Neoliberalism

1) US president Ronald Reagan and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who implemented radical neoliberalization domestically; 2) President Bill Clinton campaigns for the NAFTA trade agreement, which devastated workers' rights across the region; 3) Russian president Boris Yeltsin, whose economic reforms directly caused the worst peacetime economic collapse in history; 4) Paul Bremer signs sovereignty over to a US-installed government in 2004 after he had destroyed the Ba'athist welfare state of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Headline during the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis after President Gerald Ford refused to bail out the city, forcing them to adopt neoliberal reforms which helped send the city into a period of violence and unrest.

Neoliberalism is the economic ideology and resulting economic policy which defines the current and newest phase of global capitalism. Originally an economic philosophy influenced by heterodox economic schools of thought, including monetarism and neoclassicism, neoliberalism rose from obscurity in the 1970s to present itself as a radical new solution to the unexpected profitability crisis of Keynesian embedded liberalism. The policies that followed in the United States and United Kingdom were highly successful at resolving the crisis through class war tactics including downward pressure on wages, open attacks on the power and rights of labour unions, and the cannibalization of state spending by private parties. The Western powers were able to reproduce these results on a global scale in the 1980s and 1990s, imposing neoliberal policies through both violent and non-violent means in order to effectively loot the economies and state coffers of the world.

Core points of neoliberalization include deregulation in nearly every sphere from price controls to labour rights, a laissez-faire liberal economic policy, and domestic austerity, all of which are held to be crucial to resolving economic crises and budgetary deficits. Neoliberals typically also carry out privatization in the name of free market principles. However, neoliberalism is also connected to increased military and police spending, both necessary to stem the rise in crime and unrest which naturally follows.

Neoliberalism is the dominant variant of capitalism in the world today at least in the West, replacing the welfare systems which existed beforehand in the 1970s–1980s. and embodied in people such as Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. Neoliberalism is a distinct form of liberalism from social democracy, in which the workers were given much more concessions whereas neoliberalism only distinguishes itself from traditional right-wing ideologies like conservativism, as more 'socially progressive', although this is usually just symbolic than actually addressing problems. Neoliberalization is directly connected to the phenomenon known as globalization, destroying domestic labour and commodity markets by reducing trade barriers and limits on foreign investment. Decades of neoliberal policy have led to a sharp crisis in the 2020s defined by political instability, economic crisis, and the inability of states to effectively respond to the COVID crisis. Neoliberalism is typically thought of a form of soft power from the imperial core against countries to implement its measures, in opposed to neoconservatism which uses hard power through military interventions such as in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan; however, the two have historically been closely connected.

Sources

• Harvey, David (2007). Template:Citation/make link. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Template:Citation/identifier. Template:Citation/identifier. 

Harvey, David (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-928327-9. OCLC 123453532.

See also

• American imperialism
• Austrian economics