Crisis in Neoliberalism or Crisis of Neoliberalism?

The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked.Anonymous British cabinet minister 1 T his rather perceptive assessment of the implications of the current crisis for the United Kingdom (and a good many other countries) is more candid and insightful than the twaddle of many mainstream journalists, economists and politicians, who proclaim the virtues of the 'free market' while blaming an unholy coalition of unhinged bankers, shifty borrowers and incompetent regulators for the disaster.2 In order to save neoliberalism from itself, the free marketeers have nationalized some of the largest financial institutions in the world, socialized financial market risks and pumped huge amounts of public money into the economy.The rhetorical gyrations justifying this frenzy have been ideological in the worst possible sense: they are deliberately misleading representations of reality, concocted to confuse the audience and stultify the opposition.In contrast, Marxian assessments of the crisis, being grounded upon the realities of accumulation and located within systemic analyses of the class relations under neoliberalism, suggest that this is not a crisis of (de)regulation but, instead, a systemic crisis in neoliberal capitalism.It is not, yet, a crisis of neoliberalism. NEOLIBERALISM AND FINANCIALIZATIONNeoliberalism is the mode of existence of contemporary capitalism.This system of accumulation emerged gradually, since the mid-1970s, in response to the transformation of the conditions of accumulation accompanying the disarticulation of the Keynesian-social democratic consensus, the paralysis of developmentalism and the implosion of the Soviet bloc.3 In essence, neoliberalism is based on the systematic use of state power, under the ideological guise of 'non-intervention', to impose a hegemonic project of recomposition of the rule of capital at five levels: domestic resource allocation,