There are, finally, some fundamental political problems within neoliberalism that need to be addressed. A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other. While individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not supposed to choose to

They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.38 More broadly, it is hard not to conclude with Chandler that ‘the roots of today’s human rights-based humanitarianism lie in the growing consensus of support for

Furthermore, the actual developmental path taken seems to fit with the aim of preventing the formation of any coherent capitalist class power bloc within China itself. Heavy reliance upon foreign direct investment (a completely different economic development strategy to that taken by Japan and South Korea) has kept the power of capitalist class

Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself. While this may sound a counter-revolutionary conclusion to those on the far left, it is not without a strong element of self-interest either, because it is ordinary people who suffer,

the lack of any examination of the class forces that might be at work is quite startling. The possibility, for example, that the ruling ideas might be those of some ruling class is not even considered, even though there is overwhelming evidence for massive interventions on the part of business elites and financial interests in the production of

Innumerable ways exist to skim off values from within the financial system. Since brokers get a commission for each transaction, they can maximize their incomes by frequent trading on their accounts (a practice known as ‘churning’) no matter whether the trades add value to the account or not. High turnover on the stock exchange may simply reflect

For a shift of this magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization

There was, however, one other concomitant shift that also impelled the movement towards neoliberalization during the 1970s. The OPEC oil price hike that came with the oil embargo of 1973 placed vast amounts of financial power at the disposal of the oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. We now know from British

It is not above reasserting its imperial traditions in the region and beyond. When confronted by Argentina’s worries about cheap Chinese imports destroying the vestiges of its indigenous textile, shoe, and leather industries that began to revive in 2004, the Chinese advice was simply to let such industries die and concentrate on being a raw