Correlations between anniversaries and historical conjunctures are likely to be ironic. When nlr was launched in London fifty years ago, in January 1960, it was one of myriad small harbingers of left renewal. Anti-colonial forces were registering victories in Africa, Asia and the Arab world; the Communist movement was emerging from the stranglehold of Stalinist orthodoxy; in North America, Western Europe and Japan a new generation chafed at the conformism of Cold War culture. By the mid-60s the Review had staked out a programme of mapping these three world zones in a series of comparative studies of national social formations—not least its own. Strongly oriented towards Continental theory and practice, the journal played its part in the intensive debates within Marxism that accompanied the heady days of 68. It helped to pioneer work on women’s liberation, ecology, media, film theory, the state.

By the 1990s, the journal survived within an international landscape that would have seemed a sci-fi dystopia in 1960: the Kremlin’s economic policy run by Friedmanites, the General Secretary of the ccp lauding the stock exchange; Yugoslavia, the most pluralist and successful of the workers’ states, decimated by imf austerity policies and subjected to a three-month nato bombing campaign, cheered on by liberal opinion in the West; social democratic parties competing to privatize national assets and abolish labour gains. Neo-liberalism reigned supreme, enshrining a model of unfettered capital flows and financial markets, deregulated labour and internationally integrated production chains. On its fortieth anniversary, at the high noon of globalization and American supremacy, nlr was relaunched by its editorial committee in a spirit of uncompromising realism: ‘the refusal of any accommodation with the ruling system, as of any understatement of its power’.footnote¹

Ten years on again, the continuation of the neo-liberal era itself has been thrown into question by the eruption of an epic financial crisis at the heart of the system. During the grandes journées of September 2008 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant us institutions at the centre of the mortgage-backed securities market, were taken into government stewardship after their shares had plunged by 90 per cent. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch was forced into a shotgun marriage with Bank of America, hbos with Lloydstsb; a tottering Citigroup, whose stock value had fallen from $244bn to $6bn, was shored up by government funds, Washington Mutual pulled from receivership by JPMorganChase. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale were saved by massive Treasury transfusions into their bankrupt insurer, aig. In the months that followed, world output, trade, equity, credit and investment ground to a halt, while unemployment soared towards double digits across the Northern hemisphere.

Running into trillions of dollars in direct and indirect support, the bailouts of the financial institutions will weigh on domestic economies—above all in the us and uk—for years to come. But did the massive state interventions also signal the end of the neo-liberal model? Ideologically, the wealth-creating prowess of big finance has been one of its central legitimating claims. There was a feeling, not just on the left, that the crisis could not but leave the paradigm itself discredited; it might even have dealt a body-blow to American hegemony. The humbling of the Wall Street giants—us Treasury Secretary Paulson offering to go down on his knees before Congress on their behalf—seemed to suggest that the world stood on the brink of a new era. Since then the financial system has been stabilized, although none of its underlying problems have been resolved. But despite the torrent of literature on the crisis, its historical meaning remains obscure. What ended, and what did not, in September 2008?

Any answer will need to begin by setting the crash in comparative perspective. Crises that shake the entire capitalist world have been surprisingly rare, for all the creative-destructive nature of the system; but 2008 could arguably be set against the railroad bust of 1873, the 1929 New York stock-exchange collapse or, as a lower limit-case, the ‘great panic’ of 1907. Their outcomes differed widely. In 1873, German receipt from Paris of the 1871 Franco-Prussian war indemnity—£90 million, paid in gold—set off frenzied building booms in Berlin and Vienna that sucked back German funds from over-extended American railroad trusts, which in turn helped bring down us banks. Financial contagion spread, and the recessions that ensued initiated a widespread deflationary downturn—‘a depression of prices, a depression of interest, a depression of profits’—that persisted, punctuated by occasional rallies and further recessions, until 1896.footnote² By contrast, the ‘Rich Man’s Panic’ of 1907, upshot of speculative banking failures in Italy and copper and railroad busts in New York, had little lasting impact on manufacturing and trade; after a short, sharp recession, recovery set in the following year. Different again, the 1929 crash signalled a plunge in trade and output that would usher in the Great Depression.

A precondition for any deeper understanding of the 2008 crisis will be a thorough-going comparative analysis; but an investigation along those lines lies beyond the scope of the present survey. What follows will simply take these earlier crises as markers for a preliminary scanning of the post-2008 landscape, to ask what remains of neo-liberalism, as programme and ideology, and what may be consigned to the past.

‘Neo-liberal’ is a dismal epithet, of course, imprecise and over-used. But some term is needed to describe the macro-economic paradigm that has predominated from the end of the 1970s until—at least—2008. Hayek once said that, while he regarded himself as a classical liberal, the term neo-liberalism was not inappropriate, since liberalism had been so completely abandoned in the West after the 19th century that the return—still incomplete—to its principles merited the prefix.footnote³ Three features have distinguished the late 20th-century variety from earlier free-market avatars. First, its Americanness: from Carter on, the neo-liberal programme has been developed and propagated by us-led institutions, and propounded as international policy by the us state. American multinationals and financial giants have been among its principal beneficiaries and it has been experienced in many parts of the world as the Americanization of economies, cultures and societies. Second, its enemies: the social-democratic post-war settlement, organized labour, state socialism. Whereas Victorian-era laissez-faire tried to hold the line against a coming world of protectionism, the genius of neo-liberalism has lain in the destruction and expropriation of existing structures and goods: privatization of utilities, de-unionization of labour, means-testing of universal benefits, removal of tariffs and capital controls. Its positive constructions have been less charismatic: the wto, shadow banking, workfare, nafta.