Neoliberalism is commonly portrayed as a collection of economic policies advocating free markets, deregulation, privatization, and a reduced role for the state. While descriptively useful, this conventional framing captures only the visible institutional surface of a much deeper historical transformation. It lists the instruments but does not reveal the underlying structural logic. When examined through the methodological lens of quantum dialectics, neoliberalism appears not simply as a policy preference but as a systemic phase transition in the organization of global capitalism.
Every relatively stable social order represents a form of historical coherence—a structured alignment among productive forces, property relations, political institutions, and cultural norms. Such coherences are not harmonious unities but dynamic equilibria formed through the managed interaction of opposing forces: capital and labor, market competition and state regulation, private accumulation and social reproduction. For several decades after the Second World War, advanced capitalist societies achieved one such coherence through welfare-state institutions, regulated markets, public infrastructure, and collective bargaining frameworks. These mechanisms acted as cohesive structures, binding economic activity to social stability and long-term development.
However, coherence always carries the seeds of its own transformation. As technological development advanced and global economic integration deepened, the institutional arrangements that once stabilized growth began to function as constraints. Profitability pressures increased, industrial production faced intensified international competition, and financial capital sought greater mobility than national regulatory systems allowed. The previously functional coherence hardened into structural rigidity. From a quantum dialectical perspective, this moment corresponds to the accumulation of internal contradictions reaching a threshold where the existing equilibrium could no longer reorganize itself from within.
Neoliberalism emerged as the historical response to this saturation point. Its core reforms—deregulation, privatization, trade liberalization, labor flexibilization, and financial liberalization—did not simply “reduce government.” They systematically weakened the binding forces that had held earlier social structures together. Regulatory frameworks that tied capital to national development were dismantled. Public assets that served collective purposes were opened to private accumulation. Labor protections that anchored social stability were eroded in favor of labor mobility and cost minimization. Financial systems were liberated from geographic and productive constraints, allowing capital to circulate with unprecedented speed and abstraction.
This transformation can be conceptualized as programmed decoherence. Decoherence, in quantum dialectical terms, refers to the structured loosening of stabilizing bonds within a system, allowing previously constrained elements to reorganize into new configurations. It is not mere chaos; it is a directed destabilization that alters the balance between cohesive and decohesive forces. Under neoliberalism, decoherence was politically engineered. State power was not withdrawn but redeployed to dissolve social protections, enforce market discipline, and secure the global conditions for capital mobility. The result was a deliberate reduction of the social “binding energy” that had previously integrated economic activity with collective welfare.
The dissolution of older coherences did not produce emptiness; it released latent accumulation potentials. As industrial and nationally regulated frameworks weakened, capital expanded into newly accessible domains: global supply chains, digital platforms, intellectual property regimes, data extraction, and highly abstract financial instruments. These domains constitute new accumulation fields—structured spaces of profitability made possible by the breakdown of earlier institutional limits. Just as physical systems entering decoherent phases explore wider regions of phase space, capitalism under neoliberalism extended its operational range into previously protected or nonexistent economic terrains.
Yet programmed decoherence carries systemic consequences. When cohesive structures are weakened faster than new stabilizing forms can emerge, the system becomes volatile. Financial crises become more frequent as speculative coherence replaces productive grounding. Labor becomes precarious as social reproduction is individualized rather than collectively supported. Inequality widens because capital mobility outpaces the capacity of societies to redistribute gains. Public institutions fragment, and long-term infrastructural planning erodes. The system achieves flexibility and expansion but at the cost of resilience and social integration.
In this sense, neoliberalism represents a historical phase in which decohesive forces are intentionally amplified to overcome the limits of a previous accumulation regime. It is neither accidental nor purely ideological; it is structurally rooted in the need of capital to reorganize when existing coherences become restrictive. However, because decoherence disrupts the social field that sustains economic life, it generates new contradictions at a higher level of complexity. The very processes that enable capital’s expansion undermine the social and ecological conditions required for long-term stability.
