Neoliberalism and Process of Privatisation

Introduction
Neoliberalism, State and Economy
Neoliberalism as a Public Pedagogy
Neoliberalism and Inequality Regimes
Conclusion:

Introduction

This blog discusses neoliberalism's philosophy, legislation, and methods. It attempts to prove that neoliberalism is a social, political, and cultural ideology as well as an economic one by drawing on a variety of sources. It is crucial to distinguish between neoliberal advocates, who include Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who claim that because it is founded on "unprecedented individual freedom," neoliberal political and economic thought is the best way to live. The notions of social justice and equality, on the other hand, are viewed as being challenged by neoliberalism by critical thinkers. Neoliberalism's development in India won't be specifically covered in this module. It would prefer to concentrate on the neoliberal movement's overarching theory and ideology. The other modules on livelihoods and social security would cover the particulars of neoliberalism and India.

Hayek and Friedman's interpretation of neoliberalism favors the control of the "market" over the sovereignty of the democratic state. According to Hayek (1944, 25–26), neoliberal thought originated as a defense of capitalism and a blatant rejection of socialism. According to Hayek, those who advocated for neoliberalism "thought that socialism had mutated into fascism in Germany and Stalinism in the Soviet Union and argued that socialism promised a false and morally repugnant freedom from economic necessity at the cost of limited choices and an inevitable descent into totalitarianism.". Neoliberals therefore advocate maximizing individual freedom through competition, with the primary responsibility of the government being to create favorable conditions for competition. According to Hayek (1944), it's critical to understand that under neoliberalism, human rights and equality only apply to the ability to compete, not the ability to start from the same starting line, with the same tools, or when the gun fires. No rights to specific results, like a specific level of health or education, are included.

According to Harvey (2003; 2007) and Braedley and Luxton (2010), one of the key characteristics of neoliberalism is that it was founded on the tenets of the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, as articulated by De Tocqueville, Hume, Locke, and Smith. Individual human freedom from coercion and servitude is liberalism's core value. The neoliberals adopted this concept because it encourages the growth of wealth and gives people the freedom to pursue their interests. Drawing on the writings of Brodie (2007), Braedley and Luxton (2010) argue that, unlike classical liberalism, aspects of neoliberal policies have brought the logic and rationale of the market to all aspects of life, social, political, and cultural, in addition to economics. The critics contend, however, that neoliberalism is essentially a more extreme form of the classical liberal economic theory that was created by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the 18th and 19th centuries. The academics have labeled neoliberalism as ideology (Giroux and Luxton), creative destruction (Harvey), a project (Connell), a logic of governance (Braedley), and Bourdieu (pedagogy), contending from various theoretical and methodological vantage points that neoliberalism is not promoting social justice and equality but is, rather, legitimizing, repeating, and intensifying injustices and inequality. According to Giroux (2004), it's critical to recognize that neoliberalism is not a "neutral, technical, economic discourse," but rather an ideology and political system propelled by the spirit of market fundamentalism that subordinates democratic politics to the market economy and broadens its influence to encompass all facets of social life within the rules and ideals of a market-driven society.

Neoliberalism: Definition and its Challenges

Neoliberalism, according to Harvey (2007:22), is "a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterised by private property rights, individual liberty, unrestricted markets, and free trade.". As stated by Harvey (2003. 2007) two significant neoliberalism-related issues stand out. Increasing volatility within global capitalism has been a result of neoliberalization. Secondly, from the perspective of the upper classes, neoliberalism has been a huge success. The ruling elites in the advanced capitalist economies of the U.S. have thus regained their class position as a result. In countries like China, India, Russia, and elsewhere, the U.S. and Britain have helped to foster the development of capitalist class structures. It's interesting how the ruling elite-controlled media has institutionalized the notion that some industries failed because they lacked sufficient competition. An intriguing argument is made by Harvey (2007:34), who claims that "within neoliberalization, social inequality was necessary to encourage entrepreneurial risk and innovation, which in turn conferred competitive advantage and stimulated growth.". If conditions among the lower classes worsened, it was because they had failed for personal and cultural reasons to develop their own human capital through education, the acquisition of a protestant work ethic, and submission to work discipline and flexibility. In short, issues arose due to a lack of competitive strength or due to individual, societal, and political failings.

