1. Introduction

The rise of Neoliberalism since the 1970s was, first and foremost, a
consequence of the deep, even “revolutionary” changes in the world
economy. The “revolution” , however, was a “passive revolution” ,
“transformism” in the sense of Antonio Gramsci. It strengthened
capitalist hegemony by means of an all-encompassing transformation of
the social, political and economic system. Market-liberalisation was
accompanied by a far-reaching de-regulation of politics. Milton Friedman
called it a “neo-liberal counterrevolution” against Keynesianism. It was
a success and started its triumphal march around the world. It lasted
until September 2008, when the liberalised system of global financial
markets imploded, causing huge immediate losses of more than $1,4
trillion (SZ, October 8, 2008). In the 1970s the “Keynesian environment”
of the post-world war II era literally broke into pieces and the new
“neo-liberal” epoch took off. At the end of the days of neoliberalism
even the most hard nose-neoliberals, managers of big banks as well as
representatives of the Bush-administration were urgently asking for
state help and even for a nationalisation of big private banks in order
to avoid the final melt down of the whole system. The neo-liberal cycle
which began in the 1970s less than 40 years later is over.

It began with the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange
rates in March 1973, and the following “big bang” of the liberalisation
of financial markets in Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain. The formation
of crucial prices of the world economy, such as exchange rates and
interest rates, were no longer based upon official decisions and state
agency, in turn legitimised by the people in a democratic order.
Instead, the decisions on exchange and interest rates were up to private
actors, i.e. to multinational banks, speculative investment and other
funds, and transnational corporations. Thus, the first acts of
privatisation concerned the manner by which prices on global financial
markets have been formed. This triggered a wave of wild privatisation of
public goods and services which swept over the entire world. The new
private actors immediately used their new freedom to create financial
innovations: new institutions and new instruments to increase the
returns on financial investments. Countries with still regulated markets
were induced or enforced to give up their techniques of - by
neo-liberals so called - “financial repression†(exchange controls,
fixed interest rates, credit control, prescribed assets, etc). Since
then, financial markets have exerted their own repression of the real
economy, of social systems and of the natural environment.

The liberalisation, de-regulation and privatisation mania of
neo-liberalism triggered radical repercussions in the relationship
between the industrialised and the “Third World” . Liberalised financial
markets helped to recycle so-called “petrodollars” from the Middle East,
back into oil-importing Third World countries. They have been enabled to
accumulate vast debts over the course of a few years when real interest
rates were low (even negative) prior to 1979. They slid into the debt
crisis of the 1980s after the US Federal Reserve tripled interest rates
(the so called “Volcker Shock” ), leading to what later has been
described as the “lost decade” for the developing world. The other side
of the medal was a strengthening of the US-Dollar: first of all, because
oil by oil-producers has been sold against US$ despite the obvious
economic weakness of the US$ vis-à-vis other competing, strong
currencies. Secondly, the recycling of petrodollars and then the
debt-servicing has been managed by the US financial system which
occupied the strategic heights of global finance. It was of utmost
importance that after the debacle of the USA in Vietnam, the USA found a
way out of the hegemonic crisis and restored their economic and
political hegemony in the more and more globalised world.

Globalisation mostly is understood as a process of spatial expansion, of
world trade, investment, migration flows. This is not wrong. However, it
is a one-sided perspective. For, globalisation also means the
globalisation of a certain development model, of political concepts and
standards of global governance, of rules, norms and a global language.
Therefore, the “Washington Consensus” , the financial policy-package
which indebted countries had to accept under the conditionality of the
IMF, has beeen one of the most efficient globalising forces after the
liberalisation of global financial markets.

Monetarism emerged as the hegemonic economic policy concept of the
neo-liberal counter-revolution. The monetary base provided by the
“independent” central bank should react to market conditions and not be
used as a political tool of governmental institutions to realise other
objectives than monetary stability. Policies of full employment have
been understood by neo-liberals as the most frowned on policy concepts.
Consequently, the independence of the central bank is understood as an
insulation against democratic political institutions, in order to be
free to perform monetary policy according to the necessities of
globalised financial markets. The rule of independence has been
inscribed into the founding statute of the European Central Bank. The
independent central bank must control the quantity of money circulation
and nothing else. Fiscal policy in the long run has no influence on the
growth rate of the economy and on employment and should therefore follow
the rules of monetary stability and not the policy target of full
employment.

