neoliberalism
Webbe says Hunt’s measures fatten the rich at poor’s expense – and Labour little better
Independent MP slams latest damaging Tory budget measures and assault on poor, sick and disabled
Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe has accused the Tory government of using Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement to fatten business at the expense of the poor, of ‘snatching the assessment of illness out of the hands of doctors’ to punish the long-term sick and of doing the exact opposite of what the UK economy needs – and says that Keir Starmer’s Labour is little better in enthusiastically promoting the discredited austerity narrative.
In a statement issued today, Ms Webbe said:
Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement boasted of giving corporations the biggest tax handout in modern British political history, doling out billions to companies – many of whom are already making obscene profits in a cost of greed emergency of soaring bills and food costs.
And he is doing this on the backs of the poor, sick and disabled, with horrendous measures to whip those who are unfit to work into taking jobs their medical experts have said they cannot do – and to do it they will snatch the assessment of illness out of the hands of doctors and have it decided by the government’s agents instead.
The past decade has seen a steep rise in poverty, with fourteen million people below the poverty line, including well over four million children. In Leicester East, four in every ten children were already living in absolute poverty – now the Chancellor says if people do not submit to his new regime to get them back into work, he will cut them off completely from support after six months. The effect of this on my constituents and the poor and sick across the country will be horrific.
This country, since 2010, has seen an appalling rise in the misery imposed on those who were already struggling to get by. More than four in ten disability benefit claimants have attempted suicide under the government’s brutal regime. Suicide has become the leading cause of death in men under fifty. Poor mental health abounds, yet the government has today shown it remains determined to punish and persecute those who cannot work – and indeed that it is determined to deny the reality of life in this country for so many.
In my constituency of Leicester East, we have seen endemic exploitation and poverty wages in our garment industry. I told the Chancellor in response to his Autumn Statement that the unionised manufacturing base of Leicester East has long been diminished – not replaced by technology, innovation and good modern jobs with decent pay, but by fast fashion, sweatshops and unscrupulous employers paying illegally-low wages. All this has been exploited by brands and retailers who are in a race to the bottom for ever-increasing profits while their supply chains fail to pay the minimum wage.
I asked him what action the government will take to regulate and ensure that brands and retailers are held to account for the sustainable outcomes of their products in their supply chains and wage justice for the people that make their goods, and to tackle those British brands and retailers who threaten to seek cheaper labour overseas so they can avoid paying the new minimum wage that the he had just announced. There was no meaningful response.
The government is using tweaks to the minimum wage – which it misnames the living wage – as cover for its handouts to business, but its increases are still very far below the level at which a person working one job could live on. The government claims work is the way out of poverty, but millions who are working are among the poorest.
Mr Hunt claims the government is going for growth, when in fact they are doing the exact opposite of what our economy needs – and hurting millions to do it. Economists recognise that the best way to boost economic growth is to give more money to the poor, because they have to spend it. But yet again the Conservatives are giving more to the rich and to corporations who will put much of it into offshore bank accounts where it does no good. As it is, despite his claims of growth he has had to acknowledge that the Office for Budget Responsibility is downgrading growth forecasts for the next three years.
And it has to be said that the Labour party is largely in agreement with the government it is supposed to oppose. This country needs politicians with the courage to speak the truth that the punishment of the poor to enrich the wealthy is a political choice and not a necessity or even productive. Sadly such politicians are at the moment in very short supply at the moment.
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The UK leech in charge is the Bank of England Governor:
In the light of today’s really underwhelming and deluded budget I thought this American article made some good points. After observing that most Americans know an awful lot about George Washington’s life, the author remarks: But it’s very unlikely that you heard about how George Washington died. After eating dinner in cold, wet clothes, he... Read more
Abby Innes introduces Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail
In an excerpt from the introduction to her new book, Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail, Associate Professor of Political Economy at LSE’s European Institute Abby Innes considers how factors including the rise of neoliberalism have destabilised Britain’s governing institutions.
Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail. Abby Innes. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
Why has Great Britain, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? This book demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. This history has direct parallels not just in the United States but across all the advanced capitalist economies that adopted neoliberal reforms. The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.
Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions.
The rise of nationalist populism in some of the world’s richest countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of contemporary capitalism. What this book offers, by contrast, is the explanation of a dark historical joke. It explores for the first time how the Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fail for many of the same reasons. Leninism and neoliberalism may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but when we grasp the kinship between their forms of economic argument and their practical strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in both systems, as well as their calamitous results.
Comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias, [w]hat emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future.
Britain’s neoliberal policies have their roots in neoclassical economics, and Part I begins by comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias. What emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future. These affinities are rooted in their common dependence on a machine model of the political economy and hence, by necessity, the shared adoption of a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality. As the later policy chapters demonstrate, these theoretical similarities produce real institutional effects: a clear institutional isomorphism between neoliberal systems of government and Soviet central planning.
When it comes to the mechanics of government, both systems justify a near identical methodology of quantification, forecasting, target setting and output-planning, albeit administrative and service output-planning in the neoliberal case and economy-wide outputs in the Soviet. Since the world in practice is dynamic and synergistic, however, it follows that the state’s increasing reliance on methods that presume rational calculation within an unvarying underlying universal order can only lead to a continuous misfit between governmental theory and reality. These techniques will tend to fail around any task characterised by uncertainty, intricacy, interdependence and evolution, which are precisely the qualities of most of the tasks uploaded to the modern democratic state.
In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government
The Soviet and neoliberal conceptions of the political economy as a mechanism ruled by predetermined laws of economic behaviour were used to promote pure systems of economic coordination, be that by the state or the market. Leninism, as it evolved into Stalinist command planning, dictated the near-complete subordination of markets to the central plan. In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government and, over time, for prudential, strategic action, as its offices, authority and revenues are subordinated to market-like mechanisms. Both Soviet and neoliberal political elites proved wildly over-optimistic about the integrity of their doctrines, even as they demonised the alternatives.
For all their political antipathy, what binds Leninists and neoliberals together is their shared fantasy of an infallible ‘governing science’ – of scientific management writ large. The result is that Britain has reproduced Soviet governmental failures, only now in capitalist form. When we understand the isomorphism between Soviet and neoliberal statecraft, we can see more clearly why their states share pathologies that span from administrative rigidity to rising costs, from rent-seeking enterprises to corporate state capture, from their flawed analytical monocultures to the demoralisation of the state’s personnel and, ultimately, a crisis in the legitimacy of the governing system itself. This time around, however, the crisis is of liberal democracy.
