Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

AT: Cede the Political

Individual freedom and agency are a myth under neoliberalism – it is a guise for elite control and the suppression of public dialogue.

Roy Karadag 2010 ( Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. Neoliberal restructuring in Turkey: From state to oligarchic capitalism “Introduction”)

For more than three decades, countries around the world have been coping, more or less effectively, with pressures to establish a market-based economy. Transformations in the current age of neoliberalism challenged the Fordist growth models of the postWorld War II era and put an end to Keynesian economic policies in both industrialized and late developing countries. The end of the Bretton Woods international financial architecture and the oil price revolutions in the 1970s set the stage for the translation of neoclassical ideas into the economic policies known as “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism” in the 1980s and into the discourses and practices of the international financial institutions (IFIs). We may go so far as to conclude that the phase of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982) was succeeded by an era of embedded neoliberalism in which the contradictions of global capitalism are veiled by the hegemonic ideology of individual freedom and prosperity, reminiscent of the first “Age of Capital” (Hobsbawm 1975) in the nineteenth century.1 In contrast to the challenges facing the capitalist democracies of the West, these changes exerted much higher adaptation pressures on late developing countries. The high interest-rate policy of the United States further aggravated the foreign debt problems of most developing countries. In the early 1980s, the IFIs began to enforce structural adjustment programs which were designed not only to overcome the short-term financial crises of those countries, but also to initiate systemic changes towards export-oriented and market-based economic orders. The policies bundled in the so-called “Washington consensus” (Williamson 1990) were intended to liberalize inward-oriented economies, with the intended effect that the rules and mechanisms of world market competition would finally erase the efficiency-inhibiting measures of the state. However, as can be seen three decades after that shift began, neither in industrialized Western OECD countries nor in late developing countries did these globalization pressures lead to the expected result of convergence towards a liberal market economy. The countries affected did not resort to the economists’ standard responses of state withdrawal and market liberalization. On the contrary, even though the pressures on national economic models are obviously present, the results of the reform paths actually pursued are much more divergent than neoclassical economists could have imagined. The reasons for this divergence are many and arise from specific political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Accordingly, the explanation presented here is a historical-institutionalist account of Turkish capitalism. I argue that what emerged in Turkey’s twentieth-century capitalist development was a state capitalist economic order, institutionalized and controlled by new nationalist state elites in the 1920s and 1930s. Similar to other late developers, the state bureaucracy operated as the original source of capitalist accumulation. Through top-down structured corporatist arrangements, linked to the new variety of ethnonationalist identities, state elites sought to maintain social control in a rapidly changing and industrializing socio-economic environment. The inherent dynamism resulted from the introduction of representative, electoral-democratic institutions that slowly undermined the position of state elites. Efforts by “Kemalist” elites to regain control of the political process and economic developments did not manage to reshape the national arena. The political and economic crisis dynamics of the late 1970s were resolved by the decision, backed by the Turkish Armed Forces, to dismantle the state capitalist framework and to introduce liberal economic restructuring reforms. However, if we must interpret the post-1980 transformations, we can conclude that those reforms resulted in the emergence of what is here labeled “oligarchic capitalism.” The fragmentation of the political arena, the end of corporatist social control, and the establishment of new, closed elite political business cartels that capture the state represent the crucial elements of oligarchic dynamics that have undermined state power and institutional trust. The outcome of neoliberal restructuring experiments, therefore, depends crucially on preexisting and changing power structures and relations in the course of state transformations. These recent changes have to be framed within a historical-institutional explanation of where these power structures and change dynamics come from. In this paper, based on arguments concerning the political embeddedness of economies, they are linked to the emergence and erosion of Turkey’s state capitalist model. Only by depicting historically grown power structures is it possible to assess the impact of the most recent phase of financial regulation under the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Unsustainable

We are in a period of gradual economic decay- neolib is unsustainable

Streek, 14

(Wolfgang, “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review 2014, http://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end)