The result of policy programs based on these rules is by no means
convincing. Unemployment did not decrease since Neoliberalism has been
the ideological basis of economic policy concepts, instead unemployment
increased in nearly all countries - and if not, this was due to the
expansion of the informal economy or of the sector of precarious labour.
Distribution of income and wealth became more unequal in most countries
and in the world as a whole. The number of millionaires increased as
well as the number of poor peoples. The future expectations of the
working classes are sinister in neo-liberal capitalism. Many economies
are crisis ridden, with extremely negative effects upon social systems,
political stability and the natural environment. The balance of the
neo-liberal epoch is disastrous for the majority of peoples; it
temporarily was golden and sometimes good for financial wealth owners,
but it is bad for labour.

 2. The hierarchy of disembedded markets

If Karl Polanyi’s concept of “disembedded markets” makes sense
altogether, then with regard to financial markets. Markets are
disembedded from society and nature since the “great transformation” to
a market economy in the 18^th and 19^th century. Financial markets are
moreover disembedded from markets for real goods, services and labour:
The monetary economy is “autonomised” and self-valorising, i.e.,
delinking from dynamics in the real economy. Financial markets are
self-referential, they follow their own logics of development. The
relations between social reproduction and the accumulation dynamics of
the real economy on the one side and the working of financial markets on
the other have widely been dissolved. This is a consequence of the
all-embracing liberalisation of markets in general and particularly of
finance since the end of the Bretton Woods regime in the 1970s.

Neo-liberalism is the theoretical background of liberalised and
self-referential financial markets. The necessity of disembedding
financial markets is justified by the concept of market equilibria and
the possible efficiency-gains. In the neo-liberal understanding, an
equilibrium is possible on each single market so long as decision makers
are free to follow market signals. There are no interrelations and
interferences between markets. Unemployment above NAIRU is interpreted
as the result of an inefficient allocation of labour and of economically
unjustified wage levels. The dogma of autonomous markets is an explicit
argument against the Keynesian (and also the Marxian) theory of a
hierarchy of markets and their connectedness: labour markets depend on
investment decisions of capital owners on commodity markets. The
investment decisions on their turn depend on future expectations
concerning prices of products, i.e. on the performance of product
markets, as well as on the development of interest rates, i.e. on
capital markets. The prices on the latter determine prices (the wage
level) and volumes (employment) on the labour market. Consequently, in
Keynesian as well as in Marxian approaches, an equilibrium in labour
markets depends on the performance of financial markets.

However, the autonomy and self-reliance of financial markets are by no
means a guarantee against financial crisis-tendencies. On the one hand,
crises have their origins in the “real economy” in the case that real
flows of income are not sufficient to service the claims of financial
investors. On the other hand, crisis tendencies spill over from finance
to the real economy and to society and nature, as crises at the end of
the first decade of the 21^st century so dramatically have demonstrated.
The concept of “disembedded markets” therefore does not mean that they
in fact are autonomous and independent on each other. In the contrary,
markets are highly interrelated and interdependent. Keynes and Marx are
right, and neo-liberalism is wrong.

Contrary to some neo-liberal simplifications the interest rates and
rates of return on financial investments have to be produced in the real
economy. A virtual economy without a real basis is a nice but stupid
idea. If not, high yields on financial assets of 20% and more cannot be
paid in real terms; the financial pressures on the real economy are
producing an inflationary bubble: asset inflation rather than price
inflation. When prices of products and services are stable or even
declining, and simultaneously asset prices soaring, a radical
distribution of real flows of incomes in favour of the financial sector
is going on. This tendency then is responsible for new speculative
attacks on the real economy because of the high liquidity of financial
investors (funds and banks). They try to reap as much as possible of the
surplus produced in the real economy; and by doing so they are pushing
it into a crisis. This mechanism, basically, is driving the most recent
financial crisis.

Karl Polanyi described disembedded markets in general as "satanic
mills" , pushing labour into misery, nature into environmental
destruction, and the monetary system into a malfunctioning state.
Disembedded financial markets work even more than product- and
labour-markets as satanic mills, because their horizon is not the “real”
national economy but the world market, i.e. the economy on a global
scale. In terms of time they are characterised by an endemic “myopia” .
Financial actors only have a very short-term horizon. The higher the
interest rate and the financial yield, the shorter the perspective of
actors on financial markets. Therefore, the counter-movements against
the destructive functioning of the satanic mill in order to protect
labour (the emergence of the welfare state), nature (environmental
regulations) and money (the monetary and financial authorities, i.e.
central banks, national and international authorities of supervision
etc.) must develop a global and long-term perspective.

