* How has the inception of neoliberalism transformed the political economy of the world? Starting when and where has this taken place?

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Introduction

Future historians may well look upon the years 1978–80 as a revo- lutionary turning-point in the world’s social and economic history. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping took the first momentous steps towards the liberalization of a communist-ruled economy in a country that accounted for a fifth of the world’s population. The path that Deng defined was to transform China in two decades from a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism with sustained growth rates unparalleled in human history. On the other side of the Pacific, and in quite different circumstances, a relatively obscure (but now renowned) figure named Paul Volcker took command at the US Federal Reserve in July 1979, and within a few months dramatically changed monetary policy. The Fed thereafter took the lead in the fight against inflation no matter what its con- sequences (particularly as concerned unemployment). Across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher had already been elected Prime Minister of Britain in May 1979, with a mandate to curb trade union power and put an end to the miserable inflationary stagna- tion that had enveloped the country for the preceding decade. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and, armed with geniality and personal charisma, set the US on course to revitalize its economy by supporting Volcker’s moves at the Fed and adding his own particular blend of policies to curb the power of labour, deregulate industry, agriculture, and resource extraction, and liberate the powers of finance both internally and on the world stage. From these several epicentres, revolutionary impulses seemingly spread and reverberated to remake the world around us in a totally different image.

Transformations of this scope and depth do not occur by acci- dent. So it is pertinent to enquire by what means and paths the

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, OUP Oxford, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stpu/detail.action?docID=422896.

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Introduction

new economic configuration––often subsumed under the term ‘globalization’––was plucked from the entrails of the old. Volcker, Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xaioping all took minority argu- ments that had long been in circulation and made them majoritar- ian (though in no case without a protracted struggle). Reagan brought to life the minority tradition that stretched back within the Republican Party to Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s. Deng saw the rising tide of wealth and influence in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea and sought to mobilize market socialism instead of central planning to protect and advance the interests of the Chinese state. Volcker and Thatcher both plucked from the shadows of relative obscurity a particular doctrine that went under the name of ‘neoliberalism’ and transformed it into the central guiding principle of economic thought and management. And it is with this doctrine––its origins, rise, and implications–– that I am here primarily concerned.1

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political eco- nomic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.

There has everywhere been an emphatic turn towards neoliber- alism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s.

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Introduction

Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common. Almost all states, from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in other instances in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly. Post-apartheid South Africa quickly embraced neoliberalism, and even contemporary China, as we shall see, appears to be headed in this direction. Furthermore, the advo- cates of the neoliberal way now occupy positions of considerable influence in education (the universities and many ‘think tanks’), in the media, in corporate boardrooms and financial institutions, in key state institutions (treasury departments, the central banks), and also in those international institutions such as the Inter- national Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) that regulate global finance and trade. Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of dis- course. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.

The process of neoliberalization has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sover- eignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, repro- ductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart. In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substi- tuting for all previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace.2 It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. This requires tech- nologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyse, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace. Hence neoliberalism’s intense interest in and pursuit of information technologies (leading some

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Introduction

to proclaim the emergence of a new kind of ‘information society’). These technologies have compressed the rising density of market transactions in both space and time. They have produced a particu- larly intensive burst of what I have elsewhere called ‘time-space compression’. The greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on ‘globalization’) and the shorter the term of market contracts the better. This latter preference parallels Lyotard’s famous description of the postmodern condition as one where ‘the temporary contract’ supplants ‘permanent institutions in the pro- fessional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political affairs’. The cultural consequences of the dominance of such a market ethic are legion, as I earlier showed in The Condition of Postmodernity.3

While many general accounts of global transformations and their effects are now available, what is generally missing––and this is the gap this book aims to fill––is the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated so com- prehensively on the world stage. Critical engagement with that story suggests, furthermore, a framework for identifying and con- structing alternative political and economic arrangements.

I have benefited in recent times from conversations with Gerard Duménil, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch. I have more long- standing debts to Masao Miyoshi, Giovanni Arrighi, Patrick Bond, Cindi Katz, Neil Smith, Bertell Ollman, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. A conference on neoliberalism sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin in November 2001 first sparked my interest in this topic. I thank the Provost at the CUNY Graduate Center, Bill Kelly, and my colleagues and students pri- marily but not exclusively in the Anthropology Program for their interest and support. I absolve everyone, of course, from any responsibility for the results.

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1 Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual appar- atus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual appar- atus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question. The founding figures of neolib- eral thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as ‘the central values of civilization’. In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose.

