![]() ![]() But it also has an intellectual genealogy with real bearing on our time, making a careful reconstruction of its history essential to understanding our global economy. Its critics are right that neoliberalism has multiple meanings and can be used in a way that is more pejorative than precise. The historian Daniel Rodgers, meanwhile, argues that neoliberal means too many different things, and therefore not enough.Īnd yet, the world today works in a distinctive and relatively new way, and those workings need a name. But the term has its critics on the left, too: Political economist Bill Dunn finds it too insular, rarely adopted by the people it is said to describe. Chait argues that leftists use the word to “bracket the center-left together with the right” and so present socialism as the only real alternative. For the left, neoliberalism often connotes a form of liberal politics that has embraced market-based solutions to social problems: the exchanges of the Affordable Care Act, for instance, rather than a single-payer, universal program like Medicare. ![]() Jonathan Chait has expressed a common point of view when he has argued that neoliberalism is little more than a slur used by writers on the left to label varieties of liberalism they dislike. GLOBALISTS: THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE BIRTH OF NEOLIBERALISM by Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $35.00Įven to say this word is to invite controversy. But few call this “post-Fordism” any longer. In the years since, these trends have only accelerated due to improvements in, and the spread of, information technologies. David Harvey, writing in 1990, saw it being replaced with “post-Fordism”: an economy built on just-in-time production, the internationalization of capital, the deregulation of industry, insecure labor, and the entrepreneurial self. What can be identified is a shift, usually dated to the 1970s, when rich countries moved away from a regulated economy of mass production and mass consumption, organized within nation states. ![]() The term “late capitalism” acknowledges that, but it presumes something about the future that we cannot know. It is not enough to call it capitalism, since capitalism has been around for hundreds of years and transforms itself with great dexterity. But what to call this system? What is its name? A global system underlies this vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power. Eight men, it is calculated, hold as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet: 3.6 billion people. Some people can make unimaginable fortunes in microseconds, while others still scratch a living out of the dry ground. The products we rely on-whether for food, fuel, communication-are woven together in supply chains that have the complexity of medieval tapestries. Humanity has greater capacity for production than it has ever had before, and simultaneously, the ability to destroy the world many times over. It is difficult to consider the state of the world in 2018 and not feel a sense of vertigo. ![]()
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