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org/2019/05/09/absolute-
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May 9, 2019

Category: Capitalism, crisis, financialization, John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review,

Neoliberalism, Political economy

By John Bellamy Foster. (originally posted here)

The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1864 that “the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to
persuade you he does not exist!”1 I will argue here that this is directly applicable to today’s
neoliberals, whose devil’s ruse is to pretend they do not exist. Although neoliberalism is
widely recognized as the central political-ideological project of twenty-first-century
capitalism, it is a term that is seldom uttered by those in power. In 2005, the New York
Times went so far as to make neoliberalism’s nonexistence official by running an article
entitled “Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist.”2

Behind this particular devil’s ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality.
Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project,
associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is
to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in
safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced
solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation
of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological
destructiveness that characterizes our time.

The Origins of Neoliberalism

The notion of neoliberalism is nearly a century old, although its main political influence is
much more recent. It first arose as an ideology in the early 1920s in the face of the collapse
of liberalism nearly everywhere in Europe, and in response to the rise of German and
Austrian social democracy, particularly developments in Red Vienna.3 It had its first
notable appearance in Austrian economist and sociologist Ludwig von Mises’s three
works: Nation, State, and Economy(1919), Socialism (1922),
and Liberalism (1927).4 Mises’s ideas were immediately recognized as representing a sharp
departure from classical liberalism, leading the prominent Austro-Marxist Max Adler to
coin the term neoliberalism in 1921. Mises’s Socialism was subjected to a sharp critique by
another gifted Austro-Marxist, Helene Bauer, in 1923 and to a more extended critique
entitled “Neoliberalism” by the German Marxist Alfred Meusel, writing for Rudolf
Hilferding’s Die Gesellschaft in 1924.5

For Meusel and Bauer, the neoliberal doctrine presented by Mises was far removed from
classical liberalism and constituted a new doctrine devised for the era of “mobile capital” or
finance capital, of which Mises was a “faithful servant.”6 It was expressly aimed at
justifying the concentration of capital, the subordination of the state to the market, and an
openly capitalist system of social control. Mises’s neoliberalism, Meusel wrote, was
characterized by the “merciless radicalism with which he attempts to derive the totality of
social manifestations from a single principle” of competition. Everything opposed to the
complete ascendance of the competitive principle was characterized by Mises as
“destructionism,” which he equated with socialism. For Mises, Charles Dickens, William
Morris, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Émile Zola, Anatole France, and Leo Tolstoy
were all “without perhaps being aware of it…recruiting agents for Socialism…paving the
way for destructionism,” while actual Marxists were nothing more than destructionists,
pure and simple.7

In Liberalism, Mises explicitly distinguished between “the older liberalism and

neoliberalism” on the basis of the former’s commitment, at some level, to equality, as
opposed to the complete rejection of equality (other than equality of opportunity) by the
latter.8 The question of democracy was resolved by Mises in favor of “a consumers’
democracy.” Where democracy is concerned, he wrote, “free competition does all that is
needed.… The lord of production is the consumer.”9

Mises was to exert an enormous influence on his younger follower Friedrich von Hayek,
who was originally drawn to Mises’s Socialism and who attended Mises’s private seminars
in Vienna. They shared a hatred of the Austro-Marxists’ Red Vienna of the 1920s. In the
early 1930s, Hayek left Vienna for the London School of Economics at the invitation of
Lionel Robbins, an early British neoliberal economist. Mises took on the role of economic
consultant to the Austrofascist Chancellor/dictator Engelbert Dollfuss prior to the Nazi
takeover. In his work Liberalism, Mises declared: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and
similar movements [on the right] aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the
best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization.
The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”10 He
later emigrated to Switzerland and then to the United States with the support of the
Rockefeller Foundation, taking up a teaching post at New York University.
The Great Transformation Reversed
The most important critique of neoliberalism in the early post-Second World War years
was to be Karl Polanyi’s attack on the myth of the self-regulating market in The Great
Transformation, published in 1944, at a time when the allied victory was already certain
and the nature of the postwar order in the West was becoming clear. Polanyi’s critique grew
out of his earlier defense of Red Vienna in the 1920s, where he had identified to a
considerable extent with Austro-Marxists like Adler and Otto Bauer, strongly opposing the
views of Mises, Hayek, and others on the right. The neoliberal project, Polanyi explained
in The Great Transformation, was to embed social relations in the economy, whereas prior
to capitalism the economy had been “embedded in social relations.”11 Polanyi’s book,
however, appeared in a context in which it was assumed that the neoliberal perspective was
all but doomed, with the “great transformation” standing for the triumph of state regulation
of the economy, at a time when John Maynard Keynes was recognized as the dominant
figure in state-economic policy, in what came to be known as the Age of Keynes.

