The Hegemon

The most important question that has ever been asked in human history is this: Will organized human life as we know it survive in the not so distant future? This is what scholars such as Noam Chomsky are posing as the most important existential question of the present generation, and to which all other moral considerations are moot.

Apart from his dominance in the field of linguistics, Chomsky has been a formidable critic of US foreign policy with respect to human rights violations and military aggression around the world. The legacy of colonization and neo colonial hegemony, has left an imprint on Western culture that guides the dominant forces around the world. As Chomsky argues, the modern nation state and its legacy is the New Imperialism.

Along with his colleague, the late Ed Herman, Chomsky developed a “propaganda model” demonstrating how the corporate “power elite” dominate the economic and political aspects of society. The corporate news media functions as a propaganda system reinforcing elite power in ideology, education, politics, economics, etc. In recent years, however, Chomsky has focused his attention on climate extinction and ecocide, a threat on par with Chomsky argues with nuclear war. But it is the hegemony of US foreign policy that perpetuates the dominance of the power elite and the constant reinforcement of the military-industrial-complex (MIC). The maintenance of the life-giving dimensions of the environment are viewed by the power elite as expendable in the face of profit maximization.

The continued environmental catastrophe has reached the point of no return. One reason is that the planet will never recover by virtue of the fact that the polar caps are melting and will never regenerate enough ice to insulate the planet from unhealthy levels of heat. Numerous externalities in terms of rising sea levels and increased hurricanes, are all harmful effects on local populations and their environment. The cause: fossil fuels and big money. The drive for domination of global markets which undermines the environment if American hegemony. The declared objective for the past twenty years has been outlined in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) document.

When examining the US hemispheric hegemony and the corelated effects of environmental devastation, two social phenomena that manifest themselves over time: (1) increasing levels of political and economic power in the North and decreasing levels in the South; and (2) increased concentrations of wealth in the North, and increased levels of poverty in the South which has translated to continued poverty, unemployment, odious foreign debt, and environmental devastation. Nothing has fundamentally changed and there are reasons for this. It has everything to do with the domination of the Western Hemisphere and access to irreplaceable natural resources and cheap labor. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, New York: Vintage, 1989.

In terms of power, the North has generated an unprecedented concentration of financial, technological, economic, political, and military power. The gap separating the North (20% of the world population) from the South (80% of the world population) is wider than it has ever been in history. This has resulted in what has been described as the “dematerialization of production,” that is, the reduction of the use of natural resources per unit product or service. Basically, it is an outcome of the technological revolution that makes it possible to attain the same productive unit with less raw materials. This causes a permanent structural reduction of the value in raw materials and a structural disadvantage in the terms of trade between the North and the South. The outcome is a widening gap between countries with an abundance of vital resources, specifically technology, and those countries lacking vital resources. 

The technological revolution has also produced the growing automation of productive labor and services, diminishing the value and need for human labor per unit of product. This has led to a loss of the negotiating capacity of labor as opposed to capital, both in the North and the South. Within labor itself, manual labor forfeits value to technical-scientific labor. As a result, the “comparative advantages” of the South (i.e., raw material and labor) becomes static before the dynamic of modern technological production. Even the law of “diminishing returns,” is fundamentally altered. It is precisely because of the new technologies that this economic relationship is changed to “increasing returns.” This is how the technological revolution has distorted the “asymmetry” and obstacles to the weaker competitors with less technological capital and sophistication. 

Revolutionary Insurgents

The recent UNDP report, “Human Development 1992,” asserts that throughout the world the last decade has been characterized by the rise in inequality between the rich and poor, in terms of the North and South. In 1989 the richest fifth of the population, controlled 82.7 percent of the revenue; 81.2 percent of the world trade; 94.6 percent of commercial loans; 80.6 percent of internal savings and 80.5 percent of investment. If understood in terms of distribution, the current trend is untenable. This is equally so regarding resources. The rich countries of the North possess approximately one-fifth of the world population, but consume 70 percent of world energy, 75 percent of the metals, 85 percent of timber, and 60 percent of food. 

