A response to Wacquant

We academics have a penchant for inventing new terms. One of the current favorites, especially on the Left, is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is of course still capitalism, but it is a new kind of capitalism, powered by a new logic. Where under Fordist regimes, the State regulated markets, under neoliberal-ism, market actors have colonized the State and turned state authority to the project of expanding markets and increasing profits at the expense of subal-tern groups. In other words, neoliberalism means that politics and the State have become more important instruments in the age-old capitalist project of class domination. The policies through which this is accomplished involve the dismantling of earlier Fordist modes of corporate regulation, including regulations that protected labor, as well as the privatization and commodifi-cation of large sectors of state activity, shifts in the burden of taxation from business to the broader public, and the use of imperial military force to extract the natural resources of countries in the southern hemisphere while opening their markets and exploiting their labor. In sum, neoliberalism is