THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

• Published in: New Left review 2017-03, Vol.104 (104), p.5-18
• Main Author: Streeck, Wolfgang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ambition; Capitalism; Democracy; EU membership; Global economy; Globalization; Industrialized nations; International trade; Labor market; Labor productivity; Labor unions; Liberalism; Markets; Neoliberalism; Politics; Populism; Productivity; Profits; Victims
• ISSN: 0028-6060; 2044-0480

Is the long reign of neo-liberalism coming to an end, struck by the untoward blows of Brexit, Trump and spread of populist insurgencies across Europe, as victims of its pattern of globalization start to find a voice? If so, with no radical alternative yet in sight, is a strange interregnum looming, where ‘everything is possible and nothing consequential’? Neoliberalism arrived with globalization or else globalization arrived with neoliberalism; that is how the Great Regression began. In the 1970s, the capital of the rebuilt industrial nations started to work its way out of the national servitude in which it had been forced to spend the decades following 1945. The time had come to take leave of the tight labour markets, stagnant productivity, falling profits and the increasingly ambitious demands of trade unions under a mature, state-administered capitalism. The road to the future, to a new expansion as is always close to the heart of capital, led outwards, to the still pleasantly unregulated world of a borderless global economy in which markets would no longer be locked into nation-states, but nation-states into markets. As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics. This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised.