This is an extract from Freedom for Capital, Not People: The Mont Pèlerin Society and the Origins of the Neoliberal Monetary Order, now available from Verso Books.
Some writers have taken the period since the crisis of financial capitalism in 2008 to mark the “end of neoliberalism” or the advent of “post-neoliberalism.” Others have described it as a “mutant,” “zombie” iteration of a neoliberalism that is in effect “half-dead, half-alive.”
In an era of rising protectionism, right-wing ideology, and deglobalization, neoliberal ideologies have certainly experienced a backlash. But they have also rearticulated themselves by forging new alliances and taking on novel forms. Three dimensions of the current conjuncture are worth highlighting.
Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.
Of course, the form of money — essentially the socially and politically constructed “promise to pay” — has always fluctuated. What is distinctive about the transformation of money in the early-twenty-first century is, first of all, the proliferation of digital currencies and tokens. Operating in the shadows…
Auteur: Matthias Schmelzer
