McMurtry throughout this interview launches a scathing attack on neoliberalism and its many deceptive manifestations in today's world. He often uses the metaphor of cancer to explain how this advanced stage of capitalism has spread through every Western institution and throughout much of the world. I thoroughly agree with his attacks on neoliberalism, but disagree with his implied espousal of capitalism prior to this advanced transnational stage: a nation-based stage of capitalism. For example, he expressed several statements like this:
In a nutshell, social evolution itself has been reversed by a US-led war on social and ecological life organisation driven by one corrupt master value – to free transnational corporations and their shareholders from social responsibility to multiply private fortunes without limit. It is a counter-revolution against the long development of democratic government and the welfare state that once crossed across the divisions of the Cold War.And his whole emphasis is on this post-WWII period which saw the evolution of nation-based capitalism into its transnational form of neoliberalism that is being aggressively implemented by the US Empire. This, for him, is when everything went bad. Before this, capitalist rule was engaged in "the long development of democratic government and the welfare state...."
I regard this view as another middle class rejection of neoliberalism as expressed by a life-long member of capitalism's indispensable middle class. The growing number of such critics does not bode well for neoliberalists, but does not yet offer much in the way of inspiration and support to genuine anti-capitalist revolutionaries who want to construct a system that assures equality and sustainability.
