We published a video on 25 January entitled 'Neoliberalism is dying: what's next?'
It has been viewed 84,000 times so far. More than 1,250 comments have been made. They are not moderated. And those comments on our videos are now of increasing interest to us, and we are analysing them, especially on more popular videos where a wide variety of views are expressed.
We have tried to do this in a number of ways and have found ChatGPT useful in doing so. The analysis that follows focuses on the top 200 comments on this post, ranked by likes and responses. I thought this was worth sharing, and further comments are welcome, especially on what we might do in response.
Key Themes, Arguments, and Questions in the Comment Threads on 'Neoliberalism is dying: what's next?'
1) Neoliberalism as a rigged system, not a neutral “free market”
A dominant theme is that “free market” rhetoric is seen as branding rather than reality. Multiple commenters argue that what is sold as market discipline is selectively applied: corporations and the wealthy receive subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and legal advantages, while ordinary people face austerity, precarious work, and strict “personal responsibility.”
Key claims in this theme:
- The market is described as structurally biased: “socialism for the rich…rugged individualism for the rest.”
- “Corporate welfare” is framed as the real operating system beneath the “free market” label.
- The concept of a neutral market is rejected: neoliberalism is depicted as state-enabled (rules, enforcement, bailouts), not “small government.”
- This theme also includes a moral framing: the system isn't merely inefficient—it is portrayed as illegitimate and extractive.
2) Neoliberalism as political project: extraction, rentierism, and “subscription life”
One long comment sets the tone for a deeper analysis: neoliberalism is framed less as an economic theory and more as a political weapon designed to:
- De-legitimise the state as a vehicle for collective good.
- Re-legitimise concentrated wealth as “merit.”
- Transform citizenship into a consumer relationship—“rent your life.”
A key concept repeated in different forms is the shift from productive capitalism to rentier capitalism:
- Productive capitalism is associated with industrial innovation.
- Rentier capitalism is associated with financialisation, subscriptions, paywalls, tax havens, monopolies, and extraction.
This analysis resonates with other comments that mention “hollowed out growth capacity,” “wealth concentration,” and “nothing makes sense anymore if you aren't asset wealthy.” It's essentially a story of systemic transformation: not just “bad policy,” but a restructuring of society around extraction.
3) Thatcher/Reagan era as the origin story and cultural turning point
A major narrative anchor is the 1980s—often personalised through lived memory:
- Thatcher is described as doing “more damage” than wartime bombing (hyperbolic but expressive).
- Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney are named as a trio (UK/US/Canada) who mainstreamed the model.
Several commenters describe watching the “deification of the market” and the elevation of the rich to quasi-priestly status.
This theme includes:
- A sense of delayed vindication (“finally the truth is coming out”).
- Intergenerational tension (“Boomers agreeing with the Boomers. All nonsense.”).
- A broader claim that privatisation and social atomization spread globally, even through nominally “left” parties.
4) The “social contract” and middle-class decline
Many comments converge on the idea that something like a social contract has broken:
- A repeated framing is middle-class erosion and working-class precarity.
- One commenter directly asks whether the undermining of the middle class counts as “making the poor poorer,” even if absolute poverty declines globally.
Core elements:
- Housing/rent and cost-of-living pressures appear implicitly as key stressors.
- Anxiety and overwork are emphasised (“worked into the ground”).
A political conclusion follows: people feel abandoned, which fuels anger and opens the door to demagogues.
This theme often functions as a bridge between moral critique and political consequence: economic insecurity is linked to polarisation, resentment, and authoritarian temptations.
5) Is neoliberalism “dying” or entrenched?
A substantial dispute wass about the video's implied thesis: that neoliberalism is in decline.
Some commenters agree and frame current politics as the “mask off” phase.
Others pushed back: neoliberalism remains dominant and adaptable; Carney is seen as part of it, not its undertaker.
A specific subtheme is whether elite speeches (like Davos) can represent a genuine ideological shift or just rebranding (“snake oil”).
So the argument isn't just “neoliberalism is bad,” but whether we're at an endpoint versus a continuation with new packaging.
6) State power: necessary tool or inevitable threat?
A major fault line emerges around the role of the state:
- One camp argues the state is essential and already active: neoliberalism depends on state enforcement and policy design.
- Another camp fears state power itself as the core danger, citing historical atrocities and modern examples of repression.
This creates a recurring tension:
- Anti-neoliberal critique often calls for rebuilding public capacity (“politics of care,” Nordic model, protecting middle/working classes by law).
- Anti-state critique warns that expanding state capacity risks surveillance, censorship, arbitrary power, and the erosion of rights.
This tension is one of the most important “structural debates” in the threads: even among people critical of the current system, there is disagreement about whether the solution is more state capacity (welfare, regulation, redistribution) or less centralised power.
7) Democracy, “uniparty,” and legitimacy
Several commenters express democratic disillusionment:
- Neoliberalism is described as “invented as a solution to democracy,” and producing a “uniparty” where outcomes don't change regardless of elections.
- Others reference “too much democracy”.
The underlying sentiment is that democratic choice is constrained by elite consensus, media narratives, and institutional inertia. This theme overlaps with a “rigged system” argument but shifts from economics to political legitimacy: the system is not only unfair, but unresponsive.
8) Climate, bunkers, and exit fantasies
Climate appears as an “ultimate market failure” and moral indictment:
- Environmentalists were mocked; now consequences are unavoidable.
- The ultra-wealthy are portrayed as planning escape (bunkers, “freedom cities,” Mars) rather than repair: an image of end-stage irresponsibility.
This becomes symbolic: elites extracting value and then extracting themselves from consequences.
9) Culture-war drift and controversial side-threads
As in many YouTube comment sections, subthreads drift into polarising issues:
- Speech laws, protests, and Gaza appear in the anti-state thread.
- Hungary and Orbán appear via a “strong leader resisting pressure” argument.
- Elon Musk, data scraping, and AI appear as examples of extraction and dystopian consolidation.
These side-threads show how a comment section can become a convergence point for multiple grievances, even when the video topic is more specific.
10) Questions asked (explicit and implicit)
Several key questions animate the threads:
- What's the solution? (Asked directly: “what's the solution ?!?”)
- Does middle-class decline count as impoverishment even if absolute poverty globally falls?
- Is neoliberalism actually dying, or just mutating?
- What role should the state play: protector of the public, or threat to liberty?
- Can change happen via reform/ballot box (Greens/Corbyn/reform) or does “revolution” inevitably produce new authoritarianism (“you get a Napoleon”)?
- Who benefits from the current order, and is it intentional design or corruption layered onto “free markets”?
Bottom line
The threads cluster around a shared diagnosis—neoliberalism as extractive and elite-serving—but split sharply on prognosis (dying vs entrenched) and prescription (rebuild the state vs restrain it; reform vs revolution). The comment section functions as a hybrid of public catharsis, ideological sorting, and informal political education—typical of YouTube, where short slogans and long essays coexist, and where a single video becomes a staging ground for broader anxieties about democracy, inequality, climate, and power.
A last word
I should add one final comment: when I last looked, 9,339 people had liked or disliked this post (meaning 11% of those watching the video had voted), and 99% of those voting had liked the video, with 1% suggesting that they disliked it. The negative comments noted above need to be read in that light.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Hi Richard, my 2 page IFC framework is 854 words, where should I send it?
My email is in here https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/about/
On occasion, I read too many comments for the time and emotional capacity available. Excellent to have this analysis, thank you. AI is a good servant when instructed by a good master.
Both parts 6 and 7 are things I have been reflecting on a lot lately.
The state – that I often advocate more of – has become a blunt instrument of Neo-liberalism as it has become increasingly captured by capital (corruption). Like Ayn Rand’s Atlas, many states have been shrugging off responsibility. States in the West have become tools of economic oppression.
A good state is like a good parent, willing to protect a child from itself if necessary.
The only counter balance to the state is an active local/regional polity that reflects local conditions back to the centre and reconnects with the majority real people who are not mega rich. But this needs to be done carefully.
But what I do not see above is any focus on what the real failure is in all this. It is not necessarily the Left or the Marxists or even One Nation Tories.
The real failure is within Liberalism itself. Liberalism has arrogantly refused to confront human weakness and has reduced and hijacked the concept of ‘rational self interest’ from an inter-dependence mind set (if I am kind and helpful to others, I may well receive kindness and help in return) to actually creating an excuse and even the legal means to support greed in the pursuit of some extreme independence mind set. And then sells this as a desirable objective to the rest of us.
The politics of care have existed for centuries in humans societies as inter-dependence – debts owed not in money but in deeds, taking from nature in a sustainable way for example. We are always stronger together. That is how we survived. Neo-liberalism is an aberration; a mutation of the worst kind, it is ahistorical, a construct of rule breakers.
If we are to begin afresh (and there is a lot to do) then the checks and balances have to pay heed to human weakness and accept them as such and mitigate for them. And this is huge in itself; this means putting a limit on some ‘freedoms’; this means resource accounting; this means understanding your impact on others and the planet; this means that the power of individuals and institutions have to be constrained; this means living consciously attuned to the world, not just to one’s self. This means living for all of life itself.
“If we are to begin afresh (and there is a lot to do) then the checks and balances have to pay heed to human weakness and accept them as such and mitigate for them.”
Agreed
I am very much in agreement with your view and would add, as a development of the idea, that the role of the nation state will need to soften to become the keeper of a set of values and then as an enabler of local solutions. With the provision of essentials by local communities political life will inevitably start to involve the whole community and upper tiers of regional and national government would have a coordinating role rather than a directing one. This is about recognising the need for us to live in a world of human scale where we know and interact with our neighbours and have a say about how we go about looking after each other.
