Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:
The globalization that defined the neoliberal period was imagined at a remove from the material world: weightless supply chains composed of transparent logistics networks, just-in-time production and delivery amounting to a seamless world of efficiency and complexity. Neoliberalism’s crisis of legitimacy began with the financial crisis in 2008, but the sudden re-entry of physical problems introduced by the Covid-19 shock—what we called the “geopolitics of stuff” back in 2022—solidified the rebuke.
Emblematic of the shift was President Joe Biden’s use of a Korean War-era authority—the Defense Production Act (DPA)—to airlift twenty-seven million tins of goat milk-based baby formula from Australia to the US, to fill a supply gap caused by the shuttering of a Michigan factory caused by the shuttering of a Michigan factory operated by operated by Abbott Nutrition. (The company, which shut the plantplant after its product was linked to two contamination-related deaths, had just increased its dividend to shareholders and announced a $5 billion share buyback program.) After being deployed to meet the nutritional needs of US newborns, the DPA was subsequently used to provide financing support for mining and processing of critical minerals from Australia, Canada, and the United States. From baby formula to mining supply chains, the state was back.
Neoliberalism’s demise has been well and widely proclaimed. Where market shaping policies were once dismissed with epithets like interventionism and “picking winners,” policy makers now talk openly about disciplining capital and industrial policy.
More here.
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