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Introduction: Neoliberalism, Crime and Control
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
Hillel, Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14
Law and order has become a central issue of our times. Opinion polls show that over the last twenty-five years it has regularly been rated ‘one of the most important issues facing Britain today’. This has not always been the case. Law and order emerged as a political issue in the early 1970s (following the US where it became contentious in the late 1960s). During this time there has also been a huge rise in recorded crime rates. Concern about crime is far from unwarranted, but the growing obsession with law and order can only be explained in small part by increasing risks of victimization. This book’s main thesis is that the massive rise in crime of recent decades, and the turn to law and order, are both due to the same ‘root cause’: the increasing dominance of neoliberal political economy since the 1970s.
Neoliberalism: The Revolution of the Rich
Neoliberalism is the most common label for the economic theory and practice that has swept the world since the early 1970s, displacing communism in Eastern Europe and China, as well as the Keynesian, mixed economy, welfare state consensus that had prevailed in Western liberal democracies since the Second World War.1 As an economic doctrine it postulates that free markets maximize efficiency and prosperity, by signalling consumer wants to producers, optimizing the allocation of resources and providing incentives for entrepreneurs and workers.2 Beyond economics, however, neoliberalism has become the hegemonic discourse of our times, so deeply embedded in all corners of our culture that its nostrums, once controversial and contested, have become the commonsense, taken-for-granted orthodoxy underpinning most public policy debates.
Neoliberalism as culture and ethic
Advocates of neoliberalism see it as not only promoting economic efficiency, but also political and personal virtue.3 To neoliberals, free markets are associated with democracy, liberty and ethics. Welfare states, they claim, have many moral hazards: they undermine personal responsibility, and meet the sectional interests of public sector workers, not public service. Neoliberals advocate market discipline, workfare and New Public Management (NPM) to counteract this.4
Neoliberalism has spread from the economic sphere to the social and cultural. The roots of contemporary consumer culture predate neoliberal dominance, but it has now become hegemonic. Aspirations and conceptions of the good life have become thoroughly permeated by materialist and acquisitive values.5 Business solutions, business news and business models permeate all fields of activity from sport and entertainment, to charities, non-governmental organizations, and even crime control.6 ‘Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything’,7 penetrating everywhere, from the stuff of dreams to the minutiae of daily life. Money has become the measure of men and women, with the ‘Rich List’ and its many variations ousting all other rankings of status.
The harms of neoliberalism
The benefits of neoliberalism have been familiarized as common sense by its cheerleaders, and indeed in most public discussion Mrs Thatcher’s TINA (‘there is no alternative’) rules. There are however many negative consequences of unbridled markets and materialism. They used to be stressed by a variety of traditions, above all the diverse forms of socialism, but also by many religions. They were well understood by classical liberal political economy, from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall and Pigou. As with the trumpeted virtues of markets, their dysfunctions transcend the economic, and include moral, social and political harms.
In the light of the huge increases in inequality sketched below, the rise of neoliberalism can best be interpreted as a revolution of the rich. Since the 1970s the operations of capital that had been restrained in the interests of security, stability and social justice by Keynesian and social democratic leaning governments around the world after the Second World War were more or less rapidly ‘unleashed’.8 In essence neoliberalism has been a class war launched and won to devastating effect by ‘capital resurgent’.9 In the absence of countervailing interventions, markets tend to produce a variety of negative economic, ethical, and socio-political consequences:
Economic harms
Free markets are prone to generate concentrations of power that undermine their freedom.
