especially relevant here because they are between the formal governance structures responsible for urban renewal in their official capacity and township communities.1 Mirroring the response to remobilized communities across the nation, the local state has not only been quick to deploy security forces to confront protestors, but has also explicitly framed many of these actions and those who carry them out as criminal.2 In doing so, the state connects gangsters, other “real” criminals, and many community activists, perhaps the most visible township residents from the vantage point of the urban core, through a discourse of criminality, obscuring, or perhaps misrepresenting, the larger, more fundamental conflict between the city’s neoliberal agenda, security, and the demands of communities for socioeconomic development. Considered alongside the troubling rise in complaints by residents against police, the choice by state actors to respond to protests in this way suggests that securitization, itself embedded in neoliberal governance, has generated a form of punitive containment aimed at entire communities.3 The second important consequence of neoliberal governance for the state’s approach to the periphery is the absence of youth development.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

This was apparent to many critics from the outset, but its consequences have now become obvious: the interest charged on the loans used to build new hospitals is so high that in order to make repayments other publicly owned facilities are being closed, including accident and emergency departments. If you were a cynic, you might ask if this was not part of the neoliberal agenda from the outset, a hollowing-out of the NHS to make the marketisation of healthcare palatable to the electorate. The dishonest obsession with cutting up-front costs, which has spread throughout British bureaucracy, has also had a devastating effect on the architectural profession. Good design is considered an unnecessary expense, so patrons opt instead for ‘design-build’ contracts, which cut out architects in favour of developers and their in-house design teams.

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
by Sarah Williams
Published 14 Sep 2020

I believe the scholars’ point is: because data and many of the insights it offers are gathered by private institutions, responsibilities once attributed to the state are now taken on by private agencies. And, for some governments, the shift of responsibility to private companies is exactly the point: it helps to promote their neoliberal agenda. One example often used as evidence of this phenomenon is the open data movement, which was promoted by governments to help spur private innovation for the development of services that governments would typically provide.11 These type of concerns about the shifting role of technology in society are not new.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

That the term has been thrown around with complete lack of nuance by many leftists is undoubtedly true, and hence why it immediately makes eyes roll whenever it is brought up in discussion and debate. But it is not just the left that has misused it. In a 2016 article reluctantly admitting that many of neoliberalism’s promises were “oversold”, the IMF defined it as: The neoliberal agenda — a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies—rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition — achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.58 Unfortunately, this definition misses out what truly distinguishes neoliberalism from liberal capitalism and that which is yet another contradiction of our economic system: that while it seeks to erode the power of the state in domestic economic affairs, it actively enlists nation-states around the world to comply with this task.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Scripting the play In 1947, the year before Samuelson published his iconic Circular Flow diagram, a small laissez-faire band of wannabe economic scriptwriters – including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Frank Knight – gathered in the Swiss resort of Mont Pèlerin to start drafting what they hoped would one day become the dominant economic story. Inspired by the pro-market writings of classical liberals such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo they established what they called a ‘neoliberal’ agenda. Its aim, they said, was to push back hard against the threat of state totalitarianism, which was spreading fast thanks to the growing reach of the Soviet Union. But that aim gradually morphed into a hard push for market fundamentalism, and the meaning of ‘neoliberal’ morphed along with it.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

In 2009, while still in his pajamas, President José Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was ousted by a military coup led by a general trained at the US-based School of the Americas (SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), where sixty-four thousand Latin American military and elite counter-insurgency forces have trained. In Zelaya’s place, successive narco-governments favorable to a neoliberal agenda of special economic zones and corporate plunder have been installed. Present-day counterinsurgency operations are layered with the paramilitarized landscape of the war on drugs and the $1.2 billion Central American Regional Security Initiative.26 Dawn Paley asserts, “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policy-making in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”27 Today, all three countries have some of the world’s highest disappearance, homicide, and femicide rates.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

There will never be unanimity, but when there are large disparities, it is inevitable that there will be considerable disgruntlement with whatever decision is taken. There are a myriad of detailed issues in which different conceptions of how the economy functions play out, not just the macroeconomic issues of austerity and inflation previously discussed. One aspect of the neoliberal agenda entails privatization. There are strong arguments that governments should focus their attention on those areas where they have a comparative advantage, leaving the private sector to run the rest. Though this principle makes theoretical sense, in practice determining where the government has a comparative advantage is difficult.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

So what are we really talking about when we talk about gentrification in the twenty-first century? In many ways, the term itself is a diversion. It’s the bright green face of Oz that distracts from the man behind the curtain, the invisible hands pulling all the levers. Those hands belong to the globalized world order of the so-called free market, the neoliberal agenda launched in the late 1970s to destroy socioeconomic progressivism, the stuff that made New York so New York. In cities across America and the world, those hands pull the levers on hyper-gentrification. There is nothing natural about it. It is a man-made virus that grows rhizomatically, creeping into every crack and crevice of Manhattan, reaching ever deeper into the outer boroughs, pushing out whatever stands in its way.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David C. Korten
Published 1 Jan 2001

In addition to the measures noted above, military expenditures were increased, and the abandonment of antitrust enforcement allowed for ever larger corporate mergers. Europe, Canada, and Japan were pressured to similarly “modernize” their economies. The third-world debt crisis of 1982 created the necessary pretext for the IMF and World Bank — operating under the direction of the U.S. Treasury Department — to impose the neoliberal agenda on indebted low-income countries. Through their structural-adjustment programs, the IMF and World Bank stripped governments, some democratically elected, of their ability to set and enforce social, environmental, and workplace standards or even to give preference to firms that hired locally or employed union workers.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

But, as the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty points out, when it comes to policies, there’s a difference from Tory donors here: whereas the big funders of the Tory party expect and usually get favours, the 15 trade unions that provide Labour with much of its funds get neoliberal policies that reduce the power of working people and allow the rich to take more.17 Such is New Labour’s embrace of the neoliberal agenda. At the time of writing, the Labour leadership is proposing to switch to an opt-in system that would be likely to slash the amount it receives from unions, though it would improve the democratic credentials of the funding. In the US, things are bigger, of course – and worse, though at least they’re a bit more transparent.18 In the 2012 election each candidate spent more than $1 billion!

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Take away the regulatory power that the central state had amassed to itself during the over-reaching days of the New Deal and the Great Society, Reagan argued, and the social engineering initiatives of the federal government would simply collapse. The God-given liberties of Americans on matters of race, religion, and employment would then be quickly restored. Reagan, seemingly, had found a way to draw on conservative racial and religious fury to propel his anti-government, neoliberal agenda. That was quite a feat. He found a partner in Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to promote Christian values in American politics and to help propel Reagan into the White House. Falwell had long immersed himself in Milton Friedman’s writings; by 1980, he was willing to make the case that the Bible had instructed Christians to embrace free market capitalism.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

The combination fed anti-​government and anti-​European sentiment.129 Italian workers protested.130 Grillo linked his criticism of the Jobs Act with a renewed call to exit the eurozone.131 Thus, as the eurozone “elite” and Italian employers cheered, large segments of the Italian population positioned themselves on the other side of the political debate. To those who were economically vulnerable, the Jobs Act was more evidence that the European establishment was pursuing a “neoliberal” agenda that took away economic security but offered little hope in return. Renzi’s real task was harder: to give people greater opportunities to increase their skills, with which they would be more likely to get well-​paying jobs. European politicians speak often and glowingly of this alternative.