Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.
Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.
It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.
In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.
So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.
Globalized trade is good actually
Globalized trade has been a thing long before neo-liberalism existed, arguably longer than capitalism has existed. Equating neo-liberalism with “global/globalized trade” is incredibly reductive…
EDIT: I read the comment wrong, OP is saying that international/global trade is not inherently bad, not that neo-liberalism is the same thing as international/global trade.
I didn’t see that comment as reductive. More like pointing out a part of neo-liberalism that the commenter thought was good.
In other words, the comment is simply “globalized economy is good.” The comment is not what you’re inferring: "neo-liberalism is good because globalized economy is good "
On the whole, for sure. But that doesn’t make it any more palatable for workers when jobs are relocated from their area.
Right, but that’s less of a consequence of Globalization and more of a consequence of our national economy being structured in a way that offsets risk onto the most vulnerable working class folks. If we had universal healthcare not reliant on employment, reskilling assistance, and some kind of basic income, it would be easier to both protect people and reap the benefits of Globalization.
our national economy being structured in a way that offsets risk onto the most vulnerable working class folks
i.e. neoliberalism
Internationalism is good. Globalism is not. All globalism means is open borders for capital and hard borders for workers.
Globalism when used by like 95% of people includes dropping immigration restrictions, so I’m not sure what you’re on about here.
Not really. They emphasize “legal” immigration, by which they mean a series of restrictions on how people are allowed to enter the country and what qualifies them to become citizens. The actual implementation of neoliberal policies always includes strict border controls, limited asylum seeking, 2nd class citizenship for migrants, and harsh penalties for migrating “wrong” and not jumping through all the legal and financial hoops.
Capital moving freely while migrants die in the Mojave and drown in the Mediterranean.
Again, 95% of people who use the term “globalist” to describe someone else associate it with open borders. I’m not sure what you’re on about here.
When you’re talking about neoliberalism, ‘globalism’ also has a lot to do with trade and international finance- from the 1940s (after fallout of the great depression and the World Wars) Keynesian economics was ‘in’, and international lending agreements upheld countries’ ability to conduct nation-level managed/mixed economies- but when the neoliberals swung into power, the new order of the day was to strip countries of their self-managing ability in ways that made them accessible to/exploitable by global conglomerates and corporations:
At Bretton Woods in 1944, the use of fixed exchange rates and controls on speculative private capital, plus the creation of the IMFand World Bank, were intended to allow member countries to practice national forms of managed capitalism, insulated from the destructive and deflationary influences of short-term speculative private capital flows. As doctrine and power shifted in the 1970s, the IMF, the World Bank, and later the WTO, which replaced the old GATT, mutated into their ideological opposite. Rather than instruments of support for mixed national economies, they became enforcers of neoliberal policies.
The standard package of the “Washington Consensus” of approved policies for developing nations included demands that they open their capital markets to speculative private finance, as well as cutting taxes on capital, weakening social transfers, and gutting labor regulation and public ownership. ~ https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/
So, in this sense, ‘globalization’ not just the opening of borders for labor and immigration, it is the swing away from ‘nationalization’ of economies and of national economic sovereignty, to prevent countries from impeding the flow of capital (and corporate power) into and out of their borders on behalf of global finance and colonial power
People who describe themselves as globalists generally reject the idea of open borders. Labor visas, not the free movement of labor.
What you’re talking about is a smear, not reality.
Much more than globalized trade, globalized sharing of knowledge, awareness and circumstance - perhaps even globalized power, one day. The fight against capitalism will definitely require a great plan to take global communication away from private capital.
So, while you’re 100% correct about neoliberalism not belonging to either the left or the right, your basic description of neoliberalism isn’t correct. What you describe (deregulation, positive valuation of wealth generation, free markets, etc) is just liberal capitalism.
Neoliberalism names the extension of market-based rationalities into putatively non-market realms of life. Meaning, neoliberalism is at play when people deploy cost/benefit, investment/return, or other market-based logics when analysing options, making decisions, or trying to understand aspects of life that aren’t properly markets, such as politics, morality/ethics, self-care, religion, culture, etc.