- Left to themselves markets will become increasingly dominated by monopolistic accumulations of power, as the winners use their resources to drive out competitors. ‘While the virtues of competition are placed up front, the reality is the increasing consolidation of oligopolistic, monopoly, and transnational power within a few centralized multinational corporations: the world of soft-drinks competition is reduced to Coca-Cola versus Pepsi, the energy industry is reduced to five huge transnational corporations, and a few media magnates control most of the flow of news, much of which then becomes pure propaganda.’10
- Inequality of wealth and income become ever greater, as the winners of early competition multiply their advantages. The wealthiest 1 per cent in Britain now own more than half of all wealth, and the wealthiest half of the population own nearly all the country’s wealth – 94 per cent, a considerable increase over the last three decades.11 Neoliberal political economies such as the US and Britain have seen inequality rocketing up by contrast with those (notably in Scandinavia) that have retained more of the postwar social democratic framework. In the last twenty years, income inequality rose 28 per cent in the UK, and 24 per cent in the US. By contrast, inequality of incomes rose by only 1 per cent in Denmark, 4 per cent in Finland, 7 per cent in Norway, and 12 per cent in Sweden.12
- Allocation of resources increasingly reflects the consumer power of the rich, not human need, exemplified by Galbraith’s juxtaposition of private affluence and public squalor.13 The central claim made on behalf of free markets by proponents, now largely conceded even by most of the left, is that they produce economic ‘efficiency’, an optimal allocation of resources guided by the myriad signals of what people demand. This system is often represented as more democratic than state planning. What is seldom pointed out is that the market is a peculiar form of democracy: not one person, one vote, but one pound, one vote. Demand that counts in the market is not human need but effective demand, demand backed by purchasing power. So celebrity chefs in Mayfair flourish, while many poor children are undernourished, or obese because of cheap junk food. Pharmaceutical corporations produce drugs to enable affluent old men to have sex, while research languishes on diseases of the poor like malaria that kill millions around the world. Measuring economic progress by national income growth based on market prices is to use an index that reflects market power not human welfare. The New Economics Foundation has produced alternative indices, incorporating estimates of the social costs of conventional economic activity (such as pollution), and of social benefits that do not command an adequate market price (for example childcare, health, security, happiness). They suggest that economic welfare has fallen back since the advent of neoliberalism.14 Inequality itself complicates the assessment of economic efficiency and growth. How can one say that the higher gross national product of 2006 compared to 1976 represents progress in well-being when some have done very well but there are also many losers? Is this not a biased judgement that the latter are less important than the former? The conventional economic answer is that if the overall cake is bigger the gainers can overcompensate the losers and everyone is better off. But this answer is unpersuasive unless such compensatory redistribution actually occurs.
- Market systems are prone to macroeconomic cyclical fluctuations. The postwar dominance of Keynesianism was because it was seen as offering a set of techniques for managing these cycles, and thus hopefully averting a repetition of the 1930s Depression, with its disastrous consequences for everyone, including in part the Second World War itself.
- Insecurities caused by the adversities of ill-health, old age, etc., are widespread and hard to predict at the level of the individual. The welfare state originated in Bismarckian Germany and other countries in the late nineteenth century because of the view that these largely random vicissitudes are better protected against by collective rather than individual insurance. Although neoliberals have trumpeted the ‘moral hazards’ and other supposed deficiencies of state welfare and insurance it is far from clear that market solutions are preferable. The sorry sagas of private pensions ‘mis-selling’ and ‘NHS plc’15 illustrate this.
Ethical harms
Materialistic market societies generate cultures of egoism, short-termism, irresponsibility towards others. They encourage lack of concern about the wider ramifications of action, in the present, but above all for posterity (as the threat of climate change shows most obviously). Bakan demonstrates that company law requires corporations to act in ways psychiatrists would diagnose as psychopathic in an individual.16 The ‘live now, pay later’ mentality of consumer culture parallels the psychic structure of criminality suggested by much conservative criminology: ‘impulsive, insensitive … risk-taking, short-sighted’.17 The changing work patterns of ‘the new capitalism’, their ‘flexibility’ and ‘dynamism’ eroding the security and stability that could inculcate virtues of commitment and craftsmanship, produce a ‘corrosion of character’.18 The ‘aspirational’ culture, celebrated by many commentators, prioritizes the desire for individual success in the form of material accumulation. It is the essence of the concept of ‘anomie’, the key explanation of crime and deviance in classical social theory.
Tawney anticipated this in his stirring statement of ethical socialism in The Acquisitive Society. Competitive market society
suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expression. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies.19
Social/political harms
Inequality and competitiveness produce many adverse social consequences, notably poor health, social conflict and violence.20 The affinity between markets and democracy postulated by neoliberal theorists is doubtful. ‘Free’ markets have complex institutional, cultural and legal conditions of existence. These include state suppression of the disorder sparked by market-generated social dislocations. As Karl Polanyi forecast in 1944, the same year that Hayek published his Road to Serfdom warning of the perils of socialism:21
The idea of freedom … degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise … the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.22
In Andrew Gamble’s famous formulation, the ‘free’ market needs the ‘strong state’23 … and the ‘strong’ state may well become authoritarian. Democracy today remains threatened by wide inequality, as a wide-ranging study by the American Political Science Association has shown.24 Neoliberalism supplies the ‘best democracy money can buy’:25 the costs of campaigning spiral beyond the reach of all but the wealthy and their corporate interests.
‘Root Causes’ or ‘Realism’?
‘Root cause’ and political economy perspectives have become deeply unfashionable in criminology. James Q. Wilson launched the attack on ‘root cause’ perspectives with ferocious acerbity in his 1975 book Thinking about Crime. ‘I have yet to see a “root cause” or to encounter a government programme that has successfully atta...