Nevertheless, Polanyi’s deeper concerns regarding attempts to rejuvenate market liberalism

were, in part, justified. The Walter Lippmann Colloquium held in France in 1938, just prior
to the outbreak of the Second World War, with Mises and Hayek both present, had
constituted the first step at creating a capitalist international among major intellectual
figures. At the time, the term neoliberalism was explicitly adopted by some participants,
but was to be later abandoned, no doubt with the memory of the strong critiques that arose
in the 1920s.12 Still, the neoliberal project was taken up again after the war. In 1947, a mere
three years after the publication of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the Mont Pèlerin
Society was established. It was to become the institutional basis, along with the University
of Chicago Department of Economics, for the reemergence of neoliberal views. A key
participant in the inaugural conference, in addition to Mises, Hayek, Robbins, Milton
Friedman, and George Stigler, was Karl Polanyi’s younger brother, Michael Polanyi, the
noted chemist, philosopher of science, and virulent Cold Warrior.13

Keynesianism dominated the entire period of what is now sometimes called the Golden
Age of capitalism in the first quarter-century after the Second World War. But in the mid–
1970s, with the appearance of a major economic crisis and the beginnings of economic
stagnation first manifested as stagflation, Keynesianism disappeared within the economic
orthodoxy. It was to be replaced by neoliberalism, first in the guise of monetarism and
supply-side economics, and then in the form of a generalized restructuring of capitalism
worldwide and the creation of a market-determined state and society.14

The critical figure who best captured the essence of neoliberalism almost the moment that it
rose to dominance, analyzing it extensively in his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France
on The Birth of Biopolitics, was Michel Foucault.15 As Foucault brilliantly explained, the
role of the state is no longer to protect property, as in Adam Smith, or even to be an
executive for the common interests of the capitalist class, as in Karl Marx. Rather, its role
under neoliberalism became one of the active expansion of the market principle, or the
logic of capitalist competition, to all aspects of life, engulfing the state itself. As Foucault
wrote,
“Instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were under state
supervision—which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism, [neoliberals]…turn the
formula around and adopt the free market as [the] organizing and regulating principle of the
state.… In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market
supervised by the state.…

And what is important and decisive in current neo-liberalism can, I think, be situated here.
For we should not be under any illusion that today’s neo-liberalism is, as is too often said,
the resurgence or recurrence of old forms of liberal economics which were formulated in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are now being reactivated by capitalism for a
variety of reasons to do with its impotence and crises as well as with some more or less
local and determinate political objectives. In actual fact, something much more important is
at stake in modern neo-liberalism.… What is at issue is whether a market economy can in
fact serve as the principle, form, and model for a state which, because of its defects, is
mistrusted by everyone on both the right and the left, for one reason or another.”16

In a nutshell, Foucault declared: “The problem of neo-liberalism is…how the overall

exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy.” Its
single-minded goal is “privatized social policy.”17

