A Very Brief History of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism was originally the project of the right that believed it could be used to erode the post-war welfare protections. Stupidly, the right convinced itself that it would somehow exercise enough control to prevent neoliberalism from eroding everything else. When it became obvious that there was no containing it, the right – and I don’t mean politicians. I’m taking about regular people – lost interest in neoliberalism.

By that time, though, neoliberalism had another ally, the Left. The Left loved neoliberalism’s promise of eroding every certainty and plunging the world into a real permanent revolution where everything always revolves, changes, and mutates in a very literal way. All that had to be done to complete the alliance between the Left and neoliberalism was to ditch the concept of “workers” and adopt the idea that instead of the most progressive class, workers were the most regressive one. Workers were rebranded into “racists, bigots, and like literal Nazis” and the merger between the Left and neoliberalism was complete.

The current situation of the compact between neoliberalism and the Left is that the Left is facilitating the largest transfer of capital from the middle class to the oligarchy and create a semi-feudal system where the former middle classes will serve as guinea pigs for medical, digital, and psychological experimentation benefitting the oligarchy. In return, the oligarchy will tolerate the Left’s favorite slogans about “systemic racism”, “the global South,” and the rest of that inane, neoliberal stuff.