The book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk.
After setting out the philosophical foundations of these ideologies, the book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk. In Part III I examine the political consequences of these changes, and demonstrate how Britain’s exit from the European Union has played out as an institutionally fatal confrontation between economic libertarianism and reality. The final chapter considers how the neoliberal revolution, like its Leninist counterpart, has failed within the terms by which it was justified and instead induced a profound crisis not only of political and economic development but also of political culture.
Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm.
I use different periods of Soviet history as an analytical benchmark throughout the book, but the Brezhnev years (1964–1982) were those of the fullest systemic entropy: the period of ossification, self-dealing and directionless political churn. Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm. I use the United Kingdom as the case study because it was both a pioneer of these reforms and, in many respects, has gone furthest with them. If neoliberalism as a doctrine had been analytically well-founded, it was in the United Kingdom, with its comparatively long and strong liberal traditions, that we should have seen its most positive outcomes.
By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny.
To be clear, Britain’s neoliberals were never totalitarians of the Soviet variety. They never used revolutionary violence to create a one-party state, deployed ubiquitous intelligence agencies to enforce repression or used systems of mass incarceration and murder for political ends. Britain’s neoliberal consensus has nevertheless favoured a one-doctrine state, and the violent suppression of specific, typically economy-related, protests has been a periodic feature of its politics since 1979. Britain’s neoliberal governments have also developed an increasingly callous attitude to social hardship and suffering. Most troubling of all is that the more neoliberalism has been implemented, the more the country has been driven to the end of its democratic road. By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny. In short, it had abused its authority to disable legitimate political opposition. What I hope to explain is why any regime that commits itself to neoliberal economics must travel in this direction or abandon this ideology.
What follows is an argument about the collapse of the empiricist political centre and its replacement by utopian radicalism. Specifically, this is a story of how the pioneering and socially progressive philosophy of liberalism is being discredited by utopian economics and the practically clientelist methods of government that follow from it, just as the politics of social solidarity essential to a civilised world was undermined by the violence and corruption of the Soviet experiment. As the old Soviet joke had it, ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is its exact opposite.’ There are, of course, many challenges distinct to neoliberalism and I pay attention to them, but my purpose here is to see what we can learn about the political economy of the neoliberal state when we look at it through the lens of comparative materialist utopias.
Note: This excerpt from the introduction to Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail by Abby Innes is copyrighted to Cambridge University Press and the author, and is reproduced here with their permission.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: globetrotters on Shutterstock.
Humanity sits at a crossroads as politicians re-sell the politics of public austerity
‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture.
We’ve got to have an ‘enough’.
Always ask growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough.
Donella Meadows – Environmental scientist, educator and writer.
The city of Derna, Libya, hit by cyclone Daniel. Image taken 21/9/23 by Dipartimento della Protezione Civile/Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license
We are living in troubling times. Whilst Western vassal leaders pursue endless wars at the behest of the hegemon, cheer on death, destruction and facilitate injustice under the illusory banner of freedom and democracy, the existential threat of climate change and its consequences for humanity has been put on the back boiler, shuffled off the list of priorities. As vast resources are poured into a profitable war machine with seemingly no end of monetary resources available, humanity sits at a crossroads as snake oil politicians re-sell the politics of public austerity dressed up as pain today for future gain.
As Antonio Guterres noted in a speech at the UN last month, referring to Derna in Libya where thousands lost their lives in unprecedented flooding:
‘Derna is a sad snapshot of the state of our world – the flood of inequity, of injustice, of inability to confront the challenges in our midst.[…]
“Our world is becoming unhinged.
Geopolitical tensions are rising.
Global challenges are mounting.
And we seem incapable of coming together to respond.”
After decades of COP conferences, it is clear that commitment to action has been little more than hot air and promises which go nowhere, by politicians driven by short-term political objectives and winning the next election, not forgetting the corporate influence which coerces political decision-making. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have changed the world in ways that are difficult to comprehend for many, and yet the political response is to forge ahead with further destruction.
As we have seen in recent weeks during the Conservative conference, and to the consternation of many environmental campaigning organisations and some in his own party, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has delayed or abandoned critical measures to reduce emissions and approved licences for more oil and gas development.
Whilst we should have our doubts about the concept of net zero as a mechanism to cut emissions, we are without doubt currently travelling in the wrong direction, as three climate scientists discuss in an article in The Conversation:
“The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were, and still are, driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe, then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.”
This will mean a global rebalancing of access to real resources, and support for the Global South to address the Western-imposed climate injustices, exploitation, poverty and inequity which has its roots in colonialism. We urgently need to sweep away the economic model which puts growth and profit over people’s lives and planetary well-being, and then greenwashes its way to more of the same and is a toxic mix of short-termism and greed which pervades government and the corporate estate.
While politicians focus on domestic issues, important as they are, we can no longer ignore the wider planetary context of our existence and the interdependent nature of the world in which we live.
The UK may be an island (still holding on to pretensions of colonial power and influence), but it is not unaffected by the geopolitical twists and turns that are currently determining a shift in the balance of power as countries in the Global South begin to reject the western economic model of exploitation, and theft of their resources.
A model which has been promoted by a US-led IMF and World Bank predicated on the lie of household budget economics, unfair trade rules and corporate domination which has overseen more exploitation as a result of its actions and the growth of poverty and inequality to prop up what has become a monstrous economic model. Indeed, what we are seeing is a Western world in turmoil at those power shifts, doing its best to hold on to the status quo, so favourable to itself.
Equally, none of us, as we are beginning to realise, are unaffected by a changing climate which will increasingly impact water resources and global food production which will most certainly affect everyone without some strategic, targeted planning, as an unstable climate becomes the norm across the planet.
Factor into this that it is the people who are causing the least emissions that suffer the most, as more extreme weather conditions, being exacerbated by the current El Nino weather system, have produced unprecedented droughts and floods.
While the West largely refuses to accept its culpability and is unwilling to offer reparations, the Global South is, without doubt, waking up to the possibility of an alternative even at this late stage. What is needed, as the economist Fadhel Kaboub suggests, is a new financial architecture – for the Global South to ‘design a coherent comprehensive vision for south-south cooperation, complete with trade, finance, and investment policies on its own terms, then welcome cooperation and partnership from the global north on fair, equitable, and transparent terms, under a new model of multilateral cooperation.’