In the neoliberal era, the state was not to intervene to counter the effects of the system, but
was simply to promote through its interventions the spread of the rule-based system of the
market into all recesses of society. It was thus the guarantor of a self-regulating and
expansive market, from which neither the society nor the state itself were
immune.18 Monopoly and oligopoly were no longer considered violations of the principle
of competition, but mere manifestations of competition itself.19 Perhaps most important in
distinguishing classical liberalism and neoliberalism, according to Foucault, was the
emphasis of the former on a fictional equal exchange or quid pro quo. For neoliberalism, in
contrast, free competition, reinterpreted to embrace monopoly power and vast inequalities,
was the governing principle, not exchange.20

The overriding of the state’s social-reproductive role in favor of neoliberal financialization

was most apparent, Foucault argued, in the demise of social insurance, along with all forms
of social welfare. In the neoliberal system, “it is up to the individual [to protect himself
against risks] through all the reserves he has at his disposal,” making the individual prey to
big business without any protection from the state. The result of this shift was the further
growth of privatized financial assets monopolized by a very few.21

Neoliberalism, conceived in this way, is the systematic attempt to resolve the base-
superstructure problem, perceived as an obstacle to capital, through the introduction of “a
general regulation of society by the market” to be carried out by a state—itself subordinated
to the market principle. This new capitalist “singularity” is to be extended to all aspects of
society, as an all-inclusive principle from which no exit is possible.22 Even economic crises
are to be taken as mere indicators of the need to extend the logic of the market further.

As Craig Allan Medlen, building on Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy’s Monopoly
Capital, explains in Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, today’s neoliberal
order involves a systematic shift in the “boundary line” between state economic activities
and the private sector. This boundary line has now shifted decisively against the state,
leaving little room for the state’s own consumption and investment, outside of the military
sector, and with the state increasingly subsidizing the market and capital through its fiscal
and monetary operations.23

When neoliberalism reemerged in the late 1970s, it was thus as an opportunistic virus in a
period of economic sickness.24 The crisis of Keynesianism was related to deepening
problems of surplus capital absorption or overaccumulation in the developing monopoly-
capitalist economy. Neoliberal restructuring arose in these circumstances first in the forms
of monetarism and supply-side economics, and then evolved into its current form with the
financialization of the system, itself a response to economic stagnation. With the growth of
excess capacity and stagnant investment, money capital increasingly flowed into the
financial sector, which invented new financial instruments with which to absorb
it.25 Financial bubbles propelled the economy forward. None of this, however, removed the
underlying stagnation tendency. In the decade since the Great Recession, as distinguished
from all previous post-Second World War decades, the capacity-utilization rate in
manufacturing in the United States has never surpassed 80 percent—a level chronically
insufficient to ignite net investment.26

All of this reflects the transition from twentieth-century monopoly capital to twenty-first-
century monopoly-finance capital.27 This is evident in an explosion of credit and debt,
institutionalized within the system despite periodic financial crises, leading to a whole new
financial architecture for amassing wealth. The seizure of excess profits on a world scale
through the new imperialism of the global labor arbitrage was made possible by digital
systems of financial and technological control, and the opening of the world market after
1989. All of this has culminated in a globalized process of financialization and value
capture, directed by the financial headquarters of multinational corporations at the apex of
the capitalist world economy.28

The diminishing role of the state both as an instrument of popular sovereignty and of social
protection has led to a crisis of liberal democracy. The greatest inequality in history plus the
undermining of the economic and social conditions of the vast majority of the population
has given rise to massive, but still largely inarticulate, discontent.29 Capital’s response to
this destabilizing situation has been to try to mobilize the largely reactionary lower-middle
class against both the upper-middle class and the working class (especially through racist
attacks on immigrants), while making the state outside the market the enemy—a strategy
that David Harvey has recently referred to as a developing “alliance” between
neoliberalism and neofascism.30

Absolute Capitalism and Social-System Failure

In Foucault’s interpretation, neoliberalism is as remote from laissez-faire as it is from
Keynesianism. As Hayek argued in The Constitution of Liberty, the neoliberal state is an
interventionist, not laissez-faire, state precisely because it becomes the embodiment of a
rule-governed, market-dictated economic order and is concerned with perpetuating and
extending that order to the whole of society. If the neoliberal state is noninterventionist in
relation to the economic sphere, it is all the more interventionist in its application of
commodity principles to all other aspects of life, such as education, insurance,
communications, health care, and the environment.31