A concrete example is when people describe or rationalize self-care as a way to prepare for the workweek. Yoga, in this example, becomes of an embodiment of neoliberalism: taking part in yoga is rationalized as an investment in self that results in greater productivity.
Another example: how it seems that most every public policy decision is evaluated in terms of its economic viability, and if it isn’t economically viable (in terms of profit/benefit exceeding cost/investment) then it is deemed a bad policy. This is a market rationality being applied to realms of life that didn’t used to be beholden to market rationalities.
Hence the “neo” in “neoliberalism” is about employing the logics of liberalism (liberal capitalism, I should say) into new spheres of life.
A good (re)source for this would be Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures, which trace the shift from Liberalism to Neoliberalism. As well, there’s excellent literature coming out of anthropology about neoliberalism at work in new spheres, in particular yoga, which is why I used it as my example here.
Yes! For anyone wanting more reading on the subject, Start here https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/ Monbiot is also a good primer: https://www.astrid-online.it/static/upload/monb/monbiot_guardian_15_04_16.pdf
It’s kinda sad how classical social democracy is basically dead nowadays. Here in Europe they are almost all neoliberals and some (like in Denmark) even start to mix this with right wing social policies.
Slightly OT comment from me, so sorry.
Social democracy was a false idol anyways, nothing but socialism can work in the long term, socdem always gets repealed by the rich.
What socialist societies that have existed have lasted a long time?
Rome lasted a lot, should we get back to empire and slavery?
Rome was a republic for like 500 years.
It was, than it wasn’t any more.
Really wish there was a coherent structure to political labeling.
Follow a prefix-root-suffix system or something - one glance at name should give you some idea of where they land on the political spectrum and what their identity is built on.
ELI5: The difference between neoliberal (as defined above) and libertarianism.
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Many leftists ( myself included) also have started to referring to neoliberals and other slightly-left centrists as just liberals" If you go right or left enough on the spectrum, liberal is an insult.
Speaking as an ML, there’s something admirable about old-school Keynesian Liberal Democrats who actually believed in the End of History and were optimistic that our lives could improve under Capitalism. I think Dukakis was the last of this breed to get anywhere near the White House.
Nowadays these sorts of people, your Liz Warren stans, just sound delusional. You’re either a Socialist or a “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” establishment Democrat, whose greatest hope is that at least things might not get worse.
Take Jordan for example, a county being ruined day after day by neoliberal policies and ruthless privatization.
It’s good to read what neoliberalism has done to some country in practice: https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/jordans-protests-and-neoliberal-reforms-walking-thin-ice
Take the US for example with crippling student loan debt.
The saddest Catch 22 I’ve ever seen… Need education for money, need money for education, rinse and repeat
The thing to get about deregulation in this context is that it’s a misleading term- ‘deregulation’ doesn’t mean un-doing regulation, it means handing regulatory authority over from democratically-accountable regulators, to private regulators that are less-accountable and often have interests at odds with those of the public.
In feudal times, regulation of trade or business was left to trade associations or guilds (who got to write their own rules that were typically rubber-stamped by the local nobility’s younger son) and that system more or less translated into today’s modern republics, up until the guilds and trade associations became trusts and monopolies. When the democratic regulatory state emerged to regulate spheres of business like banking and polluting industry because private regulators shat the bed, that was a shot in a war that the old guard business elites haven’t stopped fighting- they saw this as a taking of their power, and have sustained decades of effort to hand public authority back over to private trade associations
Seems to me this argument rests on the assumption of private regulators being less accountable public regulators but i don’t think this plays out so clear cut in practice. When’s the last time you ever had a problem with FINTRAC or the New York Stock exchange for instance?
centre-left
This is misleading. Neoliberalism is inherently capitalist, not socialist/communist.