Even as a new world order is emerging, with all the uncertainties that occur in times of change, we have politicians in the UK and elsewhere still behaving like the colonialists of old, still able to dictate the rules of engagement.
Worse, they are still stuck with their heads in the sand, bleating about whether action on climate change or to address global inequity is currently affordable. Indeed, cuts to foreign aid announced in 2020 have been attributed to the government’s aim to cut public expenditure.
Even an article published in the Guardian in August quoting Katy Chakrabortty from Oxfam repeated the nonsense suggesting that “The UK government has tried to give what it could, but it has no emergency reserves to dip into.”
Oxfam, like so many other charities, mitigating a rotten economic model rather than challenging it, fails at the first hurdle by implying that the government has no money of its own and must pull in its horns and get the public finances in order.
At the same time, both parties are fixated on future growth as the mechanism to manage public finances and create future funding for public services. A morally indefensible use of a lie to justify cuts at home and abroad. On that narrative, we are certainly done for.
Whether it’s the yearly ‘we’ve run out of money’ joke surrounding the US debt ceiling, or an EU which, when it chooses, imposes rules on deficit and debt (unless there is a pandemic or a war), or indeed the UK where Mrs Thatcher is still alive and well, dictating to the left and right her mantra ‘There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money’, orthodoxy rules. If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.
Fiscal discipline is the guiding force for decision-making, wherever you look. Certainly, over the last few months which culminated in the latest conference season of the usual hot air, lies and propaganda on all sides, that narrative has been predominant, with institutions and the media doing their usual good job at keeping the public in the dark. The willing participation in a lie about how the government spends to deceive an ignorant public.
This is a common thread which pervades economic policy and has done so for decades, pursued by successive governments both Labour and Tory.
In a speech in 2012, Rachel Reeves said ‘Sound public finances will always be the indispensable platform for delivering better jobs, better services, and a strong, growing economy.
What I want to demonstrate this morning is that being trusted with the nation’s finances and building a stronger, fairer, Britain are imperatives that are not only compatible they are inseparable’.
Then last month in a recent article in the FT she wrote: ‘During my time as an economist at the Bank of England, I learnt a very simple lesson: your sums must always add up.’ Ergo she ‘will never spend what we cannot afford.’
Reeves still backing the austerity horse as if there were a scarcity of money, and as if the government’s role is to manage the finances and balance the books, rather than to provide stability through its spending and taxation policies throughout the economic cycle, or when disasters strike, to ensure that the public infrastructure meets the needs of all, and that there is a fair and equitable distribution of real resources. These are the starting blocks for a functioning economy.
Then, predictably, with the same message in her speech in Liverpool last week, whilst committing to ‘rebuild Britain,’ she vowed to deploy ‘iron clad fiscal rules’, stupidly comparing the state finances to her own mum’s, sitting at the kitchen table doing her accounts.
So, Labour’s big plan is to rebuild Britain but impose fiscal discipline at the same time, two clearly mutually exclusive propositions. As Professor Mitchell put it in a recent blog aptly entitled ‘British Shadow Chancellor promising the impossible:’
“The general problem with fiscal rules, […] is the government of the day does not have the capacity to directly control all variables that come together to determine the final fiscal outcome.
The point is that essentially non-government, spending and saving decisions, determine economic activity in tandem with government spending and tax decisions; and tax revenue and welfare spending are functions of that economic activity.
So, if the non-government sector reduces its overall spending, then other things being equal, economic activity falls and tax revenue declines, and as unemployment rises, welfare spending also increases.”
So much for fiscal rules and common sense.
A functioning economy needs good public services and a well-educated workforce to service it and a decade of austerity has left the sector in a state of decay. Capital investment in such things as schools and hospitals is all very well and good, but such infrastructure also requires nurses, doctors, teachers and other public sector workers to run them. Reeves’ big idea to borrow for capital investment and cover day-to-day spending through tax receipts is just more of the same old nonsense couched in household budget economics and ignores the fundamentals. That government is the currency issuer and spends the money into existence first and from that everything else flows. Rebuilding Britain starts there.
In a nutshell, with Labour at the helm spending is to be predicated on the holy grail of future growth to raise the taxes to pay for public services. Can we wait that long? How many will die in the wait?
And so much for rebuilding Britain, as if the future can be predicted with certainty. A former Bank of England economist clearly too clever by half and a plan with a potential dead end. On the basis of previous and current experience, from financial crashes to pandemics and wars, the future has proved itself to be less than certain, indeed unknowable.
In the meantime, whilst we wait, the waters in every sense will continue to rise. Indeed, the reality is that without adequate spending and appropriate legislation now to address a decaying public infrastructure, deliver a green transition and protect people from the worst excesses of a world ruled by corporate diktat, the future will be very bleak.
The Tories, also on the same old track at their Conference, ‘sound money or run out of money under Labour’, will, apparently, ‘always protect public services’ (yes Jeremy Hunt actually said that), but they are ‘always honest about the taxes that pay for them.’ Just those few words are instructive about their intentions.
This of course is nothing new. We can trace this neoliberal narrative way back to the 70s and Callaghan’s Labour government. However, George Osborne with his Thatcherite credentials gave us an austerity package that cut spending on public infrastructure and services, cut welfare spending, imposing sanctions and other destructive mechanisms wrecking people’s lives, whilst at the same time creating a fractured and divided society. The pandemic brought home to the nation the terrible consequences of those cuts to spending and we are still paying the price.
Putting it politely, the nation is being stuffed by politicians fixated on fiscal discipline to serve their own political objectives or prove they are fiscally responsible. Instead of using the power of the public purse to rebuild a fairer Britain, oversee a more equitable distribution of real resources and a green transition through targeted spending, taxation and legislative policies, what we have, as Matt Kennard describes in his book ‘Silent Coup’, is the unstoppable rise of global corporate power, with the full compliance of government. With both Labour and Tory promising yet more partnerships with big business in one way or another, the die is being cast.
In a saner world, where democracy counted and where the government put the interests of its citizens and the planet first, before those of its corporate mates, we could do so much better. The heart of change lies in understanding the power of the pound. And yet we seem incapable of even engaging with monetary reality, not even to ensure a future for our children.
Every day the evidence piles up about what happens when governments use the lie of scarcity of money to excuse their cuts to spending or to delay action. From a collapsing NHS and social care system, schools and other public buildings that are falling down due to faulty construction and lack of adequate maintenance, local authorities facing bankruptcy and all that means for local service provision, food banks, rising homelessness, the list goes on. And still the lies just keep spewing from their mouths.