From a quantum dialectical standpoint, neoliberalism is therefore best understood as a transitional configuration. It marks the turbulent interval in which an exhausted form of social coherence is dismantled, but a new, sustainable synthesis has not yet fully formed. Programmed decoherence unlocks new possibilities, yet it also destabilizes the broader system, setting the stage for future struggles over the emergence of a new level of global social coherence capable of integrating technological capacity, economic organization, and collective well-being into a more durable dynamic equilibrium.
In quantum dialectical analysis, a stable social order is never understood as a static or harmonious arrangement. Rather, it is a temporary coherence—a dynamically maintained equilibrium emerging from the structured interaction of opposing forces. Stability is not the absence of contradiction but the organized containment of it. Social systems persist because their internal tensions are balanced through institutions, norms, and material arrangements that prevent contradiction from escalating into systemic breakdown.
Within such a coherence, fundamental polarities are held in a workable relationship. Capital and labor, for instance, stand in structural opposition: one seeks profit maximization, the other livelihood and security. Market dynamics push toward competitive expansion and cost minimization, while state regulation introduces constraints, redistribution, and long-term coordination. National production systems aim for internal development and employment, whereas global exchange pressures economies toward openness, specialization, and interdependence. Private accumulation drives investment and innovation, yet public welfare systems sustain the social conditions—health, education, infrastructure—upon which productive life depends. None of these oppositions disappear; they are woven into a functional configuration that allows the system to reproduce itself over time.
The postwar Keynesian–welfare state order provides a clear historical example of such coherence. Emerging from the crises of depression and global war, this regime reorganized capitalism by embedding markets within strong institutional frameworks. Industrial production expanded alongside rising wages, enabling mass consumption to absorb output. Organized labor gained bargaining power, while states implemented fiscal and monetary policies to stabilize growth and employment. Public services and social security systems reduced the volatility of market outcomes, buffering individuals and communities against economic shocks. International economic relations were managed through regulated trade and financial systems, limiting destabilizing capital flows.
This arrangement did not eliminate contradiction; rather, it mediated it. Regulations moderated competition, preventing destructive races to the bottom. Labor protections limited exploitation while sustaining purchasing power. Public investment complemented private enterprise by building the infrastructural and human foundations of long-term productivity. These mechanisms functioned as cohesive forces, binding together diverse and often antagonistic elements into a relatively stable accumulation regime. The system’s equilibrium was dynamic, requiring constant adjustment, but it maintained a broad alignment between economic expansion and social stability for several decades.
Yet, from a quantum dialectical perspective, no coherence is permanent. The very structures that stabilize a system also shape its limits. Over time, institutional arrangements that once enabled growth can become rigid constraints. Strong labor protections may compress profit margins under new competitive pressures. Regulatory frameworks can slow adaptation to technological change. National development strategies may conflict with increasingly globalized production networks. Public expenditure commitments can strain fiscal capacity when growth rates decline. In this way, cohesion gradually transforms into rigidity, and the equilibrium that once facilitated expansion begins to impede further development.
This transformation signals the accumulation of unresolved contradictions within the existing coherence. The balance among opposing forces becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, and pressures build for structural reorganization. What once acted as stabilizing bonds now function as resistances to change. In quantum dialectical terms, the system approaches a phase boundary where its established coherence can no longer reorganize itself internally and instead becomes susceptible to large-scale transformation.
By the closing decades of the twentieth century, the postwar social and economic order that had previously functioned as a stabilizing coherence began to enter a period of deep structural crisis. The institutions that had once harmonized growth, employment, and social welfare no longer operated with the same integrative effectiveness. Instead, they became sites where unresolved tensions accumulated and intensified. What had been a dynamic equilibrium gradually transformed into a configuration marked by strain, imbalance, and declining systemic adaptability.
One major expression of this crisis was the falling rate of profit in industrial sectors. The long postwar boom had relied on expanding markets, rising productivity, and relatively stable labor relations. Over time, however, productivity gains slowed, markets became saturated, and competition intensified. As capital investment increased in scale and technological complexity, returns diminished relative to costs. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, this reflected a growing imbalance between the cohesive structures of industrial organization and the expanding forces of global competition and technological change. The established industrial coherence could no longer sustain the same level of profitability without structural reorganization.
