Alternatives to Neoliberalism

Towards Equality and Democracy

Bryn Jones, Mike O'Donnell, Jones, Bryn, O'Donnell, Mike, Bryn Jones, Mike O'Donnell

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781447331148, 9781447331148
• eBook ISBN: 9781447331186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Interessenvertretung

In this collection, innovative and eminent social and policy analysts, including Colin Crouch, Anna Coote, Grahame Thompson and Ted Benton, challenge the failing but still dominant ideology and policies of neo-liberalism.

The editors synthesise contributors' ideas into a revised framework for social democracy; rooted in feminism, environmentalism, democratic equality and market accountability to civil society.

This constructive and stimulating collection will be invaluable for those teaching, studying and campaigning for transformative political, economic and social policies.

Part One

Alternative paradigms and perspectives

Editors’ overview

Building on the Introduction’s historical and critical review of neoliberalism and of existing proposals to change it, Part One specifies alternative, more radical perspectives to this still dominant, if elusive ideology. Following our proposal in the Preface, of a spectrum of ‘regime’ and ‘system’ changes, contributors’ political and policy perspectives in this part of the book assume democratic and non-violent, rather than ‘revolutionary’ change – some modest but strategic, others with broader, societal scope.

Jeremy Gilbert contextualises his recommendations for a renewal of socialist challenges to neoliberalism by distinguishing between critiques and counternarratives as moralistic, pathologising (‘neoliberalism makes you ill’), eco-Marxist and Marxist, and his preferred approach of radical democracy. Gilbert describes ‘moralistic’ approaches as limited to moral stances and exhortations to act differently and ‘better’, rather than providing specific strategies and programmes of change. Thus the moralism of the left can be as conservative as that of the right and is unlikely to appeal to those voters preoccupied with material hardship. Though impressed by the evidence that neoliberalism can damage people – make them ill – physically and psychologically, Gilbert argues that these perspectives lack a crucial identification of power and material interests in the present system. In an analysis that complements that of Benton in Chapter Three, he finds a lack of convincing solutions in the otherwise devastating demonstrations by Marxists, and particularly eco-Marxists, of the enormous material damage neoliberalism causes. Again Gilbert offers a radical democratic path allied to a modernisation ethos. This would utilise the radical potential inherent in media technologies and new organisational techniques: sophisticated tools to bring the individuals isolated by corporate neoliberalism into ‘potent collectives’. The organisational forms to promote these changes would be self-governing alternatives to the corporate model, developed through democratic decision making, rather than top-down, state imposition.

Anna Coote’s recommendations cover three overlapping areas: social justice; environmental sustainability and a more equal distribution of power. A key unifying theme is that the distribution and control of resources should be directed towards the needs and potential of all members of society and not, as is currently the case, disproportionately to the few. Accordingly people should ‘be able to influence and control decisions that affect their everyday lives’. Her stipulation of a new, society-wide social settlement is similar in several key respects to the changes Ted Benton considers are increasingly urgent for ecological survival. Benton offers a ‘red/green’ alternative to neoliberalism, combining a sombre and urgent assessment of the impossibility of neoliberal market economics’ solution to climatic catastrophe, with a case for reforms for the system change needed to save the planet. He identifies popular and community-based environmental movements as the potential drivers of such changes.

Mike O’Donnell’s central argument is that unless democracy is greatly extended and securely institutionalised, it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve and sustain the various radical and progressive goals proposed as alternatives to neoliberal regimes. Democracy as an essential aspect of liberty has long been a member of the radical trilogy of liberty, equality and solidarity. Arguments for democracy are recurrent prescriptions, both in this part and throughout this book. Several authors make a convincing case for societal rather than merely political democracy, expressing frustration with the inadequacies and limits of Britain’s system of parliamentary and local democracy. In this part Gilbert makes clear that the expansion of democracy must also be pursued democratically – there should be a consistency and integrity between means and ends. Addressing the workings of democracy, Coote supports the radical principle of subsidiarity – that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the citizen. In advocating institutional democracy, O’Donnell extends the case for democracy to areas of society in which it is often disregarded or ignored. In their joint chapter in Part Three Jones and O’Donnell substantiate this thread by describing an increasingly potent source of the current democratic surge, in the form of post-war social movements’ advancement of an extended range of human and civil rights.

ONE

Modes of anti-neoliberalism: moralism, Marxism and 21st century socialism

Jeremy Gilbert

In this chapter, I will begin by considering a number of different genres of anti-neoliberal discourse and politics, and the implicit or explicit alternatives to neoliberalism which they propose, before fleshing out in more detail what I consider to be the most useful alternative to neoliberalism that contemporary radicals could propose. This first section will not offer an exhaustive typology, but merely an attempt to elaborate on some of the different ways in which neoliberalism is criticised from varying perspectives and what the political implications of those variations are.

