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(Peck and Tickell 1994:289, italics in original). Deindustrialization, recession,
slowing productivity growth, and a deteriorating trade balance set the stage
for the rise of increasingly powerful, politically conservative coalitions.
Unable to tame the lions of in
ation, unemployment, and interest rates in the
1970s, Keynesian interventionism became increasingly discredited, and with
it, numerous liberal political parties and programs. Ideologically, the con-
servative factions and parties that took advantage of these circumstances
preached an interlocking web of notions centered on the faith in the free
market and a distrust in state intervention, including supply-side economics
and the “trickle down” of the bene
fl
ts of economic growth from rich to poor.
In the U.K., monetarism took precedence during the Thatcher administra-
tion in the 1980s; similarly, in the U.S., monetarism jostled with Keynesian
fi
fi
fiscal policy. In the name of restoring national competitiveness, consider-
ations of equity quickly gave way to those favoring e
ciency in national
political discourse. By the 1990s, throughout the West, orthodox welfarist
prescriptions had been thoroughly discredited. The much-proclaimed, osten-
sible need to substitute an enterprise culture for the debilitating dependence
of welfarism was linked to a determination to de
fl
ate the swollen,
fi
fiscally
pro
igate public bureaucracy (Jessop 1997, 2006).
Conservative laissez-faire dogma also led to widespread e
fl
ff
orts to sell
government assets and privatize public services. By selling off
ciently
operated publicly owned and operated assets and services (e.g., through con-
tracting out), privatization allowed governments to provide services without
producing them. E
ff
ine
cient economic management of industry was to be
entrusted to the business acumen of the entrepreneur, not public bureaucrats.
Thus, Harvey (1989b) and Leitner (1990) tie the rise and fall of the Keynesian
state to the coterminous disappearance of Fordism. The Keynesian state was
largely legitimated by the bene
ts of Fordist production, particularly the
provision of collective goods that depended upon a continuously rising prod-
uctivity of labor: as productivity growth declined, political agendas for
restructuring the economy by cutting state funds for collective consumption
achieve popularity under the aegis of restoring competitiveness, and transfer
social surplus from the sphere of production to reproduction. This leads to
right-wing attacks on the familiar litany of victims including the poor,
women, minorities, immigrants, and the elderly. In this context, social pro-
grams initiated in the 1960s, when expectations of continued growth made
their
fi
fiscal burden seem small, were portrayed as intolerably expensive in the
face of intense international competition.
Around the world, therefore, the rapid, postmodern time-space compres-
sion was accompanied by a transition into a post-Fordist economic order,
central to which was the steady neoliberal peeling back of Keynesian social
and economic policy through deregulation, reductions in welfare spending,
and the removal of trade barriers. In this sense, neoliberalism constitutes a
form of creative destruction (Harvey 2006). The welfare state, long the bed-
rock of Fordist national economic policy, has been under assault worldwide,
fi
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