BLOG #1

BLOG #1

“We can, therefore, examine the history of neoliberalism either as a utopian project providing a theoretical template for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political scheme aimed at reestablishing the conditions for capital accumulation and the restoration of class power. In what follows, I shall argue that the last of these objectives has dominated. Neoliberalism has not proven effective at revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded in restoring class power. As a consequence, the theoretical utopianism of the neoliberal argument has worked more as a system of justification and legitimization.” (Harvey; pp. 29).

As it was described in the reading, the ideals of neoliberalism came about after the termination of the second world war in 1945 but it was nonetheless pushed at an international mainstream phenomenon during the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Regan in the United States in the 1980s. The promulgation of the neoliberal approach tries to argue that by opening to a free market economy in which free trade and foreign investments are viable, a country and its people are better suited to confront the challenges of a constant changing and interconnected world.

An example of this is mentioned in the reading regarding the United States’ military intervention of Iraq in 2003. As recollected by Harvey, President Bush in an op-ed to the New York Times expressed the American excuse for turning Iraq into a camp for foreign investment and American corporate appropriation. In that op-ed, Bush used the attainment of freedom as a reason for revolutionizing the social, economic and political atmosphere of the Iraqi people which according to this neoliberal model was aimed at restoring the wealth and economic integrity of its people and government. Nonetheless, the ideal of revitalizing that global capital was just that an ideal because in reality it just helped American corporations and other western neoliberal governments to further inflict the wounds of deterioration and uncertainty that had already plagued Iraq and the region.

This quote is fundamentally the response to the hegemony that neoliberalism has become. Nothing less than a fallacy in which global wealth hasn’t being distributed accordingly to the needs of the people but only a selected few (the elites) are able to enjoy the results of such economic model. A model that is seemed not only as common sense in this era of rapid globalization but also as the common and only practice to restore stability, democratic values and decent standards of living. However, when we really look at it the effects of such materialistic and frankly careless capitalist model have left problems and chaos with national and international repercussions. 

In Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Britain, South Africa, Japan, the United States, and many others, there’s an elite class (1% of the population) that is not only growing in capital but also in power by determining and defining the terms and conditions for the rest of the 99% of humanity. The effects are not only visible in the economy but also in our environment. Inequality, poverty, criminality, among others are all consequences of an international capitalist model intended, as the quote states, to promote and ensure class power to a selected privilege class, a ruling class.