And Patrick Bond challenged "Dennis... with guys like this?? [examples, Larry Summers, etc.]"
Neo-liberalism died a long time ago. The attempt to wind down government spending and open up industry to free competition collapsed in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's alarming budget deficits. The so-called entrepreneurial class are massively dependent on government hand-outs, like the trillion dollars that Joseph Stiglitz estimates spent over Iraq, or the billions the UK government dribbled into potemkin consultancy companies in the private finance initiative. The financial sector was not bailed out for the first time last month, but for the nth time (S&Ls, LTCM).
And though it is often asserted that labour markets have been de-regulated, that is certainly not the case in Europe, where an extraordinary array of qualifications and credentials are used to control labour, to keep Polish nurses and Indian doctors from earning the same as their European counterparts, for example. The welfare state, too, is not being rolled back, but is much more interventionist, micro-managing people's lives in a welter of regulations and 'guidance' on everything from breast-feeding to 'Anti-Social Behaviour Orders'.
Neo-liberalism? Hardly. Anyone awaking from cryogenic freezing in Britain, Austin Powers-style, would assume that the Russians had won the Cold War and the whole country was governed by some ghastly Stalinist nomenklatura, with bureaucracy running every aspect of life, secret lists of 'At Risk' familes spied on through the self-same CCTV cameras that George Orwell told us would be the hallmark of totalitarianism. Is the outcome of the Patriot Act in the US not similar?
Lenin told us that capitalism could only survive by suspending the ordinary laws of 'free' competition, taking refuge in monopolies and a burgeoning state power. It is naive in the extreme to take the ideological tosh about liberalisation seriously when the property-owning class is creating a police state all around us.