Excerpt from David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (emphasis added in bold):

“The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. I have elsewhere provided an account of the main mechanisms whereby this was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes. 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 or erasure of various forms of common property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care) 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. Accumulation by dispossession comprises four main features:

1. Privatization and commodification. […]

2. Financialization. […]

3. The management and manipulation of crises. […]

4. State redistributions. The state, once neoliberalized, becomes a prime agent of redistributive policies, reversing the flow from upper to lower classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism. It does this in the first instance through pursuit of privatization schemes and cutbacks in those state expenditures that support the social wage. Even when privatization appears to be beneficial to the lower classes, the long-term effects can be negative. At first blush, for example, Thatcher’s programme for the privatization of social housing in Britain appeared as a gift to the lower classes, whose members could now convert from rental to ownership at a relatively low cost, gain control over a valuable asset, and augment their wealth. But once the transfer was accomplished housing speculation took over, particularly in prime central locations, eventually bribing or forcing low-income populations out to the periphery in cities like London and turning erstwhile working-class housing estates into centres of intense gentrification. The loss of affordable housing in central areas produced homelessness for some and long commutes for those with low-paying service jobs. The privatization of the ejidos in Mexico during the 1990s had analogous effects upon the prospects for the Mexican peasantry, forcing many rural dwellers off the land into the cities in search of employment. The Chinese state has sanctioned the transfer of assets to a small elite to the detriment of the mass of the population and provoking violently repressed protests. Reports now indicate that as many as 350,000 families (a million people) are being displaced to make way for the urban renewal of much of old Beijing, with the same outcome as that in Britain and Mexico outlined above. In the US, revenue-strapped municipalities are now regularly using the power of eminent domain to displace low- and even moderate-income property owners living in perfectly good housing stock in order to free land for upper-income and commercial developments that will enhance the tax base (in New York State there are more than sixty current cases of this).

The neoliberal state also redistributes wealth and income through revisions in the tax code to benefit returns on investment rather than incomes and wages, promotion of regressive elements in the tax code (such as sales taxes), the imposition of user fees (now widespread in rural China), and the provision of a vast array of subsidies and tax breaks to corporations. The rate of corporate taxation in the US has steadily declined, and the Bush re-election was greeted with smiles by corporate leaders in anticipation of even further cuts in their tax obligations. The corporate welfare programmes that now exist in the US at federal, state, and local levels amount to a vast redirection of public moneys for corporate benefit (directly as in the case of subsidies to agribusiness and indirectly as in the case of the military-industrial sector), in much the same way that the mortgage interest rate tax deduction operates in the US as a subsidy to upper-income homeowners and the construction industry.The rise of surveillance and policing and, in the case of the US, incarceration of recalcitrant elements in the population indicates a more sinister turn towards intense social control. The prison-industrial complex is a thriving sector (alongside personal security services) in the US economy. In the developing countries, where opposition to accumulation by dispossession can be stronger, the role of the neoliberal state quickly assumes that of active repression even to the point of low-level warfare against oppositional movements (many of which can now conveniently be designated as ‘drug trafficking’ or ‘terrorist’ so as to garner US military assistance and support, as in Colombia). Other movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the landless peasant movement in Brazil, are contained by state power through a mix of co-optation and marginalization.

The Commodification of Everything

To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide—an ethic—for all human action. In practice, of course, every society sets some bounds on where commodification begins and ends. Where the boundaries lie is a matter of contention.”

Excerpt from:

David Harvey
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005/2007