In this ideal, restructured neoliberal order, the state is the embodiment of the market and is
supreme only insofar as it represents the law of value, which in Hayek’s terms is virtually
synonymous with the “rule of law.”32 The hegemonic class-property relations are encoded
in the juridical structure and the state itself is reduced to these formal economic codes
embodied in the legal system.33 What Hayek means by “the rule of law,” according to
Foucault, is the imposition of “formal economic legislation” that “is quite simply the
opposite of a plan. It is the opposite of planning.” The object is to establish “rules of the
game” that prevent any deviation from the logic of commodity exchange or capitalist
competition, while extending these relations further into society, with the state as the
ultimate guarantor of market supremacy.34Foucault contends that this principle was most
explicitly enunciated by Michael Polanyi, who wrote in The Logic of Liberty: “The main
function of the existing spontaneous order of jurisdiction is to govern the spontaneous order
of economic life.… [The] system of law develops and enforces the rules under which the
competitive system of production and distribution operates.”35

Hence, the supremacy of the dominant social relations of production or hegemonic class-
property forms is encoded in the rule of a commodified legal structure. The new Leviathan,
which has discarded any precapitalist trappings, is no longer a force above or external to the
realm of commodity exchange—that is, a superstructure—but is subordinated to the logic
of the market, which it is its role to enforce.36 This, Foucault suggests, is Max Weber’s
rational-legal order, which turns out to be simply the imposition of formal economic
relations circumscribing the state. At the same time, the state is given the role of enforcing
this new privatized order through its monopoly of the legitimate use of force.37

Hence, Abraham Bosse’s famous frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, depicting
the giant sovereign composed of individuals who have transferred their sovereignty to the
monarch, would today take the form of a giant rational-legal individual in a two-piece suit
composed internally of corporations, replacing the multitude.38 The crownless sovereign
power would now be portrayed as holding not a scepter in one hand and a sword in the
other, but the fourteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution (originally meant to ensure
the rights of former slaves but transformed into the basis of corporate personhood) in one
hand and a cruise missile in the other. The neoliberal Leviathan is a state that increasingly
has a single function and follows a single market logic—and in those terms alone it is
absolute and represents an absolutist capitalism.

Naturally, absolute capitalism is not without contradictions, of which five stand out:
economic, imperial, political, social-reproductive, and environmental. Together, they point
to a general system failure. The economic-crisis tendencies are best viewed from the
standpoint of Marx’s wider critique of the laws of motion of capital. Economically,
neoliberalism is a historical-structural product of an age of mobile monopoly-finance
capital that now operates globally through commodity chains, controlled by the financial
headquarters of the multinational corporations in the core of the world economy, which
dominate international capital flows.39The inherent instability of the new absolute
capitalism was marked by the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–9.40 Overaccumulation and
stagnation remain the central economic contradictions of the system, leading to corporate
mergers and financialization (the shift toward the amassing of financial assets by
speculative means) as the main countervailing factors. All of this, however, simply
exacerbates the top-heavy character of twenty-first-century capitalism intensifying its
already-existing long-term tendencies toward disequilibrium and crisis.41

Neoliberal globalization refers specifically to the system of global labor arbitrage and
commodity chains, coupled with the growth of worldwide monopolies. The fulcrum of this
form of imperialism is the systematic exploitation of the fact that the difference in wages
between the global North and South is greater than the difference in their productivities.
This creates a situation whereby the low unit labor costs in emerging economies in the
global South become the basis of today’s supply chains and the new system of value
capture.42 These international economic conditions mark the advent of a new imperialism
that is generating increasing global inequality, instability, and world struggle, made worse
in our age by declining U.S. hegemony, which points to the prospect of widening and
unlimited war.

