Neoliberalism: Dominant but Dead.
Neoliberalism has been a long, difficult and violent ride for millions if not billions of people around the world. The financial crash that began unfolding publicly in 2007 marked the end of neoliberalism in some sense, or so it has been suggested by many commentators, but it also provoked a longer view for those concerned more with capitalism in toto than with its specifically neoliberal variant. Unlike the so-called Asian economic crisis of 1997-1999, when the operative metaphors raised the threat of “contagion,” ten years later the language was of “toxic assets.” The shift from an epidemiological to an environmental metaphor may be symptomatic of a broader political shift in ruling ideologies, but both metaphors also express a certain denial of the gravity of the crises. In 1997, “contagion” expressed the fear that an otherwise healthy body (European and North American capitalism) would be infected by economic disease (Asia); ten years later, the new language expressed a parallel but less spatialized fear that an otherwise healthy capitalism would be polluted by an aberrant toxicity. When that pollution in fact occurred and capitalism itself became toxic on a global scale, desperate financiers around the world exclaimed in astonishment: “but this is not how capitalism is supposed to work!”
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