Neoliberalism Quotes

“Wikipedia: Neoliberalism”

“The very concept of collective responsibility for human well-being is under attack by neo-liberalism all over the world.”

“Neoliberalism, despite the claim by its adherents that it was simply an economic theory, was from its beginnings a class project articulated on behalf of the interests of capital.”

“The alliance’s expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious military-industrial complex that underpins much of its economy and society.”

“Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?”

“In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.”

“In the last three decades, neoliberalism and global capitalism have destroyed social democracies, widened gaps between rich and poor, dispossessed farmers, assaulted indigenous peoples, and marketized the entire world, all the while escalating the war on animals and intensifying the assault on every ecosystem on the earth as a whole.”

“The Global South countries have been suffering from Thatcherism and Reaganomics, just like England and the United States have been devastated by neoliberalism.”

“We have preserved social security and the welfare state, but at the expense of employment. Neo-liberalism, which put the emphasis on the market, manifested itself in Europe by the policies led by Margaret Thatcher, who sometimes had good reasons to prise off the shackles which were condemning British society to decline. But [Thatcherite policies] fell into an excess of laissez faire.”

“[Securing] resources for large-scale economic transformational change [...] can be achieved by a government committed to subordinating markets in money, goods and services to regulatory democracy [...]. 'Free-market' neoliberal economic policies that detach markets from society's oversight achieve the reverse. They are designed to subject markets to private, not public, democratic authority.”

“The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of 'spillover' or 'trickle' – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems.”

“The idea of the rule of law lies at the heart of the neo-liberal view of the nature and role of the state. More than this, however, it is the deep fault line that divides neo-liberalism and social democracy and, for that matter, more radical forms of socialism. On the neo-liberal view social democracy and socialism are outside the rule of law. On the face of it, this might seem to be rather an arcane point.”

“And it’s gone on for the United States. We have measures of it. I’m sure you know that the Rand Corporation about a year ago came out with an estimate that about $50 trillion – That’s not pennies – $50 trillion had been transferred to the pockets of the top 1%, or to a fraction of them, mostly in the last 40 years of class war. Meanwhile, real wages have stagnated, and for mail workers, benefits have collapsed.”

“The central claim of today’s neoliberal economic orthodoxy is that all problems are caused by labor being too greedy, and putting its own living standards above the ideal of creating a wealthy rentier class to lord it over them. The aim of cutting back credit is to reduce employment by bringing on a new recession, there by rolling wages back – and also making working conditions much harsher, blocking labor unionization, and cutting back public programs on social spending.”

“The collapse of communism, then, opened the entire world to capitalist penetration, shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.”

“In the early, expansive years of neoliberalism, unpopularity and policy failures were less of a problem. The first country where the philosophy was applied was not a democracy. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, which began with a military coup in 1973, turned what had been a relatively open and egalitarian society into a laboratory for polarising free-market policies such as privatisation and austerity.”

“The utterly shambolic response of ruling elites to the coronavirus crisis in both Britain and the US is symptomatic of neoliberalism — of 40 years of profiteering, of grotesque greed, of privatisation of public services, of contempt for ordinary people and their needs. [...] The time has come to put an end to neoliberalism. This crisis is a radical opportunity. Another system is possible. Another system is a necessity.”

“Singapore has become a stratified society. Years of unevenly distributed growth in a neoliberal growth regime has led to emergence of a class of working and non-working poor who face insurmountable challenges in uplifting themselves from a cycle of poverty.”

“Despite powerful mobilizations that brought them to power, the progressive administrations in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela discovered that structural constraints closed off the possibilities for systemic change. Two decades of neoliberalism had so transformed the class structure of these countries that the social base of Pink Tide governments, while militant, had little economic leverage against capital. Backed primarily by workers in the informal economy and marginalized communities, left-wing governments simply lacked the leverage to challenge ruling classes.”

“In the West, I think a large part of what’s happening, a very large part, is the bitter, savage, class war that’s been conducted for the last 40 years. It’s called neoliberalism. It even has rhetoric about markets and so on. But that’s widely misleading. It’s basically savage class war. And it was understood by the leaders. It starts with Reagan and Thatcher. Their first moves in office were to attack, undermine the labor movement, opening the door for the corporate sector to enter with illegal strike-breaking efforts, organization efforts tolerated by the criminal state. That made sense. If you’re going to carry out a bitter, savage class war, better eliminate all the means of defense.”