This pattern, the UNDP concludes, is only viable in the degree to which the extreme inequality is maintained, as otherwise the world resources would be exhausted. The indication is that inequality is not a distortion, or negative externality, of the system. But rather, inequality is an inherent component and systematic prerequisite inherent in the system itself. Economic growth within this model simultaneously produces inequality.  What is significant here is the acceleration of the increasing gap between the rich and poor. In 1960, the incomes for the wealthiest 20 percent were 30 times higher than those of the poorest 20 percent. In 1990, they were 60 times higher. Moreover, the unequal distribution within the countries of both the North and the South, the reported incomes for the richest 20 percent of the world population were 150 times higher than those of the poorest 20 percent. 

Another important assertion of the UNDP is that global markets do not operate freely.  The unequal relationship between the North and the South costs developing countries $500,000, 000 annually, or ten times more than what is received as foreign aid. Furthermore, 20 of the 24 most industrialized nations are currently more protectionist than they were 20 years ago, although total market liberalization is imposed on the less developed countries. According to the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), only 7 percent of the world trade is in conformity with the principles of free trade. The remainder is under “administrative market.” Notwithstanding, since 1970, the South’s role in international trade has fallen drastically from 3.8 percent to 1 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa and from 5.6 percent to 3.3 percent for Latin America and the Caribbean.  The increasing problem of marginalization is affecting over 2 billion people who are increasingly marginalized. All of this has placed significant stress on natural resources and environmental issues.       

The most significant reason for the environmental crisis has been the wasteful development system that benefits the 20 percent of humanity that consumes global resources and discards their waste in a contaminating manner. The “environmental crisis” is also affected by the poverty of the three-fourths of the global population which continues to dominate and stress the global economic systems. Add to this the “environmental debt,” along with the “social debt,” and the unprecedented international emigration (approximately 75 million people are dislocated as refugees each year as displaced persons or migrant workers), are the most significant reasons for instability in the post-Cold War era. The UN report, accordingly, recommends the creation of a Security Council of Development and the reform of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), GATT, and UN Programs with a view to ensuring improved administration and management of the world economy in the interests of all the countries and all the peoples. As such, in the midst of a technological revolution the global community is experiencing greater polarization, instability, un-governability, and economic non-viability.

Today there exists a geo-economic hierarchy which controls and manages the concentration and centralization of the economic, political, technological, financial, and military power on international global scale. The restructuring of the transnational companies and banks has enabled them, on the basis of mergers, to diversify their activities and has ensured the flexibility of their accumulation. These new mega-conglomerates, organized around the technological structures and scientific matrices, allow them great flexibility in adapting to the new demands, created to a large extent by themselves through their control of the mass media. The growing interdependence of economies and the international division of labor in the service of these mega-groups, together with the increased integration of the countries of the East, have transformed this geo-economic hierarchy of transnational capitalism into a select international group of elites that benefit from their mutual interests. 

The Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples

The international elites seek to develop mutual alliances and interdependent systems in order to prioritize their mutual interests. They seek to dominate a world economy and control international competition with the support of the governments of the Group of Eight and the countries of the North. These same elites are the ones who define the “rules of the game” with respect to financing, production, and technology. Accordingly, the Group of Eight has morphed into a “global parallel state’ in the service of these interests. Multilateral organizations and even the United Nations (UN) lack the financial and political influence to control and implement democratic and equitable international development. To a large extent, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are dependent upon the Group of Eight. These international lending agencies take on the role of system maintainers of the international bureaucracy that protects and preserves the logic of the dominant economic structure established by international capital and transnational corporations.     

Neoliberal and neoconservative theories constitute the legitimizing ideological impetus for the global elite. Neoliberalism, therefore, is not simply a neutral economic project, but rather a project of domestic and international relations in order to maintain social relations. The so-called “end of history” hides the real agenda of the world’s right-wing, given the collapse of the left, and the global weakening of the negotiating capacity of labor and of the South to effect change, even with the election over the past decade of progressive and leftist leaders in the South. This is because the right-wing have made a powerful impact on the ideological and religious front. 

