Authoritarian Neoliberalism

Philosophies, Practices, Contestations

Ian Bruff, Cemal Burak Tansel, Ian Bruff, Cemal Burak Tansel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367375447
• eBook ISBN: 9781000712469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Authoritarian Neoliberalism explores how neoliberal forms of managing capitalism are challenging democratic governance at local, national and international levels.

Identifying a spectrum of policies and practices that seek to reproduce neoliberalism and shield it from popular and democratic contestation, contributors provide original case studies that investigate the legal-administrative, social, coercive and corporate dimensions of authoritarian neoliberalism across the global North and South. They detail the crisis-ridden intertwinement of authoritarian statecraft and neoliberal reforms, and trace the transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces) through uneven yet cumulative processes of neoliberalization.

Informed by innovative conceptual and methodological approaches, Authoritarian Neoliberalism uncovers how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and highlights how alternatives to neoliberalism can be formulated and pursued. The book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

1 Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis

Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue takes as its point of departure three centres of gravity that have shaped the study of neoliberalism but have also established barriers to further progress in these debates. By promoting an intersectional materialist research agenda which challenges extant ideational, modernist and empiricist tendencies in scholarship on neoliberalism, the essay contextualizes the special issue articles by outlining and clarifying key aspects of our understanding of authoritarian neoliberalism. In particular, we reflect on themes related to conceptualization and periodization, which are of importance for both this special issue but also for broader questions of knowledge production and praxis. Through doing so, we argue that there are two distinct yet connected trajectories within the research agenda on authoritarian neoliberalism: one which focuses on the intertwinement of authoritarian statisms and neoliberal reforms; and another which traces various lineages of transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces). Recognition of this spectrum of authoritarian neoliberal practices is important as it helps us uncover how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and pushes us to consider more fully how other worlds can be made possible. Nevertheless, it is affirmed that we must remain open to what an emancipatory society might look like, and what struggles would be most appropriate, in and across various socio-spatial contexts.

Understanding neoliberalism: moving away from three centres of gravity

The conceptual value and political utility of neoliberalism continue to be significant fault-lines in academic and public debates. On the one hand, many scholars increasingly question whether ‘neoliberalism as a broad, catch-all term [can] adequately serve so many different phenomena and theoretical conceptualizations’ (Venugopal, 2015, p. 165). On the other hand, the claim that public policies and state strategies that have been variously described as ‘neoliberal’ in the past three decades continue to dominate is accepted not only by scholars, but also by those who have often been portrayed as the architects of those policies (see Ostry, Loungani, & Furceri, 2016). Coupled with the fact that ‘neoliberalism’ has not lost its popular and analytical resonance after the 2007–8 global economic crisis and throughout a state of ‘permanent austerity’ enacted especially but not only in Europe (Bailey, 2015), it is urgent that we consider these crucial questions:

• How do the practices, policies and ideas that are associated with ‘neoliberalism’ reproduce themselves in the face of crises and popular opposition?

• In what ways are such attempts at reproduction – in the current period, increasingly authoritarian and coercive – productive of new forms of crisis due to their contradictory nature?

• What lineages of transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces) can be traced to inform both our understanding of neoliberalism but also strategies for critiquing and resisting it?

• How do social struggles and various forms of resistance shape the manifestations of authoritarian neoliberalism, and how could they be utilized to generate visions of a more equitable future?

While debates on the conceptualization and utilization of neoliberalism continue to produce vibrant points of analytical contention, the term ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ is fast becoming an established part of critical social science scholarship, as shown by its deployment across numerous disciplinary and critical perspectives (for example, Bruff, 2014, 2016; Bruff and Wöhl, 2016; Gonzales, 2016; Smith, 2018; Tansel, 2017b, 2018; Wigger and Buch-Hansen, 2015; Yeşil, 2016; and the contributions in Tansel, 2017a).