Political manoeuvring to discredit the party in power or the party in waiting, while Rome burns, is the name of the game. Not only is it shameless and shameful, it is a political choice unconnected to the state of the public finances. That surely should be the wake-up call for all.
When all is said and done, the tax and spend model is destroying the infrastructure that sustains a functioning economy and is, to be frank, killing people. And yet politicians are doubling down on that narrative as if there were no alternative.
An understanding of the power of the pound, the role of government as currency issuer, imposer of taxes and legislator is the starting place. But, at heart, it is the political decisions that derive from that monetary framework that really count. Is it so hard to understand that the real constraints to spending are not financial but real resources, followed by the decisions about how and to whom they are distributed to create equity and address the key challenges we face? On current experience, we have seen exactly how that system works for the richest and most powerful.
Regrettably, it is clear how the political establishment views citizens. Outside of their inclusive rhetoric at election or Conference time, we are just expendable pieces on a chess board, pawns in the great neoliberal game of securing power and wealth for the few.
Here’s what we could do with an informed public, a functioning democracy and a political class that served citizens instead of itself and its corporate masters. It starts here. Pass it on.
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The post Humanity sits at a crossroads as politicians re-sell the politics of public austerity appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.
Economic delusions cannot save us from the climate crisis and societal decay
“Never forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature”.
Global Boiling – Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay
Image: Paul Walker/Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 License
Many of us have grown up with the story of an arrogant ruler King Cnut, who placed his throne on the banks of the Thames, waiting for the tide to come in. As it did so he held out his hand and demanded that it recede. Predictably, it didn’t. What most of us don’t know, however, is rather than telling of a King’s hubris, it celebrates something quite different. An acknowledgement from Cnut that ‘All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial’. Whilst Cnut recognises a holy power, we might in these very different times acknowledge that far from humans controlling their environment, as we have the arrogance to imagine, it is instead the power of nature that dictates responses to our behaviour.
This arrogance is displayed daily by our politicians who seem to think they can put off action on climate change, citing economic credibility over scientific facts or putting the profits of the oil and gas producers above those of the health of the planet.
On the one hand, we have Sunak granting permits for more oil and gas drilling (whilst the industry continues to rake in huge profits), on the crazy basis that home-grown is better for the environment, which actually is not the case, as discussed in this Channel 4 Fact Check.
And on the other, Keir Starmer, fixated on household budget economics, reportedly thinks that ‘the hard grind of rebuilding economic credibility must come first, as opposed to Labour spending “vast sums of money”’. ‘Growth, investment and wealth creation will be, he said ‘the only show in town’ if Labour is to build a prosperous country with strong public services for the long term.”
At the same time, Rachel Reeves has postponed Labour’s green plan, and a few weeks ago also rejected the call to ditch the Tory imposed two-child benefit cap because, apparently, the ‘dire public finances’ means there will not be enough money to go around. Not only is the shadow chancellor intent on denying some of the poorest in our society the means to live decent lives, but also putting on hold urgent action on climate change. Here we have yet again, the eternal circus of blame which politicians indulge in (remember Liam Byrne) but which has nothing to do with monetary reality.
This is a neoliberal, monetarist pile of crock at a time of existential climate crisis and societal decay. Both the consequences of a destructive economic system which treats people and the planet as objects to exploit for profit.
We have a party opposition leader (and his shadow chancellor) dedicated not only to further economic decline, decay of public infrastructure and harm to citizens, who clearly thinks he can hold back the tide of ecological overshoot and climate change until the public finances are in good order.
Predictably King Cnut failed to hold back the tide, and now our own politicians seem to think that they can put off action because heaven forbid that we interfere with the profit streams of polluting industries or the god-like market. They talk about the economy as if it were separate from the sphere of people’s existence or the planet’s ability to sustain human activity. And with astonishing arrogance imagine that the great arrow of human progress will provide the solutions in the form of technology that is scarcely off the drawing board, or growing millions of trees (important though that is) and will save the day at some unspecified time in the future. Both questionable propositions and time is not on our side.
It surely is disturbing to be a witness to the fact that the emperor has no clothes and yet the entire political establishment fauns daily over a toxic economic system which has created vast poverty and inequity across the planet and is bringing an end to the world as we know it, to keep the consumption truck running and the profits flowing.
Then, at the same time as the media reports on the scientific evidence for climate change, and as we are witnessing the increasing incidence of damaging weather events from heat domes to drought, fire and floods which affect humans, destroy vital natural habitats and impact on food production, in the next breath is allowing politicians, government institutions, think tanks and its own journalists to reinforce the household budget narratives of how government spends.
We need a frank, public conversation about the future. As an article published in The Conversation makes clear, ‘The only way to keep humanity safe is immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse emissions in a socially just way.’ The last part is key, not just from a domestic point of view but also how we address the vast western created inequity that exists in the Global South, and the ecological destruction and pillage of real resources that has occurred to serve Western consumption and reinforce the power politics of empire.
As it also points out, ‘Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business not the climate’. In those few words, today’s reality is confirmed through government’s political priorities. It is time to see through the game and challenge those ideologically driven preferences.
As Jason Hickel, author of ‘The Divide; A Brief Guide to Inequality and its Solutions’ tweeted recently, ‘As climate-related damages hit, remember that this crisis is not due to generic “human activity”. Excess emissions are due overwhelmingly to the core states of the global North, and the ruling classes that control the systems of production, energy and national legislation.’
The time is now to deal with ecological overshoot and climate change in a socially just way. As GIMMS emphasises endlessly, the only way we can do that is to reject an economic system built on growth and endless consumption which benefits fewer and fewer people and destroys life, not to mention being at the heart of exceeding the planet’s ecological boundaries.
While politicians continue to count the pennies as in Labour’s abandonment of its commitment to a timeframe for spending the promised £28bn on a green transition, citing as it does the worsening financial situation, we are closing our eyes to the urgent nature of the challenge.
The question is not how we pay for it. The real challenge is to decide what our priorities are, draw up a strategic plan for achieving them and using the dual supports of legislation and tax policy to free up the real resources it will need to carry out those plans. Money in itself is never the consideration but politicians on both sides want us to believe it is. Truth is that we pay for it by spending the money. The only constraints to spending are real resources and decisions about how and to whom they are distributed.
We pay for it by spending the money - By Alan Hutchison
We need to start altering the discourse and the first candidates for change should be the phrases ‘taxpayers’ money’ and ‘government borrowing’. Taxpayers are not and never have been the source of currency. Similarly, government doesn’t borrow when it issues bonds; instead, it provides a safe place for us to store our savings.
The flat earthers need a lesson in monetary reality, to stop putting people’s lives on the line for a lie. In short, the government is the currency issuer. It spends the money into existence first, then taxes and plays the smoke and mirrors game it calls ‘borrowing’. Up until now, it has been the failsafe mechanism to keep the troops compliant and under control.
Whatever the future holds, it should be about our values which include respect for a life-giving planet and its inhabitants. Instead, and in reality, we have psychopaths in charge, prosecuting endless wars, advocating growth at any cost and, at the same time, proposing austerity (but not for the richest).
What we need now in these uncertain and unstable times is global cooperation, not a myopic focus on keeping the status quo in place for a lie, or to maintain the reins of global power.
Whilst what we face is a global challenge, we also can’t ignore what is happening at home to our own citizens as a result of short-sighted, market-driven solutions and the household budget economics that drives spending and policy.
Two articles in the Guardian in recent months report on the shocking exploitation of foreign care workers brought to the UK to plug the gaps caused by decades of government neglect, outsourcing and privatisation, and austerity in the form of public sector spending cuts. Shockingly, in the past year, the number of modern slavery cases reported within the UK care industry had more than doubled. Failures in duty of care has facilitated organised crime to exploit unfortunate victims who were desperate to find a better life but instead found slave-like conditions, long hours and below subsistence wages.
The solution is not to steal the valuable resources of poorer countries, but to bring social care back into public hands, invest more in social care provision and training, along with secure employment rights and fair terms and conditions and wages. The solution is for the nation to decide what its priorities are – more of the same contempt for citizens by its leaders, or something better.
Here, predictably we see again an economic ideology that puts private over public provision, all justified by the claim that we can’t afford better public services, or quality care for those who need it. An economic system which has taken precedence and is not fit for purpose, unless we mean the enrichment of those who benefit from government spending policy. All the government is actually doing is papering over the cracks it has caused, and the victims are both those using social care services and those persuaded that the good life awaits if they sign on the dotted line.
Again, the only constraints faced by government are related to how real resources are distributed and who benefits from that distribution. A stable and healthy society relies on government laying the foundations. However, successive governments have abdicated their responsibility and have increasingly shifted it to the corporate estate, along with public money. Whether it is the NHS, social care or indeed the many other vital public services which support citizens, all have been subjected to this false belief that there is no money, and that the private sector is more efficient.
Last week, the health minister Maria Caulfield defended Steven Barclay’s plans to use the private healthcare sector to deal with the long post-covid waiting lists, on the basis that it would provide good value for money for the taxpayer. If there are long waiting lists, this is not a new phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic in February 2020, there were 4.43 million people on a waiting list for care. The latest figures for May 2023 show that around 7.47 million people were waiting for treatment.
The fact is that the private sector is already operating in the NHS, taking public money to run health services with profit in mind. We now have a fragmented service where the word national is in name only and the NHS logo hides a myriad of private healthcare companies. From a publicly paid-for, managed, and delivered service to one that is now serving the needs of the corporate estate, where publicly paid-for means corporate welfare. If the NHS is broken, it broke as a result of the decades of reshaping it through the pursuit of an ideology that serves the neoliberal tenets of faith in markets and privatisation. When Blair said last month that ‘there should be complete cooperation between the public and private sector’, and Starmer in the Observer that we need to prioritise ‘radical reform of public services over reckless spending promises,’ the only thing to note is that they are all in it together. Blair and Thatcher’s legacy lives on.
MMT Verify: How We Can Staff the NHS Without Tax Rises - Neil WilsonSpending only happens if there was something to buy. If that spending is then deficit spending it has a lower inflationary impact than spending that is tax-matched.
Then as the Prime Minister seeks to blame striking NHS staff for record-high long waiting lists, this must surely be the final insult to a workforce that has been unfairly treated as a result of government policy and like many, struggling to manage the cost-of-living crisis on top of previous public sector pay squeezes. One minute we are being exhorted to clap for our dedicated nurses and doctors, and the next, government ministers are demonising them.
Neither health nor social care should be viewed as a business, and it certainly doesn’t involve being good value for the taxpayer, since taxes do not fund government spending. Let’s instead put the blame where it really lies. At the government’s door, resulting from a decade of cuts in real terms to spending (austerity), failure to train sufficient healthcare professionals, private sector for-profit involvement (which predates the Tories), and closure of hospitals, beds and even treatment options, all of which has been justified on the false premise of public sector unaffordability, and to push an ideological preference for private sector involvement. We can translate this as absolutely nothing to do with the state of the public finances, but rather as a political choice. The false narrative of monetary affordability constantly trumps delivery of public purpose, and when it comes to ethics, as in stealing the resources of poorer countries, as long as things can be done on the cheap, then it’s acceptable.
If we want better public services, health, and social care, it can only come through government which holds the power of the public purse. This is what we could have in a sane world where people matter more than a cruel ideology and profit. Instead, what we have is a shameless manipulation of a hapless public to justify what will be in effect more austerity, more ‘difficult decisions’ that can only cause more human distress and hardship, damage the life chances of our youngest citizens, and cause further decay of our public infrastructure.
And then, while the life-giving planet overheats because of human activity and the distribution of wealth becomes ever more unequal, last month the number crunchers at the OBR were ‘preparing to sound the alarm’ over the impact of rising interest rates on the public finances which, according to the Guardian, would ‘deliver a serious blow to the government’s scope for pre-election tax cuts.’ In its ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability report,’ it set out the impact of higher interest rates for the public purse. This would, it suggested, make it less likely that [the Chancellor] would meet one of its five key pledges – tackling Britain’s public debt. And no doubt such thinking will drive more damaging austerity thinking on both sides of the political spectrum.
Let’s be clear first, interest rates don’t hurt the public finances. Government as the currency issuer can always meet its liabilities. There are, instead, winners and losers in the private, non-government sector. The winners are savers, banks and holders of Treasury gilts, while the losers are those who will suffer the economic effects of higher interest rates which can filter through in higher unemployment and cause more pain for people struggling to pay higher rates on debt and mortgages.
Then in the same household budget vein, Chancellor Hunt, after checking thoroughly down the back of the sofa for a few stray quid, ordered his ministers to find £2bn savings for public sector pay rises. Not content with the nonsense claim that there is a threat of public sector wage spirals driving inflation, he then acts as if the government is short of money and must rob Peter’s pot to pay Paul’s.