Perhaps few right-wing ideologists could have stated it with such clarity as Zbigniew Brzezinski himself, a founding member of the Trilateral Commission and permanent advisor to various subsequent U.S. administrations when he sates, “. . . In the technocratic society, the direction taken will apparently be marked by the individual support from millions of uncoordinated citizens who easily will fall within the range of magnetic personalities who will effectively exploit the most efficient techniques for manipulating emotion and controlling reason …”  

The restructuring of the axis of international accumulation conforms to, and demands, this ideological re-colonization of the New World Order based on the neo-con doctrine of American Exceptionalism and the New American Century (William Kristol’s right-wing think tank), just as 500 years ago the conquest of America (then identified as the New World), required papal legitimation. Neither the protests of the Dominican missionaries articulated in the “Cry of La Espanola,” by Friar Antonio de Montesinos in 1511, nor the protests and prophetic roles of Bartolome de las Casas, and the first Bishop martyr of Latin America, Antonio Valdivieso in Nicaragua, together with “the majority of the friars of the Kingdom,” whom the Viceroy Toledo of Peru denounced before King Philip the Second, were sufficient to arrest either the conquest of Spain or the colonial system itself.  The same neo-colonization is taking place in the twenty-first century with the United States now taking the lead as the New Spain or Roman Empire. 

The colonization, on behalf of these empires, was based on another dogma that supported the belief of the right of Europeans to extract the wealth and resources of the indigenous inhabitants. This included slavery and genocide slavery as capital investment and genocide as a transaction cost. The major empires investing in this enterprise were Holland, England, France, Portugal and Spain. Arguably, the most pathological was Spain.

Then with the American Revolution, 1776-1787, and the end of British rule, the United States set out to expand its new empire, using policies such as the Monroe Doctrine, racist imperial justifications for Manifest Destiny, westward expansion with the Robber Barons, and imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century, the United States emerged as a fledgling empire with expansionist designs. The underwriter for these excursions was the federal government and its funds and resources. This includes not only wealth and resources; it also included military support. All of this was based on the drive for wealth and profits.

The creation of macro-planetary policies that authorize the global administration of the world in turn calls for a monopoly of planetary thinking that legitimizes the global monopoly of accumulation. Control of the media is fundamental to guaranteeing the legitimacy needed to stabilize this global power. Research, knowledge, and even alternative thinking is a prerequisite for the new global restructuring. However, the crisis of the universities and the tribulations of the research centers and NGOs that do not yield to this logic of capital and market, is a recurrent phenomenon the world over, even within the churches. As a result of the “economic Darwinism” engendered by neoliberalism, and defined by people such as the late Pope John Paul II as “savage capitalism,” the human family is continually confronted with the demands of a technological totalitarianism that threatens the planet's existence. 

Business Is Business

 The reduction of the budget for higher education, the political control of the universities, the emphasis on primary education promoted by the universities, the emphasis on primary education promoted by the World Bank in the Third World cannot conceal the real purpose – to maintain the masses as technological and analytic invalids, incapable of understanding and changing the “technetronic society.” Nevertheless, the great capacity of neoliberalism has not been one of creating efficiency and growth, but one of destroying any alternative that does not respond to its market logic, or to profit as a driving force within society, and to the acceptance of the “opaque power” as an inevitability of the New Order. The New World order carries with it a New International Division of Knowledge in this era of technological revolution. The democratization of knowledge, therefore, will be one of the fundamental demands of an alternative order.

The application of raw power demands not only geo-economic hegemony, but also geo-cultural hegemony as well. Market ideology and automatism that postulates the capacity for solving the problems of poverty, unemployment, and ecological destruction by their own dynamic, carry with them the need for global homogenization and uniformity. The multiple and varied brands of products found anywhere in the world respond to a homogeneous productive and cultural system. The modeling of the market in this way dictates a modeling of the culture in which the homogenization and automatism of the market leave a future complete with promises but lacking any projects or prospects. 

