The Corporate Contradictions of Neoliberalism
americanaffairsjournal.org
americanaffairsjournal.org
Very briefly, my feeling is owners have become so faceless and indirect that executives and boards have sort of "broken loose" and created "their own class", effectively answering to no-one. I suspect that this breeds a "political" work environment, and a kind of inequality that is more difficult to accept psychologically (than the old owner-worker divide): that some people are paid hundreds of times more for what is essentially their labor, and have vastly greater opportunities, than others, mostly based on "who they know". It incentivizes a "you scratch my back; I scratch your's (at the owner's expense of course)" kind of economy.
Anybody feel similarly? Anybody better able to put it into words? :P
Corporate charters seem most like copyright. If its there, you might as well use it to your own advantage, and you might as well expand it everywhere you can get away with since its using the power of the state to your advantage.
(The Pacific Northwest?)
My "all governments are bad, but government is good" leftist friend derisively calls me neoliberal for me thinking US has moral superiority over Russia, or that we should project power in any part of the world but our own. He's a good guy, though.
Take a look at Macron in France - he sure stepped right up to a hardline of "strength over liberties" after the London attacks.
I equate neoliberal with corporatist.
Neoliberalism is a right-wing (but not far-right) position.
> The most effective neoliberals are "centrist" and rely as much on "strong defense" and "economy uber allies" posturing as neoconservatives.
Neoconservatism is essentially the policy of using (specifically US) military force and related means to establish and secure a neoliberal international regime. The names might make you think that neoliberalism and neoconservatism are opposed, but that is not at all the case.
> I equate neoliberal with corporatist.
Pro-corporate capitalist would be accurate. Corporatism is a whole different thing.
(This isn't just a neoliberalism thing: any political philosophy will be different in theory than when it has to meet the real world. Neoliberalism got bit by this harder than most because it actually did "take over the world" and, admittedly, because it pretty much sows the seeds of cronyism in its fundamental principles)
Long story short, it could've been a good idea but it went badly wrong, and there are some people who are trying to figure out a way to have just the good bits.
No, it got bit by it because the real-world thing now called "neoliberalism" (since about the 1980s) has no connection whatsoever to the politico-economic theory called "neoliberalism"; the latter was an 1930s path between classical unconstrained capitalism and socialism, the former is just a new name applied to the internationalization of unconstrained capitalism.
That said, with liberalism & non-populist centrism in general on the ropes in advanced democracies, I could see the term being embraced and rehabilitated. See the already mentioned /r/neoliberalism for an example that I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. Does meme magic work on centrist compromises?
Early roots of neoliberalism were laid in the 1970s, during the Jimmy Carter administration, with deregulation of the trucking, banking, and airline industries.[76][77][78] This trend continued into the 1980s, under the Reagan Administration, which included tax cuts, increased defense spending, financial deregulation and trade deficit expansion.[79] Likewise, concepts of supply-side economics, discussed by the Democrats in the 1970s, culminated in the 1980 Joint Economic Committee report, "Plugging in the Supply Side." This was picked up and advanced by the Reagan administration, with Congress following Reagan's basic proposal and cutting federal income taxes across the board by 25% in 1981.[80]
During the 1990s, the Clinton Administration also embraced neoliberalism[68] by supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act, and implementing cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.[79][81][82] The neoliberalism of the Clinton Administration differs from that of Reagan, as the Clinton Administration purged neoliberalism of neoconservative positions on militarism, family values, opposition to multiculturalism and neglect of ecological issues.
You couldn't get elected in this country without being a neoliberal for the last 30 years. Bill Clinton got elected precisely because he was a relatively conservative Democrat from the south. The only reason nobody wants to identify as a neoliberal is because it has the word liberal in it and people want to get elected.
Saw a similar comment the other day about neoliberalism being a newfangled nonpartisan movement (not accusing you of saying that), but the populist movements are around because of its flaws.
You don't hear discussion of neoliberalism often for the same reason fish don't often discuss water; it's the prevailing ideology of our time so it is pervasive and "the way things are". Things which are not neoliberal are, by definition, radical and extreme. The only people who talk about it are the people like philosophers who do deep critique of society and our economic and moral system, or those who wish to set themselves apart from it like e.g. communists, nationalists, socialists.
They love their businesses, but that doesn't translate to state charters.
A small cadre of elite economists that convened as the Mont Pelerin Society (led by Hayek) called themselves neoliberals for a bit but stopped using the term.