Authoritarian Liberalism, Class and Rackets

Socialist Register 2019: A World Turned Upside Down?, 2019

What exactly is the nature of neoliberalism that it can simultaneously both rely upon state intervention and deny its efficacy by recourse to political and ideological populism, quite apart from appeals to other (conservative) collectivities – nationalism and racism, in particular – in the context of market individualism? Coherence is not the order of the day, but there is underlying order in the chaos as our argument here, summarized as follows, suggests. First, what occurred in 2008-09 was a severe crisis within neoliberalism, exposing the limits of reliance on finance as the driver of global accumulation. Initially taken by many as a fatal crisis of neoliberalism, especially as the market failed spectacularly in its favoured arena of finance, the crisis proved nothing of the sort. Despite the decline of GDP growth rates and the vast and continuing reverberations of the crisis, neoliberalism remains alive and well in the economic domain and beyond. Indeed, in most respects, neoliberalism has been strengthened during the last decade. Second, the social and institutional changes brought about by neoliberalism, and furthered by the finance-first and fiscal ‘austerity’ policies imposed in the wake of the global crisis, have destabilized the political sphere formed under neoliberalism and steadily sapped the ideological legitimacy of the system of accumulation. These developments have not quelled political activism entirely, but they have severely undermined its traditional forms of expression and created fertile conditions for more extreme politics as new vulnerabilities to livelihoods emerged. Third, while neoliberalism was, previously, typically grounded in increasingly shallow and formal practices of liberal democracy, its current political forms are transitioning towards unstable modalities of which authoritarianism is increasingly common, with ‘spectacular’ leaders driving right-wing exclusionary programmes and the emergence of mass movements of the right both supporting and pushing them forward. We argue that these political shifts are not transitory phenomena ensuing directly from poor economic performance, that will reverse once faster economic growth resumes. Instead, they are the outcome of the degeneration of liberal democracy under neoliberalism. Yet, to understand whether authoritarian neoliberalism is a transitory adjustment phase to the murky post-crisis world or becoming the ‘bestfit’ political arrangement for neoliberalism, the tendencies and countertendencies characterizing the present phase of neoliberalism need to be identified and disentangled. For the fate of authoritarian neoliberalism inevitably hinges on how such tendencies will be resolved – a process which is chaotic, still in flux, and by no means predetermined.

New Political Science, 2018

This article argues that the common understanding of neoliberalism as a set of state policies emerges out of the problematic characterization of power within dominant mainstream and critical paradigms. Working from critical realist social theory and Marxian state theory, it presents an alternative theoretical framework to properly account for the complex unfolding of objective history. From this Institutional Marxist perspective, neoliberalism is theorized as a trend in the institutional organization of interlocking state and corporate power.

Contango, 2017

The present crisis of neoliberalism is a crisis of its politics. In this way it mirrors the birth of political neoliberalism, in the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution of the late 1970s – early 1980s. The economic crisis of 2007-08 has taken 8 years to manifest as a political crisis. That political crisis was expressed by SYRIZA’s election in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to leadership of the Labour Party, the Brexit referendum, and Bernie Sanders’s as well as Donald Trump’s campaign for President of the U.S. Now Trump’s election is the most dramatic expression of this political crisis of neoliberalism.

2012

"There are many key questions concerning the current status of the notion of neoliberalism. What is it? Is it an appropriate concept to describe a political and intellectual movement or form of state? What are its prospects as a framework of public policy after the global financial crisis? The article proposes a way of answering these questions by regarding neoliberalism as a definite ‘thought collective’ and a regime of government of and by the state. It exemplifies these by shifts within neoliberalism regarding the question of monopoly, its relationship to classical liberalism and its approach to crisis management. In regard to the latter, it further proposes an emergent rationality of the government of and by the state concerning the fostering of resilience in the anticipation of catastrophe."

Neoliberalization is a distinctive economic, political, and social project that promotes profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation as the primary axis of societalization. This might suggest that neoliberalism promotes the primacy of the economic but, since its extension and reproduction require continuing state support and, indeed, involve what Weber called political capitalism, one might also argue that it entails a primacy of the political. To address this paradox, my article offers a baseline definition of neoliberalism and identifies four ideal-typical historical forms thereof; relates neoliberalism to the world market, geopolitics and global governance; disambiguates the primacy of the economic; and addresses the role of the political in promoting neoliberalism and handling its contradictions and crisis-tendencies. It illustrates this exercise in critical theory from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and how its (mis)management has strengthened the neoliberal project, enabled its main promoters and beneficiaries to escape the need to learn from their mistakes, and even enabled them to further enrich themselves.

