ABSTRACT
David Harvey’s suggestion that idealized versions of neoliberalism have stood in for differentiated state policies explains the unevenness of neoliberalism throughout the globe, why neoliberals do not demand the elimination of all state intervention in the economy everywhere, and why some neoliberals have also been proponents of authoritarianism and antidemocratic principles. The policies that were implemented between the 1970s and 1990s in response to the long crisis in profitability necessarily took different shapes in different national economies: monetarism and an attack on the welfare state; IMF-enforced structural adjustment; state-manipulated market economies; newly formed capitalist class networks; protracted attacks on labor unions; and shock therapy. Concepts crucial to literary studies also tend to converge and become reorganized in their historical connectedness to shifts in the economic structure of global capitalism. Postcolonialism now appears as attempts by the indigenous capitalist class to gain a greater share of the national profits as much as a hangover from colonial organizations of the economy.
