A New Generation Is Rising Up To Resist Neoliberalism Across the Globe
Nicholas Powers, Truthout, Nov. 26, 2019.
We are protesting against problems in the whole system,” a young Chilean protester said on TV in November. “Above all, the neoliberal system.” The increasing cost of everyday life drove more than a million people from numerous world capitals into the street. In October, Chilean protesters fought cops as buses were torched. Ecuadorians used satellite dishes as shields against police tear gas. In Lebanon, people barricaded roads and held mass sit-ins at state buildings. Since July, throngs of Haitians and Iraqis, frustrated at government corruption, filled the streets, even braving sniper fire and pulling down razor wire blockades.
The protests in the Global South reinforce those in the Global North, like France’s Yellow Vests and Spain’s Indignados. Now a possibility is emerging — a vision of a new internationalism that could upend nearly 50 years of neoliberalism.
- Demonstrators raise their hands in a performance against police violence outside La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on November 12, 2019.
Class War- The Chilean who threw a rock at an armored police van also struck the half-century ideology of neoliberalism. Even as today, governments send police in riot gear to defend that economic ideology, it’s worth remembering that it was first promoted by its authors as a way to protect individuals against the state – although the “state intervention” they were worried about at the time involved services and support that helped millions.
The idea of neoliberalism took shape during the Great Depression and after World War II, when economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek watched in growing dismay at “collectivism” or state intervention in the economy. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dealt with labor strikes and widespread poverty by turning John Keynes’s ideas of government spending to stimulate a moribund economy into the New Deal. In 1945, Britain, facing a mass demobilization of soldiers and a people tired of war-time austerity, created a large welfare state. The U.S.S.R. was a superpower rivaling the West.
So Friedman, Hayek and others met in 1947 at Hotel du Parc and formed The Mont Pelerin Society to fight Keynesianism and Marxism. They believed the more power the state took, the less the individual had until it ended in totalitarianism. Hayek wrote in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, “To achieve their ends planners must create power – power wielded by men – democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom.” He and Friedman saw big government as a potential enemy of the people. It had to be kept small, they said. It had to be limited. Or it would turn on us.
Neoliberalism was a fringe idea, ignored until it became a useful tool for capitalists to reassert dominance. In the 1970s, economic convulsions from the 1973 oil crisis and stagflation scared the ruling class. David Harvey, in his 2005 book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wrote, “In the U.S. the control of wealth by the top 1 percent of the population had remained fairly stable … but in the 1970s it plunged … the upper classes had to protect themselves.” They seized the ideas of Hayek and Friedman and put them into practice. With the election of Ronald Reagan in the U.S and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., neoliberalism became a hammer for the Global North to discipline domestic and international labor...
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