Flickr/Marta Nimeva Nimeviene. Some rights reserved.In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with the system pulled back from the brink only thanks to massive – and completely orthodoxy-defying – deficit spending by governments, many of us on the Left believed that neoliberalism’s days were counted, so spectacularly had it failed.
As Paul Heideman wrote, ‘the feeling of the day was that the era of unfettered marketization was coming to a close. A new period of what was loosely referred to as Keynesianism would be the inevitable result of a crisis caused by markets run amok’. I was among those who, in a perversely naïve way, believed that the system would self-correct, giving way to a better, fairer, greener world – not unlike what had happened in the United States after the Great Depression, and in Europe after the Second World War.
As we all know, the exact opposite has happened. Not only has the neoliberal regime gone largely unchallenged all throughout the west – its ideological dogmas broken only insofar as it was necessary to keep the system alive (quantitative easing – i.e., printing money and giving it away to banks and the wealthy – being the most obvious example); in the case of Europe, the political-financial elites successfully exploited (and to some extent ‘engineered’) the crisis to lodge the most violent attack on democracy, labour and the welfare state in recent history, and to impose an even more extreme neoliberal order on the continent.
