Neoliberalism
This pro-business activism, the foundation for late twentieth-century neoliberalism, was built out of earlier “conservative” activism. Neoliberalism developed over many decades as a mode of polemic aimed at dismantling the limited U.S. welfare state in order to enhance corporate profit rates. The elevation of profit rates required that money be diverted from other social uses with overall economic inequality increasing as a consequence. And such diversions required a supporting political culture, compliant constituencies, and amenable social relations. Thus, pro-business activism in the 1970s was built on and further developed a wide-ranging political and cultural project: the reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism in ways supportive of upward redistribution of a range of resources and tolerant of widening inequalities of many kinds.1
Neoliberalism developed primarily in the United States, and secondarily in Europe, in response to global changes that challenged the dominance of Western institutions. Within the United States specifically, one might divide the construction of neoliberal hegemony into five phases:
(1) attacks on the New Deal coalition, on progressive unionism, and on popular-front political culture and progressive redistributive internationalism during the 1950s and 1960s;
(2) attacks on downwardly redistributive social movements, especially the civil rights and black power movements, but including feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, and countercultural mobilizations during the 1960s and 1970s;
(3) pro-business activism during the 1970s, as U.S.-based corporations faced global competition and falling profit rates, previously conflicting big and small business interests increasingly converged, and business groups organized to redistribute resources upward;
(4) domestically focused “culture war” attacks on public institutions and spaces for democratic public life, in alliances with religious moralists and racial nationalists, during the 1980s and 1990s;
(5) emergent “multicultural,” neoliberal “equality” politics – a stripped down nonredistributive form of “equality” designed for global consumption during the twenty-first century and compatible with continued upward redistribution of resources.
During every phase, the construction of neoliberal politics and policy in the United States has relied on identity and cultural politics. The politics of race, both overt and covert, have been particularly central to the entire project. But the politics of gender and sexuality have intersected with race and class politics at each stage as well.
Though built over several decades beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, neoliberalism per se is generally associated with the set of policy imperatives for international government and business operations called the “Washington Consensus” of the 1980s and 1990s. Generated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury and also implemented through the World Trade Organization, neoliberal policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, market liberalization, and governmental stabilization are pro-corporate capitalist guarantors of private property relations. They were designed to recreate the globe in the interests of the unimpeded operation of capitalist “free” markets and to cut back public, noncommercial powers and resources that might impede or drain potential profit making. Nominally pro-democratic, the neoliberal financial institutions have operated autocratically themselves, primarily through financial coercion. They have also consistently supported autocratic governments and plutocratic elites around the world to promote one kind of stability, a stability designed to facilitate business investment. The effects of neoliberal policy implementation have consistently included many kinds of instability, however, including unrest associated with dramatically increasing inequality, and political fragility resulting from reduced sovereignty for national governments.
The Washington Consensus was a kind of backroom deal among the financial, business, and political elites based in the United States and Europe. Its policies reinvented practices of economic, political, and cultural imperialism for a supposedly postimperial world. Neoliberalism’s avatars have presented its doctrines as universally inevitable and its operations as ultimately beneficial in the long term – even for those who must suffer through poverty and chaos in the short term. In other words, neoliberalism is a kind of secular faith. Its priests were elected by no one and are accountable only to the global elites whose interests are promoted by its policies.
- For varying but nonetheless overlapping outlines of the features and agenda of neoliberalism, see Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., “Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism,” special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); and David Boaz, ed., Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World (Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 2002). [↩]