In our work, we locate the term at the intersection of a range of social relations and utilize it to highlight how contemporary capitalism is governed in a way which tends to reinforce and rely upon practices that seek to marginalize, discipline and control dissenting social groups and oppositional politics rather than strive for their explicit consent or co-optation. Such practices include the repeated invocations of ‘the market’ or ‘economic necessity’ to justify a wide range of restructurings across various societal sites (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces), the growing tendency to prioritize constitutional and legal mechanisms rather than democratic debate and participation, the centralization of state powers by the executive branch at the expense of popular participation and other nodes of governance, the mobilization of state apparatuses for the repression of oppositional social forces at a range of scales, and the heightened pressures and responsibilities shifted onto households by repeated bouts of crisis and the restructuring of the state’s redistributive mechanisms. Nevertheless, for us, authoritarian neoliberalism is also understood as a crisis-ridden, contradictory set of practices which enhance the capacities and potentials for resistance as well as for domination. While the political and socio-economic developments that triggered the conceptualization of authoritarian neoliberalism tend to be understood from within a framework of progressive politics – such as the emphasis on the emergence of new sites of solidarity and autonomous movements seeking to prefigure a better world (see Huke, Clua-Losada, & Bailey, 2015) – we argue that resistances are multi-form and not always emancipatory, as signalled, for example, by the rise of new radical Right populism (see Konings, 2012).

Our aim in this collection of contributions to the rich debate on neoliberalism is to advance three main considerations, which together propose a departure from some of the limitations inherent to the well-established approaches in the literature. This is, by no means, a wholesale dismissal of the extant body of work on neoliberalism, but should be seen as an extension of a collective effort to move away from three centres of gravity that have shaped the study of neoliberalism but have also established barriers to further progress in these debates. With this objective in mind, and with a view to forging a stronger dialogue with cognate approaches to and critiques of neoliberalism in various branches of the social sciences, our contributions are framed thus:

(1) We advocate an explicitly ‘political’ reading of neoliberalism, promoting an intersectional materialist research agenda in contrast to predominantly ideational approaches which have often been at the centre of debates about neoliberalism (for example, Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2010). The role of ideas and discourses is not to be discounted, and these works have been essential for advancing our understanding of neoliberalism beyond simplistic ‘free market’ narratives which also have a habit of essentializing states as inherently socially protective. However, these accounts, by virtue of their very focus, tend to underplay the connection between such ideas and discourses with capitalist development and statehood – plus with unequal social relations across society – and particularly their imbrication with coercive practices which seek to support and protect capital accumulation in the name of ‘free markets’ (Cahill, 2014). Moreover, these contributions place implicit faith in the potential of a new set of better ideas and discourses to displace and replace neoliberal practices. While laudable in a general sense, the works in this tradition do not say enough about the fact that ‘[m]aterial circumstances are the net of constraints, the “conditions of existence” for practical thought and calculation about society’ (Hall, 1996, p. 44), thus saying too little about how and why certain ideas come to dominate policy and preferences at particular points in time, as well as how and why they come to be contested (cf. Bieler & Morton, 2008).

(2) The special issue responds to the call made by Connell and Dados (2014, p. 134) to ‘[move] beyond the self-referentiality of Northern social science [and] towards a more democratic structure of theory on a world scale’, which, for us, includes a more thorough examination of global South cases hitherto viewed as marginal to the study and especially the (re)constitution of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism in the global South has come to mean much more than what can be captured through the use of the traditional ‘structural adjustment programme’ analytical prism. Therefore, the special issue offers a wide range of empirical case studies that cover more ground than the Anglo-American centre of gravity that has long dominated the literature (see also Klein, 2007). In doing so, it challenges modernist and Eurocentric dichotomies about the forms taken by neoliberalism, which tend to contrast democratic capitalism in the global North with authoritarian development in the global South – i.e. as if ‘capitalism’ and ‘development’ can be neatly separated and mapped on to the world in an either/or fashion (see Tansel, 2017b). It is clear that countries such as the UK and the US, and relatedly Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, are important examples of neoliberalization, but this does not justify a strong focus on these spaces over others – a choice that effectively limits the potential for furthering our understanding of neoliberalism as well as skewing its conceptualization.

(3) Our contributions move the debate decisively beyond the empiricist tendencies of some accounts of neoliberalism’s resilience since 2007–8, which have largely superimposed commentary about the increasingly authoritarian forms taken by a resilient neoliberalism onto theoretical frameworks and approaches established prior to 2008 (for example, Ban, 2016; Schmidt & Thatcher, 2013; Streeck, 2014). In various ways, the articles in the special issue take stock of the important contributions made by these accounts, but also aim to co-produce a research agenda more attuned to the significance of post-2008 shifts in socio-economic, legal and political landscapes. As we explore in detail below, highlighting this character of the crisis as a key conjuncture does not mean that the current trajectory of neoliberalism signifies a radical break from its pre-crisis orientation. Nor do we wish this consideration to be seen as a move that separates the association of neoliberalism from capitalism. Nevertheless, we contend that the crisis – and its accompanying aftershocks at various levels of governance and across a range of societies – did play an important role in heightening the extant anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism as well as generating new and mutated mechanisms that reproduce such tendencies. As such, our contributions complement some of the recent additions to the literature on neoliberalism (Soederberg, 2014; Springer, 2016; Wacquant, 2009) and simultaneously act as a call for the further shedding of some of the notions and assumptions which advanced our understandings of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s, but ultimately require amendments in light of concrete political and socio-economic changes (e.g. the dominant focus on ‘marketization’ as a driver of neoliberalism).

