Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of modern capitalism, is under sustained challenge. For the past quarter of a century neoliberalism, sometimes called market fundamentalism, the policy of non-intervention in the economy, has been the ideology, and the set of policies that go with it, which has adamantly opposed the rights and attempted to drive down the living standards of the working class all over the world. Now the economic crisis is forcing the authorities to intervene, regulate, and even nationalise firms because they have no choice. Is neoliberalism dead?

'Modern history’s greatest regulatory failure’; ‘The end of American capitalism as we know it’; these are just two of the headlines thrown up by the credit crunch, both appearing in the Financial Times, the organ of British finance capital. In the course of a single week, we have seen the collapse of three of America’s biggest financial institutions: on Sunday 13th September, Bank of America announced it was buying out Merrill Lynch, one of the world’s most famous investment banks; on the following Monday, Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest securities firm in the US, filed for bankruptcy; and, as if that were not enough, on Tuesday, the US Federal Reserve invested $85 billion in a takeover of AIG, America’s largest insurance company. More recently, on Thursday 25th, the huge US bank Washington Mutual, in a state of collapse, was taken over by JP Morgan Chase, in a move described as ‘the biggest bank failure in American history” (Saskia Scholtes, Joanna Chung and Deborah Brewster, JPMorgan swoops in again, FT, September 26 2008).