Neoliberalism placed a strong emphasis on moving and transferring assets, wealth, and resources from the poor to the rich and powerful nations as well as from the vulnerable to the upper class. This process is described by Harvey as "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey 2003). According to Harvey (2007:34), this process entails the upkeep and legitimization of some behaviors that Karl Marx had labeled as "primitive" when he examined the rise of capitalism. The following are some of the procedures:

1. the commodification and privatization of land, as well as the eviction of peasant populations (observed in Mexico and India);
2. conversion of various types of property rights (common, collective, and state) into only private property rights;
3. a restriction on commons rights;
4. Commodification of labor and the repression of alternate (indigenous) modes of production and consumption;
5. colonial, neocolonial, and imperial methods of appropriating property, including raw materials;
6. exchange and taxation are being monetized, especially with regard to land;
7. the sex trade (slave trade), and
8. Usury, national debt, and credit system usage are radical forms of prehistoric accumulation.

The core of the process of accumulation by dispossession, which has transferred assets from the public to the private and particularly class-privileged domain, can be observed in the four elements of neoliberalization listed below (Harvey 2003, 2007):

Neoliberalism, State and Economy

The fundamental aspect of neoliberalism, while avoiding a linear historical analysis, is the methodical application of state resources and power to impose (financial) market imperatives within domestic structures that are internationalized through the processes of "globalization.". How does the state fit into this? According to Harvey, the state must establish institutions like the military, police, court system, and defense to protect private property rights. The establishment of "freely functioning markets" is another crucial task, and government intervention in these markets (once it has been established) must be kept to a minimum because strong interests will always skew and slant government action (especially in democracies) in their favor. It is crucial to recognize that neoliberalism has established itself as the dominant discourse mode and has had such profound effects on political-economic practices and thought processes that they have permeated everyday perceptions of reality and informed how we live and interpret it. Thus, neoliberal proponents now hold influential positions in the media, corporate boardrooms, financial institutions, important state institutions (treasury, central banks), and international financial organizations that oversee international trade and finance, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Harvey 2007: 22–23).

Harvey contends that neoliberalism has institutionalized itself as a set of universal rules, whereby the WTO's and the IMF's current rules of engagement, which regulate international trade and international finance, are universally acknowledged and adhered to. Harvey (2007) refers to the process of "naturalization," in which an idea has been so thoroughly ingrained in consciousness that it is taken for granted as "natural," as what leads to the acceptance and institutionalization of "neoliberalism" on a global scale. How did the neoliberal process become a significant component of the world political economy is the question. According to Harvey (2007:29), the ideology behind neoliberalism was to reestablish the conditions for capital accumulation and the restoration of class power. According to Harvey, by the late 1960s, many developing nations, including Mexico and Argentina, as well as advanced capitalist nations like France and Italy, seemed to pose a political threat to the world's ruling classes. Furthermore, the threat to the position of the ruling classes from the economy was now very serious.

Harvey claims that "one requirement of the post-war settlement in almost all countries was to restrain the economic power of the ruling classes and for labor to be accorded a much larger share of the economic pie.". When growth was robust, it didn't seem to matter that there were restrictions in place, but when it slowed in the 1970s, the ruling classes felt threatened even though real interest rates turned negative and dividends shrank. If they wanted to keep their political and economic influence from being destroyed, they had to act quickly. Neoliberalism has been successful in regaining class power, but it has failed to revive global capital accumulation. In particular state formations and even within specific sectors, such as health and education, the process of neoliberalization has been halting, geographically uneven, and heavily influenced by class structures and other social forces that are either in favor of or opposed to its central propositions (2007:28–29).

Harvey (2007) makes the case that even though neoliberalism has developed unevenly around the world, the 1970s crisis of capital accumulation had a significant impact on every nation due to a combination of rising unemployment and quickening inflation. As a result, after the 1980s, Britain supported the imperial power of the United States through strategic leadership and persuasion, such as by involving U. S. Research universities were crucial in the training of numerous economists who went on to spread neoliberal values throughout the world. The removal of Keynesian economists from the IMF and their replacement by neoliberal monetarists in 1982, according to Harvey (2003) in his seminal work "The New Imperialism," "transformed the U. Through its structural adjustment programs applied to any state (and there were many in the 1980s and 1990s), S dominated IMF into a leading agent of neoliberalization. The 1998 WTO negotiating rules and the 1990s-era Washington Consensus, both of which confirmed the world's shift toward neoliberal practices.