Concepts of dignity and individual freedom are powerful and appealing in their own right. Such ideals empowered the dissident movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War as well as the students in Tiananmen Square. The student movements that swept the world in 1968––from Paris and Chicago to Bangkok and Mexico City––were in part animated by the quest for greater freedoms of speech and of personal choice. More generally, these ideals appeal to anyone who values the ability to make decisions for themselves.

The idea of freedom, long embedded in the US tradition, has played a conspicuous role in the US in recent years. ‘9/11’ was immediately interpreted by many as an attack on it. ‘A peaceful world of growing freedom’, wrote President Bush on the first anniversary of that awful day, ‘serves American long-term inter- ests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America’s allies.’ ‘Humanity’, he concluded, ‘holds in its hands the opportunity to

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Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

offer freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes’, and ‘the United States welcomes its responsibilities to lead in this great mission’. This language was incorporated into the US National Defense Strategy document issued shortly thereafter. ‘Freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world’, he later said, adding that ‘as the greatest power on earth we have an obliga- tion to help the spread of freedom’.1

When all of the other reasons for engaging in a pre-emptive war against Iraq were proven wanting, the president appealed to the idea that the freedom conferred on Iraq was in and of itself an adequate justification for the war. The Iraqis were free, and that was all that really mattered. But what sort of ‘freedom’ is envis- aged here, since, as the cultural critic Matthew Arnold long ago thoughtfully observed, ‘freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere’.2 To what destination, then, are the Iraqi people expected to ride the horse of freedom donated to them by force of arms?

The Bush administration’s answer to this question was spelled out on 19 September 2003, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coali- tion Provisional Authority, promulgated four orders that included ‘the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits . . . the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and . . . the elimination of nearly all trade barriers’.3 The orders were to apply to all areas of the economy, including public services, the media, manufacturing, services, transportation, finance, and construction. Only oil was exempt (presumably because of its special status as revenue pro- ducer to pay for the war and its geopolitical significance). The labour market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted. A highly regressive ‘flat tax’ (an ambitious tax- reform plan long advocated for implementation by conservatives in the US) was also imposed.

These orders were, some argued, in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off.4 Some Iraqis resisted the imposition of what the London Economist

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Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

called a ‘capitalist dream’ regime upon Iraq. A member of the US- appointed Coalition Provisional Authority forcefully criticized the imposition of ‘free market fundamentalism’, calling it ‘a flawed logic that ignores history’.5 Though Bremer’s rules may have been illegal when imposed by an occupying power, they would become legal if confirmed by a ‘sovereign’ government. The interim gov- ernment, appointed by the US, that took over at the end of June 2004 was declared ‘sovereign’. But it only had the power to con- firm existing laws. Before the handover, Bremer multiplied the number of laws to specify free-market and free-trade rules in minute detail (on detailed matters such as copyright laws and intellectual property rights), expressing the hope that these institutional arrangements would ‘take on a life and momentum of their own’ such that they would prove very difficult to reverse.6

According to neoliberal theory, the sorts of measures that Bremer outlined were both necessary and sufficient for the cre- ation of wealth and therefore for the improved well-being of the population at large. The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.7 What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profit- able capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. I call this kind of state apparatus a neoliberal state. The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial cap- ital. Bremer invited the Iraqis, in short, to ride their horse of freedom straight into the neoliberal corral.

The first experiment with neoliberal state formation, it is worth recalling, occurred in Chile after Pinochet’s coup on the ‘little September 11th’ of 1973 (almost thirty years to the day before Bremer’s announcement of the regime to be installed in Iraq). The coup, against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, was promoted by domestic business elites threatened by Allende’s drive towards socialism. It was backed by US corporations, the CIA, and US Secretary of State Henry Kiss- inger. It violently repressed all the social movements and political

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Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

organizations of the left and dismantled all forms of popular organization (such as the community health centres in poorer neighbourhoods). The labour market was ‘freed’ from regulatory or institutional restraints (trade union power, for example). But how was the stalled economy to be revived? The policies of import substitution (fostering national industries by subsidies or tariff protections) that had dominated Latin American attempts at eco- nomic development had fallen into disrepute, particularly in Chile, where they had never worked that well. With the whole world in economic recession, a new approach was called for.