Among critical social scientists and progressive activists alike, analysis of neoliberalism has become inseparable from the examination of the crisis that has engulfed the global economy since 2007. When the crisis began, it was interpreted by many, not least the mainstream media and even some of the staunchest advocates of neoliberalism, as a crisis of the model of capitalism that had dominated global economic policy for the previous two-and-a-half decades. Moreover, neoliberal policies promoting financialization were widely held to be responsible for the onset of crisis. As states responded to the crisis with (what appeared to be) new restrictions on finance capital and the nationalization of some of the world's largest banks and financial corporations, many thought it reasonable to conclude that the neoliberal era was coming to an end. Yet, as the global economic crisis continues, so does the rollout of recognizably neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, deregulation and more and more features of the welfare states built in the postwar era. They have been used as tools of crisis management, even as states have experimented with new forms of economic regulation, such as quantitative easing. Particularly in those countries worst hit by recession, such tools have deepened and (provisionally) channelled abroad the economic crisis, instead of resolving it, while contributing to the stagnation of demand and miring ordinary people in perpetual austerity. It is perhaps unsurprising then that contestation over post-crisis neoliberalism is evident in many of the recent seismic political developments across the globe. Most obviously, the rise of radical left-wing parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere, and the popularity of leaders such as British Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, or Bernie Sanders in the USA, are direct reactions to the devastating effects of enforced neoliberal austerity. These follow earlier political movements against some of the harshest forms of neoliberalism in the Global South – such as the so-called 'Pink Tide' that carried a series of (more-or-less radical) left-wing parties to government across Latin America. But the echoes of dissent against neoliberalism, however distorted, can also be heard in the successful 'leave' campaign in the British referendum on its EU membership, in some of Donald Trump's economic policies (even as he is so obviously one of the world's leading beneficiaries of neoliberalization), and in the rise of the National Front, in France, alongside the mobilization of racial prejudices and national imaginaries in many countries. The premise of this special issue of Critical Sociology is that an understanding of neoliberalism since the crisis is crucial for comprehending the contradictions, conflicts and social forces reshaping the contemporary global political economy. Despite scholarship on, about and around neoliberalism having burgeoned since the onset of the global crisis, a settled definition of neoliberalism remains

About the Book The recent, devastating and ongoing economic crisis has exposed the faultlines in the dominant neoliberal economic order, opening debate for the first time in years on alternative visions that do not subscribe to a 'free' market ethic. In particular, the core contradiction at the heart of neoliberalism – that states are necessary for the functioning of free markets – provides us with the opportunity to think again about how we want to organise our economies and societies. The Rise and Fall of Neloberalism presents critical perspectives of neoliberal policies, questions the ideas underpinning neoliberalism, and explores diverse response to it from around the world. In bringing together the work of distinguished scholars and dedicated activists to question neoliberal hegemony, the book exposes the often fractured and multifarious manifestations of neoliberalism which will have to be challenged to bring about meaningful social change. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: A World Turned Right-Way Up - Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko Part 1: The Rise of Neoliberalism 2. How Neoliberalism Got Where It Is: Elite Planning, Corporate Lobbying and the Release of the Free Market - David Miller 3. Making Neoliberal Order in the United States - Kean Birch and Adam Tickell 4. Neoliberalism, Intellectual Property and the Global Knowledge Economy - David Tyfield 5. Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading - Larry Lohmann 6. Tightening the Web: The World Bank and Enforced Policy Reform - Elisa van Waeyenberge 7. The Corruption Industry and Transition: Neoliberalising Post-Soviet Space? - Adam Swain, Vlad Mykhnenko and Shaun French 8. Remaking the Welfare State: From Safety Net to Trampoline - Julie MacLeavy Part 2: The Fall of Neoliberalism 9. Zombieconomics: The Living Death of the Dismal Science - Ben Fine 10. From Hegemony to Crisis? The Continuing Ecological Dominance of Neo-Liberalism - Bob Jessop 11. Do It Yourself: A Politics for Changing Our World - Paul Chatterton 12. Dreaming the Real: A Politics of Ethical Spectacles - Paul Routledge 13. Transnational Companies and Transnational Civil Society - Leonith Hinojosa and Anthony Bebbington 14. Defeating Neo-liberalism: A Marxist Internationalist Perspective and Programme - Jean Shaoul 15. Conclusion: The End of an Economic Order? - Vlad Mykhnenko and Kean Birch

Pakistan Perspective, 2012

Societies Without Borders, 2009

Coils of the Serpent, 2018

The lasting effects of the unresolved financial and economic crisis that began with the bursting of the US housing bubble in 2007 and the ongoing global crisis of accumulation have led to the re-emergence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For those who believe that “there is no alternative,” it gave way to a latent sense of a crisis of civilization. For many, it was proof of the notion that capitalist modernity has an intrinsictendency towards crisis. While this re-generated socialist and communist hopes of capitalism's ultimate demise, the virtually unchallenged hegemony of neoliberal governance gave way to a massive wave of right-wing populist and neo-fascist reaction. Since the 2016 American elections the focus has predictably turned away from Bernie Sanders and Occupy to the spectacle of Donald J. Trump. The rise of Trumpism in many ways mirrors the rise of Bonapartism that Karl Marx analyzed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, showing how class struggle itself "created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part" (Marx 1985: 57). At a time when the most precarious and stigmatized sections of the working class, including those rendered surplus by "the production of non-production" (Clover), are put at an ever greater risk of falling victim to state violence as a consequence of racism and "wageless life" (Denning), the New Right is pitting exploited wage laborers defined in nativist terms against dispossessed and racialized surplus proletarians without remorse. However, while the path of global class restructuring that neoliberal capital has taken since the 1970s has been one of intensified differentiation and inequality, the much greater inequality is between plutocratic capital and both wage laborers and surplus proletarians. Liberalism narrowly focuses on the latter's recognition and inclusion, while disavowing the Real of capital through one of its most acute symptoms. What gets lost in this framing of the problem, I argue, is the question of political subjectivity (of the dispossessed) and what it means to grasp categories of social critique as simultaneously abstract and concrete. Cultural studies thus needs to confront these liberal blindspots to fully grasp the significance of the New Right's political pandering to those who are indispensable for the accumulation and extended reproduction of capital and those who prove themselves useful to its unrestricted rule.