Claiming Too Much for Exchange
The common problem with the "monopoly capital" and "unequal exchange" perspectives is their reliance on exchange as the foundational concept.
The common problem with the "monopoly capital" and "unequal exchange" perspectives is their reliance on exchange as the foundational concept.
It is only the left who talk about neoliberalism. Our opponents don’t use the concept so we are not engaging with them when we speak a different language. At best, because the term has been used in so many different ways, we almost always need to re-trace our steps to establish what exactly we mean by neoliberalism. Worse, the term lends itself to mirror-image inversions of the facile libertarian mantra that the market is good and the state bad. Ultimately, the term neoliberalism is misleading – not a tool but an obstacle to working out how the world works and how it changes. Nor does it help us identify what we should do.