ABSTRACT
The world is becoming more and more interconnected, interdependent and interrelated. This we can agree upon. How did contemporary globalization and neoliberalism materialize? What brought about this most recent restructuring of the world system? Surprisingly, globalization’s emergence is usually taken for granted, or critics/analysts isolate what they consider the important new features of the phenomenon. Missing from most examinations is a detailed account of neoliberalism’s central role in contemporary globalization’s emergence and consolidation in the second half of the twentieth century. Although other major structural transformations – such as technological change, social and cultural transformations, geopolitical crises and dynamics – are also significant, neoliberal capitalism and neoliberal modernization deserve special attention because, as our latest macroeconomic doctrine, “neoliberalism” has grown to become an unchallenged ideology; nothing short of an overwhelming, mind-controlling ethic. Yet, as today’s current global ideology and market faith, it has ascended from its roots in the contradictions of previous eras of advanced capitalism, and its accompanying restructuring imperatives are in response to the crises and obstacles of these earlier projects. The consummate power of market exchange, privatization and capital accumulation as the defining features of human action and activity has been raised to unprecedented levels, so that neoliberalism disciplines, destroys, dehumanizes and destabilizes, while such outcomes are rationalized as social inevitabilities, and people – especially the poor, weak and powerless (and, by definition, ‘uncompetitive’) – become the disposable assets of today’s uneven globalizing world.