As indicated above, the neoliberal regime represents a new synergy of state and market,
with the increasing subordination of the social-reproduction activities of the state to
capitalist reproduction. Whole sections of the state, such as central banking, and the main
mechanisms of monetary policy, are outside effective governmental control and under the
sway of financial capital. Under these circumstances, the state is increasingly viewed by the
population today as an alien entity. This raises contradictions with respect to the three key
social classes below the super-rich and the rich: the upper-middle class, the lower-middle
class, and the working class.

In a broad sketch focusing on advanced capitalist society, the upper-middle class can be
seen as consisting predominantly of a professional-technical stratum deeply suspicious of
any attacks on government, since its position is dependent not simply on its economic class
but also on the general system of political rights. It is therefore wedded to the liberal-
democratic state. In contrast, when taken by itself, the lower-middle class, made up mainly
of small business owners, middle management, and corporate-based white-collar salaried
and sales workers (particularly the white, less-educated, rural, and fundamentalist-religious
sectors), is generally antistate, procapital, and nationalist. It sees the state as chiefly
benefitting its two main enemies: the upper-middle class and the working class—the former
perceived as benefitting directly from the state, the latter increasingly designated in racial
terms.43 The lower-middle class includes what C. Wright Mills called “the rearguarders” of
the capitalist system, mobilized by the wealthy in times of crisis when a defense of
capitalist interests is considered essential, but represents in itself an extremely volatile
element of society.44 The working class, essentially the bottom 60 percent of income
earners in the United States, is the most oppressed and most diverse population (and thus
the most divided), but nonetheless the enemy of capital.45

The biggest threat to capital today, as in the past, is the working class. This is true both in
the advanced capitalist countries themselves and even more so in the periphery, where the
working class overlaps with the dispossessed peasantry. The working class is most
powerful when able to combine with other subaltern classes as part of a hegemonic bloc led
by workers (this is the real meaning of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s “we are the
99%”).

The 1 percent thus find themselves potentially without a political base, which remains
necessary to continue the neoliberal, absolute-capitalist project. Thus, from Donald Trump
to Jair Bolsonaro, we see the emergence of a tenuous working relationship between
neoliberalism and neofascism, meant to bring the rear guard of the system into play. Here,
the goal is to enlist the white, rural, religious, nationalistic lower-middle class as a political-
ideological army on behalf of capital. But this is fraught with dangers associated with right-
wing populism and ultimately threatens the demise of the liberal-democratic state.46

The major gender, race, community, and class contradictions of capitalist society today
reflect crises that extend beyond the narrow confines of workplace exploitation to the wider
structures in which the lives of working people are embedded, including the major sites of
social reproduction: family, community, education, health systems, communications,
transportation, and the environment. The destruction of these sites of social reproduction,
along with deteriorating working conditions, has brought back what Frederick Engels called
“social murder,” manifested in the declining life expectancy in recent years in the mature
capitalist economies.47 It is in these wider social domains that such issues as the
feminization of poverty, racial capitalism, homelessness, urban-community decay,
gentrification, financial expropriation, and ecological decline manifest themselves, creating
the wider terrains of class, race, social-reproductive, and environmental struggle, which
today are merging to a remarkable degree in response to neoliberal absolute capitalism.48

The conflict between absolute capitalism and the environment is the most serious
contradiction characterizing the system in this (or any)phase, raising the question of a
“death spiral” in the human relation to the earth in the course of the present century.49 The
age of ecological reform, in the 1970s, was soon displaced by a new age of environmental
excess. In absolute capitalism, absolute, abstract value dominates. In a system that focuses
above all on financial wealth, exchange value is removed from any direct connection to use
value. The inevitable result is a fundamental and rapidly growing rift between capitalist
commodity society and the planet.

