As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, Giroux sees neoliberalism as part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital. As a political project, it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatisation of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programmes, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labour laws” (Yates 2013). As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatisation of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and trade unions, and the endless marketisation and commodification of society.
Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatisation and unrestrained self-interest, just as it has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations.
