I don't think we have any particular disagreements on this, you seem to just want me to define neoliberalism, so I will gladly do so.

And I do agree, I owe it to my readers, I was being presumptuous there. Because of my own geography, Slavoj Zizek and Yanis Varoufakis are household names, so I am used to people having at least a common grasp of this. Perhaps that was culturally biased. As such I will pin this response to my timeline and link it back from the article.

I would define neoliberalism as follows:

Neoliberalism is in many ways how the western world tried to reconcile two contradictions, namely the coup d'etat of the USSR, and the ensuing Pax NATO. As well as Marx's falling profits principle. I know sometimes in English it's called failing profits, or shrinking markets, or whatever else, but basically:

Capitalism always requires growth of profit, and so growth of profit demands market control, and so growth of market control demands growing markets, and of course growing markets require more commodity forms.

And that's a very elaborate way of saying that capitalist markets always need to find new things to innovate, which more often than not doesn't involve new technologies and products so much as it involves putting price tags on things that was once commonly accessed.

So suddenly you got madmen like Peter Brabeck who wants to privatise African water supplies in destitute places where people drink boiled sewage, and so on.

And the new deal was the reconciliation of the class division of the great depression, but then that fell apart because of civil rights. The new deal was built on splitting the working class into middle and poor, and having the poor pay for the middle, thereby letting the rich off the hook. It worked well enough until people figured out the scam.

So now they need the next way to reconcile how:

A) Justifying global military and economic control when there are no more enemies.

B) Maintaining class structures as poverty, austerity and discontent grows.

And this is neoliberalism, as defined by Francis Fukuyama: The End of History.

A kind of doctrine which says that power is always correct, and to defy power is to embrace extremism. As if every trade unionist is just one successful election cycle away from becoming Baader-Meinhoff, etc. Pure propaganda.

It makes politics invisible, simply put, through the use of overton dichotomisation, or what Tariq Ali would describe as the extreme centre.

So mass media regulates public consciousness with questions like "Do we maintain military spending, or do we increase it?", "Do we need to reduce homelessness, or do they need to take personal responsibility?"

There is never any room for "Why do we need a global military?", or "Why can't we eliminate homelessness?"

Lenin believed in eliminating homelessness when Russia was a third world country, and even if of course no system is perfect, the constitutional guarantee for housing had extraordinary results. So if we a poor country can do it, why not a rich one?

That's when Fukuyamaists talk about extremism, how you need to make compromises with homelessness. How you can't just be compassionate like some radical, you must add a bit of demeaning treatment, a bit of heartless beraucracy, a bit of sadistic police, because the truth is somewhere in the middle.

(They don't actually say this but it is that kind of fanatical stupidity in which governing authority is always correct, provided the neoliberals are the ones who rule the world.)

So it becomes the preferred politic of the central banker, and the career politician, and the pinstripe democracy of NATO occupied countries in eastern Europe, etc.

It generally involves austerity, bailouts of large corporations, military industry, and private industry-state collusion. What liberals call crony capitalism, and what Marxists call late stage capitalism.

Some people believe that crony capitalism is fixed by just turning back the clock, and thanks to magic, this will not merely repeat history. Marxists believe the resolution lies in radical change, and to introduce working class interests into democratic procedure, generally through the use of labour delegation and democratic centralism.

What makes neoliberalism hard to define is because it is not ideological, it does not have ideals. In fact, it is to death of ideals, it is pure Zizekian ideology.

You can be an anarchist, you can be a fascist, you can be a liberal or a conservative, that's fine, just as long as you follow the law and pay taxes and do not do anything to challenge the governing forces of the market.

Another good example would be Varoufakis' anecdote from his Europe seminar with Julian Assange, when he talked about how he was a finance minister in Syriza, and how he sat down with the European delegates to discuss the Greek negotiations.

He basically told them "Okay, we all know you do not like Syriza, we are socialists, you are liberals. But the Greek people elected us, and I think we can all agree that the democratic mandate must be respected."

At which point the German chancellor interjected and said "The election results must not in any way, shape, or form, affect the economic policy of Europe."

I would say this is the defining feature of neoliberalism, it is a democratic philosophy wherein you can do whatever you want using democratic power, provided it does not actually require the use of any kind of material or economic resources.

Which, in essence, hollows out democracy into a series of symbolic gestures and negative compromises with the central banks and foreign trade agreements of corporations.

This is why you can argue about gay rights and abortion all day, but you cannot discuss housing for disowned homeless LGBT teenagers, or the budgeting for viable abortion clinics, etc.

In fact I am one of those profane Marxists who actually agree with the right wing on a lot of things, and another good example is gun rights in the US. The NRA lobbyist approach to gun rights is in my opinion highly oppressive to ordinary people. It is not the right to own guns, it is the right to sell guns.

There is never any talk of setting up public institutions of gun ownership. To provide training, storage, subsidies and organisations so that the citizenry actually have the means to challenge power. Instead it simply involves guns for the haves, and disarmament of the have-nots. So the rich neighbourhoods can hoard guns, the NRA can count their money, and working class neighbourhoods can pray to God if there is ever any political turmoil.

If you want gun rights, then they should be rights. The government shouldn’t disarm the population, they should in fact arm them. So that’s another good example of how it’s not about human rights, it’s about corporate rights. Yugoslavia is a wonderful example of gun rights for the people, where you could in fact own guns and participate in well regulated militias, and as a result people would actually build a community, and make things safer rather than more violent.

Contast this with when Tito died, and Milosevic took power and began his neoliberal reforms, and the disaster that ensued from the NRA approach to gun ownership.

So everything, left or right, is emptied out to the cheapest and least effective policy from the point of view of democratic interests, and this is what is considered "moderate" and "sensible."