Built on these premises, the special issue brings together contributions that further refine our conceptualization of the term ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and flesh out how the processes that we associate with it manifest in concrete contexts. In many ways, we utilize the space provided by this special issue to expand on the collective step taken towards formulating ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a research agenda in States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order (Tansel, 2017a), and to offer a targeted exercise in mapping practices, ideas and struggles that shape contemporary capitalism. Before covering the details of our contributions, we would like to take this opportunity to reflect on a number of issues related to the conceptualization and periodization of the concept, which we think are of importance not only for the current contributions at hand, but also for broader questions of knowledge production and praxis.

Embracing messiness, or why it is healthy to work with imperfect concepts

The 11th European International Studies Association conference, organized in Barcelona in September 2017,¹ hosted a well-attended section on authoritarian neoliberalism. The call for this section attracted enough interest to enable 12 panels to take place across the conference, including a roundtable on States of Discipline (Tansel, 2017a). It was gratifying to witness such interest in the book and the concept, yet we were also struck by the tendency for certain types of well-meaning questions to be asked more than others – an experience which has been mirrored when we have delivered presentations elsewhere.

These questions often revolved around the desire for greater definitional clarity (for example, what we understand authoritarianism to be) and more precise conceptualizations of various elements of the research agenda (for instance, the exact relationship between consent and coercion). Some colleagues voiced the concern that authoritarian neoliberalism represents a top-down approach which neglects everyday life and the possibilities for grassroots change. Many of these questions prompted us to reflect on how we adopted, deployed and defined the concept, but also to think carefully about how we articulated and communicated our arguments in our work. As such, they produced helpful dialogues that displayed both the vibrancy of the debates around the concept and the existence of a number of issues that ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, at least in its current incarnation, was not – and should not be – able to explain.

Nevertheless, given the persistence of certain requests for clarification, we realized that some of these exchanges spoke to the formalized nature of knowledge production that is encouraged and, indeed sanctioned, in many parts of the social sciences – for instance, the privileging of modes of reasoning which embody and promote an incessant drive for categorizability. In principle, this categorization drive opens up the possibilities for dialogue between protagonists in various literatures, for having an analytical common ground helps provide a basis for the debates that unfold. But what happens when the very basis for the debates, the categories themselves, start mutating in front of our eyes and we are forced to reflect on the way we understand the world? Here we concur wholeheartedly with Buttigieg (1990, p. 81), when he argues that ‘if the relationship among the fragments [of our knowledge] were permanently fixed, then the concepts and theories would crystallize into dogmas’. We can, for example, trace the negative analytical consequences of utilizing neoliberalism in an inflexible way in how dominant Anglocentric conceptions have struggled to explain the complexities of cases emanating from the global South. Similarly, the governance of neoliberalism in the aftermath of the 2007–8 crisis has accentuated the need to rethink the relationship between the capitalist state and the role of the law in regulating and reproducing dominant policy paradigms, with law all too often being understood in a descriptive and analytically/politically neutral manner.

It is important to highlight that we acknowledge the value of crafting arguments which are well-informed, coherent and persuasive, but on the other hand, we agree with Mason (2011, p. 80) on the importance of adopting a less orthodox ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis
• 2 Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry
• 3 Managerial power in the German model: the case of Bertelsmann and the antecedents of neoliberalism
• 4 Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain
• 5 Neoliberal co-optation and authoritarian renewal: social entrepreneurship networks in Jordan and Morocco
• 6 Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America: urban in/security and austerity in Oaxaca
• 7 Reproducing authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey: urban governance and state restructuring in the shadow of executive centralization
• 8 Reconfiguring the state: executive powers, emergency legislation, and neoliberalization in Italy
• 9 The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives
• Index