A group of economists known as ‘the Chicago boys’ because of their attachment to the neoliberal theories of Milton Friedman, then teaching at the University of Chicago, was summoned to help reconstruct the Chilean economy. The story of how they were chosen is an interesting one. The US had funded training of Chil- ean economists at the University of Chicago since the 1950s as part of a Cold War programme to counteract left-wing tendencies in Latin America. Chicago-trained economists came to dominate at the private Catholic University in Santiago. During the early 1970s, business elites organized their opposition to Allende through a group called ‘the Monday Club’ and developed a work- ing relationship with these economists, funding their work through research institutes. After General Gustavo Leigh, Pino- chet’s rival for power and a Keynesian, was sidelined in 1975, Pino- chet brought these economists into the government, where their first job was to negotiate loans with the International Monetary Fund. Working alongside the IMF, they restructured the economy according to their theories. They reversed the nationalizations and privatized public assets, opened up natural resources (fisheries, timber, etc.) to private and unregulated exploitation (in many cases riding roughshod over the claims of indigenous inhabitants), pri- vatized social security, and facilitated foreign direct investment and freer trade. The right of foreign companies to repatriate profits from their Chilean operations was guaranteed. Export-led growth was favoured over import substitution. The only sector reserved for the state was the key resource of copper (rather like oil in Iraq). This proved crucial to the budgetary viability of the state since copper revenues flowed exclusively into its coffers. The immediate

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Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

revival of the Chilean economy in terms of growth rates, capital accumulation, and high rates of return on foreign investments was short-lived. It all went sour in the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. The result was a much more pragmatic and less ideologically driven application of neoliberal policies in the years that followed. All of this, including the pragmatism, provided helpful evidence to support the subsequent turn to neoliberalism in both Britain (under Thatcher) and the US (under Reagan) in the 1980s. Not for the first time, a brutal experiment carried out in the periphery became a model for the formulation of policies in the centre (much as experimentation with the flat tax in Iraq has been proposed under Bremer’s decrees).8

The fact that two such obviously similar restructurings of the state apparatus occurred at such different times in quite different parts of the world under the coercive influence of the United States suggests that the grim reach of US imperial power might lie behind the rapid proliferation of neoliberal state forms throughout the world from the mid-1970s onwards. While this has undoubt- edly occurred over the last thirty years, it by no means constitutes the whole story, as the domestic component of the neoliberal turn in Chile shows. It was not the US, furthermore, that forced Mar- garet Thatcher to take the pioneering neoliberal path she took in 1979. Nor was it the US that forced China in 1978 to set out on a path of liberalization. The partial moves towards neoliberalization in India in the 1980s and Sweden in the early 1990s cannot easily be attributed to the imperial reach of US power. The uneven geographical development of neoliberalism on the world stage has evidently been a very complex process entailing multiple determinations and not a little chaos and confusion. Why, then, did the neoliberal turn occur, and what were the forces that made it so hegemonic within global capitalism?

Why the Neoliberal Turn?

The restructuring of state forms and of international relations after the Second World War was designed to prevent a return to the catastrophic conditions that had so threatened the capitalist order in the great slump of the 1930s. It was also supposed to

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3 The Neoliberal State

The role of the state in neoliberal theory is reasonably easy to define. The practice of neoliberalization has, however, evolved in such a way as to depart significantly from the template that theory provides. The somewhat chaotic evolution and uneven geo- graphical development of state institutions, powers, and functions over the last thirty years suggests, furthermore, that the neoliberal state may be an unstable and contradictory political form.

The Neoliberal State in Theory

According to theory, the neoliberal state should favour strong indi- vidual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade.1 These are the insti- tutional arrangements considered essential to guarantee individual freedoms. The legal framework is that of freely negotiated con- tractual obligations between juridical individuals in the market- place. The sanctity of contracts and the individual right to freedom of action, expression, and choice must be protected. The state must therefore use its monopoly of the means of violence to pre- serve these freedoms at all costs. By extension, the freedom of businesses and corporations (legally regarded as individuals) to operate within this institutional framework of free markets and free trade is regarded as a fundamental good. Private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation. Intellectual property rights are protected (for example through patents) so as to encourage technological changes. Continuous increases in productivity should then deliver higher living standards to everyone. Under the assumption that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, or of ‘trickle down’, neoliberal theory

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The Neoliberal State

holds that the elimination of poverty (both domestically and worldwide) can best be secured through free markets and free trade.

