@cstross Of course neoliberalism was just the backlash against the welfare state and against Keynesianism, but Keynesianism didn't work anymore in the 1970s because you can't stimulate your way out of a stagflation triggered by a global oil crisis, which is what allowed the neolibs to gain ground until they were ready to take over the political landscape in the 1980s, with even former social democratic parties like the SPD in Germany and Labour in the UK infested with that horrible ideology masquerading as economic science.
Capitalism has always been unsustainable. However, for a very long time it was possible to grow the real global economy, to use more and more power and raw materials to produce more goods and provide more services. In the 1970s, many people in the world began to realise that this wasn't going to go on forever, that at some time within the following decades, any kind of economic growth would become utterly impossible. However, neoliberals managed to disguise their ideology as science and teach a generation of graduates that the free market will save the world. The end of the stagflation period was all they needed for propaganda. They had Reagan and Thatcher as their global champions while the Soviet Union had half-dead gerontocrats.
It isn't going to get any better since the global economy is bound to shrink dramatically, one way or another. I can't think of any way we can get out of this without some kind of collapse of the economy anymore. Neoliberal systems breed fascists, fascism is the emergency mode of crapitalism. But fascist systems are about as unsustainable as states get; if they manage not to lose any wars, such a dictatorship might last a few decades, but then the dictator dies, and whatever happens next, the old system is unlikely to survive--unless it isn't even fascist anymore but a true monarchy, in which case, the heir will take the throne, like in North Korea where we have the Kim dynasty.
Growth is never coming back because we have destabilised the Earth's systems to a point where it will take millions of years to get back to what used to be "normal" in the 20th century. While bubble economies built on nothing but hopes and lies did exist before the 1970s, it seems like all the net growth of the world economy in the past few decades wouldn't have happened at all if there hadn't been any bubbles providing lots of crazy money again and again. At some point, growth just ends forever, but many people still won't believe it as long as the occasional bubble can conjure an illusion of growth for a while, but in the end, even that will fail. I'm curious to see what will happen when people all over the world see the collapse of the capitalist economy and lose all faith in money and markets.