Simultaneously, global competition intensified as new industrial centers emerged and international trade expanded. Production that had once been nationally organized increasingly faced pressure from lower-cost or more technologically advanced producers abroad. National economic frameworks, designed to stabilize domestic employment and demand, now appeared as constraints in a more tightly integrated world economy. The contradiction between nationally bounded regulation and globally mobile production sharpened, placing strain on the institutional balance that had previously mediated internal and external economic relations.
The crisis also manifested as inflationary pressures and fiscal strain. Efforts by states to maintain full employment and social welfare through public spending encountered limits when growth slowed and tax revenues stagnated. Expansionary policies designed to preserve social stability increasingly generated inflation without restoring robust profitability. The tools that had once balanced market volatility—fiscal stimulus, monetary accommodation, public investment—began to lose their stabilizing effectiveness. The cohesion between state intervention and market dynamics weakened, revealing deeper structural tensions that policy adjustments alone could not resolve.
Another critical factor was the rising bargaining power of organized labor during earlier decades. While this had contributed to wage growth and mass consumption, it also compressed profit margins in an environment of slowing productivity and intensifying competition. Labor’s institutional strength, once a pillar of social stability, increasingly appeared from the perspective of capital as a rigidity limiting flexibility in production, wages, and employment. The mediated balance between labor and capital began to tilt toward open conflict as profitability pressures mounted.
At the same time, regulatory limits on financial mobility constrained capital’s ability to shift investments rapidly across sectors and borders. Financial systems that had been tightly linked to national development strategies restricted speculative flows and short-term capital movements. While these controls had previously supported stability, they now appeared as barriers to capital seeking higher returns in a more volatile and globally differentiated economic landscape. The contradiction between territorially anchored regulation and increasingly transnational capital deepened.
Taken together, these developments signal, in quantum dialectical terms, the accumulation of internal contradictions reaching a critical threshold. The institutional coherence of the postwar order—once a framework that enabled expansion and stability—had become a structure that constrained adaptation. Cohesive forces hardened into rigidities. Mechanisms designed to stabilize the system now inhibited its capacity to reorganize in response to changing material conditions.
The system thus approached a phase boundary, a point at which incremental adjustments were no longer sufficient to restore equilibrium. The existing coherence could not simply be fine-tuned; it required structural transformation. In this transitional moment, the very bonds that had maintained stability became obstacles to further development, setting the stage for a new configuration in which decohesive forces would be deliberately unleashed to dissolve the old order and open space for a different pattern of accumulation.
Neoliberalism did not arise as a spontaneous ideological shift toward “less government,” nor as a neutral correction of economic inefficiencies. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, it emerged as a historically conscious strategy to reduce the binding energy of the preceding social formation. The postwar order had woven together institutions that stabilized accumulation by anchoring capital to national development, long-term production, and social compromise. When that coherence began to function as a constraint, a systematic effort was undertaken to loosen its internal bonds. Neoliberalism thus represents not passive market freedom, but an active reconfiguration of the balance between cohesive and decohesive forces within society.
Each of its signature reforms can be understood as a decohering mechanism—a targeted weakening of the structures that had previously integrated economic life with social regulation. Deregulation removed institutional constraints that had governed banking, industry, and commerce, allowing capital to move more freely across sectors and borders. Rules that once limited risk, curbed speculation, or enforced public accountability were dismantled, dissolving the regulatory coherence that had stabilized economic activity. In quantum dialectical terms, this reduced the structural “binding energy” that had held financial and productive systems within a coordinated framework.
Privatization performed a related function by transferring public assets and services into competitive market circuits. Infrastructure, utilities, and social services that had been organized according to collective need were reorganized around profitability. This shift did more than change ownership; it altered the internal logic of these sectors, breaking their integration with long-term social planning and subjecting them to market volatility. The cohesive relationship between public provision and social stability was deliberately weakened, opening new domains for capital accumulation.