Neoliberals are particularly assiduous in seeking the privatiza- tion of assets. The absence of clear private property rights––as in many developing countries––is seen as one of the greatest of all institutional barriers to economic development and the improve- ment of human welfare. Enclosure and the assignment of private property rights is considered the best way to protect against the so- called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (the tendency for individuals to irresponsibly super-exploit common property resources such as land and water). Sectors formerly run or regulated by the state must be turned over to the private sphere and be deregulated (freed from any state interference). Competition––between indi- viduals, between firms, between territorial entities (cities, regions, nations, regional groupings)––is held to be a primary virtue. The ground-rules for market competition must be properly observed, of course. In situations where such rules are not clearly laid out or where property rights are hard to define, the state must use its power to impose or invent market systems (such as trading in pollution rights). Privatization and deregulation combined with competition, it is claimed, eliminate bureaucratic red tape, increase efficiency and productivity, improve quality, and reduce costs, both directly to the consumer through cheaper commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden. The neoliberal state should persistently seek out internal reorgan- izations and new institutional arrangements that improve its competitive position as an entity vis-à-vis other states in the global market.

While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being. This principle extends into the realms of welfare, education, health care, and even pensions (social security has been privatized in Chile and Slovakia, and proposals exist to do the same in the US). Individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or per- sonal failings (such as not investing significantly enough in one’s own human capital through education) rather than being

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The Neoliberal State

attributed to any systemic property (such as the class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism).

The free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and coun- tries is regarded as crucial. All barriers to that free movement (such as tariffs, punitive taxation arrangements, planning and environmental controls, or other locational impediments) have to be removed, except in those areas crucial to ‘the national interest’, however that is defined. State sovereignty over commodity and capital movements is willingly surrendered to the global market. International competition is seen as healthy since it improves effi- ciency and productivity, lowers prices, and thereby controls inflationary tendencies. States should therefore collectively seek and negotiate the reduction of barriers to movement of capital across borders and the opening of markets (for both commodities and capital) to global exchange. Whether or not this applies to labour as a commodity is, however, controversial. To the degree that all states must collaborate to reduce barriers to exchange, so co-ordinating structures such as the group of advanced capitalist nations (the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan) known as the G7 (now the G8 with the addition of Russia) must arise. International agreements between states guaranteeing the rule of law and freedoms of trade, such as those now incorporated in the World Trade Organization agreements, are critical to the advancement of the neoliberal project on the global stage.

Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. A strong preference exists for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision-making. Neoliberals prefer to insulate key institutions, such as the central bank, from democratic pres- sures. Given that neoliberal theory centres on the rule of law and a strict interpretation of constitutionality, it follows that conflict and opposition must be mediated through the courts. Solutions and

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The Neoliberal State

remedies to any problems have to be sought by individuals through the legal system.

Tensions and Contradictions

There are some shadowy areas as well as points of conflict within the general theory of the neoliberal state. First, there is the prob- lem of how to interpret monopoly power. Competition often results in monopoly or oligopoly, as stronger firms drive out weaker. Most neoliberal theorists consider this unproblematic (it should, they say, maximize efficiency) provided there are no sub- stantial barriers to the entry of competitors (a condition often hard to realize and which the state may therefore have to nurture). The case of so-called ‘natural monopolies’ is more difficult. It makes no sense to have multiple competing electrical power grids, gas pipe- lines, water and sewage systems, or rail links between Washington and Boston. State regulation of provision, access, and pricing seems unavoidable in such domains. While partial deregulation may be possible (permitting competing producers to feed elec- tricity into the same grid or run trains on the same tracks, for example) the possibilities for profiteering and abuse, as the California power crisis of 2002 abundantly showed, or for deadly muddle and confusion, as the British rail situation has proven, are very real.

The second major arena of controversy concerns market failure. This arises when individuals and firms avoid paying the full costs attributable to them by shedding their liabilities outside the market (the liabilities are, in technical parlance, ‘externalized’). The classic case is that of pollution, where individuals and firms avoid costs by dumping noxious wastes free of charge in the environment. Pro- ductive ecosystems may be degraded or destroyed as a result. Exposure to dangerous substances or physical dangers in the workplace may affect human health and even deplete the pool of healthy labourers in the workforce. While neoliberals admit the problem and some concede the case for limited state intervention, others argue for inaction because the cure will almost certainly be worse than the disease. Most would agree, however, that if there are to be interventions these should work through market

