Are We Still in Neoliberalism?

Vivek Chibber

There’s a certain amount of confusion, and that’s because neoliberalism has become this catchall that encompasses everything. So I think there is a scaling back of the American Empire, but it’s not because of Trump. I said this several episodes ago: what Trump is doing is simply recognizing a fact, which is that American geopolitical power is no longer unchallenged the way it was thirty or forty years ago. Geopolitical power ultimately rests on economic dominance and American economic dominance in the global economy is simply not what it was forty years ago.

There are countries now that succeeded in moving up the economic ladder globally. China is the best example, but not just China. In Latin America, economies like Brazil. You have South Asia, the Indian economy. You have obviously Russia, which has managed to fend off all of Europe coming to the aid of Ukraine.

All of this shows that the United States can’t just unilaterally call the shots anymore in the global economy, and that means then that it has a choice: it can either continue with the fantasies of the kind that Biden had, which is that you’re going to remain a global political hegemon, even though economically you just can’t call the shots anymore. Or you bring down your global political ambitions in line at the same scale as your economic ambition, as your economic capacity.

We are still in the era of the unchallenged dominance of capital. The fact that it’s experimenting with new institutional forms should not delude us.

And I think if it hadn’t been Trump, if it had been anybody else, they would’ve had to do the same thing. The US just can’t call the shots anymore. So there is a scaling back of America’s reach globally. Does that mean the American Empire is shrinking? Yeah, it has to, because empire is simply your influence over other countries —…