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A Brief History of Neoliberalism

2007; Palgrave Macmillan; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300286

1476-9336

John Schwarzmantel,

Political Economy and Marxism

David Harvey has written an impressive analysis of neoliberalism, which he defines as 'a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade' (p.2).In the short compass of some 200 pages, he provides a formidably well-documented survey of how the ideas and practices of neoliberalism have conquered the world.He sees, not surprisingly, the turning point coming in 1979-1980 with the governments of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA, but one of the strengths of his survey lies in its truly global scope.He gives extensive information on the varying fortunes of neoliberalism in such diverse contexts as Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, and Sweden.In this last example, the neoliberal assault was to some extent contained in a situation of 'circumscribed neoliberalisation', so that the welfare structures constructed by social democratic governments were not as thoroughly ravaged as in some other countries.Harvey devotes a whole chapter to China, where 'neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics' involving the privatization of state-owned enterprises has led to increasing proletarianization and flexibility of the labour market, with huge inequalities of wealth, with the Chinese Communist Party (he suggests) lined up against the workers.The analysis that Harvey offers of neoliberalism is that it is a project for the reconstitution or restoration of class power.He contrasts neoliberalism with the 'embedded liberalism' which preceded it.This was a form of class compromise where market processes were surrounded by social and political constraints.An interventionist state policed this compromise and employed Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to maintain it.But, in Harvey's account, this embedded liberalism was breaking down by the end of the 1960s in a crisis of capital accumulation.Neoliberalism has to be seen unambiguously as a conscious political project to restore the power of economic elites and to protect the upper classes from what Harvey, in possibly exaggerated mode, calls the threat of 'political and economic annihilation' (p.15).He thus