Anthony Giddens describes the tendency of market-disembedding as a
“mechanism” ; however, neither the processes of disembedding nor the
counter-tendencies for protection against the effects of disembedding
work like mechanisms. They are the outcome of hegemonic conflicts and
struggles in the political sphere (the state in a wide sense) and the
social system (performed by social movements and political organisations).

 3. Financial crises shake the neo-liberal belief system

Global crisis tendencies since the last quarter of the 20^th century
regularly appeared as crises of the financial sector: the best known
hallmarks of the crisis cycle after the liberalisation of financial
markets in the 1970s are the debt crisis of the Third World in the
1980s; then the financial and banking crisis of the 1990s (the
Peso-crisis of 1994 and the devastating Asian crisis in 1997-98 with
repercussions in Russia and South Africa in 1998, and Turkey and Brazil
in 1999); the Argentinian crisis of 2001, which affected all aspects of
economic and social life of the country leaving much of its industry in
ashes; the burst of the US new economy bubble in 2000, and finally the
US-american “subprime crisis” of 2007-08 and their metastases in many
other market segments (credit cards, investment banks, insurance, credit
default swaps etc.) and countries of the world. The end is (in October
2008) still impossible to predict. The last decades of the 20^th and the
first decades of the 21^st century will enter history as the era of the
neoliberal financial disaster.

In any event, neo-liberal promises of growth and stability, of
employment and of wealth have proven to be an insincere ideology,
grossly false and responsible for the sufferings of hundreds of millions
of peoples around the world. No wonder that neoliberal ideology lost
much of its former attractiveness and thus much of its power in a
hegemonic system of “governmentality” . The neoliberal crisis tendencies
together with the loss of hegemonic attractiveness are the soil on which
new economic policy concepts beyond neoliberalism begin to blossom.

In view of the financial disaster of 2008 and the series of recent
financial crises since the “big-bang” liberalisation of financial
markets at the end of the 1970s, it seems as if neoliberals themselves
changed their mind. The neoliberal belief-system is breaking into
pieces. First of all, one of the lessons to be learnt was that financial
stability can only be achieved by means of political regulation and not
by the working of the market mechanism, and by deploying the mechanisms
of self-regulation of the financial industry. The IMF’s "Financial
Stability Forum" (FSF) was established after the Asian crisis in 1998,
and immediately after having been set up, began to elaborate on rules of
improved transparency, prudence, surveillance. This was done partly in
order to avoid more radical proposals of global civil society movements
such as ATTAC, to control the capital account and even to forbid certain
financial activities (offshore financial centers, hedge- and private
equity funds, short-term speculation etc.). It was by no accident that
ATTAC was founded in the same year in which the FSF was set up – one as
a civil society-response to the financial disaster which affects so many
millions of peoples, the other as an official response in order to
re-instill financial stability for financial actors against market
turbulence.

The crisis of 2008, however, goes far beyond the capacity of harmless
reform proposals from the FSF and other bodies after the financial
crises of developing and newly industrialising countries. The crisis did
not hit the metropolitan countries of the world system. This is
different today and so neo-liberals discovered anew the state as an
important and indispensable institution of economic (fiscal and
monetary) stabilisation, as market actor of last resort. Even the most
neo-liberal governments like that of the UK and of the USA did not
hesitate to nationalise banks in 2008, thanks to obvious market failures
and to obvious shortcomings of neo-liberal economic policy-concepts (in
the fields of fiscal and monetary policy), and because systemic
financial risk threatened the whole capitalist economy. This is the
reason why even notorious neo-liberals are joining the herd requesting
less market-self-regulation and more state intervention.

Masses of peoples are affected by the recent financial crises - in the
subprime-crisis alone five million home-owners in the USA lost their
houses - filling up the army of homeless peoples. Tens of million
peoples suffered under the Asian crisis, many of them pushed into dire
poverty and even into misery. The debt crisis of the Third World in the
1980s cannot be forgotten, for it was responsible for a “lost decade” of
development in Latin America and elsewhere. These are only few of the
destructive consequences of financial crises. Therefore, popular
resistance grew up in many places of the world, generating a growing
alliance against neoliberal ideology and the subsequent policy concepts
which were based on it. Today, however, neoliberals themselves leave
their untenable positions and try to find rescue in the camp of their
contempted adversaries: less market and more regulation. Although they
might prefer self-regulation by the banking industry itself and not by
the state, they do not hesitate to “bring the state back in” , in a
manner even more radical than in Keynesian times. They are transforming
crisis-ridden neoliberal capitalism based on financial markets into a
kind of a “financial socialism” (as Richard Sennett termed it in the
Financial Times on October 8, 2008).

