What is the Real Story With Neo-liberalism?
Executive Summary
- Neoliberalism is a policy that is a consensus among US Democrats and Republicans.
- This article illuminates on how neoliberalism works.
Introduction
This article covers the reality of neoliberalism.
About Neoliberalism
Practiced First in Latin America
These were precisely the policies imposed on Chile by Augusto Pinochet and his advisors, the “Chicago Boys,” in 1973 and soon after carried elsewhere in the Global South, often imposed by the IMF as “structural adjustments” mandates tied to borrowing and debt restructuring. What started in the Southern Hemisphere soon flowed north, even if the executive powers of the revolutions were rather indifferent. By the end of the 1970s, exploiting a crisis of profitability and stagflation, neoliberal programs were rolled out by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, again centered on deregulating capital, breaking organized labor, privatizing public goods and services, reducing progressive taxation, and shrinking the social state. These politices rapilty spread across Western Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Bloc at the end of the 1980s meant that much of Eastern Europe transitioned from state communism to neoliberal capitalism in less than a decade. – In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
The General Proposal
This book addresses these issues by theorizing how neoliberal rationality prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious antidemocratic forces in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
The argument is not that neoliberalism by itself caused the hard right insurgency in the West today or that every dimension of the present, from the catastrophes generating great flows of refugees to Europe and North America to the political siloization and polarization generated by digital media can be reduced to neoliberalism. Rather, the argument is that nothing is untouched by a neoliberal mode of reason and valuation and that neoliberalism’s attack on democracy has everywhere inflected law, political culture, and political subjectivity.
Forged in the crucible of European fascism, neoliberalism aimed at permanent innoculation of market liberal orders against the regrowth of fascistic sentiments and totalitarian powers. – In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
What is Democracy?
The English word for “democracy” derives from ancient Greek terms, demos (the people) and kratos (power or rule). In contrast with oligarchy, monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, tyranny, and colonial rule, democracy signifies political arrangements through which a people rules itself.
Political equality is democracy’s foundation. Everything else is optional — from constitutions to personal liberty, from specific economic forms to specific political institutions. Political equality alone ensures that the composition and exercise of political power are authorized by the whole and accountable to the whole.
Wolin quotes approvingly from Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “It is evident that all forms of the modern state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democratacy.” Wolin takes Marx to mean that the legitemacy of the modern state rests in th claim to govern for the good of the entire society, to deliver the common good, rather than being instruments of the elites. According to Wolin, there is no such thing as a democratic state, since states abduct, institutionalize, and wield “surplus power” generated by the people; democracy alwasy lives elsewhere from the state, even in democracies. – In the Ruins of Neoliberalism