I’m fascinated by ideas and ideologies and none have animated me quite like the ideology of neoliberalism with its mantra that there’s “no alternative.” This bold pronouncement, along with its twin, that “there is no society,” always seemed like a challenge, and I’ve spent the better part of my adult life seeking to understand neoliberalism’s history and trajectory.

In our present milieu neoliberalism is ubiquitous, with the idea that markets are self-correcting and that whatever markets do is right. Neoliberalism regards buying and selling in markets as the template for human relations and claims that market choices scale up to the social good. To ask Americans about it is to ask a fish about water, yet neoliberalism has a history and progenitors, who talked and wrote about it in a specific fashion.

Milton Friedman is one of those, and his 1970 article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled–A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, was an opening salvo of the neoliberal revolution that would transform economics, corporate law and social relations. Friedman warned that accepting “social responsibility” was equivalent to submitting to the inevitable tyranny of collectivism. The doctrine of “social responsibility…does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine.”

Did you catch that? Friedman is saying that to acknowledge any collective morality, or any responsibility besides profit was a “socialist” view because it subverted the “market mechanism,” which to Friedman was the only way in which to order the US and Western capitalist/democracies.

This is world in which we live and was the outcome of a “counterrevolution,” led by neoliberal intellectuals like Milton Friedman, through which capitalists and their affiliated ideologues seized control of the fiscal and monetary capacities of the state amidst the 1970s crisis. The result was less spending for workers and more spending for the wealthy that emerged as complementary pillars of a coherent policy paradigm for restoring the power of asset owners following the crisis. 

What you see is a strange mix of largess and austerity that defines neoliberalism and has reshaped class politics in the United States: massive deficit spending and low interest rates to drive up asset values, on the one hand, and ever-deeper cuts to social spending, on the other. Rather than diminishing the state neoliberalism repurposes the state for economic extraction, draining resources away from society as a whole and funneling them into the pockets of the billionaires. 

Neoliberalism is amorphous by design but Friedman articulates a world where there is no social only the market. Market mechanisms are to replace society and neoliberalism confers freedom to capital while relegating the rest of us to wage slavery. This is the logic of neoliberalism and it’s no wonder our country is so fucked up and Americans are so sick and unhappy.