Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nixon’s reasons for doing so are well documented.27 As America’s competitors caught up in productivity terms, capital flowed out of the US into Europe, while its trade balance declined. By the late 1960s, with every country engaged in expansionary policies – with high state spending and low interest rates – America had become the big loser from Bretton Woods. It needed to pay for the Vietnam War and the welfare reforms of the late 1960s, but could not. It needed to devalue but could not, because to make that happen, other countries had to raise their own currencies against the dollar, and they refused. So Nixon acted.
The world moved from exchange rates fixed against the dollar and gold to totally free-floating currencies. From then on, the global banking system was effectively creating money out of nothing.

They’d faced massive resistance from organized labour and they’d had enough. In response, these pioneers of neoliberalism drew a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot coexist with an organized working class. Consequently, they resolved to smash labour’s collective bargaining power, traditions and social cohesion completely.
Unions had come under attack before – but always from paternalist politicians who had proffered the lesser of two evils: in place of militancy, they’d encouraged a ‘good’ workforce, defined by moderate socialism, unions run by agents of the state. And they helped build stable, socially conservative communities that could be the breeding ground for soldiers and servants. The general programme of conservatism, and even fascism, had been to promote a different kind of solidarity that served to reinforce the interests of capital. But it was still solidarity.
The neoliberals sought something different: atomization. Because today’s generation sees only the outcome of neoliberalism, it is easy to miss the fact that this goal – the destruction of labour’s bargaining power – was the essence of the entire project: it was a means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation.

The attack on organized labour was punctuated by signal moments. In 1981, the US air traffic control union leaders were arrested, paraded in chains, and the entire workforce sacked for taking strike action. Thatcher used paramilitary policing to destroy the miners’ strike in 1984–5.