State intervention may be back, but don't assume neoliberalism is dead | Alex Doherty
State intervention may be back on the government's agenda, but its real intention is to return to normal' as soon as possible
Some people say it doesn't even exist - that it's meaningless", or even a term of abuse". But from the 2008 financial crisis to the vote for Brexit in 2016, from the rise of the alt-right to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no way of properly grasping our world without thinking about how neoliberalism informs our politics and economy.
But what is it? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism can be defined as the raft of policies and overarching political ethos that enabled governments in the late-1970s to turn away from state-directed economic planning, towards an economic model that extended competitive markets into every sphere of human activity and initiated the reign of finance capital (the kind dreamed up in the City of London and Wall Street) by removing constraints on capital mobility.
Related: The UK must freeze private rents now - or thousands will be made homeless | Joe Beswick
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