The narrative about the Venezuelan government’s shift towards a neoliberal economic policy has been going on for some time now and has been promoted by the mainstream media. Presented as a bombastic slogan, as a general and extravagant yet blurry statement, this narrative is based on unconnected fragments of reality that lead to an incongruous and unreadable mosaic.
For those who propagate this narrative, the supposed neoliberalism of President Nicolás Maduro is defined by so many things at once that it is difficult to see where the central point that verifies his supposed ideological conversion really lies.
We are delighted and very grateful to receive the 2022 AIPEN Richard Higgott Prize for our article “COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state,” published in the journal,Review of International Political Economy. It is getting harder to remember just how extraordinary, and extraordinarily awful, the response to COVID-19 was in so many countries, and the sense of shock and disbelief that accompanied every step towards lockdowns and closed borders in the early months of 2020. This article documents our real-time effort, through the ‘fog of war’ of the pandemic’s first year and in the darkness of lockdown, to make sense of a reality that we were living through that seemed to make little sense: How come the world’s richest societies, governed by states rated by international technocrats and scientists as being among the best prepared for a pandemic, failed so abysmally to respond to a challenge they had notionally been anticipating for many years? In short, how did we end up in this mess?
Argentina has constantly been trapped over two centuries in unpayable external debt owed to foreign imperial powers. This affects the everyday life of everyone: inflation, salaries, employment, public services, elections. Here is a brief history of the deuda.
The deuda (“debt” in Spanish) is one of the most persistent elements in the two centuries of Argentina’s history. It has conditioned the political life and the economy of the country like no other factor, for generations.
But this should not be confused with just any debt. The word deuda normally refers to the external debt (both public and private), a debt owed to foreign creditors.
Historically, the key aspect of the deuda is that it is based on a foreign currency, the world trade currency controlled by the ruling empire. It was once the British pound. Since 1944 it has largely been the US dollar.
Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland to plan harsh neoliberal economic policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”
While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russian proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also making plans to essentially plunder its post-war economy.
Representatives of Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland this July to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”
Ukraine has been destabilized by violence since 2014, when a US-sponsored coup d’etat overthrew its democratically elected government, setting off a civil war. That conflict dragged on until February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded the country, escalating into a new, even deadlier phase of the war.
Sri Lanka owes 81% of its external debt to US and European financial institutions and Western allies Japan and India. China owns just 10%. But Washington blames imaginary “Chinese debt traps” for the nation’s crisis, as it considers a 17th IMF structural adjustment program.
Facing a deep economic crisis and bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was rocked by large protests this July, which led to the resignation of the government.
Numerous Western political leaders and media outlets blamed this uprising on a supposed Chinese “debt trap,” echoing a deceptive narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream academics.
In reality, the vast majority of the South Asian nation’s foreign debt is owed to the West.
Defying the state of emergency, enduring brutal police and military repression, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians continue to remain on the streets against neoliberalism
Since June 13, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have been mobilizing across the country as a part of an indefinite national strike against the right-wing government of President Guillermo Lasso and his regressive economic policies. Photo: Alexander Crespo
Since June 13, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have been mobilizing across the country as a part of an indefinite national strike against the right-wing government of President Guillermo Lasso and his anti-people economic policies. The strike was called for by various Indigenous, peasant and social organizations, with a set of ten demands that address the most urgent needs of the majority of Ecuador’s population.
The Glasgow Conference (COP26) should have given priority to 1) making good on the promise of the “developed” countries to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, from 2020 onwards, at least one hundred billion dollars a year to help the global South meet the climate challenge1; 2) forcing these same countries to intervene financially to cover the enormous “loss and damage” caused by warming, especially in the “least developed countries” and small island states; 3) “raising the climate ambitions” of governments to achieve the adopted COP21 (Paris, 2015) goal of: “ keeping the temperature increase well below 2°C while continuing efforts not to exceed 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial period”.
Regimes of Extreme Permission? State-corporate repression and the realization of neocolonial accumulation in SE Asia Joe Greener and Pablo Ciocchini, University of Liverpool in Singapore
Agency in the Periphery: the controversy between Marini and Cardoso in Geopolitical terms Rafael Alexandre Mello, University of Brasília Pedro Salgado, Federal University of Bahia and University of Brasília
Conceptualising institutional disobedience in a context of authoritarian neoliberalism: The Catalan case Monica Clua-Losada, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA Clara Camps Calvet, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain Shaun McCrory, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA
Morbid symptoms: The political economy of authoritarian neoliberalism
Adam Fabry, Universidad Nacional de Chilecito, Argentina
‘The Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization and the Global Rise of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century’ Berch Berberoglu, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
‘A Model State of Authoritarian Neoliberalism? An Analysis of the Orbán Regime in Hungary’ Attila Antal, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Hungary
‘Authoritarian Neoliberalisms, Social Reproduction and Social Policy in Croatia, Hungary and Poland’ Noemi Lendvai-Bainton, University of Bristol, UK Paul Stubbs, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb , Croatia
Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism: A Long-term Perspective from the Southern Cone of Latin America
Hernán Ramírez, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brasil
Links to associated literature by panellists:
Antal, A. (2019). The Rise of Hungarian Populism: State Autocracy and the Orbán Regime, Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Available on: https://www.emerald.com/insight/publi….
Berberoglu, B. (2020). The Global Rise of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century: Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization and the Nationalist Response, London: Routledge. Available on: https://www.routledge.com/The-Global-….
Fabry, A. (2019). The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave. Available on: https://www.springer.com/la/book/9783….
Ramirez, H. (2019). Neoliberalismo e (neo)autoritarismo: Uma perspectiva de longo prazo a partir de casos do Cone Sul da América Latina. Available on: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat… ——————————————————————————————
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In the mid-1980s, Soviet officials saw a need to open up their economy in hope of achieving Western-style innovation and productivity. That was the decade in which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were sponsoring the neoliberal pro-financial policies that have polarised the U.S., British and other economies and loaded them down with rentier overhead.
The Soviet Union followed a privatization policy far more extreme than anything the social-democratic West would have tolerated. It agreed in December 1990 to adopt the neoliberal blueprint presented in Houston by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to transfer hitherto public property into private hands.[1] The promise was that the privatisers would find their interest to lie in producing abundant new housing, consumer goods and prosperity.
The Soviet leaders believed that the neoliberal advice they received was about how to follow the path by which the advanced industrialised nations had developed and made their prosperity seem so attractive. But the advice actually turned out to be how to open up their economies and enable U.S. and other foreign investors to make money off the former Soviet republics, by creating client oligarchies of the sort that U.S. diplomacy had installed in Latin American and other puppet states. The Cold War’s isolation of the former Soviet Union gave way to turning its republics into prey for financial and natural-resource exploitation by U.S. and other Western banks and corporations.
Journal of People 