All left-right political terminology is inherently subjective, so you can argue neoliberalism is promoted by center-left parties as long as you’re defining the center as being to the right of that. Since this post seems to be about the United States, that center is already pretty far to the right as measured from, say, Denmark (picked a name out of a hat). I think the bigger argument here is about US-defaultism rather than whether or not it’s OK for Americans to describe things in terms that relate to their political climate.
EDIT: I think the comment I’m replying to is confusing people. Replying solely to the words “center-left” makes it seem like the OP described neoliberalism as center-left, which people are objecting to. However, the OP only used the phrase center-left once, to say that American center-right and center-left parties have enacted neoliberal policy. As a statement of fact, the Democrats have enacted neoliberal policy. By American standards, the Democrats are regarded as center-left. This does not mean the OP was saying “neoliberalism is a center-left ideology.” There is an argument to be made here that the Democrats are not a center-left party, but I think the issue is getting confused here because people are reacting as if the thing being described as “center-left” is neoliberalism, when it’s actually the Democratic Party.
It’s not subjective - the definitions of words has been eroded on purpose. This is orwellian destruction of language and it works
Of course it’s subjective. The terminology of the left-right political divide originally referred to 18th-century France. In the 21st century, we’re usually not defining the political center of a nation by how it compares to the French Parliament of 250 years ago. The center moves over time and space, and the left and right are relative to that center.
I do think this comment thread is confusing people, though, as noted in an above edit. For clarity, nobody is saying neoliberalism is a center-left movement.
The very concept of putting political spectrum in one-dimensional axis is purposefully broken. Left vs right doesn’t tell you jack shit about the actual ideologies. Life is more complex than this
Dude, you quoted a single word out from OP and somehow even got that wrong. Which makes me think you’re being deliberately obtuse.
OP wrote about “center-left” – the American spelling. So it’s clear that OP was discussing neo-liberalism from an American point of view. And in American politics, neo-liberalism is absolutely a component of center-left politics.
Sorry if this sounds angry. I get frustrated at the constant reframing of American politics under international standards. Yes, Americans lack a true leftwing in our politics. That’s well established at this point. Nitpicking language around “American left” vs “international left” derails real discussion and is not helpful.
I don’t know. If you ask me. I think asserting that everyone but you was wrong. And that you are correct because of a special America/western only definition is a height of the hypocrisy and absurdity.
Politics is not relative like your hands. They are defined and understood. Just not by westerners.
In this case, OP is clearly talking about American politics. That is what I am saying.
I was calling out a reply that purposefully distorted OP’s language, the language used in this specific post. The discussion of the American political compass versus the international political compass is beside the point. And it’s obtuse and unhelpful to derail a perfectly good discussion with insults aimed at OP’s clearly American perspective.
There is politics. American politics as a term is obtuse navel gazing that doesn’t really exist. As an American the political system as they wish it were defined doesn’t encompass me at all. I’m an American. This American politics BS is damaging. On purpose.
And your reflexive, intensive need to assert that it exists should give you pause. To question why you feel that you have to insist that it does.
You think center-left is socialist/communist?
They don’t “think it”, as if they’re confused, they’re implicitly defining “left” as socialist, or at least anti-capitalist.
That’s not really reality tho is it?
Watching from a far (The Netherlands), it always amazed me how the political scale in the US is described. Even the democrats in the US feel more to the right, then positioned in the US. Some people go as far to call democrats communist, but I don’t think these people know what communist really is, in the same way that Americans don’t seem to know what (neo)liberal actually is. It is both entertaining and concerning to watch.
Yeah, the idea that Democrats are center-left is hilarious - by the standards in most of Europe, they’re not even center-right, just plain rightwing, whilst the Republicans are pretty much far-right (given their heavy religious, ultra-nationalis, anti-immigrant and warmongering - amongst others - rethoric).
The Overtoon Window has moved to the Right everywhere but in the US it did way much further than in most of Europe.
