Monday, November 4, 2019

Luke Savage - Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It

The latest liberal parlor game is pretending there’s no such thing as neoliberalism. The game’s very popularity highlights neoliberalism’s enduring hegemony.


What is neoliberalism, well, we all know, it's the present economic and political system adopted by the West the last 40 years or so? Started by Reagan and Thatcher, it involves mass privatisations and reduced government regulations, where private was always deemed good while publicly owned companies were considered bad.

The neoliberals deny it exists, and say it is a derogatory term invented by the right. Well, it's what they are, that's what it is.
Many of the center-left became neoliberals believing it couldn't be fought, and that the economics looked good. Some people on the left eveb thought it could liberate people by promoting individualism. They felt more deregulation would break up the power of the huge corporations. Claire Fox, a British communist, embraced Thatcherism saying it gave power to the people, while still insisting she was a communist. Go figure! 

Far from being abstract or immaterial, neoliberalism was the consciously pursued project of an initially small group of intelligentsia who, thanks to decades of well-funded organizing and adept political maneuvering — particularly during the economic crises that afflicted Keynesian social democracy in the 1970s — gradually succeeded in taking their ideology to the heights of institutional and cultural power. First capturing the old right (in Britain’s Tory Party, the disappointments of the Heath era gave way to the more dynamic and confrontational ethos of Thatcherism, just as in America Nixon and Ford were succeeded by Reaganism), the neoliberal ascendency eventually secured a foothold in the center-left thanks to the agency of figures like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

The new generation of ideologues who came to dominate Western liberalism in the 1990s were hardly dragged kicking and screaming into the embrace of its more market-zealous incarnation. On the contrary, New Labour acolytes and Atari Democrats were some of neoliberalism’s most enthusiastic converts and set out to realign their parties with the consensus already set in motion by the new right. 

Jacobin


8 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Its just another figure of speech (metonym) like all the others they have made up by Art Degree people for them to try to codify among themselves what they observe STEM people doing...

Andy Blatchford said...

Matt Freidman himself used the term back in the early 1970's, it was even IIRC even further back by themselves way before the left used the term.

It is true that not all the worlds ills is neoliberalisms fault but its also true that art degree people didn't make up terms on everything.

Matt Franko said...

Milton Freidman didnt have a STEM degree...

"After graduating from Rutgers, Friedman was offered two scholarships to do graduate work—one in mathematics at Brown University and the other in economics at the University of Chicago.[28] Friedman chose the latter, thus earning a Master of Arts degree in 1933."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman


should have went to Brown....

Matt Franko said...

Andy nobody in the US can get a degree in "neoliberalism!"... that's not what people are being trained in...

The people that are actually doing the real things are being trained in STEM disciplines via a Science methodology...

This is foreign to Art Degree people here in the US so they come up with their own lexicon of figurative language terms to discus among themselves what the real people are doing...

So you have "neo liberalism!"... "capitalism!"... "money!" "inflation!"...etc.. all figures of speech created and used by these Art Degree people that cant even define what they are... most of their time they are just arguing among themselves what these words mean...

Complete morons who never do anything... when they do sometimes worm and weasel their way into real matters they usually just fuck it all up... dont have the correct training...



Matt Franko said...

"way before the left used the term."

Its not a political issue its an issue with the system of education... at least here in the US...

The US academe is bifurcated... Half the US academe is training in Art Degree/Liberal Art method and the other half is training in a Science methodology...

Creating output of two distinct types of people that have two types of financial outcomes...

Then the Art Degree people are saying "inequality!"... no shit sherlock...



Greg said...

So are you postulating that ;

1) STEM trained people are the only ones doing real things, things of value

2) Art Degree people don’t understand/ can’t possibly understand due to inadequate schooling, so they are “making up words” to discuss/complain amongst themselves.


So STEM people dont make up words to communicate their ideas? They just do stuff that is obvious and self explanatory ( to other STEMers)

Matt, you are becoming Axec/ Egmont etc etc. I don’t know what happened to you. You used to add value to comment section now your rants on Art degrees are just plain ill informed. There is NOT one correct way to look at the world There are way more than two distinct types of people. STEM degrees do not prevent faulty thinking.

Peter Pan said...

Conversely... Marxism, it's everywhere!

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Links on Neoliberalism
Comment on Luke Savage on ‘Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It’

For the general public, the most important thing to know about economics is that there is NO economic science. Yes, there is a prize with the title: “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” but NOTHING REAL corresponds to the word Sciences.

For the general public, the crucial thing is to keep political and theoretical economics apart. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics, the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.

For the general public, the most difficult thing is to realize is that theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by political economists (= agenda pushers). Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years.

The major variants of political economics come under the heading of Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, and MMT. These approaches are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent. Economics is proto-scientific garbage since Adam Smith.

Economic policy guidance ― left/center/right does not matter ― has NO valid scientific foundations. The lack of scientific content, though, does NOT matter because economics has no scientific function but a propaganda function, i.e. to push the current agenda of the Oligarchy.

At the moment, one can observe the switch from a direct pro-Oligarchy neoliberal propaganda to a more social/emphatic/inclusive/populist/WeThePeople/save-the-world propaganda. In real terms that does not matter much, it is just a change of the Oligarchy’s communication strategy.

Macroeconomics and the fake History of Economic Thought
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/11/macroeconomics-and-fake-history-of.html

Keynes, Lerner, MMT, Trump and exploding profit
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/12/keynes-lerner-mmt-trump-and-exploding.html

Economics as storytelling and entertainment for the masses
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/01/economics-as-storytelling-and.html

Mission impossible: economists join WeThePeople
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/10/mission-impossible-economists-join.html

Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/07/circus-maximus-economics-as.html

Deficit cheerleaders ― the Oligarchy’s useful idiots
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/08/deficit-cheerleaders-oligarchys-useful.html

No MMT illusions! YOU are going to pay for it
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/05/no-mmt-illusions-you-are-going-to-pay.html

Stephanie Kelton sells children into debt slavery
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/06/stephanie-kelton-sells-children-into.html

Is MMT Alt-Right? No, worse, it is fake science
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/09/is-mmt-alt-right-no-worse-it-is-fake.html

The end of political economics (II)
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-end-of-political-economics-ii.html

Why do workers not tar and feather economists?
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-do-workers-not-tar-and-feather.html

For details of the big picture see cross-references Political Economics/Stupidity/Corruption
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2015/11/political-economics-cross-references.html

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke