M. Matsemela-Ali Odom // Trump pay freeze attacks POC, women workers – Workers World

13.9.18

Trump pay freeze attacks POC, women workers – Workers World: Neoliberalism is a complicated term that conjures notions of modernized liberal social policies. In fact, it is merely a reprise of early 20th-century laissez-faire capitalism, a modernization of Adam Smith’s thoughts in which the liberal economic rights of individuals are awarded to corporate powers. In this process, political economic power is transferred to corporations in lieu of public control.

Most progressive and liberal economists and historians chart the 1970s as the time of the rise of neoliberal policies. However, Black radical and autoworker James Boggs had chronicled the impacts of neoliberalization, which he called automation, in the 1950s. It was then that postwar suburbanization and expansion of the white American middle class were produced through massive layoffs of Black people. The last hired in wartime industry became the first fired, and the effects of these measures became known as the “urban crisis.” Neoliberalism can be seen as the moment the general public began to experience the urban crisis.