Trade liberalization further advanced decoherence by dissolving national economic boundaries that had previously structured production and employment. Tariff barriers, import controls, and industrial policies that supported domestic industries were reduced or eliminated. As a result, production systems were reconfigured into global supply chains governed by cost minimization and competitive advantage rather than national development strategies. The coherence between domestic economic planning and industrial growth fragmented, replaced by transnational networks less accountable to local social conditions.
In the sphere of work, labor market “flexibility” weakened collective worker power and eroded job security. Employment protections, union strength, and stable wage agreements—once pillars of social equilibrium—were systematically reduced. Labor became more mobile, individualized, and precarious. While this increased capital’s ability to adjust production rapidly, it also dissolved the institutional mediation that had balanced profitability with social reproduction. The cohesive linkage between employment stability and mass consumption was loosened, increasing systemic instability even as short-term cost efficiency improved.
Financial liberalization completed the decohering process by freeing capital from productive and geographic anchoring. Controls on capital movement were lifted, financial innovation accelerated, and speculative instruments proliferated. Capital no longer needed to remain tied to long-term industrial investment or national economic cycles; it could circulate globally in search of rapid returns. This marked a decisive shift of systemic coherence away from material production toward abstract financial valuation, heightening volatility while expanding opportunities for accumulation.
Taken together, these reforms systematically dismantled the stabilizing structures that had previously tied capital to social responsibility, territorial commitment, and long-term productive development. The erosion of social cohesion was not an unintended side effect—it was a structural objective. By reducing the institutional bonds that limited capital’s mobility and autonomy, neoliberalism sought to release new accumulation potentials and reorganize the global economic field.
For this reason, neoliberalism cannot be accurately described as simple laissez-faire. Markets did not spontaneously liberate themselves; state power was actively mobilized to restructure legal systems, rewrite regulations, enforce privatization, and discipline labor. It was an active political project of structured destabilization, designed to dissolve an older coherence and create conditions for a new, more fluid regime of accumulation. In quantum dialectical terms, neoliberalism represents a phase in which decohesive forces are deliberately amplified to overcome systemic rigidity, even at the cost of undermining the broader social equilibrium upon which long-term stability ultimately depends.
Decoherence, in the quantum dialectical sense, should never be mistaken for mere disintegration or void. When established structures loosen, the system does not fall into emptiness; rather, it enters a state of expanded possibility. The dissolution of old coherences releases constrained energies, allowing elements that were previously bound within rigid configurations to reorganize in novel ways. Instability, therefore, is not simply destructive—it is generative. It opens a broader field in which new patterns of order can emerge.
As the industrially anchored, nationally regulated frameworks of the postwar era weakened, capital did not retreat. Instead, it reconfigured itself into new domains of accumulation that were inaccessible or marginal under earlier institutional conditions. One major transformation was the rise of globalized supply chains. Production processes were fragmented and distributed across multiple regions, each selected for cost advantages, regulatory environments, or logistical efficiency. The coherence that once linked production to national labor markets dissolved, replaced by transnational production networks operating across diverse legal and social terrains. This restructuring allowed capital to arbitrage differences in wages, environmental standards, and taxation, expanding profitability through spatial reorganization.
Simultaneously, the emergence of digital platform economies created new terrains of value extraction. Platforms coordinating communication, commerce, and social interaction became central nodes in economic life. Their power derived not from traditional ownership of physical means of production but from control over digital infrastructures, network effects, and algorithmic governance. These platforms thrived in the deregulated environment of neoliberalism, where data flows crossed borders with minimal restriction and public oversight lagged behind technological change. The breakdown of earlier regulatory coherence allowed digital intermediaries to consolidate unprecedented influence over markets and social behavior.
Another crucial field of expansion involved financial derivatives and speculative markets. With financial liberalization dissolving previous constraints, capital increasingly flowed into complex instruments designed to manage or profit from volatility itself. Value generation shifted from long-term productive investment toward rapid, abstract transactions based on expectations of future price movements. The system’s center of gravity moved toward financial circuits that operated at high speed and global scale, relatively detached from the rhythms of material production. This marked a qualitative shift in the locus of economic coherence, amplifying both opportunity and instability.
