Traces the development of my 2017 book published by Pluto Press

The failure of neoliberalism and the progressive failure to articulate that has engendered the rise of the far Right

On Sunday (September 20, 2026), the two state elections in Germany confirmed a trend that has been unfolding for some years in fact – the polarisation of politics in nations, and, in particular the legitimisation of far Right politicians espousing views that are not inconsistent with the views of the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s. Those views were considered the anathema of acceptable in the post WW2 period but now are garnering increased support again. Chancellor Merz called the outcome “a disaster” with the far Right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) recording the most votes in the – 2026 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election. The other interesting result was recorded in the – 2026 Berlin state election – where a Left candidate triumphed echoing the sort of momentum that Zohran Mamdani achieved in the New York in the November 4, 2025 city elections. These results are indicative of the trends that the failure of neoliberalism has engendered. I trace this theme in this blog post.

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Is opposition to the AI development the new Ludditism?

In the early C19th, skilled English textile workers fearing for their future wage earning capacity launched a campaign against the automated machinery that was fast being introduced into the factory system. The initial protests in Nottingham in 1811 spread quickly to Yorkshire and Lancashire. They became known as the – Luddites – a self-appointed title and for the next 5 years or so, the conflict between the workers and the bosses (aided by government) ensued. The workers’ case was really about who controlled the production process and the new technology they were fearful of was just another part of the sequence where capital sought to exert control on the extraction of surplus value from the workforce. Since then, if one expresses opposition to the introduction of new technology one is labelled with that title. The latest battle front in this struggle might be the rapid introduction of Artificial Intelligence, although that process goes well beyond an aim to control workplaces and reflects a broader desire to control society in general.

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Another neoliberal institution shown to be unfit for purpose while lining the pockets of private equity and millionaires

Over the last several years, I have been indicating that I think we are in the endgame for neoliberalism as a dominant ideology. On many fronts, the signs are that its institutional structure has failed and the promises that justified that structure have not materialised. I know there is a difference between the promises to sell the idea (that we would all be better off) and the true motivation (to enrich the already wealthy and consolidate their hegemony). But short of military dictatorship where the top-end-of-town control the military, major economic changes are conditioned by the legislative and regulative structure created by government. That means that the voters have to be convinced that change is worthwhile. Neoliberalism thrived because the elites reconfigured the state to serve their interests after the social democratic era saw the state play a mediation role in the class conflict. That reconfiguration was driven by an intense public relations campaign to manipulate the public perception. The working class was divided into segments and segments were turned on other segments (the ‘dole bludgers’, the migrants, trans people, etc) as part of the strategy. The strategy enriched the architects beyond belief but for the rest of us the outcomes have proven dysfunctional to say the least. Now the endgame is upon us as the evidence continues to stack up that neoliberalism was an elaborate con to enrich the already rich and powerful. A report from Australia last week added to the evidence. It shows that one of the defining manifestations of neoliberalism in Australia – the privatised job services system has failed badly and only serves to fills “the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work”. Another brick in the wall falls.

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CEO pay excess in Australia continues

In addition to the basis academic research that occupies my working time and is funded by national competitive research funding agencies such as the Australian Research Council, I also do commissioned work for various organisations, mostly unions and community groups. That income allows me to also cross subsidise the basic research and is how a research centre in a modern Australian university manages to stay afloat. In the latter work, I am always confronted by government lawyers or the experts the government hires to challenge my assessment of reasonable pay increases for union members in matters that appear at the Federal Fair Work Commission or the state-level Industrial Relations Commissions. I am always appalled by the willingness of these government agencies to spend millions on high paid consultants and lawyers just to stop their workforce enjoying a pay rise. The same agencies look the other way when their executive pay is in focus. And as a result of wage suppression for workers and the free-for-all at the top, the ratio of executive to average earnings is skyrocketing. This trend summarises the inherent inadequacy of capitalism for most of us who depend on real wages growth to enhance our material standard of living in economies that are growing. Two recent reports, one in the UK and one in Australia highlight the indecent state of affairs where CEOs can earn more than 130 times the annual salary of the median full-time UK worker and 55 times the annual salary of the average full-time worker in Australia. The top paid CEO in Australia gets 316 times the average, full-time salary in Australia.

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Replacing Starmer/Reeves with another captive of the finance sector will change nothing

Successive governments in the UK – Labour and Tory – have pushed the nation to the brink where there is little capacity left for progressive policy. And I am not referring to Brexit. Rather, the elevation of the financial sector as a primary force in the economy, dating back really to the Callaghan Labour government and then fast tracked by Thatcher and Blair, has resulted in almost every important part of the economy being devoured by the greed machine. This is relevant to the leadership struggle in the UK Labour government, which should see the lamentable Starmer replaced by the (to be assessed) Andy Burnham. The latter would be the first Prime Minister to hail from Lancashire since David Lloyd George (1916-22) although Harold Wilson came from nearby Yorkshire. The problem the new leader will face apart from his own misguided notions about fiscal capacity and the need for ‘strict’ fiscal rules is that the financialisation of the British economy (like most economies in this neoliberal age) is so pervasive that the spheres of resistance to change are everywhere.