The bailouts mean taking a step beyond the neo-liberal mind-map; but is
this tendency already the first sign of the emergence of a
post-neo-liberal order of global finance?

 4. Software and hardware of neo-liberal financial markets

In order to answer this question it is necessary to take the physical
preconditions of neoliberal finance into account. While the profit rate
on capital in the real economy suffered an underlying tendency to
decline (leaving aside for now the old controversy on Marx’ law of the
tendency of the profit rate to fall), the rates of return on financial
assets were soaring – at least for a certain period of time. Financial
innovations and the creation of new financial investment vehicles pushed
the yields in the financial sectors above the profits to be obtained in
other industries. Since the liberalisation of financial markets, most
OECD countries recorded real interest rates far above the real growth
rate of GNP. This relation is even more explicit in developing and newly
industrialising countries, because of the high spreads on the prime rate
or London Interbank Offer Rate. Since financial claims in the last
instance have to be serviced out of real flows of income, a
redistribution of incomes and of wealth from the real to the financial
economy is an inevitable outcome. Financial liberalisation and the
subsequent financial innovations work as a mechanism of increasing the
yields of financial assets and of repression of the real economy.

This constellation is inevitably crisis prone. After all, extremely high
yields on financial claims require high real growth rates. But growth
meets social, natural and even economic limits. Growth is an obsession
which only can be transformed into reality by an acceleration of the
process of production and reproduction, and by extending its spatial
reach, i.e. by creating a typically capitalist time-space regime. It
requires and fosters at the same moment high speed, high mobility, the
massive use of resources (mass production and mass consumption). It thus
also exerts massively negative effects on the environment and on social
life which follow other rhythms than those imposed by the neoliberal
time-space regime.

Neoliberalism’s disdain of nature and society is a consequence of the
concept of the world as populated by people who only follow the
utilitarian rationality of profit maximisation and thus act as homo
economicus. These rational constructs are operating in a spaceless and
timeless world, thus lacking the coordinates of nature. The
“annihilation of time by space and of space by time” , which Marx invokes
in the Grundrisse is inscribed into the neoliberal belief-system,
which takes no notice of the specific characteristics of time and
history, of space and territories. Only because of this reduction is it
possible to develop and then apply an economic policy-menu like that of
the “Washington Consensus” . It is an economic policy recipe for all
countries in all times which only have one characteristic in common:
that they are highly indebted and that they therefore have to follow the
rules of global financial markets and their regulating institutions (in
the first place the IMF).

The system can only obey the rules of physical expansion and
acceleration, i.e. transforming the annihilation of time and space into
reality insofar as it has specific “hardware” at its disposal. This
hardware consists, first of all, of fossil energy sources, especially
oil, and the (industrial) technical and organisational (social) systems
of their transformation into working energy. Oil fuelled growth since
the beginning of the 20^th century and thus turned an apparent obsession
into a real political concept for the economy over a long period of
time. Economic growth has, since then, been the fetish of economists,
even of so called alternative, non-neoliberal economists. They do not
take into consideration that growth of the real economy and even the
working of the “virtual” financial sphere are dependent upon the secure
provision of fossil fuel for production and consumption, for transport
and communication. Most economists remain blind vis-à-vis the
contradiction between growth as a geometrically extensive process and
its fuels which are a finite resource - and the fuel supply curve is not
going up, but down. Oil is running out, hence the “hardware” of the
neo-liberal system is fatally flawed. The production of oil is peaking
so that in the foreseeable future it will be available to a much lesser
extent than today, and if available then at increasing prices. The
limits of oil supply become a physical hindrance to further growth and
consequently to the high yields on financial assets. Yet the financial
sector in the last neo-liberal decades has become addicted to these
unrealistic yields. Now, it must learn to reboot the hard-drive, and
reprogram the driver software. The neo-liberal bonanza is over, and the
comfortable times of plenty of oil are gone. The growth-rates of the
past cannot be achieved in the future unless a new paradigm of
production, another time-space-regime is emerging.