Even concepts such as “development,” self-determination,” and “sovereignty,” become otiose. It is the culture of consumption and democracy based on the market, without a vision and project of society. Because they were breaking through this process of homogenization which started with the Reagan era, those countries which gave rise to new hopes, like Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador in the 1980s, needed not only to be destroyed but also discredited and converted into a spurious hope of romantic peoples.   Today the “geo-culture of despair” [1] and a deterministic “rational” theology of inevitability require global projection to facilitate homogenization of the new restructuring promoted by the global power elite. 

Despair guarantees stability for the dominator. The erosion of hope is a systemic necessity, as Brzezinski foretold. This form of nihilism of values that is the need to accept the inevitable has imposed itself on vast sectors of society, such as, intellectuals in Latin America, the Latin American church, and the political left itself. In fact, this nihilism could be the greatest legacy of neoliberalism. Short of hope, there is no reason for struggling for the quality of life, and daily survival is accepted as normal life. The effect is a culture of submission enables the global project to be reserved exclusively for capital, not labor, and the transnational power elite, not the masses. The geo-culture of despair and submission, is part of the nihilism of Nietzsche, and in the face of poverty, underdevelopment, and growing unemployment, and facing the threat of collective suicide due to the environmental crisis, does not propose alternatives, much less solutions, thus allowing the “invisible hand” of the market to decide the moral vision of the planet. See Walter F. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1983.

In order to understand how to best transition from a neoliberal market economy to a socially just democratic political economy, an analysis of three major political economists and their theories need to be considered and the importance of an anarchic social-justice model that would maintain a perpetual position of advocacy, protest, and agitation for a democratic political economy. This would provide an analysis of the systemic cause of the US economic demise, resulting from a neoliberal economic arrangement manifested in market capitalism.

 Anti-Capitalismo

Capitalism in general terms is an economic system whose characteristics are shaped by private property, investment, financial risk, free-market pricing, and the absence - or least restrictive measures in general - of government coercion through regulation. Several of the hallmarks of any contemporary capitalist system remain consistent: (1) the private ownership of most property, including the private ownership of the means of production within the system, (2) the globally scaled organization of economic activity, including the participation of state and governments associated with the global capitalist system, (3) a higher ratio of financial assets to real ones, especially compared to other kinds of economic systems, (4) the tendency of people to earn their income either as salaried workers or as wage laborers, (5) impersonal markets facilitating the purchase and distribution of most goods and services, (6) an uneven distribution of wealth, accompanied by an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, (7) the expansion of economies over time, with periods of decline and instability affecting all within the system, and, (8) at all levels, whether national, provincial or state, or municipal or local, governments actively participate in in the economy. Here in a contemporary capitalist structure, markets and their concomitant pricing systems require that people be free to engage in the ownership, utilization, and transference of their property and that people be free in order to participate through “enforceable contracts with any willing counterparty”.

Thus, defenders of capitalism have argued that democracy ought not be conflated with capitalism - that is, there is no necessary connection between capitalism and democracy while in the same breath they argue that freedoms, such as those of assembly, association, expression, and movement are necessary and, in fact, inseparable from the rights to life and property.

Today capitalism has morphed into neoliberalism. Four basic components give neoliberalism its form and can thus be described as an economic and financial policy in which radically free markets, and not states, (1) provide the best avenues for the distributions of services and goods in a global economy, which is best done through private market relations, (2) provide market-optimal solutions in which governments ought not intervene beyond their duty to secure property and the private ownership of it, (3) provide a venue for the privatization of government and public goods and services, and (4) hold that human interaction through markets is the only grounds for realizing true human freedom. Neoliberalism has become a theoretical mainstay within the social sciences and economics, and its popularity especially among neoliberal economists is that it serves to describe much of the structural changes in global economics since the international, political, and economic turbulence of the 1970s, after the decline of the “golden age” of capitalism and Keynesianism in a post–World War II setting. In all, neoliberalism persists namely because it expounds on the classical liberal sense that market forces, and individual liberty, will triumph over the state.