In order to protect "capital" at the expense of labor, it is crucial to understand that neoliberalism is a specific form of capitalism. The power of labor is significantly diminished, and it is left to fend for itself in the global whims of capitalism. According to Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005:2), both internal and external global forces have contributed to the development of this type of excessively powerful institutional ideology, policy, and structures. According to them, "the internal forces include the coalition between the financial interests, leading industrialists, traders, and exporters, media barons, big landowners, local political chieftains, the top echelons of civil service and the military, and their intellectual and political proxies" (pp. 3).

In contrast, corporate power has grown and strengthened under neoliberalism, with finance assuming an unprecedented position and political ideology shifting toward the "right" globally. As a result, the state's ability to direct and frame policies for the purposes of social justice and equality has been undermined. According to Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005), the large-scale 8 unemployment and sharp rise in contract, insecure, and powerless labor globally have weakened the left-leaning parties and mass organizations, and the presence of trade unions has been significantly diminished. The use of foreign aid, debt relief, and balance of payments support to institutionalize neoliberal programs are just a few of the pressures on states that exist globally. Other pressures include diplomatic pressure, political unrest, and military intervention through war when deemed necessary.

addressing a key claim made by pro-neoliberalists that trade openness promoted by neoliberalism promotes economic growth. According to Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005:5), there is no convincing evidence that neoliberalism is necessary for global economic growth. They contend that under neoliberalism, economic growth rates have slowed, unemployment, insecurity, and underemployment have increased, inequalities between nations have grown and are steadily widening, as well as the living and working conditions of the majority of the poor and minorities, as well as the instability of nations and the degradation of the environment. Overall, they contend, the climate is characterized by a situation where the wealth and living standards of the global elite are at an all-time high.

Neoliberalism as a Public Pedagogy

The belief ingrained in neoliberalism that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, according to Giroux (2004), wages an ongoing assault on democracy, public goods, and noncommodified values. According to Giroux (2004), big government is criticized as being either ineffective or a threat to individual freedom, and as a result the power should be embedded in markets and corporations rather than in government and citizens—where citizenship is increasingly seen as a function of consumerism. Big government is also criticized as being either incompetent or a threat to individual freedom. As a result, material investments, market identities, and commercial values are prioritized over human needs, civic duties, and democratic relationships.

Neoliberal policies have systematically undermined democratic practices around the world. Loans given to Third World nations and semi-peripheral states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have caused serious disruptions in social welfare programs relating to health care, education, social security, and working conditions, making the lives of a large number of people precarious. In monitoring 26 countries that had received loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Multinational Monitor outlined the conditions that came with such loans. These conditions included civil service downsizing, privatization of government-owned enterprises with layoffs necessary prior to privatization, promotion of labor flexibility—regulatory changes to remove barriers that prevent both public and private employers from firing or laying off employees; and macroeconomic stabilization.

According to neoliberal theory, power is moving from the open world of politics to the privatizing and subsequently depoliticizing world of economics (Marchand and Runyan 2000: 13–15). One form of state restructuring is the neoliberal downsizing of the state, which includes cutting back on state spending and budgets, eliminating welfare state programs, and shifting government responsibilities to individuals, families, or the market.

According to Bourdieu, the new about neoliberalism is.... "A new kind of conservative revolution (that) appeals to progress, reason, and science (in this case, economics) to justify the restoration and thus attempts to write off progressive thought and action as antiquated.". It establishes the so-called laws of the market, which represent the actual regularities of the economic world left to follow their own logic, as the standard for all actions and, consequently, as ideal rules. It legitimizes and exalts the dominance of the so-called financial markets, which is to say, the return to a form of radical capitalism governed solely by the principle of maximum profit. This form of capitalism is undisguised and unhindered, but it has been rationalized and pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of contemporary forms of dominance, such as "business administration," and manipulative techniques, such as market research and advertising (Pierre Bourdieu 1989: .