Financial markets are providing the driver software of this time-space
regime of acceleration and expansion. Time is money. The shorter the
cycles of financial investment, the faster the returns and the higher
the revenues to obtain. The software is permanently improved by making
use of financial innovations with the overarching objective to increase
the financial yields. But this software is ruthlessly applied and very
often predatory and fraudulent. The drivers are designed to exploit all
possible spaces to make money even when law and moral rules are obstacle
to such an endeavour. In these cases rules and laws have to be broken.
The liberalisation of financial markets opened the entrance to the
criminal economy, it was a method of issuing the licence to “printâ€
money. No wonder that even “honourable” financial institutions and big
transnational corporations are involved in money laundering, grand
corruption, illegal transfers, assistance to tax evasion, risky
speculation etc. It is said that financial institutions are prudent and
therefore avoid risks (risk-aversion). But when the driver-software
allows the system to hide the risks and to sell risky assets as secure
ones, a speculation bubble can be blown out and out – until it blows up.
This is what happened in the most recent financial crisis, and it is an
important reason why even official institutions of the global financial
system triggered a debate on new regulations of financial markets, i.e.
on a new software of the time-space regime. The criteria for the quality
of the driver software are disputed. The speculators want regulations to
be as loose as possible, perhaps with some safeguards against a crash
and with huge amounts of public money at their disposal, when possible
without public democratic control. Some political regulators argue in
favour of control, and some social movements even ask for a full
nationalisation of the financial system, to submerge finance under
democratic control in a democratic society. They also want the
prohibition of certain financial vehicles, and of highly speculative
institutions and businesses. And they pose the question of whether it is
enough to exchange the software without also changing the hardware, i.e.
the energy regime and the capitalist mode of production, the social
formation.

 5. The resilient real economy

For many observers the real economy seems to be not affected by the
crises of disembedded financial markets. Capital is performing a
cyclical movement: from the state of productive capital (real means of
production and labour), which in combination are producing commodities
to be sold on markets against money, so that at the end of the cycle
capital appears as a financial stock which again can be invested into
real means of production and labour – or it can be used for speculation
and investments in financial assets on financial markets. The
accumulation cycle of capital thus encloses the “real” and the
“financial” economy as aggregates of a capitalist system, only in the
last instance linked to the real world (London 2008). Consequently, the
financial crisis is also an expression of contradictions of the real
accumulation process, and it has repercussions on the real world. Here
it is necessary also to take time lags between fast-reacting financial
flows and the inertia of the real economy into account. The consequences
of financial turmoil for the real economy are extremely bitter as the
consequences of the debt crisis, of the financial crisis, and of the
“subprime crisis” and its after-effects show. Debtors can not afford to
pay the interest service and thus the loans’ security, the “collateral”
of the debts, is taken away. In the case of the current financial crisis
this means that workers not only are losing their jobs but they are also
evicted from their houses. Moreover, they are cut from access to new
mortgage credits so that their real disposable income dramatically is
becoming reduced. This might be interpreted as a “normalisation” . The
question, however, is why this normalisation has not been realised
without pushing many peoples into economic distress.

“Contagion” also has to be taken into account. It not only should be
understood as the spread of financial crises across national boundaries,
as in the case of the Asian crisis which spilled over from Thailand to
the Southeast Asian and East Asian neighbours, and then to Russia, South
Africa, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey. Financial crises also have a
serious impact on labour markets, i.e. on the quantity and quality of
employment, on the environment and on the provision of food. Financial
crises have been the most effective vehicles for transforming formal
labour into informal labour and thus amplifying the informal economy’s
precarious work. In some structuralist interpretations, the informal
economy is not understood as a consequence of financial distress, bus as
a remedy against the most negative consequences of the crisis. In many
parts of the world, the informal economy is the only sector offering
precarious jobs to otherwise unemployed peoples. This is the reason why
the informal sector and its accompanying ideology of self-help and
individual responsibility are, paradoxically, presented as a solution to
the crisis of neo-liberalism, as “neoliberalism from below” (Wilpert).
Strategies such as microfinance reconstruct the legitimacy of the system
by organising popular consent from below. It is a telling example of the
working of neo-liberal governmentality.