Added to the phenomenon of neoliberalism is the drive toward globalization. Although the term has numerous uses, globalization can best be described as (1) an economic agenda that traverses the world, promoting market economies and enhancing trade in the service of capital growth, (2) an ideology representing values, cultural norms, and practices, seen by some as a superior worldview and by some as cultural hegemony, (3) a corporate structure and mechanism that may supersede the rule of nation-states and challenge or even threaten democracy, (4) a global village, the consequence of vast cultural exchanges, communication technologies, transportation, migrations, and a wide array of global interconnections, including the globalization of ideas—for example, green ecology, deep ecology, de-growth—or (5) a grassroots globalization or globalization from below as witnessed in anti-globalization or prodemocracy movements emerging in resistance to economic and cultural globalization.

For purposes here, utilize definitions 1 through 3 of globalization as they apply to neoliberalism, while definitions 4 through 5 apply to what we argue is essential for a democratic political economy and a second bill of rights. Nevertheless, despite globalization’s broad and diverse meanings, the term generally refers to the economic and technological agenda that alters basic modes of cultural organization and international exchange in many parts of the world. Global monetary institutions and financial elites argue for the endless benefits from the exchange of capital on a global scale. This is best represented by President Barak Obama’s support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP, as it is known, garners praise from Obama, business elites, and other neoliberals due to the increases in export commodities and trade, the participation in global wealth, and the stabilizing of democratic civic processes they are certain will come about should the partnership be enacted. Anti-globalization and prodemocracy voices, such as Bernie Sanders, and the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, along with Donald Trump and some conservative elements in the Republican Party, argue that global financial institutions are reordering the flow of capital and wealth within a global and hegemonic economic regime that serves only the interests of the elite and rich and sends decent-paying jobs to developing countries in the Pacific Rim. These voices protest the TPP and potential devastation resulting from globalization, including ecological ruin, poorer working conditions, urban deterioration, and increased social violence.

 

'We Will Coup Whoever We Want': Elon Musk and the Subversion of Democracy in Brazil

Social and political developments accompany economic globalization as governments restructure their services in order to gain access to the global economy. Needed public services - like electricity, water, public health, and transportation - are replaced or “privatized” by private companies and shareholders. The poor find it increasingly difficult to access privatized “public” services. With globalization come unintended consequences - many would say negative consequences: Values, attitudes, and worldviews are co-opted by globalization, and the allegedly value-neutral global market and specific cultures with particular values and practices can clash. Consider the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred tribal land. Societies with public religious structures, values, and social patterns may be deeply challenged as they either absorb or resist the values embedded within the globalization process.

In the 1930s, neoliberalism began to challenge many nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophies throughout Europe, specifically with regard to a liberalized economy with completely self-regulating markets. The European countries in question, however, challenged the need to separate political and economic domains completely. This had been a fundamental assumption of their predecessors. Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, a neoliberalism emerged bearing many of the trappings of a nineteenth-century laissez-faire system from just decades earlier. Not only would this new form of neoliberalism have little in common with the grander historicity of the neoliberal movement in Europe, but the goal was an ideological doubling down on the dogmatic nature of capitalism. And this was supported by modern developed nation-states, elite international institutions, right-wing think tanks and media, and religious institutions.

In order to counter the stagflation of the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher championed neoliberal economic policies late in that decade, as did Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. This post–World War II breed of neoliberalism rejected the Keynesian style of demand management and state intervention. This new market-based global economics, actively promoted by both the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, pivoted on supply-side economics. This strain of neoliberalism diverged from the economic theory of the 1930s and was spread globally, in great part due to influence from the United States, the postwar hegemon. Neoliberalism’s most basic tenets have altered American and British welfare systems, affecting public policy, administration, and many apparatuses of the state. Through direct US involvement, institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have also deployed neoliberal tactics to shape the development of poorer nations; they widely prescribe privatizing public resources and implementing austere economic programs and even demand that changes be made to welfare before less-developed countries (LDCs) might be granted loans and other economic assistance. This is what experts describe as “disciplinary” neoliberalism, where extreme measures for consolidating governance within developing countries is hallmark.

