Seumas Milne in his new book makes a bold yet rhetorical deduction that the Neo-Liberal project has failed , and has been seen to fail on all fronts, in the first decade of the 21st century.The main failures have been the military ones in the pursuit of the disastrous War on Terror with the failed occupations of Iraq and the listless sapping one of the worlds poorest nation Afghanistan coupled with the economic collapse in 2008 and its failed litany of ineffective remedies of more and more borrowed money being sent into black financial holes.There may be some political and economic counter-arguments ( like the preposterous book by Kaletsky , Capitalism 4 , the man who preposes a tax on fresh air for poorer nations to be policed by the Air Power of the Anglo-Saxon nations if the poor fail to pay up) or the rabid revisionisms of Nick Cohen and the foaming Peter Hitchens who at best move the goalposts to a pantomime -of the-absurd level or at worst turn the world upsidedown to justify the unjustifiable neo-status-quo based on rehased arguments to prop up the bankrupt neo-con goals if not applications of these policies.Milne is adament that the core is rotten and the corpse cannot be brought to life.
Alas the issue that concerns Milne is not the pronounced bankruptcy of neo-liberal economics and policies , but why the Left has not failed the void with a workable alternative , the answer is most likely that if the neo-liberal right became bankrupt in 2008 then the Left as we know it was probably declared the same some decades earlier.
Milne has a degree in economics and so is placed to make considered judgements about the financial and political consequences of the neo-liberal project.One telling observation he makes that is relevant to us is the EU has the failed neo-liberal policy written and enshrined into the constitution , hence why the solutions are more doses of the same ineffective solutions , with with the even more toxic solutions of the IMF policies which devastated many a third world economy.
This talk by Seumas given at Sheffield University tracks almost word for word the one he gave here at the Mitchell Library.
Daniel Stedman Jones traced the neo-liberal project from the root of the later 1920s when European economists , mostly from Austria , fleeing the menace of totalitarian voyaging regimes came up with a system that would create a balance from the macro-management that only states could provide with the counter-balancing checks of individual input and quasi-private control mechanisms that would provide an outlet for a hoped-for measuring of individual non-state entrepreneurs to prevent total state management and ultimate control of all means of production.These are traced in his book "Masters of The Universe:Hayek, Friedman and The Birth of Neo-Liberal Politics."
According to Jones this concept traveled to the United States , along with the fleeing founders , where it transmogrified with contact with US economists like Friedman into the overt individual privateer with minimal state interference in wealth creation that we see in our time.
As with Seumas above the video below also gives a deeper insight of the talk given by Jones.
A very telling observation was the full acceptance of the audience of the thesis of Milne and Jones as an established judgement on the nature and failure of the neo-liberal project.Though , while Milne is happy to give a anti-eulogy of its corpse , Jones ( the more wary of early pronouncements of deaths of ghastly attempts of domination of HumanKind) is more cynical and believes neo-liberalism may still give itself life by sucking out the lives of the ordinary person both at home and abroad , it is far from done with blighting and exterminating innocents lives yet.
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