An Economy's Morphological Endpoint

Not only is it possible to draw a connection between neoliberalism and foreign policy, the two have been structurally intertwined for decades. But the connection is often misunderstood because neoliberalism is usually framed as a domestic economic program rather than an international ordering principle.

🌐 How Neoliberalism Connects to Foreign Policy.

1. Neoliberalism as an International Ordering Project:Neoliberalism isn’t just about domestic deregulation or privatization. It also proposes a global system in which markets set the terms of international relations, not states.  States enforce and protect cross‑border private ordering (capital flows, property rights, trade regimes).  Globalization is treated as a humanitarian project—the idea that expanding capitalism lifts people out of poverty.  

This is the core of what David Singh Grewal calls the geopolitics of neoliberalism.”

2. Foreign Policy as the Vehicle for Neoliberal Expansion:

U.S. foreign policy, in particular, has been a major driver of neoliberal norms.

A. Trade Agreements

- Promotion of free trade, tariff reduction, and global value chains.  

- U.S.-backed agreements (NAFTA, WTO accession, bilateral deals) embed neoliberal rules into international law.  

B. Global Financial Institutions:

- The IMF, World Bank, and later the WTO became instruments for spreading neoliberal reforms.  

- Structural adjustment programs required:

  - Deregulation  

  - Privatization  

  - Fiscal austerity  

  - Trade liberalization  

C. U.S. Strategic Influence: 

From Carter through Trump, U.S. foreign policy increasingly fused:

- Market-opening diplomacy  

- Financial globalization  

- Support for private capital mobility  

- Conditionality on aid and trade  

3. Why This Matters: Neoliberalism as a Foreign Policy Agenda...

Grewal argues that neoliberalism became a foreign policy agenda in its own right — and is now breaking down.  

Key points:  

- It assumes global capitalism is stabilizing and beneficial.  

- It requires states to subordinate political goals to market logic.  

- It is crisis-prone, especially when distributional consequences become politically destabilizing.  

This helps explain:

- U.S.–China tensions  

- Backlash against trade agreements  

- Populist movements  

- The fragility of global supply chains  

- The crisis of the “liberal international order”

4. The Deep Connection in One Sentence: 

Neoliberalism shapes foreign policy by treating global markets as the primary arena of international order, and foreign policy shapes neoliberalism by enforcing and expanding that market-led order.

5. Roots and worms found in the rabbit hole:

- The Washington Consensus  

- The post-1973 collapse of Bretton Woods  

- The Carter-to-Reagan transition  

- The rise of China within a neoliberalized global economy  

- The current breakdown of the neoliberal foreign policy regime  

It is structurally plausible that the “Epstein class” emerged from the same neoliberal milieu that reshaped global power after the 1970s. The search results don’t explicitly make this argument, but they give us enough to build a grounded, evidence‑based inference.

🌐 1. What the sources show about Epstein’s network  

The declassified network analysis describes Epstein as a broker embedded in elite transnational circles — finance, politics, media, academia, and royalty — with access to billionaires and global decision-makers. His firm catered exclusively to the ultra‑rich, and his social world was populated by high‑profile figures whose influence spanned borders.

Another source maps Epstein’s connections into a broader Trilateral Commission–style elite architecture, emphasizing invitation‑only networks, cross‑border coordination, and governance insulated from democratic accountability. These are precisely the kinds of networks that flourished under neoliberal globalization.

2. What neoliberalism created (structurally)...

Neoliberalism — as a foreign‑policy and economic regime — produced:

- Hyper‑mobile global capital

- Private governance networks (consultancies, hedge funds, foundations, think tanks)  

- Elite transnational forums (Davos, Trilateral Commission, Aspen, Bilderberg)  

- Weak regulatory oversight across borders  

- A new class of intermediaries who broker access, information, and influence  

This is the environment in which someone like Epstein could thrive.

🔗 3. The structural overlap. Here’s the key: **neoliberalism didn’t create Epstein, but it created the ecology in which an Epstein-type operator becomes systemically useful.

A. Neoliberal globalization rewards brokers of elite access. Epstein’s role — connecting billionaires, politicians, scientists, and royalty — is exactly the kind of “private diplomacy” that becomes valuable when states retreat and markets dominate.

B. Deregulation + financialization create opaque wealth channels. Epstein’s financial firm operated in a world where private wealth management became both global and lightly supervised.

C. Elite networks become more insulated and self-reinforcing. The Trilateral Commission–style architecture described in the search results is a hallmark of neoliberal governance:  

- invitation-only  

- cross-border  

- unaccountable  

- oriented toward capital mobility  

  [Labour Heartlands])

Epstein’s network fits this pattern.