What a choice! Taking steps to mitigate the human-induced existential threat of climate change, ecological overshoot, and growing poverty and inequality, or balancing the public accounts. While they tell the public about the hard choices and sacrifices to be made, there has been no problem finding the money for military support in Ukraine, £2.3bn in 2022 and the same for 2023, totalling an eyewatering £4.6bn.
There is no money for serving public purpose, helping people through these difficult times, feeding children or rebuilding our ailing public infrastructure, but there is an inexhaustible amount for waging war and killing people, bailing out banks, or contracts for dodgy PPE. Surely these contradictions must be hitting home by now, and the extraordinary con that is being practiced on citizens of this country with huge social and environmental costs.
The key to better public services, infrastructure, social security provision and a green transition is not growth, contrary to what politicians on both sides of the political spectrum would have you believe. It is, rather, something much simpler and direct, a political choice to deliver them.
Aside from the fact that taxes do not fund government spending (implicit in the belief in growth as the solution), faith in growth as a tool is misplaced in an uncertain, unstable and changing world in which we are currently in uncharted territory. We need action now. While politicians clearly have all had the ‘public finances are like a household budget’ briefing, and all sing from the same cruel hymnbook without question, aside from the human misery this narrative causes, it makes no economic or environmental sense.
Author Jason Hickle asked in 2021, ‘If our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people’s basic needs, then what is actually the point?’
Time for the public to ask those same questions of the political class.
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A practical exercise for the reconstruction of the Left
By Carlos García Hernández
Originally published in Spanish on 1/7/23.
Definition of a State: a territory with fixed borders under a central authority with the capacity to issue national currency and to impose debts in that currency on all residents of the State.
Consequence I: the national currency takes its value from the need of citizens to settle their debts with the State.
Consequence II: before collecting the imposed debts, the State has to spend in national currency to make paying the debts possible.
Consequence III: the State gives rise to a market in which goods and services are bought and sold in exchange for the national currency in order to settle debts to the State, self-sufficiency and savings.
Consequence IV: the State can acquire on the market everything that is for sale in the national currency, since as a sovereign issuer it cannot run out of its own currency.
Consequence V: the State’s production possibilities frontier is limited by the real resources of the economy, not by the State’s financial resources in national currency.
Consequence VI: the State can increase its production possibilities frontier by importing goods and services from foreign markets.
Definition of economic policy: introduction by the State of endogenous and exogenous variables in the economic cycle.
Endogenous variables: variables introduced by the State that must be complied with by economic actors in order to participate in the national market (laws).
Exogenous variables: variables that the State allows to be decided by private actors participating in the national market during the economic cycle.
Proposals of fiat socialism:
I. Convert the following variables into endogenous variables of the economic cycle:
-
- Guaranteed and permanent full employment through job guarantees based on employment buffer stocks.
- Full and prudent use of natural resources.
- Guarantee to every citizen of food, shelter, clothing, health services and education.
- Social security in the form of pensions and subsidies.
- Guarantee of decent labour standards.
II. Allow citizens to decide which variables should be endogenous or exogenous in the economic cycle by democratically deciding the extent of private sector participation in the economy.
Practical Exercise:
Based on the above, consider what economic policy should be pursued by the Left. That is, which variables should the Left incorporate into the economic cycle as endogenous variables and which variables should be considered exogenous?
***
The proposals of the Spanish Left and of the Western Left in general coincide with the proposals of fiat socialism, except on the first, and most important, point; permanent full employment guaranteed by law. The Spanish economic cycle incorporates as endogenous variables the defence of nature (unsuccessful), the guarantee of food, clothing, health services (insufficient) and education (underfunded), social security in the form of pensions and subsidies (too low) and legislation (not complied with) on labour standards. Left out of the economic cycle are the right to housing and above all the right to guaranteed work.
Why does the Western Left not guarantee access to a job? Because of their inability to understand that the level of unemployment is a political decision, just like guaranteed education or healthcare.
The definition of a State, the consequences of this definition and the definition of economic policy referred to at the beginning of this article describe what is called the monetary economy of production. In this economy, what mobilises human and material resources to create consumer goods are debts to a central power that issues the money it demands is paid in the form of taxes. Consequently, and if we consider consequence IV, the State can acquire in national currency all unemployed labour in exchange for wage labour, so that everyone who is willing and able to work has a job and a situation of permanent full employment is reached. If, in addition, full employment is achieved through job guarantees based on employment buffer stocks, and floating exchange rates and permanent 0% interest rate policies are adopted, as the modern money consensus holds, the economy can be driven towards what fiat socialism has dubbed the Lerner point, an ideal state of the economy in which both inflation and unemployment are zero.
We have just hit the last frontier of capitalism. Grudgingly, during the 20th century, the workers’ movement progressively wrested access to social rights from the jaws of exogenous variables and introduced it into the realm of the endogenous variables of the economic cycle. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were in charge of stopping this process of emancipation. To do so, they created a myth that the Western Left has accepted. This false and invented myth is called neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism changed the definition of the state and with it the consequences of the existence of states. In the neoliberal deception, public spending no longer precedes the collection of taxes, but it is taxes that finance subsequent public spending. Thus, it is no longer the State that chooses the level of employment in the economy, but the private sector that, through its investment decisions, decides the level of unemployment. This is how mass unemployment and not permanent full employment becomes an endogenous variable of the economic cycle. This is also how neoliberalism progressively denies access to social services and gradually returns this access to the realm of exogenous variables of the economic cycle.
The reconstruction of the Left must involve destroying the false myth of neoliberalism and turning both permanent full employment and universal access to the social services proposed by fiat socialism into endogenous variables of the economic cycle. To this end, the deception of tax-financed public spending must be discarded.
The recovery of monetary sovereignty is the first step to be taken by the Spanish Left. The spending and public deficit limits imposed by the European Union and the Euro are the most advanced expression of neoliberalism. Once recovered, monetary sovereignty must turn all the social rights of socialism into endogenous variables of the economic cycle and allow the citizens to decide the size of the private sector through their democratic participation.
You cannot rebuild what does not exist.
Euro delendus est
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Elizabeth Humphrys, ‘Australia under the Accord (1983-1996)’
Elizabeth Humphrys (University of Technology Sydney), 'Australia under the Accord (1983-1996): Simultaneously Deepening Corporatism and Advancing Neoliberalism'
This is the fifth seminar in the Semester 1 series of 2016 organised by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
Date and Location:
Note the time change!
