A Brief History of Neoliberalism

by David Harvey

Within these towers, trading between floors creates a vast amount of fictitious wealth.

Accumulation by dispossession comprises four main features:

Innumerable ways exist to skim off values from within the financial system.

For the alleged commodity ‘labour power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity.

The individualized and relatively powerless worker then confronts a labour market in which only short-term contracts are offered on a customized basis. Security of tenure becomes a thing of the past

the geographical mobility of capital permits it to dominate a global labour force whose own geographical mobility is constrained.

But by focusing on those rights rather than on the creation or recreation of substantive and open democratic governance structures, the opposition cultivates methods that cannot escape the neoliberal frame. Neoliberal concern for the individual trumps any social democratic concern for equality, democracy, and social solidarities.

NGOs thereby function as ‘Trojan horses for global neoliberalism

us. Even within the liberal conception as laid out in the UN Charter there are derivative rights, such as freedoms of speech and expression, of education and economic security, rights to organize unions, and the like. Enforcing these rights would have posed a serious challenge to neoliberalism. Making these derivative rights primary and the primary rights of private property and the profit rate derivative would entail a revolution of great significance in political-economic practices.

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 concepts of freedom might be appropriate to our times.

power. But when income and wealth inequalities reach a point—as they have today—close to that which preceded the crash of 1929, then the economic imbalances become so chronic as to be in danger of generating a structural crisis.

It is unthinkable but not impossible that the US will become like Argentina in 2001 overnight.

And the huge bankruptcies of Long Term Capital Management, Orange County, and others who speculated and lost, followed by the collapse of several major companies in 2001–2 in the midst of astonishing accounting lapses, not only cost the public dear but also demonstrated how fragile and fictitious much of neoliberal financialization has become.

The consolidation of neoconservative authoritarianism then emerges as one potential answer.