The driving force of Bauman's 'liquid modernity' was born when the original 13 British colonies in North America won their independence, and, in the frontier wars which they waged "out West", became the first fully individualised society.   [AVAC]

The rise of corporations like United Fruit signalled a new kind of colonialism in Latin America, (though the model had a precedent: the British East India Company).

The engine of victory in World War II, the USA dominated the founding of the organs of global economic government:

The International Monetary Fund, The World Bank, and The World Trade Organization, are the bodies which effectively licence transnational corporations as the drivers of globalisation.

Every ideology has its pantheon, and chief amongst the 20th Century protagonists of globalisation is:

Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (May 8, 1899 in Vienna – March 23, 1992 in Freiburg) ... an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher known for his defence of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-20th century. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.

His book, The Road to Serfdom, occupies a 'biblical' place in the canon of Neoliberalism:

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which, in his view, had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny.

Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal.

Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved.

Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea.

Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism.

For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.

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Under this view, Western European social-democracy was merely a 'weak' form of totalitarianism, and the experience of varied attempts to control prices and wages in the UK in the 1970's confirmed Hayek's thesis in respect of Soviet-style planning.

American economist, Milton Friedman supported Hayek.

His book "Capitalism and Freedom" published in 1962 ...

... is written from the perspective of the United States. It was published nearly two decades after World War II, a time when the Great Depression was still in collective memory and the Cold War had just begun. Under the Kennedy and preceding Eisenhower administrations, federal expenditures were growing at a quick pace in the areas of national defence, social welfare and infrastructure. Both major parties, Democratic and Republican, supported increased spending in different ways. This, as well as the New Deal, was supported by most intellectuals with the justification of Keynesian economics. Friedman sought to oppose what he saw as increasing centralization and diminishing freedom.

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He got the opportunity to turn theory into practice when Augusto Pinochet invited some of his pupils to use Chile as a test-bed for free-market 'reforms':

By mid 1975, Pinochet set about making economic reforms variously called "neoliberal" or sometimes "free market" by its supporters. He declared that he wanted

" ... to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of proprietors."

To formulate his economic policy, Pinochet relied on the so-called Chicago Boys, who were economists trained at the University of Chicago and heavily influenced by the ideas of Milton Friedman.

The government launched an era of deregulation of business and privatization.

To accomplish his objectives, the Chicago Boys privatized the pension system, state-owned industries, and banks, and lowered taxes on income.

Supporters of these policies (most notably Milton Friedman himself) have dubbed them "The Miracle of Chile", due to the country's sustained economic growth since the late 1980s.

Pinochet's lost millions

The manifesto of these reforms is summed up under The Washington Consensus, and the extent to which nations have been "successful" in implementing them is charted by The Heritage Foundation.

These reforms were adopted by President Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK.

Reagan was gifted his opportunity to break the power of the unions by the Air traffic controllers' strike of 1981:

Only a short time into his administration, Federal air traffic controllers went on strike, violating a regulation prohibiting Government unions from striking.[50] Declaring the situation an emergency as described in the 1947 Taft Hartley Act, Reagan held a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, where he stated that if the air traffic controllers "do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated."[51] On August 5, 1981, Reagan fired 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored his order to return to work.

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Margaret Thatcher had long had a plan to break the power of British trade unions, The Ridley Plan having been drawn up in 1976. In 1984 NUM President Arthur Scargill fell into a well-laid trap:

The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the Miners' Union was one of the strongest in the country. The strike ended with the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) by the Conservative government, which then proceeded to consolidate its free market programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently and some years later the Labour Party moved away from its traditional socialist agenda. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England and in South Wales where several mining communities were destroyed.

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Ronald Reagan's successor, President George H.W. Bush began the negotiations which would lead not only to the North American Free Trade Area, but also, to the World Trade Organisation

NAFTA was thus a test-bed for the wider global agenda, and it created - in miniature - the winners and losers that have emerged.

In his book "Vulnerability and Violence", Peadar Kirby offers a comprehensive exposé of the worldwide problems caused - or exacerbated - by globalisation, not the least of which is the growing disconnection of the élite from the nation-state.

Jeff Faux puts it like this:

The existence of a cross-border corporate investor class implies the existence of global working class and civil society as well. but the investor class is organized globally. The working class is not. Therefore the corporate investor class is protected in the global marketplace and the working class and its environment are not.

The Global Class War John Wiley & Sons, 2006 | page 157

Robert W. Cox offers a variation on the same theme, emphasising the growing insecurities of his second and third classes: those whose work is precarious, and the excluded who are on the margins of 'society'.

Globalisation raises tensions between these two groups. 'Precarious' workers are pressured in a multiplicity of ways: job insecurity, the mortgage, the pension, 'consumer expectations', the life-work balance; a sense of powerlessness and frustration, and the unfair effects of the switch of the tax burden from incomes to spending which falls most heavily on this group.

These tensions inevitably give rise to the evidential lack of empathy with the problems faced by the 'excluded', who are seen to be 'benefit scroungers' - 'feckless', 'idle', 'spongers'.

Blogs posted in response to reports of the UK government's continued efforts to get lone parents and the long-term sick back into work confirm this.

Is neoliberalism a religion?

John Ralston Saul believes so; John Gray refers to it as a 'faith'.

So, in a millenarian way, do globalisers like Francis - "The End of History" - Fukuyama.

Adam Smith provides the key: if the market is freed from political control an "invisible hand" ensures the right - the best - outcome.

For Adam Smith this was NOT a metaphor, it was the work of "Providence" - a euphemism for God in His 18th Century incarnation: Deism.

Unlike 'mainstream' Christians, Deists do not believe God intereferes in the material world, they believe in a sort of clockwork universe which God created, and which functioned according to a set of laws - Newtonian physics - which were unchanging and unchangeable.

In a very real sense, then, modern globalist economics emerges from this worldview. As did Marxism:

The idea that the world's diverse economies and regimes could be corralled into a single, universal free market will be remembered ... as an experiment in utopian social engineering undertaken by rationalist planners who had learned nothing from the disasters of the twentieth century.

Like Marx's idea of worldwide communism, it is an inheritance from a discredited philosophy of history. According to thinkers of the Enlightenment, the growth of scientific knowledge tends to produce a universal civilisation in which diverse religions and cultures .. will merge.

This assumption of historical convergence ... underpins both Marxism and market liberalism.

"False Dawn" John Gray, Granta Books, 2002 | pages xxi-xxii

Any "experiment in utopian social engineering" provokes a backlash, as the history of Marxism demonstrates. In pursuit of his Marxist religion, Joseph Stalin was comfortable in allowing Ukrainians to die in their millions when they tried to fight against both his policy of Russification and collective farms.

Hungarians, Poles, and Czechs all launched failed revolts against this particular "historical truth", and, in 1989-90 it finally passed into the history of failed ideas which have caused monumental suffering.

In his book "The Collapse of Globalism" - a wish rather than an event - John Ralston Saul devotes a whole chapter entitled "A Short History of Economics Becoming Religion" and it deserves to be read in its entirety. What emerges is a portrait of a 'religion' with a set of beliefs about the role of the state, and the reduction of poverty, which do not stand up to a moment's serious examination.

Neoliberalism has worsened the position of the Robert W. Cox's excluded - Outcasts of Modernity - and made the life of his precarious less stable and more uncertain. Social mobility has declined, and, the crime equation demonstrates that as the social state is degraded the prison population rises.

For this is a 'religion' which is devoid of any ethical/moral constraints, as the people of Bhopal found out to their enormous - and continuing - cost.

And, to pick up Hobbes point, by degrading the nation state it has actually promoted anarchy in the form of the Return to Promordial Loyalties, as instanced by the rise of national-socialist parties like the BNP.