Many differences exist between neoliberalism’s advocates and its detractors. Those who oppose neoliberalism signal its contribution to incredible instances of global inequality, economic asymmetries, growing unemployment, social and political alienation, environmental destruction, and cultural homogenization. In their crusade to illuminate the negative results of adopting neoliberalism, opponents of neoliberalism regularly point to the failures and injustices wrought by market fundamentalism, competition, deregulation, economic liberalization, and the destabilization wrought by privatization, among other undesirable consequences that especially plague developing countries. On the other hand, neoliberal apologists, who consider broadly unbridled competition to be superior to state-backed attempts at coordinating human productivity, insist on the economic supremacy of laissez-faire liberties, decrying any sort of public intervention. Yet market economies demand that states intentionally act, because economies do not arise from “natural” market forces; nature itself promotes no industry, markets, or law, all of which contribute to the common facility of property rights and ownership among states. That is, such things are not natural in essence; Thomas Hobbes promoted this idea centuries ago in Leviathan.

 All of this notwithstanding, neoliberalism’s steadfast proponents cling to the chimeric idea that unrestrained market forces beget prosperity and peace - two requisite conditions, they claim, for human freedom. One theory of neoliberal transformation, the ceaseless commitment to liberalized governance and market reforms, is precisely what marks a shift from embedded liberalism - the post–World War II economic order established by the United States - to disciplinary neoliberalism, which corresponds to disciplinary measures imposed on states’ governments. Entities that lend money to these governments may enforce conditions to achieve their commitments to market-based policies or to preclude changes to those commitments by future governments and their state-sponsored regulatory reforms. Thus, violations of state sovereignty is endogenous to neoliberalism—as is perhaps the general degradation of individual civil liberties supposedly afforded, and protected, by the state.

Free-market fundamentalists may support institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as their operating norms. Nevertheless, these organizations and their protocols have greatly destabilized poorer countries, especially in terms of liquidity; consider the impact of fiscal-austerity programs, for example, aimed to recalibrate the macroeconomics of debtor nations. When considering the efficacy of these structural-adjustment policies, designed to liberalize trade and free the movement of capital, we must ask whom it is they most oppress and whom they most benefit.

Today institutions like the IMF recognize that the deleterious effects of neoliberal transformations on millions of people around the world. The observable cause and effect that belies the notion of separate economic and political and social spheres. The intense deregulation and privatization efforts of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European nations after 1989 - let alone the East Asian financial crisis of 1997 - mark enormous policy failures for neoliberalism. Developing nations have suffered the most from the neoliberal metamorphosis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Their ecologies and biological systems have been depleted and destroyed. Their poor and their less-skilled women have born the most damaging effects. Several Marxist authors consider neoliberalism, globalization, and development nothing more than “imperialist exploitation” of labor in LDCs. Neoliberalism’s many critics lament structural-adjustment programs pushed by non-state entities like the IMF and the World Bank.

Neoliberalism’s proponents assume as a given that purely economic real-world processes exist. Yet to ignore that all economic policies have social and political impacts within and among states is unsophisticated to say the least. Neoliberalism’s champions might choose to ignore the political and social dimensions of economic activities, but their ignorance becomes impossible to maintain once the dysfunctional political interplay between super-industrialized states and the LDCs of the Global South brings into sharp relief the suboptimal realities in which capitalist markets regularly function. Today the United States most closely resembles a functioning neoliberal socioeconomic model. And so whether or not the 2008 economic and financial crisis marks a transition from the neoliberalism of the 1980s to a post-neoliberal era remains the question. Given that the 2008 crisis was the worst since the Great Depression, which took place more than seventy years and a world war ago, the question takes on some urgency.

