Bill Mitchell — The mass consumption era and the rise of neo-liberalism

I was having a talk with a friend in San Francisco last Monday about globalisation and the capacity of the state, which is the topic of the upcoming book I am working on (manuscript due around May 2015). He made the comment that globalisation had meant that the state can now only do bad and can no longer do good. I asked him whether he was talking about globalisation (the international nature of finance and supply chains) or neo-liberalism (free market economics) and he said “neo-liberalism is a disease – that is the problem and since the 1970s it has meant the state is restricted to doing bad”. The point I was digging at was that progressives often conflates the two concepts which then leads to flawed conclusions about what the state can and cannot do. Further, when he talked about the state doing bad he was really talking about the impact on the average person and those who are disadvantaged. He wasn’t talking about the so-called top-end-of-town, which have without any question done very well since the 1970s. And that is my next point – the state hasn’t gone way or been rendered impotent by neo-liberalism as many on the Left believe and angst over. As the currency issuer it is still very powerful. It just serves the interests of a different cohort now relative to the cohort it served during the full employment period that followed the Second World War. In doing so, it has shifted from being a mediator of class conflict to serving the interests of capital in its battle to appropriate ever increasing shares of real income from labour. That is a wholly different narrative to the one that emerges when globalisation is conflated with neo-liberalism – as if they are parts of the same process.…

The research I have been doing in the last few days continues the theme that globalisation has not rendered the nation state impotent. The thesis, as outlined in the introduction, is that the nation state has just changed its role and now uses its power to advance more narrow interests than previously.…

There is also a crucial difference between globalisation (by which I mean the growth of transnational corporations and international supply chains) and the neo-liberal ideology (by which I mean the dominance of free market economics, the demonisation of government intervention, the demands to eliminate the welfare state and the widespread deregulation of financial and labour markets).

Those two developments are separable and distinct although the latter certainly reinforces the threats imposed on nation states by the former.

My view is that the ‘Left’ has conflated the two developments and falsely concludes that globalisation is tantamount to the demise of the nation-state. It isn’t.…

Democracies can choose whether to allow the nation-state, by which I mean the currency-issuing government, to use its capacities in many different ways and to serve any number of competing interests.…

Bill goes on to explain state capture and mass consumption as a tool in this endeavor, replacing Marx's religion as opiate of the people in a 20th century secular society in the developed world.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog

The mass consumption era and the rise of neo-liberalism
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia