Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Late Capitalism

This chapter details the mutually reinforcing relationship between globalization, neoliberalism, and late capitalism. The chapter emphasizes the dialectical and politically determined evolution of all three, explaining how intensifying patterns of competition have resulted in diminishing the power of progressive social forces and increasing the leverage of competitive fractions of capital and powerful capitalist states. Neoliberalism—often conveniently dismissed by liberals and conservatives alike as a nebulous concept—is explicitly defined as the application of market and market-like discipline to the reorganization of state and society. Forged out of a set ideas and reductionist assumptions emanating from orthodox economics, in its applied form neoliberalism comprises the evolving policy sets demanded by the most powerful (‘competitive’) fractions of capital and the states that represent their interests. In a structural sense, real-existing neoliberalism serves as the institutional ‘software’ of globalization, combining with the integrative techno-logistical infrastructure that makes the ongoing reorganization of production—‘globalization’—possible. Four decades of neoliberal reform and resultant globalization have produced what is often referred to as ‘late capitalism’. Late capitalism is characterized by hypercompetition between and within states, the heightened power of finance capital and grand contradiction—the latter including gross inequality and deprivation amid plenty, deindustrialization and the ‘death of development’, and systemic environmental decline. While resistance to neoliberalism is evident in many (sometimes reactionary) forms, the all-enveloping nature of late capitalism and the ongoing reinvention of neoliberalism as the ‘only’ solution to contradiction make the political task of reimagining and realizing alternative social orders formidable.