5 May 2016, Darlington Centre Boardroom, 4:30pm – 6.00pm
All welcome!
Does Reason Matter?
The academy is rooted in the axiom of the supremacy of reason.
Let us note that, in reality, academic ‘reasoning’ is typically paradigm-bound. Thus the conscientious rigorous academic will likely be engaging in a process of constrained ‘rationality’, never raising the head above the inherited parapet. The neoclassical economist is an exemplary representative of this routine. To think ‘outside the box’ is to imperil one’s career prospects.
But let us put that pervasive peccadillo aside and assume that the academic’s research and writing regime is at her/his most far-reaching, unconstrained, and admirable. The machine is powered by logic and evidence. There may also be a propelling force that encases in a set of values, let us assume ‘progressive’ (egalitarian, etc.).
And what if this apparatus is directed towards an analysis of some aspect of government policy? Not improbable.
Let us examine this issue in the context of the rise and implementation of that political agenda since the 1970s that is loosely labeled ‘neoliberalism’. Mountains of literature, academic and its popular offshoots, has been generated by progressive-minded academics not merely on the anti-egalitarian thrust of neoliberalism but also on its dysfunctionality.
Not least, the outcomes of the neoliberalist agenda do not cohere with the character nor the outcomes proffered by neoliberalism’s proponents.
All the key channels – deregulation, privatisation, public-private partnerships, managerialism, etc. – have been forensically examined by our well-meaning nay-sayers and the latter have pointed to outcomes contrary to the promises.
For example, in the banking sector, deregulation and privatisation have produced a succession of significant dysfunctionalities and corrupt practices. And this for a sector with a fundamental public role. Some of these adverse outcomes are transparently obvious to the general public, courtesy of a media that can’t avoid reporting on their general character. Yet the political and regulatory apparatus remains immune to the problems.
For the academic, complementing these known broad parameters in providing a more rigorous analysis of said sector, one is compelled to declaim – the evidence is there, why do not those in authority follow the evidence? Why do they not see reason!
Faced with this dissonance, our typical egghead academic plows on in the same furrow, refining the argument, inducing further evidence, simplifying the language, etc. The implicit mentality is that the evidence and reason must win out in the end.
I write this scenario from experience, as I have been preoccupied with government policy for my entire academic life. And I have become obsessed with the question of why those in authority do not confront the evidence and ‘see reason’. Apart from myriad articles in the mainstream media, I have written countless submissions to Parliamentary and official inquiries only to have the content of those submissions comprehensively ignored.
So the well-meaning academic is faced with an impasse. Frustration has long set in. Does one press ahead along the same lines hoping for what looks like needing a miracle to happen?
The stark reality is that those in authority do not see reason, and for good reason! They operate according to a different logic.
By all means, one should pursue and publicise an analysis of reactionary and dysfunctional government policies. But it is not enough. The official arguments for the implementation of the neoliberal agenda cannot be taken at face value, as if the political class has the same mindset as us ‘enlightened’ academics. One must allow the possibility that the proponents themselves don’t believe in the arguments they espouse. To endlessly criticise such claims from a rationalist perspective involves a considerable waste of talent and of energy.
But how to do otherwise? One confronts that acknowledging the impasse involves not merely a personal choice. It is a systemic issue, because harnessing the logic and evidence machine is what the academy does. It is its raison d’être. (Thus is the disdain when academics are found to have taken sponsorship from outside and both their work and the integrity of the institution compromised.)
One might surmise that the academic discipline of government/political science would be well placed to confront the impasse. Not so. This discipline remains as tied to the academic modus operandi as the rest.
A recent fashion in that discipline has been to emphasise the implementation of an ‘evidence-based’ policy regime – an idealist notion par excellence. Rare instances of application (cigarettes plain packaging) do not invalidate this idealist fantasy.
This impasse embodies a more subtle form of ivory tower-dom. And it needs to be acknowledged and redressed. Can one acknowledge that reason à la the academy rarely matters in the ‘real world’?
If one is not to participate in consigning the academy to continuing irrelevance, to the pursuit of utopian gestures, a change of orientation is required.
One needs to address directly the character of the political and policy-making process. It is an arena where lies and dissembling are an art form, ditto obfuscation and stonewalling. Apart from the circus of Parliamentary question time, letters from Members of Parliament in response to correspondence from the public enclosing observations/advice/entreaties provide evidentiary raw material for this state of play. Kafka is alive and well.
Cynicism and personal opportunism typically matter more than personal principle. In contemporary Australia, it is hard to find a politician at any level (certainly in the three major Parties) for whom the public interest is the motivation for their holding office.
In the face of government policies that appear to ‘make no sense’ (dysfunctional, as well as being inegalitarian on the moral compass), it is appropriate to look for the particular ‘rationality’ in that domain.
It is appropriate to inquire, whence the policies? In particular, are the policies dictated by sectional vested interests or by a ‘false’ ideology, or both?
Those who purvey neoliberal ideology are a multi-layered lot. Of this layering, there are undoubtedly true believers. The financial press, for example, has always been neoliberal – witness the stance of a succession of editors and key columnists at the Australian Financial Review. Select vested interests of necessity desire to render themselves opaque, so the employment of functionaries (if true believers, all the better) as public propagandists is an integral element of the influence peddling process. Then get them into the mainstream media as ‘informed’ opinion-makers. The Institute of Public Affairs is Exhibit A for this dual mechanism.
But how does one discern these and complementary elements in the origins of ‘bad’ policies? The typical academic is ill-equipped for the task. The bulk of the academic’s scholarly raw material is the work of other academics – a phenomenon I explored in an earlier piece ‘Oppose Book Worship’. A reinforced insularity may prevail, regardless of intentions to break out of the loop.
Equally as fundamental, the dogged pursuit of the political and policy-making process is intrinsically difficult. Some elements are secretive of necessity – release of government papers 25 years down the track consigns a deeper analysis and understanding purely to inquisitive historians.
Other elements are secretive by design because those involved would rather that the nature of their participation not be publicised. One is perennially reliant on investigative journalism, but that means is constrained by a media management complicit with those in authority, producing a tendency to sensationalist trivia (e.g. leadership battles).
Other possible channels of exposure are shackled. Whistleblowers are demonised, destroyed. Anti-corruption bodies are neutralised.
