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“‘We’ve lived through a neoliberal era for the last 40 years, and that era is coming to an end,’ Sitaraman says, adding that the ideas and policies that defined the period are being challenged on various levels. What comes next depends on if we take a proactive and democratic approach to shaping the economy, or if we simply react to and ‘deal with’ market outcomes.”
“In Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies, Jonathan Hopkin studies the political counter-movements that have arisen on the Left and the Right since the 2008 financial crisis, positioning these as forms of ‘anti-system politics’ that are a response to the failures of neoliberal orthodoxy. Scott Timcke finds this book one of the most compelling reads of 2020, deserving of serious engagement and discussion by anyone interested in politics, philosophy and economics.”
“Amy C. Offner’s Sorting Out the Mixed Economy remakes a popular understanding of how today’s neoliberalism was built. Offner shows that neoliberalism, rather than having been imposed by the Washington Consensus, was in fact first developed at a local level. The book shows American entrepreneurs, trained in big government as Lilienthal was, working together with Latin American businesses, banks, and landlords. It was when these new kinds of partnerships returned to the US—when private companies, treated as public concerns and sustained by government funds, began to take shape in the “developed” world—that neoliberalism truly began.”
“Globalisation, which is also referred to as neoliberalism, has mostly served to generate profit and reify white supremacy. And in that sense, it is alive and well today.”
“In Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile, Juan Pablo Rodríguez examines two recent social movements leading the social and political contestation against neoliberalism in Chile, not only showing how these embody critique in practice, but also drawing on these experiences to interrogate the very idea of social critique. This ambitious book is a welcome contribution to a sociology of social movements grounded in a reflexive dialogue between critical theory, social movement studies and empirical enquiry, writes Malik Fercovic.
“Neoliberalism is often conceived primarily as an economic project, with the purpose of getting the government out of the economy and the individual citizen into the free market. Citizens are re-imagined as customers, and everything from healthcare to education is subjected to ferocious competition, with the state making way for private corporations. But, from its outset, neoliberalism also aimed to dismantle the entire social fabric of human life.”
“the Covid-19 crisis-laden political discourse of the present reveals to us the essence of neoliberalism as a social order founded on a series of inversions. At least three of these are suddenly identifiable in their re-inversion presently. (1) There is no such thing as individuals, there are collectivities and there is society. […] (2) If neoliberals truly understood economics they wouldn’t be neoliberals. […] (3) There is an alternative.”
“In his book The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek claimed that state socialism would lead to a loss of economic and political freedoms, and eventually to tyranny. Only a free market capitalism would ensure that individual freedoms would be preserved. But ironically neoliberal economic reforms have helped to create another road to serfdom. The free-market ideology has promoted and celebrated rent extraction, sometimes over wealth creation. Neoliberalism has concentrated wealth and power into the hands of a few, and has merged economic and political elites into the rentier class: individuals who extract income based on existing assets”