There is some of this I much agree with, including the importance of what is local. But I really do not think this eliminates the role of the state. In the macrpeconomy and in the delivery of an overarching narrative of justice and care it must be supreme.
All I would say is that within the ‘checks and balances’ there has to be the capacity to accept that a role for state ‘charged’ with upholding certain scene setting moral/ethical objectives could be misused and even overthrown by other forces. How that is done needs to be thought through and one way to do that is make the democratic interplay between regional/local more effective?
To put it bluntly – how can we make it more clear when pointing out and contesting government policies that hurt people and undermine them or break promises? How can that complaint be turned into something more powerful? Look at privatisation and how unpopular that has become and how we seem unable to do anything about our water industry. The local/regional element needs the power to contest and be heard. All I have ever seen is how this captured state of ours steam rollers over the counter evidence on behalf of capital.
We need a constiution.
We need a constiutional court.
The concept of “The State” is complicated because of how it is connected with the Government of the Day.
The American State under Trump is very different from the British State under Corbyn.
I like what the British State did post World War II when it founded the welfare state and the National Health Service, started building 4.5 million homes, nationalised the railways, and energy was cheap and plentiful.
Today’s state has been captured by Big Business and works in its interest at the expense of the public who are exploited by numerous means.
Perhaps we should be careful criticising the State when we should be criticising the Government.
I think you are confusing the state and the government. They are not the same.
“deligitimising the state as a vehicle for the public good”
I was deeply disturbed by a news story I saw last night and wondering if it might be a contender for a comment on one of your blogs. The sentence I quote seems like a perfect prompt.
It seems that, in the context of being questioned about student loans, Rachel Reeves said:
“It is not right that people who don’t go to university bear the cost for others to”
While you and many commenters have long been deriding this government for being indistinguishable from the tories, and I have been nodding along, I didn’t think that a Labour minister would sink so low as to publicly and emphatically disavow the fundamental Labour belief that education is a public good, and actually subscribe to an illiberal and mean minded belief which I’ve always considered to be born of ignorance and contrived class division.
Of course, it is all one with the household economy myth which actively supports corrosive division over the allocation of resources and adheres like superglue to popular economic beliefs and mendacious politicians.
But I would really like to know WTF this ignorant and deeply unpleasant woman is even doing in the Labour party, let alone holding a high office of State?
Good questions.
Good comment.
I woke up and opened one eye and wrote this this morning. After reading all your morning’s output and one of Aurelian’s, I shall put my ha’pennys worth here:
I dreamt that…
A British Prime Minister stood up and declared “There’s no such thing as taxpayers’ money” and continued: “The government agrees a budget, the Bank of England creates the money.”
“We spend it on the people in this country, the environment (built and natural) and on building a just, fair and sustainable future. No one shall go cold or hungry. All will have education, healthcare, help and care when they need it.”
“We will pay taxes according to our means; returning some of that money to the government that brought it into being, so it can be extinguished. By taxation, we will keep inequality and inflation in check, to protect the public good created by public spending from being eroded amongst other things”
Then I woke up properly, to the real world.
I cheered up when I realised the combined Murphy family and the commentators on here could write a far better and more comprehensive speech.
I remember the bittersweet pleasure of your Alternative Budget. I’m with those that want a stronger, caring state with a spine (and I am reminded by reading Aurelian, one with a cohesive, able support system or civil service). We must change the state, not walk away in fear, or we go the way of Hayek.
I look forward to more development on the Politics of Care when time allows.
I like your dream
It is a little piece of the big collective dreaming you have nurtured on this blog. I’m now fantasising about a Monty-Python style cardboard-cut-out animation, with a puppet Mrs T speaking those words (with the crude up and down jaw)… Do we see the puppeteer, or is the question, who is this wise puppeteer? Hmm, not sure about the puppet bit. But someone with skill in computer visuals could make something like this (very obviously clunky and old-school, the opposite of deep fakery) and at least give those of us over 60 a wry laugh. Is there anyone out there?
Great Summary
“there is disagreement about whether the solution is more state capacity (welfare, regulation, redistribution) or less centralised power.”
So maybe we need more properly funded, local government wirh real local accountability!
7) Democracy,
I like the synthesis of views.
Something comforting about the collective recognition of the Neoliberal Lie Factory.
Thanks
If neoliberalism is the problem then we have an even bigger problem. That politicians won’t say that neoliberalism is a problem. When I say politicians l, I mean all of them. Until the whole political spectrum has come to terms with it, we are still going to have the problem “what is Neoliberalism?” For a Trump supporter they see Trump as a wrecking ball to smash a corrupt system. The risk with the wrecking ball is that it can easily be targeted at our democracy because there is little going on to diagnose the problems we face at a national level. Our political parties skirt around the issues hoping the storm will blow itself out.