“In recent years, the full reality of global warming and its catastrophic effects” has become “the most powerful charge that can be found against neoliberal ideology”, argues Claude Vaillancourt, essayist and Quebec anti-globalization activist, in There end of neoliberalism. He takes a “look at a discreet turn” and at the idea of the obsolescence of war, especially that suffered by Ukraine.
Very lucid, the author explains: “The Great Recession of 2007-2008, global warming and COVID-19 have profoundly changed our world. But the turn made since is more discreet. The latter is characterized, among other things, by “the sharing of power between the center right and the center left” and by “the search for consensus”. It is “an era of confusion” with, Vaillancourt points out, “governments that clearly separate words from deeds”.
One of the most virulent criticisms of neoliberalism comes, underlines the essayist, from the one who was, only yesterday, one of its most ardent defenders: the German economist Klaus Schwab, founding president in 1971 of a European symposium, which became in 1987 the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. With a colleague, he published, in 2020, COVID-19: The Great Reset (in French, COVID-19The Great Reset)which rejects “hyperglobalization”.
The quiet turn caused by the agony of neoliberalism is expressed in the dominance of the English language around the globe. Vaillancourt notes, with good reason, that “the cultural weapon today far exceeds military force in effectiveness”. He relies on the American economist James K. Galbraith, born in 1952, for whom “the thing is clear: with war, ‘in the modern world, there is nothing to gain’”.
“The turn is not the one long awaited by progressive activists: too discreet, precisely, still too hesitant, it leads us elsewhere, while giving the impression of staying put. »
Vaillancourt believes that the invasion of Ukraine, on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is “anachronistic”, led by “a far-right government”, nostalgic for “the loss of an empire” and whose the military “failure” “seems obvious”. For the author, there are also far-right more or less avowed allies of Putin, sometimes driven from power: Donald Trump (United States), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey ), etc.
Faced with the future, which remains muddled, of our planet, Vaillancourt returns, in conclusion, to the environmental struggle, for him a question of life or death. He calls her “the mother of all struggles”. He takes up the cry from the heart of environmental activist Naomi Klein: “Only large-scale social movements can save humanity. »
As it dies to give way to the promise of a social dawn, will neoliberalism take away the ghost of its true name, that given to it by its most enlightened, but most ferocious detractors: neoconservatism?