Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

The orthodox understanding of economic policy was always unrealistic. As a practice of power, neoliberalism had always been radically pragmatic. Its real history was that of a series of state interventions in the interests of capital accumulation, including the forceful deployment of state violence to bulldoze opposition.52 Whatever the doctrinal twists and turns, the social realities with which the market revolution had been entwined since the 1970s—the entrenched influence of wealth over politics, the law and the media, the disempowerment of workers—all perdured. And what historic force was it that was bursting the dikes of the neoliberal order? The story we will be tracing in this book is not that of a revival of class struggle or of a radical populist challenge. What did the damage was a plague unleashed by heedless global growth and the massive flywheel of financial accumulation.