There is a widespread sense today that capitalism is in critical condition, more so than at any time since the end of the Second World War. [1] Looking back, the crash of 2008 was only the latest in a long sequence of political and economic disorders that began with the end of postwar prosperity in the mid-1970s. Successive crises have proved to be ever more severe, spreading more widely and rapidly through an increasingly interconnected global economy. Global inflation in the 1970s was followed by rising public debt in the 1980s, and fiscal consolidation in the 1990s was accompanied by a steep increase in private-sector indebtedness. [2] For four decades now, disequilibrium has more or less been the normal condition of the ‘advanced’ industrial world, at both the national and the global levels. In fact, with time, the crises of postwar OECD capitalism have become so pervasive that they have increasingly been perceived as more than just economic in nature, resulting in a rediscovery of the older notion of a capitalist society—of capitalism as a social order and way of life, vitally dependent on the uninterrupted progress of private capital accumulation.¶ Crisis symptoms are many, but prominent among them are three long-term trends in the trajectories of rich, highly industrialized—or better, increasingly deindustrialized—capitalist countries. The first is a persistent decline in the rate of economic growth, recently aggravated by the events of 2008 (Figure 1, below). The second, associated with the first, is an equally persistent rise in overall indebtedness in leading capitalist states, where governments, private households and non-financial as well as financial firms have, over forty years, continued to pile up financial obligations (for the US, see Figure 2, below). Third, economic inequality, of both income and wealth, has been on the ascent for several decades now (Figure 3, below), alongside rising debt and declining growth. Steady growth, sound money and a modicum of social equity, spreading some of the benefits of capitalism to those without capital, were long considered prerequisites for a capitalist political economy to command the legitimacy it needs. What must be most alarming from this perspective is that the three critical trends I have mentioned may be mutually reinforcing. There is mounting evidence that increasing inequality may be one of the causes of declining growth, as inequality both impedes improvements in productivity and weakens demand. Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the ‘Matthew principle’ governing free markets: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.’ [3] Furthermore, rising debt, while failing to halt the decline of economic growth, compounds inequality through the structural changes associated with financialization—which in turn aimed to compensate wage earners and consumers for the growing income inequality caused by stagnant wages and cutbacks in public services.¶ Can what appears to be a vicious circle of harmful trends continue forever? Are there counterforces that might break it—and what will happen if they fail to materialize, as they have for almost four decades now? Historians inform us that crises are nothing new under capitalism, and may in fact be required for its longer-term health. But what they are talking about are cyclical movements or random shocks, after which capitalist economies can move into a new equilibrium, at least temporarily. What we are seeing today, however, appears in retrospect to be a continuous process of gradual decay, protracted but apparently all the more inexorable. Recovery from the occasional Reinigungskrise is one thing; interrupting a concatenation of intertwined, long-term trends quite another. Assuming that ever lower growth, ever higher inequality and ever rising debt are not indefinitely sustainable, and may together issue in a crisis that is systemic in nature—one whose character we have difficulty imagining—can we see signs of an impending reversal?

Collapse of neoliberalism is inevitable because of economic and environmental trends – multiple structural trends make resuscitation impossible, which means its try-or-die for the alt

Li, 10

(Minqi, Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently an associate professor of Economics at the University of Utah “The End of the “End of History”: The Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of Humanity”, Science and Society Vol. 74, No. 3, July 2010, 290–305)

In 2001, the U. S. stock market bubble started to collapse, after years of “new economy” boom. The Bush administration took advantage of the psychological shock of 9/11, and undertook a series of “preemptive wars” (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq) that ushered in a new era of intensified inter-state conflicts. Towards the end of 2001, Argentina, which was regarded as a neoliberal model country, was hit by a devastating financial crisis. Decades of neoliberalism had not only undermined the living standards of the working classes, but also destroyed the material fortunes of the urban middle classes (which remained a key social base for neoliberalism in Latin America until the 1990s). After the Argentine crisis, neoliberalism completely lost political legitimacy in Latin America. This paved the way for the rise of several socialist-oriented governments on the continent. After the 2001 global recession, the global economy actually entered into a mini–golden age. The big semi-peripheral economies, the so-called “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became the most dynamic sector. The neoliberal global economy was fueled by the super-exploitation of the massive cheap labor force in the semi-periphery (especially in China). The strategy worked, to the extent that it generated massive amounts of surplus value that could be shared by the global capitalist classes. But it also created a massive “realization problem.” That is, as the workers in the “emerging markets” were deprived of purchasing power, on a global scale, there was a persistent lack of effective demand for the industrial output produced in China and the rest of the semi-periphery. After 2001, the problem was addressed through increasingly higher levels of debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). The neoliberal strategy was economically and ecologically unsustainable. Economically, the debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist countries could not go on indefinitely. Ecologically, the rise of the BRICs greatly accelerated resource depletion and environmental degradation on a global scale. The global ecological system is now on the verge of total collapse. The world is now in the midst of a prolonged period of economic and political instability that could last several decades. In the past, the capitalist world system had responded to similar crises and managed to undertake successful restructurings. Is it conceivable that the current crisis will result in a similar restructuring within the system that will bring about a new global “New Deal”? In three respects, the current world historical conjuncture is fundamentally different from that of 1945. Back in 1945, the United States was the indisputable hegemonic power. It enjoyed overwhelming industrial, financial, and military advantages relative to the other big powers and, from the capitalist point of view, its national interests largely coincided with the world system’s common and long-term interests. Now, U. S. hegemony is in irreversible decline. But none of the other big powers is in a position to replace the United States and function as an effective hegemonic power. Thus, exactly at a time when the global capitalist system is in deep crisis, the system is also deprived of effective leadership.4 In 1945, the construction of a global “New Deal” involved primarily accommodating the economic and political demands of the western working classes and the non-western elites (the national bourgeoisies and the westernized intellectuals). In the current conjuncture, any new global “New Deal” will have to incorporate not only the western working classes but also the massive, non-western working classes. Can the capitalist world system afford such a new “New Deal” if it could not even afford the old one? Most importantly, back in 1945, the world’s resources remained abundant and cheap, and there was still ample global space for environmental pollution. Now, not only has resource depletion reached an advanced stage, but the world has also virtually run out of space for any further environmental pollution.