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Can someone please explain neoliberalism to me in a way my brain will be capable of easily digesting? Every time I try and read a definition I can't concentrate past the first few words. I search 'what is neoliberalism?' and the results read...
Neoliberalism is an ideology that postulates blah blah market-cap blah blah deregulation blah blah state intervention blah blah unprecedented era blah blah deregulation blah blah commerce
I secretly think noone really knows what it actually is. Like..... Ow! I just stubbed my toe! That is so neoliberalism.
Ugh, Mondays. So neoliberalism.
️ 
️ Surprisingly coherent
@ira @TheBreadmonkey add far right too. Not the fascists themselves, but they join them to exploit the situation
Business good, government bad.
Isn't that just capitalism?
@TheBreadmonkey capitalism is "I get money because I own the things the workers use to make things I can sell for a profit".
So there IS a connection.
@AlexanderVI so, capitalism is just "business good". Command capitalism is what was around before neoliberalism, where the government dictates prices whenever itvfeels like it, it's what monarchies did - "business good, government better". Then there's socialism - "business bad, government good", and anarchism - "business bad, government also bad", and, well, now you know everything there is to know about economics and politics. congratulations!
@wouldinotcallmyselfahumanbeing per my previous email
@AlexanderVI sorry, don't mind me, just extrapolating unnecessarily based on your rather excellent template because I wanted to collect the whole set
@TheBreadmonkey @AlexanderVI No, we had capitalism before Thatcher and Reagan. Post-FDR, both left and right had believed that the economy needed to be regulated by government. Then came the idea that government was inherently a bad thing, and that the private sector could do everything better than government. Hence: free trade agreements, deregulation, welfare cuts, privatization, minimal taxes, etc. That shift was the rise of neoliberalism.
@bodhipaksa @TheBreadmonkey @AlexanderVI
Does that mean that before Reagan was "business good, government good"?
@Perrin42 @TheBreadmonkey @AlexanderVI There was a “post-war consensus” where both parties agreed on things like progressive taxation, environmental protection (the GOP created the EPA), that immigration was a good thing, that government should create educational opportunities for all, that monopolies had to be prevented, etc. so yes, business was seen as good if properly regulated. Government was seen as an essential tool for helping ordinary people.
@TheBreadmonkey @AlexanderVI it's pretty much the conversion of capitalism into a political ideology. It ain't pretty.
@TheBreadmonkey It's just normal liberalism, but starring Keanu Reeves, with the immortal line "I know corporate kung fu."
@scribblanitea
Now I've got to know what Trinity-liberalism means!
@TheBreadmonkey
@gnate @TheBreadmonkey I expect there are three possibilities.
@TheBreadmonkey Although neoliberalism is an actual thing, 90% of references to 'neoliberalism' are actually about something else, so it's really not worth trying to pin down a definition.
Just file it under capitalist bad ideas and move on.
@TheBreadmonkey Bascially those free market, anti-welfare state/state ownership Thatcherite ideas which have since been accepted across the political spectrum including in the Labour Party.
@Nickiquote ... despite the fact that they have been repeatedly shown to be actively harmful, both to individuals and to society as a whole. @TheBreadmonkey
So what we used to consider as Tory ideals but now adopted by Labour as a form of 'new' or 'neo' 'wiberalism' or 'liberalism'
This was funnier in my head. Reading it back it looks like I'm having an aneurysm.
@TheBreadmonkey @Nickiquote evergreen Ben toot.
@TheBreadmonkey the idea is that it harks back to 19th century classical liberalism by contrast to social liberalism or what most people would consider liberal today.
For a lot of the post-1945 period both the Tories and Labour adopted the ideas of nationalisation and the welfare state. For the Tories this was about social cohesion, or a kind of paternal attitude to the poor, and also avoiding revolution. The Thatcherites rejected this as did Blair and we are where we are.
Fucked.
@Nickiquote @TheBreadmonkey … ie a transfer of power to the wealthy mercantile class. Back then from royals and nobility. Now from democratic institutions
@TheBreadmonkey @Nickiquote "New Labour, New Danger" indeed.
@TheBreadmonkey it's a religion in which followers worship 'the invisible hand' of 'the market' and believe against all evidence that this deity will fix everything, eventually. The enemy of the market God is the Demon State, which is anything and everything public sector. True believers must destroy the State, sacrifice all public services to the market God and thus achieve utopia. Anyone with evidence in favour of public goods is in league with the demon and must be destroyed.
It's what makes things bad. Apparently. I totally agree. Nobody agrees on anything about it other than it is bad.
@TheBreadmonkey I'd recommend the recent episode of The Blindboy Podcast which explains this very well.
@TheBreadmonkey “I’m rich, so rules shouldn’t apply to me, and I want lots of rules for everyone else to stop them getting rich”
@TheBreadmonkey not going to add to the list of takes here, but you did prompt me to reread the wikipedia article. You seemed to be right first, but when I got to:
"Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation,[…]" it started making some sense to me.
Some people really believed they could define it, and I think they achieved a word with some meaning to it, although I'm not going to be using it often…
@TheBreadmonkey Hell, as an American, I can’t get meaningful definitions of liberalism. Reagan spent the entire 80’s blasting leftist liberals, so that’s where I start. Now I see people I consider to be liberals blasting liberals.
Frankly, I think a lot of them just absorbed Reagan’s hostility and now use it indiscriminately on anything that isn’t full on socialism.
@TheBreadmonkey
It's a system that espouses (1) markets and (2) technocratic bureaucracies as managers of society.
@TheBreadmonkey from what I understand, and do understand if I do have some details wrong, neoliberalism is the ideology that is basically "no no, you see? They're just doing capitalism the wrong way! It's totally not a problem with the foundations of the ideology!"
@TheBreadmonkey George Monbiot wrote a book called "The Invisible Doctrine" on neoliberalism. Here he is chatting about the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwHTd7AnZ7c