Moralism versus neoliberalism

Perhaps the most widely distributed mode of anti-neoliberal discourse in the English-speaking world is that which takes an ethical stance against the moral poverty of neoliberal norms and the perceived injustice of its social effects. Moral appeals to ‘social justice’ are typical of religious campaigners, the charitable section and mainstream non-government organisations (NGOs). For example, the following comes from

Pope Francis’ first ‘Apostolic Exhortation’ issued in November 2013:

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.¹

Such statements have an obvious rhetorical force, but are always subject to an obvious question as to what moral authority or assumptions they are actually based on. The papal critique of neoliberal ideology, unsurprisingly, goes on to assert that ‘behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God’. This is perfectly justified in this context, but it is also a reminder that without recourse to some such divine authority, it can be difficult to ground as an essentially moralistic response to neoliberalism in any satisfactory way. Above all, it is worth observing here that this is an essentially conservative response to neoliberalism which judges it for its departure from some perceived set of established moral norms.

The trouble with such a response is that it is quite difficult to imagine it achieving widespread popular currency in a secular culture, especially one wherein the extraordinary capacity of neoliberal capitalism to generate novel modes of being and enjoyment offers very marked compensations to much of the population for abandoning traditional communitarian norms, which are widely perceived as tied closely to the hierarchies and beliefs of a previous epoch. Irrespective of any religious or secularist considerations, it is easy enough to observe that appeals to social justice seem to have had at best a limited effect in mobilising large populations against neoliberalism in countries like the UK in recent years.

The same can be said of various forms of conservative communitarianism, the religious motivation of which is sometimes less explicit, if just as logically necessary to their internal consistency. A very good example in recent British politics was the ‘Blue Labour’ project, which attempted to articulate communitarianism, social conservatism, anti-immigration policies and localism with a vaguely social democratic politics, on the grounds that both social democracy and social conservatism have a common enemy in neoliberalism, while mass immigration is essentially a neoliberal policy. This synthesis, it was hoped, would enable the Labour Party to connect with white working class voters who had drifted towards the populist right or simply into non-voting apathy.

It didn’t work, partly because it was difficult to pretend that an ugly xenophobia was not an element of the structures of feeling to which Blue Labour hoped to appeal, and this was a sentiment which the rest of the Labour movement was unwilling to indulge.² More fundamentally, however, there was never any evidence that this was a project which could appeal to anything but the most conservative and residual section of the public. Its most articulate public advocate, Jon Cruddas MP (himself an explicit adherent to ‘Catholic Social Teaching’), produced a fascinating and well-researched report into the Labour 2015 electoral defeat, dividing the public into three broad groups of ‘pioneers’ (modernist metropolitan egalitarians), ‘prospectors’ (self-interested individualists) and ‘settlers’ (anxious conservatives) which showed the danger that Labour was in if it could only attract the support of the pioneers.³ However, the very same data seemed to suggest that Blue Labour, or any comparable conservative communitarianism, could only ever hope to attract the ‘settlers’, and would alienate the other groups. Arguably, this exemplifies the weakness of all moralistic, conservative and communitarian responses to neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism makes you ill

Another family of anti-neoliberal political discourses which we can identify is those which point to neoliberalism’s supposedly objectively deleterious effects on human wellbeing: at a personal, social or even planetary level. Although they may overlap considerably with ethical and communitarian discourses, the difference is that they all make some claim to objective and measurable knowledge of neoliberalism’s consequences, and to a set of objective criteria according to which those consequences can be measured and judged.

This isn’t a new idea: classical socialism and social democracy, going back to early Fabianism and even some strands of Marxism, have often claimed to be able to administer society according to principles which are not only more just than those informing liberal capitalism, but in some objective sense more efficient, effective and productive. A notable recent variant on this tradition has been the work of Pickett and Wilkinson, authors of the widely read study The Spirit Level and founders of the Equality Trust. Epidemiologists by training, Pickett and Wilkinson amass a wealth of evidence that social inequality produces deleterious social and psychological effects (mostly related to various forms of stress) even for the elite beneficiaries. Conversely, they show that higher levels of equality produce concomitant benefits, even in societies as politically and culturally different as Sweden and Japan (Pickett and Wilkinson, 2009). This is extremely interesting so far as it goes, but the lack of any real political or sociological dimension to their analysis leaves Pickett and Wilkinson somewhere short of a political strategy for the actual implementation of equality. Their early hope seems to have been that the sheer objective weight of their evidence would be enough to convince significant sections of the political class to adopt policies with such an objective: a naive hope, to say the least, and not one that has enjoyed any obvious success.