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7 Freedom’s Prospect

In his annual message to Congress in 1935, President Roosevelt made clear his view that excessive market freedoms lay at the root of the economic and social problems of the 1930s Depression. Americans, he said, ‘must forswear that conception of the acquisi- tion of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue pri- vate power’. Necessitous men are not free men. Everywhere, he argued, social justice had become a definite goal rather than a distant ideal. The primary obligation of the state and its civil soci- ety was to use its powers and allocate its resources to eradicate poverty and hunger and to assure security of livelihood, security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life, and the security of decent homes.1 Freedom from want was one of the cardinal four freedoms he later articulated as grounding his political vision for the future. These broad themes contrast with the far narrower neoliberal freedoms that President Bush places at the centre of his political rhetoric. The only way to confront our problems, Bush argues, is for the state to cease to regulate private enterprise, for the state to withdraw from social provision, and for the state to foster the universalization of market freedoms and of market eth- ics. This neoliberal debasement of the concept of freedom ‘into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’ can only mean, as Karl Polanyi points out, ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their demo- cratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’.2

What is so astonishing about the impoverished condition of contemporary public discourse in the US, as well as elsewhere, is the lack of any serious debate as to which of several divergent

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Freedom’s Prospect

concepts of freedom might be appropriate to our times. If it is indeed the case that the US public can be persuaded to support almost anything in the name of freedom, then surely the meaning of this word should be subjected to the deepest scrutiny. Unfortunately, contemporary contributions either take a purely neoliberal line (as does the political commentator Fareed Zakaria, who purports to demonstrate irrefutably that an excess of dem- ocracy is the main threat to individual liberty and freedom) or else trim their sails so closely to dominant neoliberal winds as to offer little in the way of counterpoint to the neoliberal logic. Such is, regrettably, the case with Amartya Sen (who finally, and deservedly, won a Nobel Prize in Economics but only after the neoliberal banker who had long chaired the Nobel committee was forced to step down). Sen’s Development as Freedom, by far the most sensitive contribution to the discussion over recent years, unfortunately wraps up important social and political rights in the mantle of free market interactions.3 Without a liberal-style market, Sen seems to say, none of the other freedoms can work. A substan- tial segment of the US public seems for its part to accept that the distinctively neoliberal freedoms that Bush and his fellow Repub- licans promote are all there is. These freedoms, we are told, are worth dying for in Iraq and the US ‘as the greatest power on earth’ has ‘an obligation’ to help spread them everywhere. The conferral of the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom on Paul Bremer, architect of the neoliberal reconstruction of the Iraqi state, says much about what this segment of the US public stands for.

Roosevelt’s entirely reasonable conceptions sound positively radical by contemporary standards, which probably explains why they have not been articulated by the current Democratic Party as a counterpoint to the narrow entrepreneurial conceptions that Bush holds so dear. Roosevelt’s vision does have an impressive genealogy in humanist thinking. Karl Marx, for example, also held the outrageously radical view that an empty stomach was not con- ducive to freedom. ‘The realm of freedom’, he wrote, ‘actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and of mundane considerations ceases’, adding, for good measure, that it therefore ‘lies beyond the sphere of actual material production’.

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Freedom’s Prospect

He well understood that we could never free ourselves from our metabolic relations with nature or our social relations with each other, but we could at least aspire to build a social order in which the free exploration of our individual and species potential became a real possibility.4 By Marx’s standard of freedom, and almost cer- tainly by that laid out by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, neoliberalization would surely be regarded as a monu- mental failure. For those left or cast outside the market system––a vast reservoir of apparently disposable people bereft of social pro- tections and supportive social structures––there is little to be expected from neoliberalization except poverty, hunger, disease, and despair. Their only hope is somehow to scramble aboard the market system either as petty commodity producers, as informal vendors (of things or labour power), as petty predators to beg, steal, or violently secure some crumbs from the rich man’s table, or as participants in the vast illegal trade of trafficking in drugs, guns, women, or anything else illegal for which there is a demand. This is the Malthusian world blamed on its victims in works such as political journalist Robert Kaplan’s influential essay on ‘the com- ing anarchy’.5 It never crosses Kaplan’s mind that neoliberalization and accumulation by dispossession have anything to do with any of the conditions he describes. The incredible number of anti-IMF riots on record, to say nothing of the crime waves that swept through New York City, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, and many other major cities in the wake of structural adjustment and neoliberal reform, should surely have alerted him.6 At the other end of the wealth scale, those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time or space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as ‘creative’ adventure, leis- ure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements.

It is in this context that we can better understand the emergence of diverse oppositional cultures that from both within and without the market system either explicitly or tacitly reject the market ethic and the practices that neoliberalization imposes. Within the US,

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Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, OUP Oxford, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stpu/detail.action?docID=422896.

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