The spillovers of financial crises into nature also are serious. As we
have already seen, the crucial fossil resources required for fuelling
the neo-liberal order are running out, not to speak about the harm done
to the environment by actions which only follow the individual logic of
selfish market actors. But neo-liberalism would not be as successful as
it has been, were it not able to offer an answer to the ecological
challenge. For F.A. von Hayek, markets are a powerful device of
discovering new and innovative solutions to problems that arise in the
course of economic and social development. Therefore the creation of a
market for tradable CO₂ emissions rights is the logical neo-liberal
strategy to overcome the climate crisis. At the same time, the new
certificates offer new areas of profitable financial investments. After
the recent crash of the real estate and other markets, this is good news
for financial investors searching new areas of profitable investment.
The market is estimated as to be very dynamic and potentially available
for future turnover (especially with new World Bank financing support
and the extension of the Kyoto Treaty to the whole world), soon reaching
$2 trillion. The food crisis as well as the 2002-07 price hike of other
commodities also offer new opportunities for financial speculation.
These developments may stabilise the neo-liberal financial system for a
while, until an even larger bubble bursts again. But this time, the real
world of the daily life of peoples all around the world and not only the
“real economy” are involved and adversely affected by the crisis.
Neo-liberal finance is, more and more, undermining the living conditions
of mankind.

Therefore, the built-in tendency to disembed markets out of society and
of nature must grind to a halt. It is necessary to rethink the
relationship of finance to the real economy on a global scale. Scale
matters and requires regulatory measures which go beyond traditional
(nation-state) Keynesianism, although, paradoxically, national solutions
are the main ones on offer in order to overcome the financial turmoil,
and are far more urgent than European-wide or even global ones. The
nation state comes back in, because market solutions to the deep crisis
are simply not in the global or regional policy basket.

Regulation on a global scale – how is it possible? The question can only
be answered by posing another question: Is the recent crisis a crisis of
neoliberalism or is it a crisis of neo-liberal capitalism? Is a
post-neoliberal financial system possible under capitalism or is it
necessary to go beyond capitalism as we know it? Is a financial
socialism already emerging, and could it be an answer to the challenges
of the crisis?

The crisis of neo-liberal ideology does not necessarily result in a
post-neoliberal order which aims at social forms beyond capitalism. In
the contrary, post-neoliberalism in finance can result in new forms of
capitalist hegemony which again include a stronger role of the state.
Contrary to “old Keynesian” state interventionism, the new
interventionism – including austerity with regard to the social wage -
will not be designed in favour of workers’ interest and the environment,
but in an undisguised political support of financial interests.
Financial socialism is not the socialism of the workers or of broad
popular masses. It is the expression of the expectations of bank and
fund managers who are threatened with drowning in the whirlpool of the
financial crisis. They search and find support from governments and
central Banks. Their trust in the working of free markets is over.
People like the CEO of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann, request the
nationalisation of bankrupt or defaulting financial institutions: Fanny
Mae and Freddy Mac, AIG, most investment banks, and other financial
institutions in the USA, Alitalia in Italy, Northern Rock in Great
Britain, IKB and Hypo-RealEstate in Germany, the whole banking system in
Iceland and many more still to come. Instead of self-regulation of the
market, state action is requested - and vast public monies must be spent
out from the state budget. This will increase the tax burden of citizen,
the public debt. It will increase the inflation rate and thus reduce the
purchasing power of citizens, in order to save the financial
institutions. Consequently, the financial institutions will survive by
giving up some of the most predatory neo-liberal exaggerations.
Post-neoliberalism for financial markets is nothing less than a bundle
of bail-out methods to save capitalist finance from the overshooting
irrationality of financial neoliberalism. It might be post-neoliberal,
but it is not in the same instance a post-capitalist order.

The neoliberal “counterrevolution” was, as we have seen, a Gramscian
passive revolution whose outcome is a further strengthening of
capitalist hegemony. It lasted about four decades. At the end of the
days of neoliberalism, a new passive revolution is in the making. It
will bring the state back in as a stabilising institution of a
postneoliberal, but capitalist world order.

Or are social movements intellectually and politically strong enough as
to bring their own, very different post-neoliberal - post-capitalist -
agenda forcefully and successfully into the process of restructuring the
financial system of 21^st-century-capitalism? Can this process become a
social struggle?

Literature

Welzer, Harald (2008): Klimakriege. Wofr im 21. Jahrhundert gettet
wir, (S. Fischer) Frankfurt am Main

Klare, Michael (2008): The end of the world as we know it, in: Red
Pepper, issue 161, Aug/Sep 2008: 42-45