As for the whole neoliberalism stuff, it’s pretty easy to spot the neoliberal parties even when they’ve disguised themselves as leftwing or (genuine) conservatives: they’re the ones always obcessing about what’s good for businesses whilst never distinguishing between businesses which are good for people and society and those which aren’t: in other words, they don’t see businesses (and hence what’s “good for businesses”) as a means to the end of being “good for people” (i.e. “good for businesses which are good for people hence good for people”) but as an end in itself quite independently of what that does for people.
The Democrats are more socially left wing than the vast majority of European parties.
Don’t confuse Identity Politics, aka “We care only about that inequality which doesn’t involve the priviledges of wealth” as leftwing.
Those who disregard the biggest inequality of treatment there is by a HUGE margin (that of wealth) and only care about those inequalities which can be “fixed” without putting their own inherited priviledges (usually from being born in the high middle-class and above) at risk aren’t lefties as they’re not really fighting for the greatest good for the greatest number.
The kind of liberalism that ignores the power of money and ownership to constraint others’ freedom of action is incompatible with getting the greatest outcome for the greatest number because they see restrictions of accumulation of wealth and resources and anti-freedom and it’s been painfully obvious for decades that maximization of the greatest good for the greatest number is the exact opposite of the direction of concentration of wealth and ownership we have been travelling on.
Money doesn’t work unless some people have some and some people don’t. The only way to actually fight globalism is with worker owned productivity becoming the norm. Otherwise you’ll always be stuck with the political false dichotomy of “Right” (fascism) vs “Left” (right of center).
I’ve also recently noticed people claiming to be “neoliberals” but apparently meaning something like “progressive Democrat” and it’s really confusing so I appreciate this post. It’s already bad enough “liberal” has a bunch of different definitions, pretending neoliberalism is something else isn’t going to help anything or anyone.
Much the same way people on the left have been adopting the Republican definition of socialism, as in any time the government does anything. Like having basic welfare or some such suddenly equals socialism.
Now people have been overusing neoliberal so much that the ill informed have started using it for people that are clearly pro government spending, pro social safety net, pro regulation, etc. Discussion becomes unhelpful when people redefine the means by with we identify ideologies.
By the same token though, doesn’t socialism exactly mean basic welfare? Doesn’t socialism just boil down to looking after every member of society equally, such as with basic welfare if they aren’t working or universal healthcare to make sure anyone can access it regardless of station or wealth?
When it comes to defining economic systems, no. Unless the workers own the means of production, it’s not socialism. Even social democracies like the Nordic countries is just capitalism with safety nets and strong unions, not socialism. Calling such a system socialism only muddies the waters, which is exactly why Republicans do it, to conflate basic welfare systems and unions with evil socialism! We shouldn’t empower Republican talking points.
I see, so what’s the difference between that and Communism, I’d always thought the difference was socialism was the, I guess goal of supporting all of society? Regardless of the economic approach that generated the money. I’m pretty unfamiliar with this kind of discussion and I want to rectify that haha
Communism is the communal ownership of all means of production (not just the workers owning the place they work at like socialism) and communal distribution of resources based on need (ideally). A hippie commune where everyone works a job and everyone is distributed food, goods, etc. based on their needs without money being involved is a solid, small scale model of communism, though there are a lot of issues and various theoretical solutions when it’s scaled up beyond a group of like-minded individuals who all know each other. In theory such a society is classless and has no use for currency. The reality is such a society has never actually existed and things fell apart along the way, usually by someone seizing power in the transitionary period and the state becoming a dictatorship instead.
For small scale references, worker cooperatives are a good example of socialism and communes are a good example of communism.
Ok I think I understand, thank you for taking the time to write it out for me 🙂
Democrats are neo-liberals, republican are fascists, who would you like to fuck you in the ass first?
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There is no neoliberalism in china.
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The neoliberals try claiming china’s accomplishments as their own? Pathetic.
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The term neoliberal was created to be misleading.
Neoliberalism was created, as a term, to describe something real, pervasive, and problematic. It has been co-opted as an underserving boogyman by the left, and co-opted mistakenly by the right as libertarianism. Neither understand it’s original formulation and what it names.