D. The “dominant minority” problem. Neoliberalism concentrates wealth and influence into a small transnational class. Epstein’s client base — billionaires, heads of state, royalty — is a textbook example of this concentration.

🧬 4. So did the Epstein class grow out of neoliberalism?  The evidence supports a strong structural connection:

- Epstein’s network is embedded in the same elite transnational circuits that neoliberalism empowered.  

- His business model depends on the deregulated, financialized, globalized order neoliberalism built.  

- His social world overlaps with the very institutions (finance, academia, politics, global governance) that neoliberalism reorganized.  

- His ability to operate with impunity for decades reflects the regulatory and accountability gaps characteristic of neoliberal regimes.

**So the “Epstein class” is best understood as a *symptom* of neoliberal globalization — a parasitic growth on the architecture of elite transnational power that neoliberalism constructed. This doesn’t mean neoliberalism intended such networks. But it made them possible, useful, and hard to police.

Other roots to pull:

- the shift from state-to-state diplomacy to elite-to-elite networks  

- the emergence of “shadow elites” (Wedel)  

- the structural similarities to earlier courtier systems  

Or we can explore how China played the West. This is not only “possible,” but analytically coherent.  If we treat neoliberalism not as an ideology but as a global operating environment, then the CCP’s rise since the late 1970s can be read as a case of strategic exploitation of that environment.

Oh how tempting caricature or essentialism be!

🧭 1. What neoliberalism created (globally). Neoliberal globalization produced a world characterized by:

- Hyper‑mobile capital

- Global supply chains

- Trade liberalization

- Financial deregulation  

- Export‑led development incentives  

- Weakening of industrial policy in the West  

- Offshoring of manufacturing

This was not a China‑specific project. It was a restructuring of the global economy. Finance was setting up the schematic for a Toynbeean Universal State which Immanuel Wallerstein critically illuminated.

China entered this system at exactly the right moment.

2. What China did that was different. China did not become neoliberal.  Instead, it leveraged the neoliberal order while refusing its core political prescriptions.

The CCP:

- Opened to foreign investment  

- Integrated into global markets  

- Became the world’s manufacturing hub  

- Used WTO accession to lock in export dominance  

- Attracted Western capital hungry for cheap labor and high returns  (genteel imperialism)

But simultaneously:

- Maintained state control over finance  

- Preserved party control over strategic sectors  

- Used industrial policy aggressively  

- Directed capital flows rather than liberalizing them  

- Built national champions (Huawei, ZTE, etc.)  

- Subordinated private firms to state priorities 

- "Took off" on the s-curve of a new civilization 

This is why scholars often describe China as “socialism with neoliberal characteristics” or a “state‑platform hybrid”. This was the instrumentality of Chinese II.

🔗 3. The key structural insight: Neoliberal globalization created the channels; the CCP controlled the valves.

China exploited:

A. Western offshoring incentives. Neoliberal firms sought lower labor costs and fewer regulations.  

China provided both — plus political stability and scale.

B. Global capital mobility.  Western investors poured money into China because neoliberalism encouraged cross‑border investment with minimal friction.

C. Trade liberalization. WTO rules gave China guaranteed access to global markets.

D. Weak Western industrial policy. Neoliberal states largely abandoned strategic planning.  China did the opposite — and gained leverage.

E. The ideology of “markets as neutral”. Western policymakers assumed China would liberalize politically as it liberalized economically.  This assumption was a product of neoliberal thinking.  It proved incorrect.

🧬 4. So did the CCP exploit the neoliberal milieu? And how — but in the sense that China used the global neoliberal order as a scaffold for its own rise while maintaining a fundamentally non‑neoliberal internal structure.

China:

- Benefited from global capital flows  

- Benefited from Western deindustrialization  

- Benefited from the ideology of free trade  

- Benefited from the West’s belief that markets depoliticize power  

But it never accepted the neoliberal premise that markets should govern politics.  Instead, it used markets to strengthen the state.

This is why China is now seen as a systemic rival to the very order that enabled its ascent.

🏛️ 5. The deeper pattern (if you want the mythic architecture)

In the ceremonial language I have been building, we could say:

- Neoliberalism opened the Corridor of Unbounded Exchange.  

- Western states stepped back, believing the corridor would civilize all who walked it.  

- The CCP entered the corridor not as a pilgrim but as an engineer.  

- It learned the corridor’s geometry, redirected its flows, and built a State‑Platform Engine inside it. 

- It didn't cheat. When I get time I'll find the right phrase from The Art of War. 

