September 11, 1973: The start of the global neoliberal dictatorship, Europe is now un

[nomoba]

http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2015/09/september-11-1973-start-of-global.html

[Hatshepsut]

Well? We might wish to remember Salvador Allende, elected in 1970 and deposed three years later, although the date of Sept. 11 got overshadowed in the USA by terrorist attacks neoliberalism helped to bring about. Yet I don't think Pinochet's coup was the starting point for globalization. Instead, the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, based on certain U.S. victory in WWII, is a better candidate.

[Црвена]

What did you mean by "new feudalism"?

[ComradeAllende]

Well? We might wish to remember Salvador Allende, elected in 1970 and deposed three years later, although the date of Sept. 11 got overshadowed in the USA by terrorist attacks neoliberalism helped to bring about. Yet I don't think Pinochet's coup was the starting point for globalization. Instead, the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, based on certain U.S. victory in WWII, is a better candidate.

I don't know if Bretton Woods was the start of neoliberal capitalism. Bretton Woods established strict capital controls to constrain financial capital's destructive mobility; neoliberalism opposes such restrictions and helped undermine them in the 1970s. In my opinion, I think that the fall of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s heralded the new era of neoliberalism, mainly because it laid the groundwork for the reactionary offensives of the 1980s and undermined various "protections" installed to prevent another Great Depression.

[Hatshepsut]

Bretton Woods established strict capital controls to constrain financial capital's destructive mobility; neoliberalism opposes such restrictions and helped undermine them in the 1970s.

Everything was still on the gold standard in 1944 of course; President Nixon taking the USA off gold in 1971 and onto free float in March 1973. The original Bretton Woods had fixed exchange rates until then and became, as you say, outdated; hence de facto supersession in response to pressure from economists like Milton Friedman that had begun as early as 1953; see

Exchange Rates
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/ExchangeRates.html

Yet Bretton Woods set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), institutions still extant today. The fixed rates were an antidote to arbitrary and competitive currency devaluations countries had engaged in during the depression's trade wars, as when Roosevelt banned private gold holdings and changed the dollar's gold rate from $20.67 to $35, in effect cheating citizens out of nearly half what their gold had been worth when they were forced to cash it in. After the war, countries agreed to consult each other before undertaking valuation moves. The IMF's conditions for loans, i.e. liberalization and austerity, were in place from the start, with privatization demands coming later.

From 1946 the U.S. dollar was the world's reserve currency in lieu of gold. Along with the UN founding, it was basically the thing that brought GATT, the trade treaty signed in 1948, now called WTO. Capital controls, meaning how much profit a company can repatriate from an overseas subsidiary, have always been at the discretion of the country in question, though again as you say, they've also been largely eliminated among the world's major trading partners.

That's why I tend to date postwar globalization from the end of the war instead of its big takeoff in the '70s and '80s. I'll admit Bretton Woods should maybe just be called "liberalization," without the "neo" prefix. :)