When I speak of neoliberalism, I’m talking about a package of policies—if you were going to date it, the transformations begin in China in 1978, and accompany the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1980—where, under the banner of rolling back socialism and the welfare state and letting markets reign supreme again, they cut back social service spending dramatically. They privatized state-run utilities, industries, and so on. And they attacked the power of unions. In the British case the battle over the coalmines was crucial in terms of rolling back the unions and driving down the wage levels that workers in the North can command.

That’s the first side of the neoliberal agenda. The second is the attempt to impose enormous hardship on the Global South—to use the debt crisis, which comes to a head with the recession on 1980–82, to go in and essentially rewrite the rules of the game in the Global South through structural adjustment programs orchestrated by the International Monetary Fund and to some degree the World Bank. Where they literally go and say, “You have $450 million in debt that you could never possibly pay with your little economy; well, guess what? You can have new loans that will allow you to make your payments, we’ll lend you the money, but you’re going to have to do all the things that I’ve just described and worse. You have to lay off 20 percent of all public employees. You must get rid of any subsidies for fuel and food for the poor. You must massively privatize, you must open up your financial industries, so that Western banks can come in and essentially gobble them up.”

That offensive against labor in the North and against the peoples of the Global South generally did lay the basis for a new wave of capitalist expansion. They boosted profits by cannibalizing the South on one hand and by driving down wages in the North on the other. And then they began to relocate production facilities to low-wage zones of the South.