![]() ![]() ![]() You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market is a human invention. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). It is also, in its way, a pair of eyeglasses. (No wonder centrists say it’s a meaningless insult: they’re the ones most meaningfully insulted by it.) But “neoliberalism” is more than a gratifyingly righteous jibe. Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon, a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left’s traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range of thought allowed by our politics. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. ![]() In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. L ast summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |