资本主义已经途穷，前路通往何方？（二）

美国社会主义杂志《每月评论》网站2月1日刊登俄勒冈大学社会学教授约翰·贝拉米·福斯特文章《资本主义失败了，接下来呢？》，由于篇幅较长分为三部分，今天推送第二部分。

文：John Bellamy Foster

译：由冠群

上篇文章里提到的资本主义的种种败象已经众所周知。然而，这些失败常常不被归咎于资本主义作为一种制度的失败，而只是被当作新自由主义的失败，而新自由主义则被视为资本主义发展过程中一种可以被取代的范式。在许多左翼人士看来，要告别新自由主义或灾难资本主义就必须回归福利国家自由主义、市场监管或某种形式的有限社会民主主义，从而通向更理性的资本主义。他们不认为问题的根源是资本主义本身已经失败，而认为失败的是新自由主义式的资本主义。

相反，马克思主义传统将新自由主义视为战后晚期资本主义（late capitalism）的必然产物，与垄断金融资本占据统治地位紧密相关。因此，对新自由主义进行批判性历史分析是至关重要的，既可以为我们奠定理解当代资本主义的基础，也可以揭示为什么新自由主义及其资本主义绝对论是无法在这种制度内部找到替代品的。

“新自由主义”一词起源于20世纪20年代早期，出现在马克思主义者对路德维希·冯·米塞斯的《民族、国家和经济》（1919年）和《社会主义：一种经济和社会学分析》（1922年）两书的评论中，这两本恶毒攻击社会主义的小册子构成了新自由主义-资本主义意识形态的基础。当时受聘于维也纳商会的米塞斯在这些著作中坚称，“旧自由主义”必须以这种方式“交棒”给新自由主义才能战胜社会主义。在这一过程中，他将社会主义等同于“破坏主义”，坚称垄断符合资本主义自由竞争，为不受约束的不平等现象辩护，并提出消费者可以通过购买行为行使“民主”权利，因此购买就相当于投票。他强烈谴责劳动立法、强制性社保、工会、失业保险、企业社会化（或国有化）、税收和通货膨胀，认为它们统统不利于由他翻新的自由主义。米塞斯的新自由主义观点是如此极端，以至于他明确支持狄更斯小说《艰难时世》里愚钝的功利主义教师麦却孔掐孩，反对桀骜不驯的青年女主人公西丝·朱浦。米塞斯声称狄更斯“教唆千百万人憎恨自由主义和资本主义。”

1921年，奥地利马克思主义者麦克斯·阿德勒创造了“新自由主义”这个词，专门用来描述米塞斯试图用市场拜物教这种新意识形态来翻新衰落的自由主义秩序的举动。随后，才华横溢的奥地利马克思主义者海伦·鲍威尔（译注：奥托·鲍威尔的合作人、妻子）于1923年对米塞斯的新自由主义思想进行了尖锐的批判。1924年，德国马克思主义者阿尔弗雷德·穆塞尔为德国主要社会主义理论杂志《社会》（Die Gesellschaft）撰写了一篇批评米塞斯的长文，题为《新自由主义》（Der Neu-Liberalismus），编辑是鲁道夫·希法亭。

通过大量的马克思主义理论分析，阿德勒、鲍威尔和穆塞尔抨击了米塞斯的主张，即：不受管制的资本主义是唯一理性的经济制度，以及社会主义等于破坏主义。他们强烈质疑米塞斯不符合历史的描述，即和谐的资本主义通过市场机制促进了自由交换和自由贸易。他们认为米塞斯的分析有严重的逻辑缺陷，新自由主义意识形态内部存在固有的系统性分歧，因此把工会视为对贸易的限制，却替雇主协会和垄断企业辩护，称它们符合自由竞争规律。还值得注意的是，米塞斯主张建立强大的国家，以自我调节的市场制度为名镇压工人阶级的斗争，尽管他谴责国家为工人伸张权利的行动是反自由市场的，是阶级恐怖的一种形式。对穆塞尔来说，米塞斯是“流动资本家或国际金融资本的忠实仆人”。此后在1926年，原始法西斯主义（protofascist）经济学家奥特马尔·施潘批评了这种回归某种更极端的古典自由主义的返祖企图，他在《经济理论类型》一书中将其称为“新自由主义趋势”。1927年，米塞斯在其著作《自由主义》中将“更早的自由主义”与“新自由主义”加以区分，其依据是旧自由主义许诺平等，而新自由主义除了机会平等以外否定其他平等。

1920年代，诞生于米塞斯笔下的新自由主义被马克思主义批评家（甚至还有一些右翼人士）视为一种使垄断或金融资本合理化的企图，这极大背离了古典自由主义的信条。构建新自由主义就是要为资产阶级福祉提供理论基础，它不仅要对抗社会主义，还反对一切社会监管和社会民主：这是一场对工人阶级不留余地的攻击。

米塞斯及其门徒弗里德里希·哈耶克对社会主义的攻击，部分源于他们对受阿德勒、奥托·鲍威尔和卡尔·伦纳等人启迪的红色维也纳时期（译注：指1919年至1932年奥地利马克思主义主导奥地利政坛的时期）大感失望。相反的，红色维也纳时期的政治环境也启发了卡尔·波兰尼，他受阿德勒、鲍威尔思想的强烈影响，毫不留情地批判了新自由主义对市场自我调节的迷信，这为他后来写作《大转型》（1946）奠定了基础。

20世纪30年代至60年代，在大萧条和第二次世界大战之后，新自由主义意识形态在资本主义危机不断深化的背景下逐渐衰落。30年代初，欧洲阴云密布，米塞斯在纳粹接管奥地利之前曾在奥地利法西斯政府担任总理兼独裁者恩格尔伯特·陶尔斐斯的经济顾问。他后来移民到瑞士，然后移居美国，接受洛克菲勒基金会的资助，在纽约大学任教。与此同时，哈耶克也在英国早期新自由主义经济学家莱昂内尔·罗宾斯的怂恿下，接受了伦敦经济学院的聘书。

在西方，二战后的一段时期被称为凯恩斯时代。受国家支出（尤其是冷战时期的军费开支）增加、欧洲和日本经济重建、营销规模扩大、美欧汽车普及，以及亚洲两场地区性战争的刺激，资本主义经济在四分之一个世纪的时间里飞速发展。同时，西方面临以苏联为代表的另一种模式的威胁，而且及工会经过30年代和40年代发展得十分强大，因此社会朝着凯恩斯主义、社会民主主义和福利国家的方向发展。

然而，1930年代就已暴露出来的经济停滞问题仍然是资本主义体制难以解决的结构性缺陷，它只不过暂时被二战后经济高速增长、工人收入提高的所谓“黄金时代”掩盖了起来。无论相对而言还是绝对而言，垄断资本主义下的大企业都挪用了更多剩余价值，财富集中在更少数人手中，导致资本过度积累和制造业产能过剩。尽管大规模拓展营销、军国主义和帝国主义能部分抵消这种趋势，但它对经济的刺激作用却越来越小。

美国的帝国主义行径和美元在世界范围内的扩散导致了布雷顿森林体系的崩溃，该体系在战后初期曾对世界贸易起到了稳定作用，它的崩溃迫使理查德·尼克松在1971年结束了美元金本位制。这与60年代末越南战争结束后美国经济放缓有关，造成70年代中期资本主义体系的结构性危机，开启了几十年经济停滞和发达资本主义经济体经济增长率长期下降的趋势。刺激二战后经济繁荣的主要因素都已减弱，这使发达的资本主义经济体处于低迷状态。

为了应对1970年代出现的资本主义体系结构危机，第一项应对措施是利用凯恩斯主义“增加需求促进经济增长”理论扩大政府开支。尼克松执政时期，美国政府民用开支在商品和服务上的支出占国内生产总值的百分比达到了顶峰。美国政府加大支出，再加上危机时期工会为维持实际工资而进行的斗争，以及垄断企业大幅涨价以提高利润率，导致了一段时期的滞涨（经济停滞加上通货膨胀）。

通货膨胀使以货币资产形式持有的累积财富贬值，它给资产阶级地位带来的威胁比经济停滞要迫切得多，而对工人阶级来说情况则刚好相反。其结果是在资产阶级内部出现了一场反凯恩斯主义运动，反对者采用哈耶克《通往奴役之路》中的理论，将任何比极端新自由主义学说稍微偏左翼一点的内容统统打上社会主义或极权主义的标签，并试图扭转几十年来向工人阶级适度让利的趋势。一开始是在货币主义和供给侧经济学的伪装下向经济紧缩和经济结构调整方向急剧转变，随后则采取了更难以捉摸的自由市场政策。政治、经济和司法手段被整合起来联手摧毁工会，铲除了美国新制度学派经济学家约翰·肯尼斯·加尔布雷斯在《美国资本主义》一书中所说的劳工的“抗衡力量”。

二战后新自由主义之所以能够重出江湖，以瑞士度假圣地命名的“朝圣山学社”发挥了重要作用。1947年米塞斯、哈耶克、罗宾斯、米尔顿·弗里德曼、乔治·斯蒂格勒、雷蒙·阿隆等人在朝圣山会面，共同推广新自由主义政治学和经济学理念。朝圣山学社的成员一般自称为欧洲的古典自由主义者。毫无疑问，他们没有忘记20年代马克思主义者是如何鞭辟入里地批判新自由主义意识形态的，所以回避了“新自由主义”这个标签。“新自由主义”这个名词是米塞斯1927年使用过的，1938年它在有米塞斯和哈耶克参加的巴黎沃尔特·李普曼讨论会上被正式提出。在朝圣山学社，新自由主义的主要支持者们并没有将其当作一种独立的政治意识形态，而是把它视为古典自由主义的延伸，并且可以归结为人性的内在特征。就这样，正如米歇尔·福柯所说，新自由主义被转化成了一种生命政治学（biopolitics）。

尽管放弃了新自由主义的名号，但朝圣山学社和芝加哥大学经济系仍然成为了新自由主义意识形态的堡垒，而这里的新自由主义和战间期萌发出的新自由主义毫无二致。在20世纪50年代和60年代的凯恩斯主义时代，米塞斯、哈耶克、弗里德曼和詹姆斯·布坎南等人尽管接受了私人基金会的大量资金，但学术上仍处于边缘地位。可随着70年代经济再次出现停滞，垄断资本顶层为了通过企业行动重构资本主义经济，积极招募了这些新自由主义知识分子来提供意识形态基础，其主要针对目标包括劳工、国家，以及全球欠发达的发展中经济体。

从一开始，新自由主义哲学的核心内容就是捍卫集中的企业资本和阶级制度，认为这两个特点体现了自由市场竞争和企业家精神。新自由主义的反社会主义理论想要将社会生活完全市场私有化，这正是该理论的极其恶毒之处。在玛格丽特·撒切尔执政的英国和罗纳德·里根执政的美国，哈耶克和弗里德曼这样的人物成为新自由主义时代的象征，这段时期有时被称为哈耶克时代。1969年瑞典银行设立的所谓诺贝尔经济学奖，即“纪念阿尔弗雷德·诺贝尔的瑞典银行经济科学奖”，从一开始就由极端保守的新自由主义经济学家把持。1974年至1992年期间，包括哈耶克、弗里德曼、斯蒂格勒和布坎南在内的七名朝圣山学社成员获得了该奖项，而即便再温和的社会民主主义经济学家也都被排挤在外。

新自由主义作为一种经济意识形态，以它在促进经济增长方面乏善可陈的记录来判断，在正常的经济政策条件下基本上是无效的，因为它就像新古典经济学本身一样，试图否认（或合理化）经济由大企业和集权主导的现实。但是，在垄断-金融资本试图控制社会所有货币流通的时代，新自由主义对大型企业和新兴亿万富翁阶层而言，不失为一种有效的政治-经济策略。尽管资本主义经济体持续处于停滞状态，几十年来经济增长率不断下降，但商业富豪手中的剩余资本（surplus capital）不但增加了，而且还借助金融化、全球化和数字技术革命，创造出聚敛财富的新方式。金融化是指经济相对从侧重生产向侧重金融转移，它为投机和形成财富开辟了无数新途径，却偏离了实际资本的积累，导致用于投资新生产能力的资本相对不足。

全球化不仅意味着新的市场，更重要的是，它借助全球劳动力套利这种形式，使边缘国家低薪劳动力受过度剥削而产生的巨额经济盈余最终流入富裕国家跨国企业和富豪的账房。过去由于发达国家主导了生产，处于资本主义经济中心的工人们能获得就业和工资方面的增量收益，但如今帝国主义已无法继续提供这个好处，充其量可以说由于跨国企业生产外包它有助于降低物价，典型例子就是沃尔玛的崛起。与此同时，数字技术为新的、全球化的监控资本主义（surveillance capitalism）奠定了基础，监控资本主义在营销的驱动下买卖人口信息，从而形成了严重的信息技术垄断。

不平等现象和财富积累的大幅加剧被认为是创新的回报，因此是合理的，而创新则往往被认为是少数人的成就，而不是社会的集体成果。在新的横征暴敛时代，一切都是供人争夺的：教育、医疗、交通、住房、土地、城市、监狱、保险、养老金、食品和娱乐。社会上的所有交换都要充分商品化、企业化和金融化，资金流入金融中心，通过债务杠杆推动资本投机获利。人与人之间的沟通也被变成了一种商品。所有这一切都是以社会自由市场化的名义发生的。

对于这种现象背后的各种权力来说，这一策略是非常成功的。尽管有亚当·斯密的《国富论》，但资本主义对国家财富的关心远远不如对资产阶级财富的关心。金融化进程对经济停滞起到了一定遏制作用，但代价是在正常商业周期之上出现周期性的金融危机。尽管如此，社会顶层聚敛财富的速度仍在不断加快，金融危机本身导致了更大规模的金融集聚和集中化。在这种情况下，新自由主义的逻辑越来越偏向金融化的征敛和积累。

国家也被金融化政策所绑架，其整体作用变成了保护货币价值。在2007-09年的金融危机中，大银行和大企业几乎都得到了政府救助，而普通人的死活则没有人在乎。那场巨大的金融危机不但没有成为新自由主义本身的严重危机，反而进一步推动了它的发展，反映出新自由主义政治已经成为无所不包的金融征敛制度的意识形态表述。

这个金融化积累的新时代的特征之一是，它逐步脱离现实的生产和使用价值，在整个生产和积累的过程中加剧了交换价值（价值形式）和使用价值（自然形式）之间的冲突。其结果是使我们的星球进入“社会和生态紧急状态”。最明显的例子就是自然环境的迅速恶化。化石燃料即使只是埋藏在地下的储量资源，也被当作金融资产记入公司的账簿。这样，它们就成了垄断资本主义整个金融化积累过程的一部分。因此，数万亿美元的华尔街资产与化石资本联系在一起。这使人们更难从化石燃料的开采和使用转向更可持续的替代品（如太阳能和风能）。没有人对阳光和风享有所有权。因此，这些能源形式中就没有多少既得利益。当代资本主义比以往任何时候都更注重当下利润和未来潜在利润，即使牺牲人类和地球也在所不惜。人类似乎无能为力地站在一旁，眼睁睁地看着气候遭到破坏，无数物种消失，所有这些都是市场化社会压倒一切的力量造成的。

新自由主义一向明确反对严格意义上的自由放任经济，因为它一直强调国家要扮演有力的、具有干预性和建构性的角色，从而直接服务于私有资本和市场威权主义，这便是詹姆斯·K·加尔布雷斯在著作中所批评的“掠夺型国家”（predator state）。按照新自由主义的观点，资本主义专制制度（capitalist absolutism）不是自发形成的，而必须是人为创造的。国家的作用不单单是亚当·斯密所主张的保护财产，而是福柯在其作品《生命政治的诞生》中精辟解释的那样，要积极建构市场对生活的全方位主宰。这意味着要以企业或市场为模型再造国家和社会。

正如福柯所说，“新自由主义的问题是……如何模仿市场经济的原则来全面行使政治权力。”国家不应该纠正市场对市场之外的“社会”造成的“破坏性影响”，而应该利用这些破坏性影响来采取进一步措施扩大市场覆盖面和渗透力。新自由主义的目标不是要彻底超越国家，而是要将国家绑定在资本的垄断-竞争目的上，这是布坎南大力宣传的一种观点。在被垄断-金融资本主导的新自由主义国家，国家政府被特殊手段束缚起来，不得作出任何可能对货币价值产生负面影响的改变。因此，当国家考虑通过财政和货币政策打破既得利益时，这两种工具便越来越脱离政府的掌控范围。在新自由主义国家，央行几乎变成了独立于国家政府的自治分支机构，它的实际控制权在银行手里。监管机构被垄断-金融资本攻陷，它们的行动在大多数情况下直接服务于不受政府控制的企业利益。

波兰尼有力地向我们证明，试图建立所谓的自我调节的市场化社会——实际上需要国家代表资本进行持续干预并最终建立掠夺型国家——其结果就是对社会和生活的基础造成破坏。但是，就当今的资本主义而言，已经没有回头路可走。停滞、金融化、私有化、全球化、国家的市场化、人向“人力资本”的蜕化，以及自然向“自然资本”的蜕化，使新自由主义政治成为垄断-金融资本不可抹除的特征，只有反资本主义政治才能正本清源。

在资本主义发展到全球垄断-金融资本主义阶段并陷入结构性危机的背景下，新自由主义已经与资本主义制度融为一体。它将这种结构性危机扩展到社会的各个层面，使其在资本主义制度中无处不在且不可克服。资本主义每遭遇一次失败，解决方式都是按过去的方式变本加厉，这便是市场原则的魅力，将造成问题的弊病看作解决问题的良药，而资本主义的每一次失败都会为少数人开辟新的盈利空间。这种非理性逻辑的结果不仅是经济灾难和生态灾难，而且会导致自由民主国家逐渐消亡。因此，新自由主义不可避免的导向市场威权主义甚至新法西斯主义。就此而言，不能把唐纳德·特朗普的出现看作一次偶发的“脱轨现象”。

正如米塞斯1927年在《自由主义》中公开宣称的那样：“不可否认的是，法西斯主义和旨在建立独裁政权的类似（右翼）运动有着高尚的目的，而且就目前而言，他们的干预拯救了欧洲文明。因此，法西斯主义为自己赢得的功绩将被历史永远铭记。”哈耶克与弗里德曼、布坎南等新自由主义者一起，积极支持奥古斯托·皮诺切特将军1973年在智利发动政变，推翻民选的萨尔瓦多·阿连德社会主义政府，并实施经济休克疗法。在这种背景下，哈耶克1978年访问智利时，亲口告诉皮诺切特要警惕“不受限制的民主”复活。1981年第二次访问时，他说，“独裁政权……在政策上可能比民主大会更自由。”他在1949年的《个人主义与经济秩序》一书中写道：“我们必须面对这样的事实，即：保持个人自由与充分满足我们的分配公平观之间是不相容的。”

简言之，新自由主义不单是一种可以被摒弃的范式，它还代表了垄断金融时代资本主义制度的绝对专制倾向。正如福柯指出的那样，只有将其经济逻辑单一地应用于所有社会学意义上的存在，资本主义才能“苟活”一时。然而，将资本主义简化为纯粹的点石成金术，它最终只能摧毁与其接触的一切事物。然而如果说时至今日资本主义已经宣告失败，那么问题就在于：未来在何方？

（未完待续）

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next? (Part II)

Neoliberalism and Capitalist Failure

Many of the symptoms of the failure of capitalism described above are well-known. Nevertheless, they are often attributed not to capitalism as a system, but simply to neoliberalism, viewed as a particular paradigm of capitalist development that can be replaced by another, better one. For many people on the left, the answer to neoliberalism or disaster capitalism is a return to welfare-state liberalism, market regulation, or some form of limited social democracy, and thus to a more rational capitalism. It is not the failure of capitalism itself that is perceived as the problem, but rather the failure of neoliberal capitalism.

In contrast, the Marxian tradition understands neoliberalism as an inherent outgrowth of late capitalism, associated with the domination of monopoly-finance capital. A critical-historical analysis of neoliberalism is therefore crucial both to grounding our understanding of capitalism today and uncovering the reason why all alternatives to neoliberalism and its capitalist absolutism are closed within the system itself.

The term neoliberalism had its origin in the early 1920s, in the Marxian critique of Ludwig von Mises’s Nation, State, and Economy (1919) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis(1922), both of which were written as virulent anti-socialist tracts, constituting the foundational works of neoliberal-capitalist ideology.45 In these works, Mises, then employed by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, insisted that the “old liberalism” had to be “relaid” in such a way as to defeat socialism. In the process, he equated socialism with “destructionism,” insisted that monopoly was consistent with capitalist free competition, defended unlimited inequality, and argued that consumers exercised “democracy” through their purchases, which were equivalent to ballots. He strongly condemned labor legislation, compulsory social insurance, trade unions, unemployment insurance, socialization (or nationalization), taxation, and inflation as the enemies of his refurbished liberalism.46 So extreme were Mises’s neoliberal views that he explicitly took the side of the crass, utilitarian pedagogue M’Choakumchild against the defiant young heroine Sissy Jupe, as portrayed by Dickens in Hard Times. Dickens, Mises claimed, had “taught millions to hate Liberalism and Capitalism.”47

In 1921, Austro-Marxist Max Adler coined the term neoliberalism to designate Mises’s attempt to refurbish a fading liberal order through a new ideology of market fetishism. This was followed by a sharp criticism of Mises’s neoliberal ideology in 1923 by the gifted Austro-Marxist Helene Bauer. In 1924, the German Marxist Alfred Meusel wrote a lengthy critique of Mises, entitled “Neoliberalism” (“Der Neu-Liberalismus”) for the leading German socialist theoretical journal Die Gesellschaft, edited by Rudolf Hilferding.48

Building on a wealth of Marxian analysis, Adler, Bauer, and Meusel attacked Mises’s claim that an unregulated capitalism was the only rational economic system and that socialism was equivalent to destructionism. They strongly challenged his ahistorical depiction of a harmonious capitalism that promoted free exchange and free trade through the market mechanism. A serious logical flaw in Mises’s analysis, they contended, was the systematic bifurcation built into his neoliberal ideology, whereby trade unions were considered constraints on trade while employers’ associations and monopolistic corporations were justified as consistent with free competition. Likewise, it was noted that Mises advocated a strong state to repress working-class struggles in the name of a self-regulating market system, even when state action on behalf of workers was condemned as anti-free market and a form of class terror. For Meusel, Mises was “a faithful servant of the mobile capitalist” or international finance capital. Later, in 1926, the protofascist economist Othmar Spann criticized the atavistic attempt to revert to a more extreme version of classical liberalism, referring to this in his Types of Economic Theory as “The Neo-Liberal Trend.”49 In 1927, in his work Liberalism, Mises himself distinguished between “the older liberalism and…neoliberalism” on the basis of the commitment of the former to equality, in contrast to the rejection of equality (other than so-called equality of opportunity) by the latter.50

Neoliberalism, as it first emerged from Mises’s pen, was thus viewed by Marxian critics in the 1920s (and even by some figures on the right) as an attempt to rationalize a monopoly or finance capital far removed from the precepts of classical liberalism. It was designed to provide the intellectual basis for capitalist class warfare against not only socialism, but all attempts at social regulation and social democracy: a no-quarter-given attack on the working class.

Mises’s assault on socialism, together with that of his protégé Friedrich Hayek, was motivated in part by a profound disenchantment with Red Vienna under the sway of Austro-Marxism, which was inspired by figures like Adler, Otto Bauer, and Karl Renner.51 Conversely, it was this same political environment of Red Vienna, which dominated Austrian politics from 1919–32, that inspired Karl Polanyi, who was strongly influenced by Adler and Otto Bauer, to develop a crushing critique of the neoliberal belief in the self-regulating market—later to form the basis of The Great Transformation (1946).52

In the 1930s to 1960s, following the Great Depression and the Second World War, neoliberal ideology waned in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism. In the early 1930s, as the storm clouds gathered over Europe, Mises served as an economic advisor to Austrofascist Chancellor-dictator Engelbert Dollfuss prior to the Nazi takeover of Austria.53 He later emigrated to Switzerland and then to the United States, enjoying the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and teaching at New York University. Meanwhile, Hayek was recruited by the London School of Economics at the instigation of the early neoliberal British economist Lionel Robbins.

The post-Second World War years in the West were known as the age of Keynes. Spurred on by increased state spending (particularly on the military in the context of the Cold War), the rebuilding of the war-torn European and Japanese economies, the expansion of the sales effort, waves of automobilization in both the United States and Europe, and two major regional wars in Asia—capitalist economies grew rapidly for a quarter-century.54 Meanwhile, faced with the threat of the alternative model represented by the Soviet Union, and the advent of strong unions as a result of the developments of the 1930s and ’40s, the West moved in the direction of Keynesianism, social democracy, and the welfare state.

Nevertheless, the tendency toward economic stagnation already exhibited in the 1930s remained as a structural flaw of the system, temporarily masked by the so-called Golden Age of rapid growth and increasing income for workers that immediately followed the Second World War. The giant corporations of monopoly capitalism succeeded in appropriating ever-greater surplus in both absolute and relative terms, which was concentrated in the hands of ever-fewer wealth holders, leading to a tendency toward overaccumulation of capital and manufacturing overcapacity, countered in part by a massive expansion of the sales effort, militarism, and imperialism, but with ever-lessening effect in stimulating the economy.

U.S. imperialism and the proliferation of dollars abroad led to a breakdown in the Bretton Woods system that had stabilized world trade in the early post-Second World War period, causing Richard Nixon to end the dollar-gold standard in 1971. This was associated with a slowdown in the U.S. economy from the late 1960s on, as the Vietnam War was winding down, resulting in a structural crisis of the capitalist system in the mid–1970s, which was to mark the beginning of decades of economic stagnation and a long decline in the trend rate of growth in the advanced capitalist economies. The major stimuli that sparked the post-Second World War boom had all waned, leaving the advanced capitalist economies in the doldrums.55

The first response to the structural crisis of the capitalist system that emerged in the 1970s was to utilize Keynesian demand-promotion to expand state spending. U.S. civilian-government spending on goods and services as a percentage of gross domestic product thus reached a peak during the Nixon administration.56 This, plus the struggles of unions to maintain their real wages in the crisis, while monopolistic corporations aggressively raised prices to increase their profit margins, led to a period of stagflation (economic stagnation plus inflation).

Inflation, which depreciates accumulated wealth held in the form of monetary assets, is a much greater immediate threat to the position of the capitalist class than is economic stagnation, while for the working class the situation is reversed. The result was the emergence of an anti-Keynesian movement within the capitalist class, which designated anything to the left of hardcore neoliberalism as socialist or totalitarian in the manner of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and sought to reverse decades of modest working-class gains.57There was a sharp turn toward austerity and economic restructuring, initially under the guise of monetarism and supply-side economics, and later taking a more amorphous free-market character. A concerted effort to destroy unions by combined political, economic, and juridical means was carried out, eliminating what John Kenneth Galbraith in his American Capitalismhad once called the “countervailing power” of labor.58

Key to the reemergence of neoliberalism in the post-Second World period was the Mont Pèlerin Society, named after the Swiss spa where Mises, Hayek, Robbins, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Raymond Aron, and others met in 1947, to promote neoliberal economic and political ideas. The members of the Mont Pèlerin Society generally referred to themselves as classical liberals in the European sense. No doubt remembering the devastating Marxist critiques of neoliberal ideology in the 1920s, they eschewed the label neoliberal, which Mises himself had adopted in 1927, and which had been put forward in the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris that Mises and Hayek attended.59 Instead, neoliberalism was presented by its chief adherents in the Mont Pèlerin Society not as a separate political ideology from, but as an extension of, classical liberalism and attributable to inherent features of human nature. In this way, as Michel Foucault argued, it was converted into a kind of biopolitics.60

Nevertheless, while abandoning the neoliberal label, the Mont Pèlerin Society, together with the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, was to be a bastion of neoliberal ideology—in precisely the sense that it had first emerged between the world wars. In the Keynesian era of the 1950s and ’60s, figures like Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and James Buchanan remained on the margins, though heavily bankrolled by private foundations.61 But with the return of economic stagnation in the 1970s, neoliberal intellectuals were actively recruited at the apex of monopoly capital in order to provide the ideological basis for an ongoing corporate campaign to restructure the capitalist economy, deliberately targeting labor, the state, and the underdeveloped economies of the global South.

Central to neoliberal philosophy from the beginning was the defense of concentrated corporate capital and class dynasties, which were portrayed as representing free-market competition and entrepreneurship.62 The very virulence of neoliberal anti-socialism meant that it represented the drive to a complete market-privatization of social life. In Margaret Thatcher’s London and Ronald Reagan’s Washington, figures like Hayek and Friedman became the symbols of the neoliberal era, sometimes called the age of Hayek. The new so-called Nobel Prize in Economics, or the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established by the Bank of Sweden in 1969, was controlled from its inception by ultraconservative neoliberal economists. Seven members of the Mont Pèlerin Society, including Hayek, Friedman, Stigler, and Buchanan received the prize between 1974 and 1992, while even mildly social-democratic economists were all but excluded.63

Neoliberalism as an economic ideology was largely ineffectual in normal economic-policy terms, judged by its lack of success in promoting growth, since, like neoclassical economics itself, it sought to deny (or rationalize) the reality of an economy dominated by big business and concentrated power.64 Nevertheless, it served as an effective political-economic strategy for big business and the emerging billionaire class in an age where monopoly-finance capital sought to seize control of all monetary flows in society.65 Although capitalist economies continued to stagnate with growth rates diminishing decade by decade, the surplus capital in the hands of the corporate rich not only increased, but by virtue of financialization, globalization, and the revolution in digital technology, new forms of amassing wealth were created.66 Financialization—the relative shift of the economy from production to finance—opened up vast new avenues to speculation and wealth formation, relatively removed from capital investment in new productive capacity (that is, real capital accumulation).

Globalization meant not only new markets, but, more importantly—through the global labor arbitrage—the appropriation of huge economic surpluses from the overexploitation of low-wage labor in the periphery that ended up in the financial coffers of multinational corporations and wealthy individuals in the rich countries.67 The benefits of imperialism to workers in the center of the capitalist economy no longer included incremental gains in employment and income associated with the global dominance of production, but, at best, could be said to contribute to cheaper prices from the outsourcing of production by multinational corporations, symbolized by the growth of Walmart. Meanwhile, digital technology created the basis of a new globalized surveillance capitalism, buying and selling information on the population, primarily motivated by the sales effort, leading to the creation of enormous information-technology monopolies.68

​

Vast increases in inequality and wealth were justified as returns for innovation, always attributed to a very few rather than as the collective product of society. In the new era of expropriation, all was up for grabs: education, health systems, transportation, housing, land, cities, prisons, insurance, pensions, food, entertainment. All exchanges in society were to be fully commodified, corporatized, and financialized, with the funds flowing into financial centers and feeding speculation on capital gains, leveraged by debt. Human communication was itself to be turned into a commodity. All in the name of a free-market society.

For the powers that be, this strategy was enormously successful. Capitalism, despite Adam Smith, had never been about the wealth of nations so much as the wealth of the capitalist class. The financialization process managed to counter economic-stagnation tendencies to some extent, but at the cost of periodic financial crises layered over the normal business cycle. Nevertheless, the amassing of wealth at the top continued to accelerate, with financial crises themselves leading to even greater financial concentration and centralization. In this situation, neoliberalism increasingly took on the logic of financialized expropriation and accumulation.

The state too became subject to the financialization policy, shifting its overall role to protecting the value of money.69 In the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09, the big banks and corporations were almost all bailed out; the population was not. Rather than representing a severe crisis for neoliberalism itself, the Great Financial Crisis only gave it further impetus, reflecting the fact that neoliberal politics had become the ideological expression of an all-encompassing system of financial expropriation.70

A characteristic of this new era of financialized accumulation is that it is progressively removed from the realities of production and use value, heightening the conflict between exchange value (the value form) and use value (the natural form) within the overall production and accumulation process.71 The result is “a social and ecological planetary emergency.”72 This is most evident in the rapid destruction of the natural environment. Fossil fuels are entered as financial assets on the books of corporations, even when they exist only in the form of reserves buried in the ground. In this way, they are integral to the entire financialized accumulation process of monopoly capitalism. Trillions of dollars of Wall Street assets are thus tied up in fossil capital.73 This has made it doubly difficult to shift away from the extraction and use of fossil fuels to more sustainable alternatives, such as solar and wind power. No one owns the sun’s rays or the wind. Hence, there is less of a vested interest in these forms of energy. In today’s capitalism, more than ever before, current and potential future profits dictate all, at the expense of people and the planet. The human population stands by, seemingly helpless, watching the destruction of the climate and the loss of innumerable species, all imposed by the ostensibly overwhelming force of market society.

Neoliberalism has always been directly opposed to strict laissez faire since it has invariably emphasized a strong, interventionist, and constructionist relation to the state, in the direct service of private capital and market authoritarianism, or what James K. Galbraith has critically referred to as the predator state.74 In the neoliberal view, capitalist absolutism is not a spontaneous product—it must be created. The role of the state is not simply to protect property, as maintained by Smith, but, as Foucault brilliantly explained in his Birth of Biopolitics, extends to the active construction of the domination of the market over all aspects of life.75 This means refashioning the state and society on the model of the corporation or the market.

As Foucault put it, “the problem of neo-liberalism is…how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy.” The state must not “correct the destructive effects of the market,” where these fall “on society” outside the market, but rather take advantage of these destructive effects to impose further measures that extend the reach and penetration of the market.76 The goal is not to transcend the state altogether, but to shackle it to the monopolistic-competitive ends of capital, a view forcefully propagated by Buchanan.77 The shackles imposed on the neoliberal state dominated by monopoly-finance capital are specially designed to limit any changes that would negatively affect the value of money. Hence, both fiscal and monetary policy are increasingly put out of reach of the government itself—in those cases where changes going against the vested interests are contemplated. Central banks have been transformed into largely autonomous branches of the state, in fact controlled by the banks. Treasury departments are shackled by debt ceilings. Regulatory agencies are captured by monopoly-finance capital and act, for the most part, in the direct interest of corporations outside governmental control.78

The result of such an attempt to construct a so-called self-regulating market society—in fact requiring constant state interventions on behalf of capital and the creation of a predator state—is, as Polanyi powerfully demonstrated, to undermine the very foundations of society and life itself.79 But, in terms of capitalism today, there is no going back. Stagnation, financialization, privatization, globalization, the marketization of the state, and the reduction of people to “human capital” and nature to “natural capital,” have made neoliberal politics an irrevocable characteristic of monopoly-finance capital, which only an anti-capitalist politics can supplant.

Neoliberalism has thus become integrated into the system in the context of the structural crisis of capitalism in its globalized monopoly-finance phase. It extends this structural crisis to all of society and makes it universal and insurmountable within the system. The answer to every failing of capitalism is thus to turn the screw further, which accounts for much of the allure of the market principle, since it is perpetually seen as the solution to the problems it causes—with each failure opening up new areas of profitability for a few. The result of this irrational logic is not merely economic and ecological disaster, but the gradual demise of the liberal-democratic state itself. Neoliberalism thus points inevitably to market authoritarianism and even neofascism. In this respect, Donald Trump is no mere aberration.80

As Mises openly declared in 1927 in Liberalism: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements [on the right] aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions, and that their intervention, has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”81 Hayek, along with other neoliberals such as Friedman and Buchanan, actively supported General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, overthrowing the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and imposing an economic shock doctrine on the population. In this context, Hayek, in a trip he took to Chile in 1978, personally warned Pinochet against a resurrection of “unlimited democracy.” During a second visit in 1981, he stated that “a dictatorship…may be more liberal in its policies than a democratic assembly.”82As he wrote in 1949 in Individualism and Economic Order, “we must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.”83

Neoliberalism, in short, is not a mere paradigm that can be dispensed with, but represents the absolutist tendencies of the system in the age of monopoly finance. As Foucault pointed out, the “survival of capitalism” could only be ensured for a time by the singular application of its economic logic to all of sociological existence.84 Reduced, however, to a pure Midas principle, capitalism could only end up by destroying everything in existence with which it came into contact. But if capitalism has now failed, the question becomes: What next?

(To be continued)