During the 1950s and 1960s progressive and radical movements were gaining traction around the world. In the Global North, labour unions were winning their fight for fairer wages and public services. In the Global South, newly independent governments were throwing off colonial arrangements and using tariffs, land reform and industrial policy to build national economic sovereignty.
These movements were fighting for a fairer and more just economy, and it was working. But it posed a threat to capital, particularly in the ‘core’ states of the Global North, as it constrained their access to the cheap labour and captive markets they had enjoyed under colonialism.
Capitalists responded by doing everything in their power to crush the progressive drive for change and reverse reforms – a backlash that we know today as neoliberalism. In the Global North, neoliberal policy was implemented by corporate-aligned governments, most notoriously those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In the Global South, it was often done through coups and other violent imperialist interventions by the US and its allies, including in countries such as Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), Burkina Faso (1987) and Iraq (2003).
Countries that were not subject to invasions and coups had neoliberalism imposed on them by the IMF and World Bank in the Economic policy for the majority of humanity came to be determined by bankers and technocrats in Washington DC.
