Before we get into your newest book on Marx's Capital...
You're well known for your book "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" and what you very clearly say that
neoliberalism was first and foremost a political project devised by the corporate
capitalist class towards the late 1960s and early 1970s to consolidate class power.
A lot of younger politically active and progressive people particularly here in America like to use
that word to sort of criticize a sort of ideology of certain types of politicians, economists, business leaders...
members of the media and so on.
They, in one way or another, disagree with, but if you often really press those people to define what they mean by
"neoliberalism" they struggle to articulate a definition for it.
Briefly explain what you mean by "neoliberalism" that might help us understand it better
and why it might be such an important and relevant thing for people to understand. I
I saw Neoliberalism as a way of talking about the emergence of a political project.
It really sort of had its roots in the 1960s,
but I think became more and more urgent in the 1970s because
the capitalist class was losing power, influence, wealth...
And I think they wanted to recover what they felt was rightfully theirs.
And they used the situation in the 1970s to launch a really conscious program,
and it wasn't a conspiracy in the sense of a few people on the ground. It was fairly upfront.
It was funding all of the think tanks like Manhattan Institute to no rest of it to produce a counter-narrative
as to what the nature of the problems were (and the nature) and those problems really focused on.
The workers had too much power.
They had to be somehow that disciplined and the big question was how to go about doing that.
So there emerged then this political project who tried to attack working-class power.
There have been attempts to do so by mobilizing immigration through the immigration reform in this country in the 1965.
But that didn't seem to work so then
if you couldn't bring in the workers you took capital out to where the labor was and so
you start to get this shift towards pushing towards globalization.
Which was facilitated by some technological changes in transport, and I always think:
One of the big things (that) has never (been) talked about is the container ship which allowed the... I
Mr. Mcclean I
Absolutely, absolutely wonderful.
So... So...
Neoliberalism is about many of those things.
Since then people have recognized that there is an ideology, which could be constructed behind it which
largely comes from looking at
Hayek and Friedman and people like that and the Montpelier project and so on and and obviously any
any political project needs an ideology to back it up, and that was... that was it.
But I always think it's interesting that, in practice,
that ideology was never really... Manifest.
A lot of the ideology was of course about free markets and competition and so on, and actually,
because a lot of the practice was about monopoly control and all the rest of it.
So there is the ideology. There is the notion you will find in some places, which is that it was a
set of public policies and the public policy people decided to take things in a different direction.
People got very upset about levels of debt, and wanted to retire the debt,
and so you get the notion of austerity as a public policy.
And then there are all sorts of other things and some people traced neoliberalism back to Foucault and
the like and and one of the things that's disturbed me very much is that I thought it was a very clear way to
understand it through class perspective.
But a lot of writing about Neoliberalism talks about everything except the class perspective,
and it's very interesting.
I read these books on neoliberalism, and they never mention my book!
And as a result there is a very peculiar kind of situation where the idea of neoliberalism has become so confused that
some people say we shouldn't use it because it's just an incoherent project.
And that myself was struck me as a very interesting history the way in which, you know, sort of...
And I still think that if you keep to my definition
and when people ask me "Has neoliberalism died with the crisis of 2007 and 2008?" my answer is that:
No! The political project is still alive and well and in fact if you look at
who was benefited most from the crisis of 2007, 2008... It's been the top one percent!
The ideology has taken some hits since it's been hard to sort of
talk about, you know, efficient market hypothesis and all those kinds of things.
What you see is that the project which is about
concentrating and accumulating more wealth and power within a very small fraction of
the capitalist class and corporate world that project is alive as it's ever been.