Donald Trump. Gage Skidmore/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Global neoliberalism is in turmoil. Proven policies have lost traction; established political systems haemorrhage legitimacy, and the ideology that once embodied the common sense of the age has degenerated into a farrago of clichés. Even the steadiest political hands have lost their grip on the levers of power, which, themselves, lack effectiveness. The certainties that used to hold neoliberalism together are melting into the air.
Is this an existential predicament or merely a passing disorientation? Surely, a decade-long economic crisis, the continuing decline of growth rates worldwide, and the rise of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Michel Temer, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the Thai NCPO could be merely the global political economy equivalent of senior moments; however, such alarming repetition would warrant a medical check-up. In what follows, I argue that the economic turmoil in global neoliberalism is now morphing into a political crisis that could engulf the entire system of accumulation: the beast is infirm, and it might become fatal.
A dysfunctional economic system
Neoliberalism has created unprecedentedly favourable conditions for capital accumulation worldwide. They include the west’s victory in the Cold War and the reconstruction of US imperialism, the collapse of nationalist movements and governments in the global south, the decline in the power of trade unions, peasant movements, left parties and social movements, the liberalisation of trade, finance and capital movements and the provision of unparalleled support to accumulation by competing states, the rollback of taxes on the rich and cutbacks on transfers and welfare provision, and the ideological hegemony of a bogus but vociferous ‘free market’ capitalism. At the same time, the availability of new technologies has supported productivity growth and driven the restructuring of accumulation, alongside significant increases in the global labour force, not least with the integration of China and the former Soviet Bloc into global capitalism. They have fostered a steep concentration of power, income and wealth: neoliberalism has created new patterns of inequality and uneven and combined development, in which unparalleled prosperity for certain groups (often identified as financial or other elites or oligarchs, the top 1%, or the top 0.01%) coexist with severe poverty and new patterns of exclusion.
