Neo-liberalism. Everyone knows what it is, or at least think they know what it is. When asked, I think most of us are able to name some aspects of this young ideology, or name some neoliberal politicians. But what is it really, and how does it differ from free market capitalism as defined by classical liberals?
source: YouTube
Markets are the answer to everything. That's the very short and very incomplete idea at the heart of neoliberalism. It's a bit more than that, because even classical liberals hold that same idea; based on the erroneous assumption that free markets will self-regulate into a state of equilibrium where every individual participant gets what he or she deserves, classical liberals also believe in laissez faire capitalism. But wait... That's the first big misunderstanding about neoliberalism; neoliberals DO NOT believe in laissez faire capitalism. And they DO NOT believe in a retreat from the government. Sure, they believe in deregulation of labor and financial markets, but they want governments to be the guardians of those markets, and they want governments to create more markets where there were none before.
All liberals believe in markets, but neoliberals have elevated markets above everything else. Where classical liberals still had the mistaken belief that exchange on markets with the aim to make a profit was a mutually beneficial process, neoliberals have abandoned the mutual aspect. Instead they fully embrace the truth of the matter, which is that in competitive markets there are clear winners and clear losers. Of course they've maintained the discourse of the mutually beneficial markets that they inherited from their classical forefathers; how else could they convince the general public to throw away the commons? How else could they sell the privatization of literally EVERYTHING?
Let's take the American healthcare system as an example. Healthcare is, in most of the developed world, one of the last standing bastions of the commons; it's regarded as something everyone should have access to. Neo-liberals don't agree; they say that the government isn't capable of efficiently allocating whatever resources, and that the market is far more efficient. Competition on said markets should lead to better and cheaper healthcare, so they say... I hope that by now even most Americans know that this is a load of BS. Or what about the Texas power grid failure in February 2021? Sure, let all the providers compete with each other for cheap prices and better services; we know what this free market competition resulted in, don't we? No electricity, faulty technology and prices rising to the Moon and beyond. If the richest country in the world can't handle a couple of winter storms, cant handle a pandemic, which we know returns at least once every hundred years, can't provide clean drinking water in many of its cities and states, doesn't that tell us something?
Everything has become fair game on the marketplace, from the smallest to the largest scale. Individuals behave, and are taught to behave as little private enterprises, constantly honing their worth on the marketplace and in constant competition with other individuals to claim their share of the pie. Schools compete with each other over students, hospitals compete over patients, states compete over (government) contracts, and countries compete over multinational businesses to settle on their ground. And all the world's global institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, they all operate to further the goal of privatization of everything everywhere, as demanded by the neoliberal ideology. It's market madness, but we call it "neoliberalism". And the crazy thing is, what makes it all so surreal is that markets are in themselves the product of abundance. There can be no exchange, no marketplace without enormous surpluses. We can only trade what we don't need ourselves; only if I have something left over can I take it to the market and trade it in for something I don't yet have. We're so hung up on this idea of trade, exchange and markets that we forget that if everything is in abundance, we really don't need those markets at all. That was Marx's original idea; he foresaw that capitalism would bring us to the stage where we are right now, it would create so much abundance that we would transition to a state where profits, markets and wage labor simply wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Just imagine a world where literally EVERYTHING is automated. With the mindset we have right now, we couldn't handle that world. We would be lost. We can't imagine a world in which we don't have to work for our survival. We can't imagine a world in which we work for the betterment of that world and the creatures in it, including ourselves... Oh... You think we're already doing that? If you really do, than I'm afraid you haven't really looked around my friend; the neoliberal world order is destroying us and our planet in the name of the profits of a handful of people. A handful of greedy people, as self interest is also in high regards in the neoliberal ideology. Read my post Neo-Liberalism from 3 months ago for more on this, and watch the below linked video for another more complete exploration of this destructive variation on capitalism.
Neoliberalism: From Ronald Reagan to the Gig Economy | Tom Nicholas
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