Exterminism or Revolution
As we have seen, Mises employed the notion of destructionism to characterize the role of
socialism. So important was this in his perspective that he devoted the entire fifty-page-
long Part 5 of his book Socialism to this topic. “Socialism,” he wrote, “does not build; it
destroys. For destruction is the essence of it.” It simply carries out the “consumption of
capital” with no replacement or increase. Destructionism was best characterized, in his
view, as a society that in the present consumed to the utmost extent, with no concern for the
future of humanity—a future which he saw as residing in the accumulation of capital.50
Ironically, today’s monopoly-finance capital is typified by the very kinds of absolute
destructionism that Mises so deplored. Although technological change (particularly via the
military) continues to advance, capital accumulation (investment) is stagnant at the center
of the system, except where spurred on temporarily by tax cuts on corporations and
privatization of state activities. Meanwhile, income and wealth inequality is rising to
stratospheric levels; workers worldwide are experiencing a decline in material conditions
(economic, social, and ecological); and the entire planet as a place of human habitation is in
jeopardy. All this is the result of a system geared toward the most egregious forms of
exploitation, expropriation, waste, and predation on a world scale. Science now tells us that
the capitalist juggernaut, if present trends continue, will soon undermine industrial
civilization and threaten human survival itself—with many of the worst effects occurring
during the lifetime of today’s younger generations.

A useful reference point, with which to gain a historical and theoretical perspective on the
present planetary emergency, is Marx and Engels’s analysis of conditions in colonial
Ireland from the 1850s to the 1870s.51 Here, the operative term was extermination. As Marx
wrote in 1859, English (and Anglo-Irish) capitalists after 1846—marking the Great Irish
Famine and the Repeal of the Corn Laws—were involved in “a fiendish war of
extermination against the cotters,” or the mass of Irish peasant subsistence farmers “ground
to the dust” and dependent on the cultivation of potatoes as a subsistence crop. Irish soil
nutrients were being exported with Irish grain, without return, to feed English
industry.52 The decades immediately following the Great Famine were thus referred to by
Engels as the Period of Extermination.53 The term extermination as used here by Marx and
Engels, along with many of their contemporaries, had two related meanings at the
time: expulsion and annihilation.54 Extermination thus summed up the terrible conditions
then facing the Irish.

At the root of the Irish problem in the mid–nineteenth century was a “more severe form of
the metabolic rift” associated with the colonial system.55 With the gradual expulsion and
annihilation after 1846 of the poor peasant farmers, who had been responsible for fertilizing
the soil, the entire fragile ecological balance underlying the production of crops and the
replacement of nutrients in Ireland was destabilized. This encouraged further rounds of
clearances, expulsion of the peasantry, consolidation of farms, and the replacement of
tillage with pasture geared to English meat consumption. The Irish peasants were thus
faced, as Marx put it in 1867, with a choice between “ruin or revolution.”56

Today, analogous conditions are arising on a planetary scale, with subsistence farmers
everywhere finding their conditions undermined by the force of global imperialism.
Moreover, ecological destruction is no longer mainly confined to the soil, but has been
extended to the entire Earth System, including the climate, endangering the population of
the earth in general and further devastating those already existing in the most fragile
conditions. In the 1980s, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson famously penned “Notes on
Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilisation” examining planetary nuclear and
environmental threats.57 It is no secret that human lives in the hundreds of millions, perhaps
billions, are threatened this century by material destruction—ecological, economic, and
military/imperial. Innumerable numbers of species are now on the brink of extinction.
Industrial civilization itself faces collapse with a 4°C increase in global average
temperature, which even the World Bank says is imminent with the continuation of today’s
business as usual.58 Hence, the old socialist slogan famously associated with Rosa
Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism!, is no longer adequate and must be replaced either
by Socialism or Exterminism!, or with Marx’s Ruin or Revolution!

The neoliberal drive to absolute capitalism is accelerating the world toward exterminism or
destructionism on a planetary scale. In perpetrating this demolition, capital and the state are
united as never before in the post-Second World War world. But humanity still has a
choice: a long ecological revolution from below aimed at safeguarding the earth and
creating a world of substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and satisfaction of
communal needs—an ecosocialism for the twenty-first century.

1. Charles Baudelaire, “The Generous Player,” in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed.
Thomas R. Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1919), 82.

