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

Luke Savage - Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It