Six Cases From Across Europe

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

Time's Up for Neoliberalism, 2018

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.

Journal of Australian Political Economy, 2021

This article builds upon Marx’s sensitivity to capitalist change and its implications for the superstructure to, first, explore the broad types of democracy which accompanied major capitalist transmutations across its world historic stages of development. What is shown in this analysis is that even as the franchise expanded across major democracies, a confluence of economic changes and structuring of electoral systems served to limit popular sovereignty and thwart significant challenges to ruling class interests. In turn, second, it delineates the key economic changes marking the neoliberal era as a period of capitalist decay. Understanding this helps us contextualise the superstructural shifts of the neoliberal era. Third, it then exposes three interrelated anti-democratic tendencies secreted by contemporary neoliberal polities in advanced economies. ‘Legalisation of politics’ entails systemic overriding of electoral efficacy and political decision-making in major democracies by courts and judges, leaving a wasteland of depoliticised mass publics in its wake. What is dubbed the ‘new constitutionalism’ captures the ensnaring of national polities in webs of rules crafted by, or at the behest of, major corporations. This endows them with extraordinary powers which effectively subordinate national polities irrespective of political orientation – social democratic, liberal and so forth. Finally, the ‘state of exception’ devolves from a provision embedded in most democratic constitutions granting unlimited authority to executive branches in times of emergency. As protests to the neoliberal excrescence mount, it is increasingly wielded as a truncheon against them. Particularly insidious here is that, rather than overt impositions of authoritarianism such as dictatorship or fascism, these tendencies envelop neoliberal society under the guise of constitutionality and the rule of law.

This article illuminates the paradox of democracy with its deep relation but not fully entrenched to neoliberalism and offers a robust theoretical critique to its core. The title, 'democracy against neoliberalism' points that it does not aim to criticise democracy since it recognises democracy to be valuable in itself. It separates democracy from the realm of neoliberalism in order to have a proper analysis on its problems when the two are operating under the same epoch of a capitalist mode of production. Acknowledging that the article offers a Marxist critique of neoliberal democracy, I will not review it from a non-Marxist approach, i.e. questioning the non-structural elements or absence of gender, ethnicity, or any other intersectional modalities than class; rather,

International Studies Review, 2014

Anthropological Theory

The present article is based upon a round table, in which Colin Crouch, Wolfgang Streeck, and Donatella della Porta participated, organized in the framework of the Marxism(s) in Social Movements Working Group at Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, May 2015). The roundtable was the concluding moment of a cycle of conferences aimed at rethinking some of the categories of social movement studies in light of the changes in contemporary capitalism within its global crisis. 1 A central question of the debate is how much capitalism needs democracy. The debate departs from the strengths and weaknesses of neoliberal capitalism, the global economic crisis and the new scenarios that the latter opens.

2023