So, we’ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. The other thing you’re after is social justice-forget it. We’re going to give it to you, but it’s going to be freedom of the market. The neoliberal project said to the ’68 generation, ‘OK, you want liberty and freedom? That’s what the student movement was about. When they talked about freedom, it was freedom of the market. “It got a great deal of popular consent because it was talking about individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice. “As a political project, it was very savvy,” he said. So, the ruling ideas were that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got implemented in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. “It’s important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push back,” said David Harvey, the author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, when we spoke in New York.
Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals that sent jobs to sweatshops in China, the world would be a happier, freer and wealthier place. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were groomed in places such as the University of Chicago and given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and shut out of the media. The point was the restoration of class power.Īs a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. But economic rationality was never the point. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to figure this out. 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. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity.
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