2. Daniel Altman, “Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist,” New York Times, July 16, 2005.
Altman’s article begins by mocking frequent Monthly Review author Patrick Bond (they
apparently sat next to each other on a plane) for believing that neoliberalism exists, and
for seeing it as connected to contemporary imperialism and issues such as the
commodification of water. “The problem is,” Altman, himself clearly a neoliberal, writes,
“the real neoliberals don’t seem to exist.”

3. On the collapse of liberalism in the 1920s, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of
Extremes (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 109–41.

4. Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
1983), Socialism(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), Liberalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
2005).

5. Phillip W. Magness, “The Pejorative Origins of the Term ‘Neoliberalism,’” American

Institute for Economic Research, December 10, 2018; Peter Goller, “Helene Bauer Gegen
die Neoliberal Bürgliche Ideologie von Ludwig Mises (1923),” Mitteilungen der Alfred Klahr
Gesellschaft 4 (2005), http:// klahrgesellschaft.at; Alfred Meusel, “Zur Bürgerlichen
Sozialkritik der Gegenwart: Der Neu-Liberalismus (Ludwig von Mises),” Die Gesellschaft:
Internationale Revue für Sozialismus und Politik 1, no. 4 (1924): 372–83. For a more
detailed discussion of the early origins of neoliberalism and a more complete set of
citations, see John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly
Review 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1–24.

6. Meusel, “Der Neu-Liberalismus,” 383. The term mobile capital gained currency in
Marxian theory through Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital. See Rudolf Hilferding, Finance
Capital (London: Routledge, 1981), 325–30, 342.

7. Meusel, “Der Neu-Liberalismus,” 372–73, Mises, Socialism, 413, 422. I would like to
thank Joseph Fracchia for translations from the German.

8. Mises, Liberalism, 9.
9. Mises, Socialism, 400–401.

10. Mises, Liberalism, 30; Herbert Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 10.

11. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944), 57. Polanyi’s analysis
of embeddedness, which is at the center of his critique of neoliberalism, was originally
based on Marx’s discussion of Aristotle’s inability to fully explore the distinction that he
had made between use value and exchange value, given that the separation of economy
from its embeddedness in the polis had not yet taken place. Polanyi’s treatment is thus
most fully developed in “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Trade and Market in the
Early Empires, Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Illinois:
The Free Press, 1957), 64–94.

12. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (London: Verso, 2013), 24,
37–50.

13. Eamonn Butler, “A Short History of the Mont Pèlerin Society,” The Great Offshore,
“Mont Pelerin Society” (encyclopedia entry) http://rybn.org/thegreatoffshore.

14. For an important work that described this transition as it was occurring,
concentrating on the role of international economic elites, see Joyce Kolko, Restructuring
the World Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

15. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

16. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 116–17.

17. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 131, 145.

18. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145.

19. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 133–38, 176–78; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), 81–86; Mirowski, Never Let
a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 64; Mises, Socialism, 344–51; George Stigler, Memoirs of an
Unregulated Economist (New York: Basic, 1988), 92, 162–63.

20. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 118. Foucault’s remarks are related to the
comments of Baran and Sweezy on how capitalism with growing monopoly has
abandoned its classical principle of quid pro quo. Paul A. Baran and Paul M.
Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 336–41.

21. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145. The square brackets in the quotation were
inserted by the editor of Foucault’s lectures.

22. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145, 165.

23. Craig Allan Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality (London:
Routledge, 2019), 149–69; Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 142–77.

24. Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).

25. See Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great
Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); John Bellamy Foster and Robert
W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012); Costas
Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing (London: Verso, 2014); and Medlen, Fresh Cash,
Capital Accumulation and Inequality.

26. Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, “Capacity Utilization:
Manufacturing,” February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org.

27. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 63–76.

28. On the imperialist aspects of this, see John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John
Bellamy Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 70,
no. 10 (March 2019): 1–24. On the connection between financialization and expropriation,
see Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing, 141–47, 166–68.