Neoliberalism must be understood and opposed as both an economic theory and a potent public pedagogy and cultural politics, according to Giroux (2004: xxv). It does this by encouraging rigid exclusions from civic engagement and national citizenship, in addition to creating economic inequalities, power dynamics, and a corrupt political system. Lisa Duggan (2003:34, cited in Giroux 2004: xxiv) claims that "Neoliberalism cannot be abstracted from race and gender relations, or other cultural aspects of the body politic.". Race, gender, sex, religion, ethnicity, and nationality are all heavily ingrained in its legitimizing discourse, social relations, and ideology. Neoliberalism as an ideology, according to Giroux's argument (2004), is aligned with religious fundamentalism and various neoconservative viewpoints and practices, and it has a zero-tolerance policy for concepts, ideologies, and individuals who disagree with it.

Politics is therefore largely defined by its policing functions rather than as an agency for peace and social reform as public space becomes more commercialized and the state aligns itself more closely with capital. It's critical to comprehend how neoliberalism comes to be institutionalized in public education. According to Giroux (2004), the ideology ingrained in neoliberalism is a public pedagogy that reiterates faith in a social order characterized by the elimination and demise of independent spheres of cultural and political production like journalism, educational institutions, publishing, and film. Additionally, it promotes subhuman living conditions and unemployment through its policies, as well as the eradication of all opposing viewpoints and ideologies and the subordination of nation-states to the true economic masters.

When describing the effects of neoliberalism, Bourdieu says, "The first is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of the infernal machine, particularly those of the state, repository of all the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm.". The second is the imposition of a moral Darwinism that "institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behavior everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the core of corporations," according to Bourdieu (1998). This moral Darwinism is "schooled in higher mathematics 10 and bungee jumping, and it promotes the cult of the winner. Redrawing the boundaries between the state and capital is a crucial component of the neoliberal public pedagogy. As the state gradually cuts back on its social investments, it has grown more repressive. In his argument that the state is becoming increasingly more like an enhanced police state or security state, Giroux (2004:51) references the writings of Noam Chomsky, George Steinmetz, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Aronowitz, and Howard Zinn. Such a change can be seen in the way the state apparatus is used to spy on the populace and the criminalization of social policies.

Neoliberalism and Inequality Regimes

Connell (2010) contends that neoliberalism not only develops from but also strengthens the earlier imperialist and colonialist rule of the capitalist powers of Europe and North America over a large portion of the global population. The fundamental systemic inequalities created and embedded by decades of imperial and colonial economic, political, and social dominance—and which the process of neoliberalization has strengthened—are race, gender, class, ethnicity, and, in the case of India, caste. The relationship between the metropole and the periphery, according to Connell (2010), is essential to one's understanding of neoliberalism rather than the metropole itself as the central dynamic. Therefore, it's crucial to recognize that modern capitalism developed within an imperial economy; a global regime based on a connection between elites in the military, politics, and business (economic) sectors of the world's peripheries and their counterparts in the metropole. Neoliberalism, according to Connell (2010:33), "is best seen as a large-scale historical project for the transformation of social structures and practices along market lines.". Additionally, the neoliberal project contains an embedded masculinity politics. The culturally codified masculine is the main theme of the neoliberal project "the entrepreneur.". Its opposition to the welfare state's redistribution policies forces women to perform higher proportions of unpaid work as caregivers for the young, the old, and the sick, creating a systemic policy of inequality.

We will talk about how gender regimes support and structure neoliberalism in this section. In contrast to liberalism, which was founded on the legal subordination of women, Braedley and Luxton (2010) argue that neoliberalism assumes and is based on the idea that individuals can be male or female (even trans), and thus celebrates the idea that men and women are wage earners. They do this by drawing on an analysis of Fraser (1997). The core of neoliberal theoretical structure has been implemented within inequality regimes, such as sexual division of labor, which has resulted in a decline in women's position and material and social well-being globally. Three interconnected dynamics, in accordance with Braedley and Luxton (2010), are:

1. Because women make up the majority of the world's poor people and because their labor is underpaid, their deprivation has steadily gotten worse as a result of shifting economic practices. Women's subsistence work is essential for the survival of their families in many parts of the world. According to Lucas (2007), despite evidence showing the value of women's labor for the family, national and international economic agreements undermine women's efforts, endangering their ability to maintain their families and communities.
2. The second dynamic, according to Braedley and Luxton (2010), relates to the fact that women have historically been in charge of the majority of the unpaid social reproduction work carried out within households. Within the framework of the current economic system, this work is not acknowledged. Neoliberalism, which reflects these values, assumes and reiterates that wages reflect the value of work completed (so that unpaid work done by women in households goes unrecognized) and also takes for granted that workers will show up on the job every day (not taking into account the demands of the women's family responsibilities). Accordingly, Braedley and Luxton contend that the demands of family responsibilities require women to work for extended periods of time without compensation, depending on their partners or the government, which frequently compromises their ability to compete equally in the market. In order to reduce government spending and support for private businesses, neoliberal policies severely curtailed the social programs of the welfare state, such as paid maternity benefits, parental leave, and childcare services. According to Luxton (2010), this increased pressure to balance paid and unpaid work had a particularly negative effect on women, leaving them overworked and stressed out.
3. According to Connell (2010), the third problem is the elite men's desire to preserve the sex-gender labor divisions that support their privileges and aid in their ability to amass wealth. Connell adds that it's crucial to recognize that men are the leading proponents of neoliberalism, and that their refusal to acknowledge that society as a whole bears responsibility for people's well-being and their insistence that people and their families are responsible for social reproduction is at the heart of their argument. According to Connell, the less wealth is available for private ownership the more a society accepts collective responsibility for social reproduction by raising taxes to pay for services like childcare, disability support, old age security, and a variety of other benefits. According to Connell (2010), neoliberalism thus gives room for women who are willing or able to live like men and compete like men, as the ideology resists any attempt to reduce the financial resources available for capital investment, including redistribution of work for social reproduction to the state or employers.

The fundamental inequalities of class, gender, class, race, and (in the case of caste in India) inequalities have all been exacerbated by neoliberalism, as Connell (2010) points out. The commodification of all types of services is at the heart of neoliberal policies, so how? It's critical to realize that businesses selling services in the market are now able to fill needs that were previously satisfied by the government through public organizations operating under the premise of citizen rights or through close relationships in communities and families. Connell (2010) also claims that privatizing public institutions and assets is the most dramatic form of commodification, which worsens the marginalization and vulnerability of the most vulnerable citizens who belong to marginalized groups. The provision of services is put up for bid under neoliberal regimes, forcing public agencies to compete with private agencies by "outsourcing," which calls for institutional and cultural changes. Furthermore, the emphasis on the "flexibility" of the labor market results in a growing workforce of contract and part-time workers at the bottom of an organization.

Conclusion:

Thus, the term "neoliberalism" broadly refers to the agenda of economic, political, and social transformation within the overarching framework of the free market, as well as to institutional arrangements to support neoliberal projects within nation states. It follows that it is understandable why neoliberalism is viewed as a hegemonic system of increased exploitation of the majority. Neoliberalism, according to Dumenil and Levy (2005), Campbell (2005), and Chang (2005), rationalized the transfer of state capacity to allocate resources intertemporally (the balance between investment and consumption) and inter-sectorally (the distribution of investment, employment, and output) towards a financial sector that is becoming more globally integrated (and led by the US). Thus, domestically, the spread of "market forces and ideology" severely restricts rights to access food, water, education, employment, land, housing, medical care, transportation, and public amenities, as well as gender relations. According to MacEwan (2005), neoliberal policies have restricted democracy globally, thereby escalating instability everywhere, by legalizing the rights of global capital to seize and control the land and assets. It is critical to recognize that the neoliberal doctrine tends to change the welfare developmental state's core tenet that the "state" exists to serve the greater good of society. The welfare state, on the other hand, is seen by neoliberal principles as "a drag on the global economy that must be subordinated and minimized.". The "private" is synonymous with the private sector according to the restructuring ideology of neoliberalism. Therefore, under neoliberalism, the private sphere has been "valorized" over the public sector in general and has become highly politicized as a location for and a process of restructuring (Marchand and Runyan 2000: 13–15). The principles have impacted how social goods are distributed and have exacerbated social hierarchies and disparities based on gender, race, class, and caste.

References

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