Unpacking the Global Crisis: Neo-liberalism, Financial Crises, and Authoritarian Liberalism

The paper hopes to contribute to a reading of the political economy of the current global crisis with a focus on four interrelated themes. First, we discuss the constitutive role and functional character of crises in the evolution of neo-liberalism in particular and in capitalist reproduction in general. Second, we investigate the mechanisms by which financial crises recur by highlighting the structure-agency dynamics in finance capitalism; specifically, the structural tendency of financial markets to disintegrate that has been exacerbated by misbehaviour of economic agents. Third, we look at opposing crisis responses—from multilaterals to regional organisations to global civil society—and realise that responses from either pro-neoliberal or anti-neoliberal forces are fundamentally the same through the years, simply re-articulating analyses and programmes that they have respectively pursued and advocated long before the global crisis. And fourth, in the context of East and Southeast Asia, we examine the tendencies of the global crisis vis-à-vis the strengthening and even acceleration of emergent authoritarian liberalism in the region despite and because of the global crisis.