coldhearted scientist وداد

…on neoliberalism, in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader.

My notes are never complete, but we have this book on Ebscohost.

– the “free” market is not a natural occurrence; the capitalist state has been restructured by neoliberalism (i.e. the market has not just driven the state back); the new political matrix created by neoliberalism has had an impact on all aspects of political life

– the way democracy has become devalued as a political currency is perhaps the most damaging effect of neoliberal hegemony from about 1980 forward

– neoliberalism as a system of thought (Hayek, Friedman) and the more practical vision that actually exists (Washington concensus)

– Polanyi: market is outcome of a conscious intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organization on society for non-economic ends (2001: 258, qtd. in Munck, 61) … politics is always in command and there are no purely economic processes (note how much violence it took to create primitive accumulation, after all)

– “disembedded” liberalism, sought by transnational capitalist class through 1970s and 1980s, leads to triumph of neoliberal globalization as discourse and practice in 1990s (61-62)

– this does not roll back the state, but is in fact imbricated with it, and supported by it

– first phase of global neoliberalism: Pinochet 1973, Chicago boys, Thatcher and Reagan — the “rollback of the state”

– next phase, 1990s, “rollout” of new policies; this is when we get the Third Way of Clinton, Blair, Cardoso: welfare rerform, penal policy, urban regeneration, and asylum seekers are now also to be regulated in the interests of the neoliberal political agenda … this is the social regulation aspect of neoliberalism

– so neoliberalism has transformed the state, not driven it back; we have not had deregulation but the creation of new forms of regulation, a ‘new’ capitalism; the state itself is now marketized, commodified; the state now tries to make the country more competitive in international development terms rather than increase the national wealth; the state is now a market player in the global order and not a referee as in the old national order of states. Regulation is not done on behalf of the common good but on behalf of the globalization project itself (63).

More to come.

#OccupyHE.

Axé.