The strengthening of intellectual property regimes also opened new accumulation fields. Knowledge, information, and cultural products were increasingly enclosed within legal frameworks that transformed them into proprietary assets. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks extended market logic into domains once governed by shared use or public funding. The commodification of ideas and biological materials alike reflected capital’s expansion into intangible terrains, made possible by international agreements and legal reforms that accompanied neoliberal globalization. Here again, the erosion of earlier public or national controls created space for new forms of ownership and revenue extraction.
At the same time, the growth of data extraction and surveillance capitalism marked a profound transformation in the relationship between economic activity and everyday life. Human behavior itself became a raw material for analysis, prediction, and monetization. Digital infrastructures collected vast streams of personal and social data, which were processed to generate targeted advertising, behavioral insights, and algorithmic control. This domain exemplifies accumulation through informational capture rather than traditional production, and it flourished in the deregulatory environment that treated data as a resource to be freely harvested and traded.
Together, these developments illustrate how decoherence reshaped the terrain of capitalism. As earlier institutional bonds dissolved, capital became more mobile, shifting rapidly across regions and sectors; more abstract, operating through financial and informational forms rather than primarily through material production; and more globally integrated, functioning within networks that transcended national boundaries. The system’s operational space expanded even as its social anchoring weakened.
In quantum dialectical terms, the neoliberal era demonstrates how decoherence releases a system from prior binding conditions and allows it to explore a wider phase space of organization. The loosening of cohesive constraints does not halt development; it alters its direction, enabling the emergence of new structures of accumulation that reorganize economic life at a higher level of complexity and abstraction. Yet these new configurations, born from instability, carry their own contradictions—ensuring that the dialectical movement of coherence and decoherence continues.
Sustained decoherence does not simply reorganize accumulation; it reshapes the entire systemic balance of society. When decohesive forces remain dominant over extended periods, the system’s capacity to maintain stable, integrative structures weakens. Neoliberal transformation, by amplifying mobility and flexibility, expanded opportunities for capital, but it also generated cumulative effects that destabilized the broader social field. From a quantum dialectical perspective, this represents a prolonged phase in which the dissolution of older coherences outpaces the formation of new, socially grounded ones.
One of the most visible consequences is economic volatility. As financial deregulation advanced, the center of systemic coordination shifted away from material production and toward speculative financial circuits. Under earlier regimes, coherence was anchored in relatively predictable relationships among wages, production, and consumption. In the neoliberal phase, coherence increasingly resided in asset prices, credit expansion, and expectations about future market behavior. This relocation made the system more sensitive to shifts in investor sentiment and speculative dynamics. Bubbles formed as financial values detached from productive foundations, and crises erupted when these unstable coherences collapsed. Volatility thus became a structural feature rather than an occasional disturbance—a sign that speculative coherence lacks the stabilizing depth of production-based organization.
A parallel development occurred in the sphere of work, producing widespread labor precarity. Stable, long-term employment relationships—once a cornerstone of social equilibrium—gave way to flexible contracts, informal work, gig arrangements, and periodic unemployment. Labor markets were restructured to maximize adaptability for employers rather than security for workers. In quantum dialectical terms, the cohesive bond between labor and capital, previously mediated through collective bargaining and social policy, was loosened. Social reproduction—healthcare, childcare, elder care, education—shifted from collectively organized systems to individualized responsibility. As a result, households absorbed risks that had once been socially buffered, increasing insecurity even as aggregate economic output expanded.
The dominance of decohesive dynamics also intensified inequality. Capital, now highly mobile and globally integrated, could seek the most favorable regulatory and cost environments, concentrating returns in sectors and regions best positioned to capture financial and technological rents. Meanwhile, the weakening of labor protections and public welfare systems reduced the capacity of societies to redistribute gains or cushion losses. The divergence between those integrated into high-mobility capital circuits and those anchored in local, less flexible economies widened. Inequality, therefore, is not an incidental byproduct but a structural outcome of an order where capital’s freedom expands faster than society’s integrative mechanisms.