- The engine now challenges the corridor’s original architects.

This is the structural drama of the last 46 years.

More exposed roots:

- the collapse of Bretton Woods (Keen's self-sabotage)

- the “China Shock” funded by the Mad Mob in Wal-Mart America

- the U.S. shift from industrial to financial capitalism  (imperium terminans)

- the Belt and Road Initiative as a counter‑neoliberal globalization  

- or the mythic turnabout on the Lords of the Exchange (e.g., “The Engine Behind the Veil of Trade”).

I tend to equate the Epstein Class with what I've called a "Throughput Empire". Is China on a collision course with this empire?

'Es, deedums — if we treat the “Throughput Empire” as the transnational, neoliberal order built around flows of capital, goods, data, and elite access, then China is not merely on a collision course with it; China is already inside it, dependent on it, and challenging it simultaneously.

This is what makes the situation so volatile.  

 🧭 1. What the “Throughput Empire” actually is  

In my framing, the Throughput Empire is:

- Not a nation-state  

- Not a traditional empire  

- But a global operating system built on:  

  - capital mobility  

  - supply-chain integration  

  - financialization  

  - elite transnational networks  

  - regulatory arbitrage  

  - private governance  

  - the ideology of depoliticized markets  

It is the empire of flows, not flags.

This is the same environment that produced the “Epstein class”:  brokers, fixers, connectors, asset managers, and access merchants who thrive in a world where private networks matter more than public institutions.

🐉 2. China’s rise happened inside this empire  

China’s ascent since 1978 was not an alternative to neoliberal globalization — it was a hyper‑optimized exploitation of it.

China used:

- Western offshoring incentives  

- WTO rules  

- global capital mobility  

- multinational supply chains  

- foreign technology transfer  

- the ideology of “free trade”  

But it never accepted the Throughput Empire’s core premise: that markets should govern politics. Instead, China built a state‑directed industrial machine inside a global market architecture designed by others. This is the paradox: China is both a product of the Throughput Empire and its most formidable internal dissident.

⚔️ 3. So is China on a collision course with the Throughput Empire? Yes — but not in the simple sense of two separate blocs clashing. The collision is internal, structural, and inescapable.

Here’s the dynamic:

A. China depends on global throughput. Its export model, supply chains, and foreign reserves all rely on the global flows the neoliberal order created.

B. China simultaneously rejects the empire’s political logic. It refuses:

- capital liberalization  

- independent central banking  

- privatization of strategic sectors  

- depoliticized markets  

- elite transnational governance  

C. China is building a rival throughput architecture.  

Examples include:

- Belt and Road  

- Digital Silk Road  

- CIPS (alternative to SWIFT)  

- industrial policy for semiconductors, EVs, AI  

- state‑platform hybrids like Alibaba and Tencent (before their partial domestication)  

This is not autarky. It is counter‑globalization — a bid to reshape the flows themselves.

D. The Throughput Empire cannot tolerate a sovereign node. A system built on frictionless flows cannot easily accommodate a major power that:

- controls its capital account  

- disciplines its tech giants  

- uses markets as tools rather than masters  

- treats supply chains as instruments of statecraft  

This is why the conflict feels inevitable.

🧨 4. The collision is not between “China” and “the West”. It is between:

• A global empire of flows

and  

• A civilization-state that insists on political primacy over flows.

This is why the tension is so deep.  

It is not ideological.  

It is architectural.

🜂 5. In mythic language, if the Throughput Empire is the Corridor of Unbounded Exchange, then:

- The West became its priesthood  

- The Epstein Class became its courtiers  

- China entered the corridor as an apprentice  

- But then began rewiring the corridor from within  

- And is now constructing a Parallel Corridor, one with gates, valves, and sovereign chokepoints  

The collision is the moment when the two corridors intersect and neither can absorb the other.

Where Jerry Rubin led, legions followed.

It’s a striking line, and it captures something real about Rubin’s peculiar charisma: he wasn’t a strategist so much as a catalyst. His gift was to turn a mood into a movement, to make theatrical defiance feel like a mass rite of passage. And in the late 1960s, that was enough to summon legions.

Here’s the deeper texture behind that sentence:

🔥 Why Rubin Could Make Crowds Move: He co‑founded the Youth International Party (the Yippies), a group that fused politics with spectacle—street theater as insurgency. He organized some of the earliest and largest Vietnam War protests, including the Vietnam Day Committee demonstrations in Berkeley. His style wasn’t ideological precision; it was provocation as performance—pushing boundaries, mocking authority, and making rebellion feel like a festival. Young people disillusioned with mainstream institutions found in him a kind of permission slip to reject the script they’d been handed.

