> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 1 - Anonymous Ideology The authors state that neoliberalism's invisibility is a key feature of its power. It's as if people in the Soviet Union had never heard of the word "communism". ### Chapter 2 - The "Free" Market Neoliberalism casts as consumers, not citizens. It says that our well-being is achieved through economic choice, not political choice. Through buying and selling, we discover a "natural, meritocratic hierarchy of winners and losers." > Neoliberals argue that an active state seeking to change social outcomes through public spending and social programs rewards failure, fuels dependency, and subsidizes the losers. It creates an unenterprising society, run by bureaucrats, who stifle innovation and discourage risk-taking, to the impoverishment of us all. Any attempt to interfere with the market’s allocation of rewards—to redistribute wealth and improve the condition of the poor through political action—impedes the emergence of the natural order, in which enterprise and creativity are rightly rewarded. At the same time, neoliberals contend that government intervention and bureaucratic control will inevitably lead to tyranny, as the state gains ever more power to decide how we should live. > > The role of governments, neoliberals claim, should be to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the discovery of the natural hierarchy. They must cut taxes, shed regulation, privatize public services, curtail protest, diminish the power of trade unions, and eradicate collective bargaining. They must shrink the state and blunt political action. In doing so, they will liberate the market, freeing entrepreneurs to generate the wealth that will enhance the lives of all. Once the market has been released from political restraints, its benefits will be distributed to everyone by means of what the philosopher Adam Smith called the “invisible hand.” > Over the years, we have internalized and reproduced neoliberalism’s creeds. The rich have allowed themselves to believe they’ve secured their wealth through their own enterprise and virtue—conveniently overlooking their advantages of birth, education, inheritance, race, and class. The poor likewise have internalized this doctrine and begun to blame themselves for their situation. They become defined, from within as well as without, as losers. > We are all neoliberals now. ### The Fairytale of Capitalism Instead of the standard definition: > Capitalism is an economic system in which private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and, in response to the constraints of demand and supply, set prices in free markets. The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit. The authors propose the following: > Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labor, and money into commodities that can be accumulated. # Quotes # References [Moore 2010 - Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the "First" Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Regional Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506—1530](zotero://select/items/1_USNARCNI)