Neoliberalism: A Reflection

Martyn Richard Jones, A Coruña, 9^th April 2025

In a compelling lecture by Enrique Javier Díez, a respected professor at the University of León, he opened with the well-worn Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.” A familiar refrain, often invoked in discussions of education and empowerment, it was a fitting start — but Díez, with the precision of a seasoned academic and the urgency of a citizen deeply attuned to the injustices of our time, was not content to leave it there.

“What if,” he asked, “the river has been poisoned, polluted beyond recovery, or stripped of life altogether?” What if, in an all-too-familiar twist of modern reality, the river — once a shared and vital resource — has been bought up by private interests and access to its waters denied to the very people who depend on it?

The proverb’s moral unravelled into a more uncomfortable and pressing question. In an era marked by environmental degradation, rampant privatisation, and growing inequality, the issue is not merely whether people are being taught to fish — but whether they are being denied the means to survive, even when they possess the skills. Díez’s framing was a sharp indictment of systems that preach self-reliance while undermining the conditions that make it possible.

This wasn’t just a critique wrapped in metaphor. It was a call to re-examine the deeper structures at play — to ask who owns the river, who controls the nets, and why so many are left casting lines into poisoned waters.

The enduring narrative that globalisation is a rising tide that lifts all boats has, by now, been thoroughly discredited. As political economist Susan George trenchantly observed, “globalisation cannot include everyone and indeed has no intention of doing so.” This is not a failure of implementation—it is a design feature.

Our era’s profound economic, political, social, and environmental crises are not the result of momentary disruptions or minor imperfections in an otherwise functional system. Instead, they are the direct consequence of globalised neoliberalism—a model that systematically concentrates wealth, deregulates markets, commodifies the commons, and entrenches inequality under the guise of economic efficiency.

It is precisely the ideological trinity of free markets, competitiveness, and so-called sustainable growth that enables the illusion of prosperity to mask the reality of deepening poverty and systemic exclusion. As capital flows accelerate and GDP figures rise, the material conditions of millions continue to deteriorate. In practice, the promise of shared benefit has become a mechanism for the upward redistribution of wealth and the downward displacement of risk.

To believe that this system can be redeemed by adjusting its peripheral indicators—productivity, environmental safeguards, carbon pricing, demographic shifts, or resource efficiency—is, at best, naïve. At worst, it is complicit. The idea that the right policy formula will magically harmonise market imperatives with planetary boundaries and human dignity is as fanciful as believing that one might win the lottery through sheer numerical logic.

What is required is not tinkering but transformation: a fundamental reimagining of what global cooperation, economic justice, and sustainability actually mean. Anything less risks reinforcing the very structures that brought us here.

Globalised neoliberalism is a double-edged sword that cuts deeply across societies, economies, and ecosystems, often leaving behind far more destruction than progress. Stripped of its euphemisms and the glossy rhetoric of “free markets,” “efficiency,” and “growth,” it reveals a far more straightforward and more ruthless logic: the maximisation of profit through the global reorganisation of labour, production, and power. Once the ideological cosmetics are washed away, what remains is a model designed not to elevate all but to extract value from many for the benefit of a few.

At its core, globalised neoliberalism demands extreme and unilateral flexibility on the part of the developing world. To fully capitalise on the mechanics of a global economy, the industrial core must possess the capacity to shift production and services seamlessly from one geographical region to another, often at a moment’s notice. This logistical agility, however, comes with its own set of demands. Chief among them is the controlled transfer of technology and know-how—not as a gesture of solidarity or mutual advancement but as a calculated investment to enable the periphery to meet the precise needs of transnational capital.

But the requirements run deeper. For the developing world to effectively serve this global production matrix, its education systems must be reshaped—not to cultivate critical thinking, innovation, or civic empowerment—but to produce a workforce calibrated to the specifications of the industrial core. In essence, education becomes a tool not for liberation or local development but for functional compliance. The goal is not to foster self-sustaining societies but to ensure a steady supply of technically competent, economically dependent, and politically passive labour.

In this light, globalised neoliberalism reveals itself not as a neutral economic framework but as a profoundly hierarchical and extractive order. It is a system in which the periphery is permitted to participate only to the extent that it conforms—and contributes—to the imperatives of the centre. It is a model that speaks the language of opportunity but operates according to the logic of disposability. Unless we begin to question its mechanisms and its very purpose, we will remain locked in a cycle where global integration means local disempowerment. Progress is measured not by well-being but by the relentless advance of capital.

