ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, neoliberalism, a particular form of political governance, and a political ideology that legitimizes this form of governance, has become hegemonic in the interstate system. This chapter examines neoliberalism as the politics of the international state system and of ideological legitimization of these politics in relation to corporate mega-capitalism. Mega-capitalism is simply capital writ large in the sense of being internationally consolidated and assuming the multinational company or corporate form. Neoliberalism as an ideology is thoroughly permeated by neoclassical economics and classical liberal social theory. Neoliberalism as political governance may be identified with a specific set of policies that were intended to deliver on the prescriptions of neoliberalism as ideology. Marx's theory has typically been misrepresented as positing the inevitability of capitalist collapse owing to its inner contradictions. Vampires, like zombies, must cannibalize the living in order to survive, just as capital must cannibalize living labour in order to self-reproduce and self-expand.