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Towards a progressive rebuttal of the far Right narratives

I saw a clip from John Stewart’s Daily Show yesterday where he showed some Fox News commentators (I think) talking about how they hate ‘woke’ and how they now have to put up with public events featuring “half naked men” (their slight against the gay community). Stewart then showed the next clip – the cage fight at the White House where two half naked men were featured. The way he presented it was (as usual for the show) very funny. Yesterday (June 17, 2026), the leader of the far Right party in Australia (One Nation) gave her first ever – Speech – to the National Press Club in Canberra and apart from several outrageous statements (such as “Businesses also tell me you can’t sack people these days, they’re on their phones, they don’t work, they don’t turn up, they actually are lazy” and the “hoax of global warming”), she announced that Australia cannot be a multicultural society and that “we must be monocultural”. The fact checkers have already exposed her lack of honesty with respect to the actual data surrounding many of her assertions. But the question of culture and national cohesiveness is a subject that I am working on as part of my aim to publish a sequel to my 2017 book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World – which I co-authored with Thomas Fazi. The question that the sequel begins with relates to what defines a viable currency area and what legitimates government fiscal policy. I see this issue as a central extension of the work on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) because it provides a sociological basis for currency sovereignty. One needs to develop a concept of the – Demos – to answer that question. I use that concept in the original sense.

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Can capitalism survive? Not if we want to solve the climate and poverty crisis

The opening line of Part II of Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book – Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – was “Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can”. His thesis was not that capitalism would perform badly, quite the opposite. Rather the considered that “its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it, and inevitably creates conditions in which it will not be able to live and which strongly points to socialism as the heir apparent.” The climate crisis facing the world is combining with the other outcomes of neoliberalism to create what is now called a poly crisis. Recently, a group associated with the United Nations Human Rights Council has released a – Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth (published June 10, 2026) – which proposes a series of policy shifts designed to address aspects of the poly crisis. While it recognises that we must “escape the trap of growthism”, it fails to articulate that the fundamental logic of capitalism is capital accumulation that requires growth. To escape the trap, we must move beyond that mode of production. Merely tweaking policy structures within capitalism will not solve the problem.

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Apparently the UK government is about to do the impossible – run out of sterling

Go back to the headlines in 2010 – – “Countries with debt over 90 percent of GDP enter a danger zone”. The 90 per cent threshold entered the media coverage as a result of a paper released by Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart – Growth in a Time of Debt. That paper talked about “debt intolerance limits” arising from “sharply rising interest rates” – and then “painful fiscal adjustments” and “outright default”. It also talked about the “obvious connection” between inflation and high public debt ratios – which had me laughing at the time because no-one has really shown that to be a robust relationship at all. Everyone started quoting the paper, even though at the time it had obvious flaws. The predictions failed to materialise as did all the previous predictions that economists like them had failed. But the press keeps giving their views a public platform because the lurid predictions attract audiences. It is a pity because lame politicians seem to regard the predictions as being based in fact and change policies for the worse. Anyway, Rogoff is back in town predicting that the British government will run out of sterling and be forced to bring in the IMF to address the fiscal crisis. That is what the headlines say. But if you delve more deeply, his position is a little different and exposes the chicanery of mainstream economics which holds itself out as a consistent body of theory but regularly uses that pretence to bully governments into political shifts that help the elites and damage the rest of us.

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Latest changes to Australian privatised job service industry are just window dressing and the sociopaths remain dominant

In the 1990s, a new industry was created in Australia. It produced nothing. But it was the federal government’s response to the political fallout from the high unemployment that had persisted since it abandoned its committent to full employment in the 1980s as neoliberal ideology became dominant and the corporate sector took control of public policy. The industry was the ‘unemployment’ industry and took the form of a privatised job services system which was paid billions of dollars in public money to ‘manage’ the unemployment. It produced nothing beneficial and has destroyed millions of lives. It has been a public policy disaster for more than 28 years yet successive federal governments have persisted with it. Yesterday (May 27, 2026), the Federal government announced what it claims are the first major reforms in decades of this failed system of job services provision. Unfortunately, the changes announced by the Australian government yesterday are just window-dressing and behind the hype remains a deeply flawed system that will never produce positive outcomes for disadvantaged Australians. What it will continue to achieve is the enrichment of the privatised operators and their shareholders or stakeholders, while the unemployed are forced to live on income support payments that are well below the poverty line and be subjected to sociopathological obligations that do nothing to advance their job prospects. The whole privatised system should be abandoned.

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Article 4 of the Bank of Japan Act 1997 ensures fiscal and monetary policy must work together

Last week, the RBA increased interested rates claiming there was a growing capacity constraint (even though there is 10.2 per cent labour underutilisation) and inflationary expectations were increasing and in danger of propelling inflation even further. The RBA governor once again threatened the Treasurer along the lines of ‘unless you cut net spending we will continue to hike rates’ – which not only demonstrates that the central bank is not politically independent but also reveals how poor monetary policy then compromises fiscal policy. The double jeopardy of New Keynesian macroeconomics – pretend monetary policy is effective and then cripple fiscal policy (which is effective) by subjugating it to the central bank whims. If we look at what is going on in Japan at present, we get a different angle to this. The Bank of Japan is certainly worried about inflation but it is being tethered to some extent by the Prime Minister who is placing a specific emphasis on Article 4 of the Bank of Japan Act. The resulting policy dynamics stand in sharp contrast to the way the RBA acts and thinks it is appropriate to bully the government into pursuing austerity when there is massive wastage of available labour resources.

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