To fully exploit the dynamics of a truly globalised economy, complete and easy access to all required resources must be given, and, in return for this participation, governments and regimes will be allowed to survive and thrive – making poor countries rich, relatively speaking, since the idea is that the poor countries will become rich enough to buy the crap we no longer need.

Consequently, certain nations may experience temporary increases in wealth, persisting until their economic maturation and escalating government spending drive costs to a threshold that precipitates capital and expertise outflows. At this juncture, the apparent economic gains prompt corporations to relocate their production and service hubs to lower-cost, more profitable regions or countries—a dynamic well-documented in the cycles of global capital mobility.

To ensure that the developing periphery fully understands the nature of the deal, governments must remove all their barriers to international trade. It is irrelevant that Governments can or cannot run state-owned businesses effectively; as part of the deal of participation in the globalised economy, governments should hand over their largest state-owned corporations to private investors, which in effect is the selling of public property, means of production and services at knock-down prices.

In fact, the governments of the developing periphery and even some of the industrial core nations should become solely administrators of essential services and some infrastructure responsibilities no one else wants, essentially removing the need for governments to be overly involved in politics or economics.

In short, the leitmotif offers short-term gratification for the selected few. Still, it is rotten, an intellectual, economic and philosophical lie. Notwithstanding, the incessant message still seems to be that globalised capitalism is the only way. Well, if it is so damn good, why is it so fundamentally flawed and evil? 

Over twenty-five years ago, I wrote that we are trading in a culture of enlightened decency for a culture of contentment, blissful ignorance, and morally bankrupt gratification. Suppose we don’t wake up and try and put things right to correct the rise of capitalist authoritarianism by stealth and derail globalisation that only benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. In that case, this indigence of decency and lack of respect for hard-won rights will come back to eat us alive.

Globalised neo-liberalism has created a global crisis and has dramatically reduced the poorest nations’ ability to react to severe economic crises. Globalisation has been at least as damaging for producing poverty as imperialism and colonialism. In this respect, the wealthier nations, especially the most exploitative, should be morally obliged to compensate these poor countries. They must do so now, not after the event, when the results of famine and deep economic deprivation cannot be reversed.

I never did like the economic philosophy of Malthis, but I’ll leave the penultimate words to Engels and Lenin.

Friedrich Engels uncompromisingly denounced Thomas Malthus’s hypothesis, branding it “the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed—a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and world citizenship.” In those words, Engels laid bare the profound ideological violence embedded within Malthusian logic. This pseudo-scientific framework naturalised scarcity and human suffering while cloaking its social and economic origins behind the veil of demographic inevitability.

For Marxist thought, Malthusianism has always represented more than a flawed population theory; it has stood as a core ideological pillar of bourgeois political economy, a means of justifying inequality as an unchangeable feature of nature itself. By presenting poverty as a consequence of overpopulation rather than exploitation, Malthus sought to absolve the ruling classes of responsibility and to mask the brutal mechanics of capitalist accumulation behind a narrative of biological determinism.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in his incisive critique, condemned both classical Malthusianism and its later neo-Malthusian incarnations as “reactionary doctrines”—nothing less than strategic instruments in the ideological arsenal of the bourgeoisie. For Lenin, these theories were deployed to exonerate capitalism, portraying the immiseration of the working class not as the product of wage labour, class domination, and the appropriation of surplus value but as the tragic consequence of natural limits. In this way, neo-Malthusianism functions as a moral shield for capital: it reconfigures structural violence as an unfortunate necessity and replaces historical materialism with fatalistic resignation.

From a Marxist perspective, Malthusian thinking is not merely analytically false but politically dangerous. It shifts attention away from the fundamental antagonisms between capital and labour. It reinforces the status quo by suggesting that inequality is not the result of capitalist social relations but of universal, transhistorical forces. It denies the transformative potential of collective human agency. It forecloses the possibility of a world beyond scarcity, organised not for the few’s profit but for the many’s needs.

In this sense, to critique Malthus is not merely an academic exercise but an act of ideological liberation. It is to refuse the myth that poverty is inevitable and to reassert that the conditions of human life are made, not given, and therefore, can be remade in the image of justice, solidarity, and equality.

They might just as well have been pointing to the vile resurgence of imperialism and colonialism, now masquerading under the banner of globalisation, which perpetuates inequality and exploitation on a global scale—a system that democratic socialism seeks to dismantle in favour of fairness and collective well-being.

One other thing, I have an issue with world leaders encouraging us to do things because they are in our own self-interest. Whatever happened to doing what is right simply because it is right?