The Destructive Path Of Neoliberalism

The Destructive Path of Neoliberalism: An International Examination, a compilation of twelve essays by leading scholars and educators, sheds light on the social, political, economic, and historical forces behind the rise of neoliberalism, the dominant ideological doctrine impacting developments in schools and other social contexts across the globe for over thirty years.

In recent years, Israel has deeply and quickly transformed itself from a self-perceived social-democratic regime into a privatized and liberalized "Start-Up Nation" and a highly divided society. This transition to neoliberalism has been coupled with the adoption of a hawkish and isolationist foreign policy. How can such a deep change be explained? How can a state presumably founded on the basis of socialist ideas, turn within a few decades into a country characterized by a level of inequality comparable to that of the United States? By presenting a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the evolution of the Israeli economy from the 1930s to the 1990s, The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism seeks to explain the Israeli path to neoliberalism. It debunks the ‘from-socialism-to-liberalization’ narrative, arguing that the evolution of Israeli capitalism cannot be described or explained as a simple transplantation of imported economic models from advanced liberal democracies. Rather, it asserts that the Israeli variant of capitalism is the product of the encounter between imported Western institutional models and policy ideas, on the one hand, and domestic economic, social and security policy problems on the other. This mechanism of change enables us to understand the factors that gave rise to Israel’s unique combination of liberalization and strong national sentiments. Providing an in-depth analysis of Israel’s transformation to neoliberalism, the book is a valuable resource for those studying the economic history of Israel, or the political economy of late-developing countries.

Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world’s most powerful military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct threat to secure resources for corporations? The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology—the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public’s voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people’s basic obligation to care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs. In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates—and how, through Chomsky’s analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the closing net.

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.

This is a book for the age of resistance, for the occupiers of the squares, for the generation of Occupy Wall Street. The premier radical political philosopher of our time offers a devastating critique of the way neoliberalism has hollowed out democracy.

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

In Dependency, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Latin America, Carlos Eduardo Martins manages the difficult task of updating theories on all three key concepts, enabling their fresh application towards a critical comprehension of societies, especially those in the periphery. En Globalización, dependencia y neoliberalismo en América Latina, Carlos Eduardo Martins cumple la difícil tarea de actualizar las teorías sobre esos tres conceptos clave para el pensamiento contemporáneo y la comprensión de las sociedades, principalmente las periféricas.