The Neoliberal Dominance of the State

The Neoliberal Dominance of the State

K-punk on the financial market crisis:

One can only share the exasperation of Ads Without Products about the rash of articles describing the current bail outs of financial institutions as constituting a leftward turn. It’s puzzling how “a massive transfer of public wealth to the private sector”, how the State buying up bad debts without getting any equity in return, could be considered the return of leftism. It’s capitalist realism by other means: the only kind of state intervention that is “possible”. This kind of “nationalisation” could only happen to protect the interests of the speculator class…

…What we’re seeing is not the collapse of capitalism, but the disintegration of the illusion that capitalism is about the untrammeled free market. The developments over the last few weeks only underscore Alex Williams’s point that the State, far from being exterior to capital, is a “vital element of stabilisation” which prevents capitalism from accelerating to the point of self-destruction.