http://socialistproject.ca/documents/AusterityAgainstDemocracy.pdf

Austerity Against Democracy:

An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism?

From its very beginnings, the new doctrine was quite consciously set in opposition to socialism as an alternate economic and democratic order to capitalism and as an unyielding defender of the institutions of private property. In its specific programmatic mandate, neoliberalism was an offspring of the Great Depression and set against Keynesian state intervention. But however much its protagonists set themselves up as outsiders, neoliberalism was never an alien political doctrine to economic and political elites of Western Europe and North America: neoliberal ideas were always incorporated as a legitimate component of state policy discussions.

This pamphlet is part of the Socialist Interventions series, written by Greg Albo and Carlo Fanelli (Aug. 2014).

“From its very beginnings, the new

doctrine was quite consciously set in

opposition to socialism as an alternate

economic and democratic order to capitalism

and as an unyielding defender of the

institutions of private property. In its specific

programmatic mandate, neoliberalism was

an offspring of the Great Depression and set

against Keynesian state intervention. But

however much its protagonists set

themselves up as outsiders, neoliberalism

was never an alien political doctrine to

economic and political elites of Western

Europe and North America: neoliberal ideas

were always incorporated as a legitimate

component of state policy discussions.”

Neoliberalism and Austerity

The practice of neoliberalism is many-sided, exhibiting institutional variation and alternate policy modalities across geographic regions and scales of the state. The entire spectrum of political parties, moreover, has been comprised in governing as neoliberal administrations. This is, in many ways, quite startling. For the theoretical origins of neoliberalism can be traced back to the 1930s to a tiny eccentric group of liberal intellectuals meeting in Paris to discuss the prospects for war and the threats posed, as they saw it, by ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘collectivist planning’

(Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). Their emergent ‘new’ liberalism incorporated marginalist economic thought from the late 19th century with a political philosophy rooted in late 18th century Western Europe. From its very beginnings, the new doctrine was quite consciously set in opposition

to socialism as an alternate economic and democratic order to capitalism and as an unyielding defender of the institutions of private property.