Favorite Uncle

Technological developments help the United States simulate a true neoliberal state. The country’s 1986 Federal Technology Transfer Act deregulated and privatized certain government activities in the name of better technology transfer. And the intervening years’ changes wrought by technology and science have done much to change the international economic arena (Kitching 2005). Neoliberalism no doubt played a significant role in the state’s decision to hand so much power in this case to the private sector.

The kinds of inflexible technology that preempt unalterably a particular form of political life. Immediately this brings to mind “On Authority,” Friedrich Engels’s celebrated essay, where he writes that “the automatic machinery of a big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been”; if the workers stop, production risks grinding to a halt. Additionally, in volume 1 of Capital, Marx lays the theoretical groundwork for understanding why a would-be neoliberal nation like the United States might want to produce a piece of legislation on technology that privatizes evermore state functions. Modern industry, writes Marx, employs technical means of eliminating “the manufacturing division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation.” He continues, “the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labor in a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine” For this reason, neoliberalism bears out Winner’s observation that central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid social hierarchy [are] increasingly prudent.”

For all our understanding of the ways neoliberalism functions, no resounding agreement on definitions for neoliberalism or neoliberal globalization can be said to exist. Generally speaking, opponents of neoliberalism are politically left of center and often identify the same components of neoliberalism for criticism. For instance, they decry the destructive recalibration of the state according to market whim, or, for instance, they take issue with the privatization of trans-border governance. Indeed, neoliberalism’s main detractors speak on the state’s obvious role in establishing a transnational government system—which facilitated the emergence of a hierarchical order among states. In this process, states changed from distributive, administrative entities to competitive ones. Thus, it seems logical to consider the state as seedbed of neoliberalism, a tract of political and economic soil less-regulated markets, required to fully cultivate the long-held productive forces of capitalism. See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, New York: Picador, 2019.

Examining certain state-managed economies—namely, the Asian Tigers—we might conclude that when state involvement yields economic successes, less and less consideration should be given to the market. Assuming this is true in at least some cases, the question remains whether this conclusion is generalizable. Thus, we must ask whether or not the struggle for “development” actually corresponds to development’s orientation toward the market. Or does development depend on state-oriented economic action? Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of either effectual or ineffectual state economic policy and regulation. Ultimately, neoliberalism’s own failures have contributed greatly to its declining significance as an economic theory. Marxist scholar David Harvey, for example, treats neoliberalism as an ideological wave that has swept over the globe. Indeed, Marxists tend to view neoliberalism as ideologically powerful in its obfuscation of class relations. In the process, class relations have been mystified, and global wealth, concentrated and reversely funneled.

Despite the global social erosion incited by neoliberalism, class dynamics remain important, assuming new forms and adopting new meaning in the now-collapsing neoliberal world order. The Thatcher-Reagan species of neoliberalism has garnered much criticism. We know many LDCs have suffered great harm thanks to its implementation. As a result, its critics chiefly lament the damning effects of economic liberalization and deregulation; they signal the privatization of formerly public service. They acknowledge the global ascension of powerful financial institutions, which has wreaked havoc on government relationships with publics. They cite the adverse effects induced by the influx of capital in governmental frameworks, as well as the state’s increasing inability to uphold and maintain public policies due to individual isolation from social networks. Another issue to arise from welfare capitalism includes an increase in economic disparity within certain nations and among their classes. Despite neoliberalism’s inherent and persistent problems, the most important, post-2008 crisis question may not be whether the world has entered a post-neoliberal era but to what extent.

See US as major retailor in global market: https://www.vox.com/world/2022/12/16/23507640/dc-party-invite-military-contractors-money-ukraine-russia-war-us.

See US psychopath NSA advisor: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/john-bolton-review/.

Ed Martin  

Tubac, Arizona 

Long Beach, California

[1] See Xabier Gorostiaga and his research in international and development economics in The Role of the International Centers in Underdeveloped Countries,1985 and George Irvin and Xabier Gorostiaga, Towards an Alternative for Central America and the Caribbean. 1985.