At the institutional level, sustained decoherence led to fragmentation of public infrastructures. Systems such as healthcare, education, housing, and social security had previously functioned as cohesive frameworks linking individual well-being to collective provision. Under neoliberal restructuring, these institutions were partially privatized, marketized, or subjected to austerity. Their integrative coherence weakened, and access became increasingly stratified by income and location. Long-term planning gave way to short-term cost efficiency, reducing systemic resilience. When crises emerged—financial shocks, pandemics, ecological disasters—the fragmented institutional landscape struggled to mount coordinated responses.
Taken together, these effects reveal a fundamental transformation in the system’s internal balance. It gained unprecedented mobility, flexibility, and capacity for rapid reconfiguration, but it lost stability, predictability, and integrative depth. Decoherence enabled expansion into new economic domains, yet the formation of new cohesive structures capable of stabilizing social life lagged behind. The result is a condition of chronic turbulence, where innovation and instability advance together.
In quantum dialectical terms, this phase is marked by an asymmetry: decohesive forces dominate while cohesive forces remain underdeveloped at the corresponding scale. Such imbalance cannot persist indefinitely. Systems require a renewed equilibrium between integration and transformation to sustain themselves over time. The turbulence of the neoliberal era thus signals not a final form of organization, but a transitional stage in which the search for new, socially grounded coherences becomes an increasingly urgent historical necessity.
In every historical phase, systemic stability depends on where a society locates its primary centers of coherence—the domains whose relative stability organizes the rest of social and economic life. In earlier postwar regimes, this stabilizing core was rooted in the material and institutional structures of everyday reproduction. Employment provided predictable income flows linking production to consumption. Communities offered social networks that buffered shocks and transmitted norms of reciprocity. Public institutions—schools, healthcare systems, transport networks, social security—formed durable frameworks that integrated individual life trajectories with collective provision. Long-term productive investment anchored capital in physical infrastructures and industrial development, tying profitability to sustained material growth. Together, these elements created a coherence grounded in lived social reality, where economic dynamics were closely coupled to the conditions of daily life.
Neoliberal transformation progressively displaced this center of gravity. As deregulation and financial liberalization advanced, systemic coordination shifted away from production and social institutions toward the circuits of finance. Financial markets became key arbiters of value, with stock indices, bond yields, and currency movements influencing policy decisions and corporate strategies. Asset valuations—the prices of equities, real estate, and financial instruments—served as measures of economic “health,” often overshadowing indicators of employment or social well-being. Credit systems expanded dramatically, sustaining consumption and investment through debt rather than wage growth. Meanwhile, speculative expectations about future price movements became central drivers of present economic behavior, amplifying the influence of anticipation and perception over material production.
This relocation of coherence represents a shift to a higher-order but more abstract form of organization. Financial systems can coordinate vast flows of capital across the globe with remarkable speed, generating a kind of systemic integration at a level removed from direct material processes. However, this coherence is less anchored in the tangible rhythms of production and social reproduction. It depends heavily on confidence, liquidity, and shared expectations—factors that can change rapidly. Because its stabilizing mechanisms operate through valuation rather than direct material linkage, it is inherently more sensitive to shifts in sentiment and information.
In quantum dialectical terms, this transformation reflects a move from a coherence grounded in dense material interconnections to one based on more tenuous, symbolically mediated relations. The system’s center of stability becomes more abstract and less buffered by everyday social structures. When disturbances occur—whether financial imbalances, geopolitical shocks, or sudden reassessments of risk—the effects propagate rapidly through interconnected markets. Without the counterweight of strong, materially grounded institutions, adjustments become abrupt rather than gradual.
As a result, crises in such a system tend to be sharper and more systemic. When asset bubbles burst or credit networks freeze, the disruption quickly transmits to employment, public finances, and household stability. The stabilizing center, being detached from everyday material reproduction, cannot absorb shocks through slow, localized adjustments. Instead, the system undergoes rapid phase transitions—sudden shifts from expansion to contraction, from confidence to panic.