Even if the hurdle-jumping academic succeeds in providing a window into the political process on a particular policy development, say, and exposes this discovery to the broader public as well as the academic community, will it make any difference? Will it contribute to those with a capacity to influence matters ‘seeing reason’?
From my experience, no. One can see why academics stick to their last, or escape into topics both obscure and meaningless.
Reason matters, but its application remains caged, and it is generally an alien concept to politics. To appropriate W.H. Auden (who was referring to poetry):
For [Reason] makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper …
Believe in reason if it makes one feel good. But never over-estimate its power to persuade those who run the show.
Once more into the (neoliberal) breach
What do we mean when we call an idea or policy ‘neoliberal’? Does the term signify anything other than trends which are simply embedded in the process of capitalist development? Is it at all useful? That’s right – yet another article trying to figure out exactly what this ‘neoliberalism’ thing is all about. ‘Why bother?’ one might ask. After all, this debate has been ongoing for at least twenty years; each intervention aiming to clarify meaning seems only to add to the cacophony.
As messy as it might be, I believe this is an important discussion to have – and to keep having – as it speaks to some of the most pressing theoretical and practical challenges of our modern age: theoretically, it pushes us to justify the fundamental task of periodising capitalism, as well as challenging us to really think through the implications of ‘interdisciplinarity’; practically, it highlights ongoing strategic disagreement on the ‘left’, both in terms of how best to attack our capitalistic foes, while also speaking to the choice between reformation or revolution.
One of the many common criticisms of the term is that ‘no-one self-identifies as neoliberal’ – if those who are labelled ‘neoliberal’ reject the term, of what strategic use could the label be? Well firstly, that claim is not entirely true. Milton Friedman, the ‘ideal-typical’ neoliberal, briefly recognised the concept in a 1951 article, ‘Neoliberalism and its Prospects’. Generally speaking, however, it is true that the concept is rarely used for self-description. Indeed, ‘neoliberals’ line up to denounce the concept: from Austrian economists, to Blairites, to Australia’s own Institute of Public Affairs. The confusion around the meaning of ‘neoliberalism’ is used by these groups to declare that ‘neoliberalism’ is merely a ‘secret handshake’ used among those who harbour a general dislike of markets, and is indicative of pervasive intellectual laziness.
It is interesting to note that this need for specificity, so often used to denounce neoliberalism, can be seen to be resultant from the ‘scientistic’ epistemology which characterises neoliberalism. Foucauldian analyses of neoliberalism often note the epistemological imperialism of neoclassical economics (and positivism more generally), as part of neoliberal ‘governmentality’. That is, dismissing the term on the grounds of ‘non-specificity’ actually shows the pervasiveness of neoliberal epistemologies. This defence of ‘neoliberalism’ was made recently by Will Davies, who went on to point out the ridiculousness of purging all imprecise concepts from the humanities and social sciences. While perhaps not ‘pithy’ enough for this online-blog format, it is worth quoting Davies at length:
Since Jeremy Bentham, the English tradition of positivism has rested on the notion that only acutely defined terms are politically valid – a premise that can quickly flip into the idea that if I don’t know exactly what you mean, then you are talking nonsense. Benthamite utilitarianism has been slowly subsumed by welfare economics since the end of the 19th century, to the point where policy wonks can argue that esoteric terms such as ‘price elasticity’ or ‘market failure’ mean something, but ‘neoliberalism’ doesn’t. This implies that terminology is something to be overseen by HM Treasury (for example in its Green Book), which would be a surprising position for any devotee of George Orwell to find him or herself in.
And so the criticism that ‘neoliberalism is too vague’ is rejected. But does that mean we are to throw the flood gates wide open, and embrace complete, anarchic plurality of meaning? (Perhaps these conceptions will be able to compete via research funding, with a pseudo-market finding the ‘correct’ definition?) No, some limits must be drawn.
In particular – as I have argued in the latest issue of the Journal of Australian Political Economy – conceptions of neoliberalism which see ‘free’ markets and ‘small’ states as characteristic of neoliberal practice must be refocused. While these ‘ideals’ are certainly evident in rhetoric and ideology, too many ostensibly progressive actors and intellectuals – including Kevin Rudd, Waleed Aly, and even Benjamin Kunkel – assume a direct link between ideas, and the policies enacted under those ideas. This assertion follows from the work of several historical materialists, such as Neil Brenner, Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck, Adam Tickell, and most recently (and most powerfully), Damien Cahill. These scholars have all forwarded ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ as a more-useful conception of the term, particularly in contrast with the widespread ‘free-market neoliberalism’ of authors such as Rudd.
‘Actually existing neoliberalism’ emphasises the stark disjuncture between neoliberal ideas and practices; rather than being characterised by receding state involvement in the economy, the neoliberal state is actually extensively involved in creating and extending markets. While ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is marked by policies – such as deregulation, privatisation, and/or marketisation – which seem to conform to classic neoliberal modalities, in fact it extends or reconfigures the role of the state in facilitating new market arrangements which have particular class-distributional effects.
This is where we arrive at the problematic of periodising capitalism. Those otherwise-friendly scholars who criticise the explanatory power of neoliberalism from within critical thought – often of a Marxist bent – often do so by arguing that ‘everything that happens under neoliberalism happens under capitalism’. I agree. But does that mean that no significant changes have occurred in the global (or local) political economy? Of course not. Even if all ‘neoliberalism’ means is ‘the particular (shifting) crystalisation of class structures, social movements, and relative power of capital since the decline of Keynesianism’ – though I think it means more than that – it is still a worthwhile term to have in our vocabulary. These voices which push us to constantly (re)consider ‘what is ‘neo’ in neoliberalism?’ challenge us to constantly justify our periodisation, which is important. But this should not lead to abandoning the term.
While this short piece has in no way concluded the debate around neoliberalism, I hope that it has at least presented something of a case for the relevance and necessity of that debate. So where to now? If neoliberalism is indeed a lens which highlights significant trends and tendencies within the current context, what exactly is that lens showing us? Some of the most interesting research within the field of neoliberalism studies at the moment is considering the relationship between neoliberalism, the state, and democracy – recent experiences of austerity being constitutionalised and embedded in supra-national institutional frameworks illustrate this. In this space, ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ is emerging as a powerful framework. But whether one is considering the anti-democratic structure of the European Union, or the gendered impact of neoliberal financialisation, one thing is clear: the study of neoliberalism in these areas – as opposed to ‘free-market caricatures – is anything but ‘intellectual laziness’.