🎭 The Rubin Effect. Rubin’s leadership wasn’t hierarchical. It was contagious. He embodied the idea that if you lived your politics loudly enough, others would join you—not because they agreed with every point, but because he made dissent feel alive, communal, and fun.

He didn’t command followers; he summoned them.

Then...Jerry Rubin attended Erhard Seminars Training (est). Multiple biographical accounts note that after leaving radical politics in the 1970s, Rubin immersed himself in the emerging human‑potential and self‑actualization movements, including Werner Erhard’s est training. This was part of his broader shift from Yippie revolutionary to entrepreneurial networker and self‑improvement enthusiast. 

Rubin’s participation in est wasn’t a footnote — it symbolized his pivot from confrontational activism to personal transformation culture. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he became:

A promoter of self-help seminars

A connector in the New Age–business hybrid scene

A figure who embraced the idea that social change begins with individual psychological change

This shift baffled some of his old comrades but made perfect sense within the broader migration of many 1960s radicals into the human‑potential movement.

What the engineer-prophet Jon Larson thought of this "create-your-own-reality" movement.

This is a corridor Jon Larson walked with real heat in his stride. And the contrast is almost operatic: the engineer‑prophet versus the “create‑your‑own‑reality” mystics of the 1970s–80s. He didn’t just disagree with them — he saw them as a civilizational hazard, a kind of epistemic dry rot spreading through the beams of the republic.

🔧 1. Larson’s First Principle: Reality Pushes Back.

For Larson, the world is made of:

energy flows

material constraints

engineering tolerances

thermodynamic limits

institutional feedback loops

You don’t “manifest” a bridge. You design it, test it, build it, and pray the welds hold. So the whole “your beliefs create your world” ethos struck him as a category error — confusing subjective experience with objective structure. He would say: “The universe is not optional.”

🧱 2. His Core Objection: It Replaces Competence With Vibes. Larson believed civilizations rise when elites are technically competent and fall when they drift into symbolic self‑absorption. The human‑potential movement, in his eyes, was:

a retreat from skill

a substitution of mood for mastery

a way to feel powerful without producing anything

a psychological sugar high that eroded civic seriousness

He saw it as the inverse of the engineer’s ethic.

Where est said:

“You create your experience.”  

Larson said:

“You are accountable to the consequences of your design.”

🔥 3. The Moral Dimension: Waste Is Immoral.

Remember: Larson’s ethics come from thermodynamics.

Waste is sin.

Inefficiency is violence.

Pretending constraints don’t exist is a kind of civic negligence.

So the “create‑your‑own‑reality” movement looked to him like:

a refusal to confront material limits

a denial of responsibility

a spiritualization of narcissism

a way to avoid the hard work of rebuilding civilization

He would have called it entropy in the guise of enlightenment.

🌀 4. The Sociological Diagnosis: A Symptom of Institutional Decay. Larson often argued that when institutions fail to deliver meaning or competence, people turn inward. They seek:

personal transformation

therapeutic catharsis

mystical shortcuts

identity‑based self‑creation

He didn’t hate these people.

He pitied them.

To him, the human‑potential movement was what happens when a society stops giving its citizens real work worth doing.

⚙️ 5. The Engineer‑Prophet’s Verdict: If I had to compress his stance into a single, Larson‑sounding line:

“You don’t create reality — you collaborate with it. And if you get the collaboration wrong, the bridge collapses.”

He wasn’t anti‑spiritual.

He was anti‑delusion.

He believed meaning comes from building, not from declaring.

I can only declare with Jim Byrne - MMT101.ORG " -  we must throw neoliberal economics out of the window. And when it hits the pavement - it should be stamped on with force, to ensure it can’t climb back in again."

https://hewlett.org/the-breakdown-of-neoliberalism-as-foreign-policy-agenda-5-questions-for-david-grewal/

https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/neoliberalism-in-us-foreign-policy

https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/neoliberalism-in-us-foreign-policy

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-71383-0.pdf

https://hewlett.org/the-breakdown-of-neoliberalism-as-foreign-policy-agenda-5-questions-for-david-grewal/

https://vaultterminal.com/storage/VERA_epstein-network-analysis_b0c8b443_1750837794263.pdf

https://labourheartlands.com/from-rockefeller-to-starmer-mapping-the-trilateral-network-in-the-epstein-files/

https://labourheartlands.com/from-rockefeller-to-starmer-mapping-the-trilateral-network-in-the-epstein-files/

https://mmt101.substack.com/p/neoliberal-economics-kills-3-reasons