Thus, the neoliberal relocation of systemic coherence from social and productive foundations to financial abstraction increases both the reach and fragility of the economic order. It creates a form of integration that is globally extensive yet structurally unstable, illustrating how higher levels of abstraction in systemic organization can simultaneously enhance coordination and heighten susceptibility to crisis.
The neoliberal phase of capitalism is defined not by equilibrium but by the sharpening of a profound structural contradiction. On one side stands an unprecedented level of globalized and technologically advanced productive capacity. Digital communication networks coordinate production across continents in real time. Automation, logistics systems, and data analytics increase efficiency to levels unimaginable in earlier industrial eras. Scientific and technological knowledge circulates globally, enabling rapid innovation and complex forms of cooperation that bind distant regions into a single operational field. From the standpoint of material potential, humanity has developed the capacity to produce and distribute goods, services, and knowledge on a planetary scale with extraordinary precision and speed.
On the other side lies a condition of fragmented, insecure, and unequal social life. Employment is often precarious, communities are destabilized by economic restructuring, and public institutions struggle under fiscal and political pressures. Access to the benefits of technological progress is uneven, mediated by income, geography, and social position. The same global networks that integrate production can dislocate local economies, undermining the social bonds that once provided stability and shared identity. In many regions, the erosion of welfare systems and labor protections has shifted risks from collective structures onto individuals and households, deepening insecurity even as aggregate wealth expands.
In quantum dialectical terms, this opposition reflects a growing divergence between the development of productive forces and the coherence of social relations. The material capacity to generate abundance expands, but the institutional and social frameworks required to distribute, regulate, and stabilize that abundance are weakened. Cohesive structures—public services, labor institutions, redistributive policies, and community networks—are eroded in the name of flexibility and competitiveness. Decohering reforms dissolve the bonds that once linked economic growth to social integration. As a result, productive power advances within a social field that becomes increasingly unstable and uneven.
This contradiction is not accidental; it is structurally generated by the neoliberal emphasis on mobility, deregulation, and market primacy. The system liberates capital and technology from many of the constraints that previously tied them to social obligations, but it does not simultaneously construct new forms of cohesion at a corresponding scale. The global integration of production is not matched by equally robust global mechanisms of social protection, democratic governance, or ecological coordination. The imbalance between expanding capacity and weakening integration intensifies systemic tensions, producing cycles of growth alongside crises of inequality, political polarization, and social fragmentation.
Such a configuration cannot be understood as a stable endpoint. In quantum dialectical analysis, when decohesive forces dominate without the emergence of new integrative structures, the system enters a transitional phase marked by turbulence and heightened sensitivity to disruption. The neoliberal order thus represents not the culmination of capitalist development but a moment of intensified decoherence in which old forms have been dismantled faster than new, sustainable coherences have formed. The central contradiction between immense productive potential and fragile social organization signals the necessity of further transformation—toward new structures capable of aligning technological capacity with social stability and collective well-being.
In quantum dialectical analysis, prolonged periods of decoherence do not stretch endlessly. As cohesive bonds weaken and instability accumulates, systems approach critical thresholds beyond which their existing configuration can no longer sustain itself. At such points, quantitative increases in disorder produce qualitative shifts in organization. This principle, observable in physical phase transitions, applies equally to social systems. When contradictions intensify and stabilizing mechanisms erode, society is compelled toward reorganization at a new level of coherence.
Under neoliberal conditions, decohesion has manifested as economic volatility, social fragmentation, institutional weakening, and ecological strain. These are not isolated disturbances but interconnected expressions of systemic imbalance. As they accumulate, the capacity of existing structures to manage tensions diminishes. Trust in institutions declines, political polarization rises, and crises cascade more rapidly across sectors and regions. Such dynamics signal that the system is nearing a threshold zone—a phase boundary where incremental reform becomes insufficient and structural transformation becomes increasingly likely.
At these thresholds, multiple pathways of reorganization become possible. One trajectory leads toward regressive coherence. In this pattern, instability and fragmentation provoke demands for rigid order imposed from above. Authoritarian governance, exclusionary nationalism, and intensified social control attempt to restore stability by narrowing participation and suppressing diversity. Cohesion is reestablished through hierarchy, coercion, and boundary enforcement rather than through inclusive integration. While such formations may temporarily reduce visible disorder, they do so by hardening divisions and restricting the dynamic capacities of society, often generating new contradictions beneath the surface.