Pickett and Wilkinson’s work resembles in some senses that of psychologically oriented writers such as Oliver James and other diagnosticians of ‘affluenza’ (James, 2008): a set of psychological symptoms supposedly produced by the excessive self-indulgence (psychic as well as material) encouraged by hyper-consumerism and neoliberal individualism. While their methods and diagnoses may vary, all rely on various forms of medical discourse and all try hard to assert that on some fundamental level even finance capitalists suffer from the cultural effects of neoliberalism. This is no doubt true on a certain level, but it is an approach which always risks depoliticising the phenomena which it tries to analyse, to the extent that it occludes any sense that certain material interests are in fact served by the propagation of neoliberalism. James, for example, is at pains to convince us that ‘the selfish capitalist’ alone in his penthouse with his cocaine and his prostitutes is not really happy. That may well be true, but it is also an approach which tends to occlude the extent to which, whether or not they make him happy, those accoutrements are all evidence for the selfish capitalist having successfully accrued certain significant forms of power which others do not have and which, indeed, he deprives them of. This failure to consider neoliberal society as a field of power relations is entirely typical of other interventions aimed at the general promotion of ‘happiness’, ‘wellbeing’ or ‘flourishing’ (Davies, 2014), such as economist Richard Layard’s project to promote Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Radical materialism: ecology versus neoliberalism

Perhaps the most powerful analyses of neoliberalism’s objectively deleterious effects are those which rely on the most incontrovertibly objective data: not psychological diagnoses or sociological deductions, but physical measurements of carbon, temperature and water flow. It is interesting to note, therefore, that critics who bring together an understanding of neoliberalism with an interest in topics such as geography and environmental economics also tend to bring to bear a distinctly Marxian analysis of neoliberalism and its motivations. Commentators such as Naomi Klein (2015) explain clearly the close relationship between measurable climate change and neoliberal regimes of governance and intensive marketisation. Put simply, following radical geographer David Harvey (2007), neoliberalism is above all a project to restore the class power of finance capitalism, and the only way to confront it is not with moralising critique, but with projects to build up the collective power of currently subjugated social groups.

However, exactly how to do this is a further question. If such accounts generate analyses of neoliberalism which are both more politically satisfying and more securely evidence-based than either religious communitarianism or psychosocial epidemiology, they are often somewhat lacking in any strong account of why the exploitative relations which neoliberalism facilitates are tolerated in subject populations, or what the political mechanisms might be by which those relations could be changed. We might, therefore, for the sake of schematism, identify both purely Marxist and eco-Marxist accounts of neoliberalism as a third broad family of anti-neoliberal discourse. What characterises this group of analyses and proposals is that they have a clear sense of the material interests supporting and being expressed by neoliberalism, are able to gesture towards systemic alternatives, and do not, like conservative critics, seem to imagine that the entire history of capitalist modernisation could simply be reversed. Programmatically, they would tend to be associated with quite classical projects to build socialist alternatives to capitalism, from Latin America to Northern Europe.

Radical democracy

The final group of anti-neoliberal positions that I will identify here does not sit in any kind of opposition to the former one, but rather exists in a necessary relationship of dialogue with them. These we might call political or radical democratic variants of anti-neoliberalism. They are typically concerned with the anti-democratic consequences of neoliberalism and with attempting to understand the specificities both of its forms of governmentality and of the ways in which its hegemony has been won and secured in various contemporary and historical contexts. My own work clearly falls into this category, as does that of contemporaries like Will Davies (2014), while we have obviously built on the contributions of major thinkers such as Stuart Hall (1988) and Wendy Brown (2015). Perhaps the key observation that unites the different perspective within this family is that neoliberalism has only ever been implemented to the extent that democratic institutions have been weakened, as neoliberalism has never enjoyed an explicit popular mandate anywhere in the world (Gilbert, 2014a). Politically, the logical correlate of this family of anti-neoliberalism would include those political projects which have sought to articulate a critique of neoliberalism with demands for radical democratic institutional reform, as well as major socioeconomic transformation: examples would include, of course, Podemos in Spain, but also Common Weal in Scotland.

Radical modernity

One logical necessity of any such project to link social, political, institutional and economic demands is the need to challenge the institutional nexus which neoliberalism has produced, from international technocratic bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the frameworks in place for the monitoring of public services at the level of individual users. An absolute necessity for that is to reject one of neoliberalism’s primary ideological claims: that it represents the only viable and logical model of modernity in the world today. If we look back at points in history where the left has achieved real political successes, we can see that progressives have always had to identify the problems which capitalism is creating at any given moment, and respond to them by using new technologies, new forms of government and new types of self-organisation in order to achieve their objectives.

The moment of the socialist left’s greatest success – the mid-20th century – was also the moment when it most wholeheartedly embraced what were then the cutting-edge sciences of manufacturing, communication and management. The nationalised industries and universal public services of the post-war welfare states made heavy use of organisational techniques developed by Ford and other pioneers of industry. Lenin had already declared, years earlier, that ‘Communi...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Sylvia Walby
• Editors’ preface
• Introduction: The open-market society and its opponents: an overview
• Part One: Alternative paradigms and perspectives
• Part Two: Reform within economic and governance restraints:pushing the boundaries
• Part Three: Economic and political democracy: restoring the market-civil society balance
• Conclusion: A Brexit from neoliberalism?