For 30 years, the world has changed. When I entered active intellectual life in the early 1990s, neoliberalism reigned supreme. The communist countries had just collapsed and Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, spoken in 1980, according to which there is no alternative solution to capitalism and globalization imposed themselves as an indisputable truth.
When you had your heart in the right place, you resisted this cruel state of affairs for the ordinary world, but you often felt like you were crying out in the desert. The American intellectual Francis Fukuyama, in 1992, even saw “the end of the story” in this victory of liberal democracy inseparable from the capitalist economy.
The Glorious Thirties (1945-1975) had had their day. This blessed time when Western countries, especially for fear of communism, tried to improve the life of the ordinary world by a certain redistribution of wealth, by social measures and by the recognition of trade unionism was exhausted.
Neoliberal dogma now took its place. This ideology, which refused to be one by pretending to be the natural order of things, advocated tax cuts, especially for the rich and businesses, generalized and unconstrained free trade, all-out privatization and deregulation.
This empire, today, is shaken, observes Claude Vaillancourt in The end of neoliberalism (Écosociété, 2023, 200 pages), a solid analytical essay whose thesis is particularly original. Without really realizing it, writes Vaillancourt, “we have made a ‘discreet turn’: the direction we are taking in our policies and our economic choices, in the broad sense, is no longer the one in which we had been committed for a long time. “. We would now be in the era of post-neoliberalism, says the man who is also a novelist and anti-globalization activist for a long time.
Neoliberalism has failed on several counts. It widened social inequalities, failed to prevent the economic crisis of 2007-2008, precipitated global warming and left many countries destitute when COVID-19 hit. Depending on foreign countries for the most part when such a disaster occurs is not a good idea, we have seen.
Today, the neoliberal consensus no longer holds. Fiscal austerity is no longer popular, tax cuts are contested, free trade, although still current, is counterbalanced by a certain return to protectionism and the idea of privatizing public services strong opposition.
Capitalism is not dead, obviously recognizes Vaillancourt, but we are nevertheless witnessing a shift towards the national economy, an increase in public spending and a rehabilitation of social measures for the benefit of the population. In Canada, Quebec and the United States, for example, the parties of the classic right or of the center, currently in power, have all, to some extent, moved a little to the left.
Can we, if we have the heart on the left, rejoice in this turn, however discreet it may be? Not so fast, replies Vaillancourt. The exercise of power, he explains, is generally based on strong convictions, as was the case during the Trente Glorieuses and during the neoliberal era. Today, “the absence of certainties” dominates.
If the parties of the center are turning a little to the left, a militant extreme right, Trumpist style, is expressing itself more and more loudly, with the aim of rounding up those left behind by neoliberalism, disappointed by a left n not having been able to defend them.
Resolutely camped on the left, Vaillancourt defends the so-called identity or woke left, which has made the struggles against all forms of discrimination his own, but he nevertheless insists on the need to rely on “what brings us together” to avoid division.
The centrist parties, which are in power in most Western countries, face an aggressive far right and are torn between pressure from powerful corporate lobbies — the GAFAMs, the oil companies, the banks — who wish to maintain their privileges and the pressure from social movements — for social justice and for ecological transition — driven by the quest for the common good.
The future is therefore open. Will it have the face of a triumphant extreme right, that of resilient neoliberalism although unsustainable in the medium term, that of left-wing reformism which is moving towards the common good in small steps or that of the great ecological and economic transition forward by a more radical left? Vaillancourt chooses the last option; I opt for an energetic version of the penultimate. Can we talk.