Neoliberalism.

Source: Walden Bello"Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment

and Global Poverty" Pluto Press & Food First San Fran.
If we can identify a dominant ideology behind the current globalization project it
is "Neoliberalism". Neoliberalism is the European term. Neoconservativism the
US term. These are just new words for the 200 year old doctines of "Laissez
faire". "Laissez faire" is just a fancy french word for "allow to do", meaning not
that the poor should be allowed to raid the houses and bank accounts of the rich,
but that business should be free of nasty regulations, taxes and red tape like
pollution and labor laws which limit their capacity to do business. "Laissez
faire", "free market" are all terms that mean "unregulated business". The
term liberal is mistakenly applied to progressive or even leftwing politics in the
United States. As should be clear liberal actually means conservative in
economic terms. However liberal has come to signify in the US a reformed state-
capitalist position.
"Laissez faire" ideology regards government intervention in the economy to be
the source of all the ills of society. If only the market were left free to operate,
boundless wealth would be created and we would all be better off. Margaret
Thatcher put it concisely:- "It is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents
and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit of us all".
"Laissez faire" ideology universalizes the interests of business to the whole
community.
Classic Liberalism

Classic liberalism is attributed to late 18th century english philosopher Adam
Smith among others. His belief was that if individuals pursued their selfish
interests producing, buying and selling in a free meaning unregulated market,
then wealth is created and prosperity grows, benefitting everyone as Thatcher
asserted.
In particular Smith advocated that the state should interfere as little as possible in
free markets. State interference he believed always distorted their beneficial
machinery. The term the state refers to the collected institutions of government,
judiciary, police and army, which have assumed a monopoly of law making and
enforcement over society.
Smith was writing in a time when the industrial revolution was just beginning,
before massive factory production, assembly lines, limited liability companies
and transnationals. His ideal of a market was of small artisans and merchants
trading in a local marketplace.
There were transnationals in Smith's time, but they were imperial state companies
like the East India Company, exactly the sort of state involvement in commerce
that Smith deplored. Smith also deplored slavery violence and coercion of all
kinds, regarding these as the exact opposite of the theoretically non-violent
activities of the market. He exalted competition and deplored what he called
conspiracy or combination, criticising the obvious tendency of merchants to
conspire together to fix prices and to use the state in their favor, but equally the
tendency of workers to do the same by forming unions. Hence the liberal ideal of
the state is as a neutral entity, writing and enforcing laws without partisanship.
Smith's ideal of the free market is promptly wrecked on the realities of social
relations. In the liberal ideal atomised individuals resolutely avoid any
cooperation or resort to force, and stick to trading peacefully and competitively.
The glaring defect of this idealisation is that markets do not exist in some social
vacuum.
Individuals and corporations have historically pursued their interests in whatever
way that society permits them to. There is no absolute ethic of business other
than this central principle. If slavery is permitted then slavery there will be. The
important issue is not markets which in any case are an inevitable human activity,
even in the most centralised Stalinist or Drug -War regime, but rather how such
social mores and laws are developed and enforced- is every citizen a genuine
participant or is power concentrated in few hands usually in the pay of the rich?
David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus writing a little later than Smith turned
liberal ideas into attacks on the poor rather than the state. Peasants were at that
time flooding into English cities where they served as cheap expendable labor for
the Industrial Revolution.
Ricardo denied any inherent human right to food, clothing or housing other than
what they could get by selling their labor or products on the free market. Malthus
added that this was an iron law of nature. The starving of the poor was a simple
result of their population exceeding the food supply, and hence a natural
corrective that it would be wrong and futile to try and redress through social
action.
The fact that this poverty was created by collusion between the wealthy and the
state to usurp (or enclose) the common lands of the people, while ruthlessly
suppressing popular rebellion, was strangely absent from their analysis. We must
not forget that private property is routinely carved out of communally held
resources by the well-heeled, using the power of the state.