29. On the deepening global inequality, see Jason Hickel, The Divide (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2017).

30. David Harvey, “The Neoliberal Project Is Alive but Has Lost Its Legitimacy,” Wire,
February 9, 2019. See also John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2017).

31. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 221.

32. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 232–33.

33. Michael Tigar, Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2018).

34. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 171–73; Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 220–
33.

35. Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
185; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 174; Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 220–33. See
also Tigar, Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power.

36. “Why Leviathan?… The answer is both very simple and painfully difficult. Very simple
in the sense that the state—despite the great variety of its forms, as constituted in history,
from the time of the so-called oriental despotism and the early empires to the Modern
Liberal State—cannot be other than Leviathan in imposing its structurally entrenched
power on overall societal decision-making” (István Mészáros, “Preface to Beyond
Leviathan,” Monthly Review 69, no. 9 [February 2018]: 47). While this remains true, in
neoliberalism the state is selectively withered away in its relation to capital, confined by
its own self-imposed rational-legal character that must conform to the formal economic
laws of the capitalist system, of which it is, paradoxically, the main legitimating force and
official guarantor. The extent of these limitations is apparent whenever a social
democratic government is brought to power, thinking it can institute reforms, only to
discover that it is compelled to enforce neoliberal policies.

37. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 105, 172.

38. “Leviathan Frontispiece,” Willamette.edu.

39. See Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of
Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). On the role of neoliberalism to finance,
see also Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Capital Resurgent (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 110–18; David Harvey, The Enigma of
Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.

40. The extreme monetization of information in our era induced by the Internet has led
to an era of surveillance capitalism. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney,
“Surveillance Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014); Shoshana
Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

41. John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates, “Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical
Economics,” Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 1–24.

42. Suwandi, Jonna, and Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism”:
15.

43. On the class analysis provided here and its relation to neoliberalism and neofascism,
see Foster, Trump in the White House.

44. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 353–54.

45. R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of
Labor,” Monthly Review 66, no. 5 (October 2014): 7. For a rough demarcation of the major
class divisions in the United States, see Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an
Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47. The divisions between
the working class and the lower-middle class obviously cannot be determined with
precision. As Karl Marx wrote, “Middle and transitional levels always conceal the
boundaries.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 1025.

46. See Henry A. Giroux, “The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism,” Truthout, June 10,
2018.
47. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International,
1975), 330.

48. There has recently been a convergence of Marxian analyses of ecological crisis,
social reproduction, and racial capitalism, all of which increasingly emphasize the dialectic
of exploitation and expropriation. See Nancy Fraser, “Behind the Hidden Abode,” New Left
Review 86 (2014): 60–61; Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the
World? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 52–56; Michael C. Dawson, “Hidden in
Plain Sight,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 143–61; John Bellamy Foster and
Brett Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature,” Monthly Review 69, no. 10 (March 2018): 1–27.

49. George Monbiot, “The Earth Is in a Death Spiral. It Will Take Radical Action to Save
Us,” Guardian, November 14, 2018.

50. Mises, Socialism, 413–14, 452.

51. The brief comments on Marx and Engels’s Irish writings here are inspired by
research I have carried out with Brett Clark to be included in our forthcoming book, The
Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

52. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress,
1971), 90, 124; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 860.

53. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 210.

54. “Extermination,” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.

55. Eamonn Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish Soil” (Maynooth University Social
Science Institute Working Paper Series no. 3, January 2018), 40.

56. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 142.

57. E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–79.
Thompson made it clear at times that he thought of exterminism as generally applicable to
the environment. Others were to develop this notion explicitly in terms of ecological crisis.
See especially Rudolf Bahro, Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster (Bath: Gateway, 1994),
19–25; John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2009), 22–28; and Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2016), 179–80.

58. David Roberts, “The Brutal Logic of Climate Change,” Grist, December 6, 2011; World
Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided (Washington, D.C.:
World Bank, 2012), http://documents.worldbank.org.

Category: Capitalism, crisis, financialization, John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, Neoliberalism,
Political economy