An alternative trajectory points toward progressive coherence. Here, systemic instability becomes the catalyst for constructing new integrative structures at a scale matching the complexity of global interdependence. Democratic coordination expands beyond national limits, seeking to align technological capacity with social welfare and ecological sustainability. Public institutions are renewed and reimagined to provide universal access to the foundations of life—health, education, housing, and environmental stability—while enabling participatory governance. Economic organization shifts toward long-term resilience rather than short-term speculation. In this pathway, coherence emerges not through repression but through the conscious integration of diverse interests within a shared planetary framework.
Both possibilities arise from the same condition of intensified decoherence. The direction taken depends on how emerging cohesive forces organize in response to instability. Social movements, political institutions, technological systems, and cultural narratives all play roles in shaping whether new coherence will be exclusionary and rigid or inclusive and adaptive. Quantum dialectics emphasizes that thresholds are moments of heightened contingency: small organizational differences can influence large-scale outcomes because the system is highly sensitive to new forms of integration.
Thus, the neoliberal era’s turbulence should be understood not as endless decline but as the approach to a transformative boundary. Sustained instability prepares the ground for reorganization, but it does not predetermine its form. The future coherence of global society will be shaped by the capacity of collective actors to construct integrative structures that balance technological power, social justice, and ecological limits. Whether regression or progression prevails depends on the dialectical struggle over how new bonds of coherence are forged from the conditions of systemic instability.
Neoliberalism can therefore be interpreted as a phase of programmed decoherence within the historical development of capitalism. It was not simply a passive drift toward markets but a structured strategy through which entrenched institutional stabilizations were deliberately loosened or dismantled. The regulatory frameworks, welfare institutions, labor arrangements, and nationally anchored production systems that had once stabilized accumulation were progressively weakened to remove constraints on capital mobility and profitability. In doing so, the system unlocked new domains of expansion—globalized production networks, financial innovation, digital economies, and commodified knowledge. Capital’s operational space widened dramatically, enabling unprecedented integration and speed across the world economy.
Yet this expansion carried a dialectical cost. The same processes that liberated capital from earlier constraints also destabilized the broader social field that had sustained long-term systemic balance. Public institutions lost coherence, employment security eroded, and inequality widened. Economic coordination shifted toward more abstract and volatile financial mechanisms, while the social infrastructures necessary for resilience weakened. The result was a condition in which dynamism and fragility advanced together. Growth became more uneven, and crises more frequent, because the integrative structures capable of absorbing shocks had been thinned out in the name of flexibility.
From a quantum dialectical perspective, such a configuration cannot be understood as a stable endpoint. It represents a turbulent transitional interval, analogous to a system passing through a phase of instability between two distinct states of organization. The prior coherence—rooted in industrial production, national regulation, and social compromise—had reached the limits of its adaptability. Neoliberal restructuring dissolved that form but did not yet produce a new, durable synthesis capable of rebalancing cohesive and decohesive forces at a higher level. The present order thus occupies an intermediate zone characterized by heightened volatility, structural contradiction, and ongoing reconfiguration.
The central historical question arising from this condition concerns the possibility of consciously shaping the next level of systemic coherence. Humanity now possesses technological capacities capable of sustaining global abundance and intricate interdependence. At the same time, social and ecological stresses reveal the inadequacy of existing institutional forms. The challenge is to construct new integrative frameworks that align technological power with social well-being and ecological sustainability. Such a transformation would require reembedding economic processes within renewed structures of democratic coordination, social provision, and long-term planetary stewardship.
In this sense, the turbulence of the neoliberal era should be understood not as permanent disorder but as the unstable passage between historical forms. Whether this passage leads to deeper fragmentation or to a higher, more inclusive equilibrium depends on the emergence of cohesive forces capable of reorganizing global society at a scale commensurate with its material and technological development.
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