



The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income.





'Accumulation by dispossession', meaning the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations, conversion of various forms of property rights into exclusive private property rights; suppression of rights to the commons; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets including natural resources; and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.





To this list of mechanisms we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution of or erasure of various forms of communal property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, access to education and healthcare) won through a generation or more of class struggle.





The proposal to privatize all state pension rights (pioneered in Chile under the dictatorship) is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of the Republicans in the US.











