Overturning âembedded liberalismâ
Neoliberalism, for Bourdieu (2001, p. 35), is best perceived as a âconservative revolutionâ that âratifies and glorifies the reign of ⌠the financial markets, in other words the return of the kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than the return of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism ⌠pushed to the limitsâ. More theoretically, we can perhaps comprehend neoliberalism as seeking to succeed the type of âembedded liberalismâ largely dominant in most of the industrial West from the end of the Second World War into the 1970s. During this period âmarket processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained ⌠economic and industrial strategyâ. In contrast, the neoliberal project seeks to âdisembed capital from these constraintsâ (Harvey, 2005, p. 11). Thus, to different degrees, depending on the specific cultural and national context, neoliberalism endeavours to âstrip away the protective coverings that embedded liberalism allowed and occasionally nurturedâ (Harvey, 2005, p. 168).
This process is illustrated by circumstances surrounding the major fire occurring at Grenfell Tower, on 14 June 2017, which resulted in the deaths over seventy people. Completed in 1974, Grenfell Tower was a 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington, London, England. It was often referred to as the âMoroccan towerâ because many residents came from the local Moroccan immigrant community. Prior to the catastrophic fire, a residentsâ organisation, the Grenfell Action Group (GAG), had highlighted fire safety issues and poor maintenance (GAG, 2016). In The Guardian, passionately castigating the âviolence of neoliberal âausterityââ, Chakrabortty (2017, p. 25) drew comparisons between contemporary social and economic conditions and the not entirely dissimilar circumstances concerning Marx and Engels in Victorian Britain (Garrett, 2018a). This was period, of course, before liberalism had been partly âembeddedâ within a constraining network of relationships aiming to promote values at odds with, or existing in tension with, those of market rationality. Nevertheless, over
170 years later, Britain remains a country that murders its poor ⌠What happened last week [at Grenfell Tower] wasnât a âterrible tragedyâ or some other studio-sofa platitude: it was social murder ⌠Spectacular examples of social violence, such as Grenfell, are thankfully rare. They usually occur out of public sight. This decade of austerity has been a decade of social violence ⌠Austerity is at the heart of the Grenfell story ⌠Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. Itâs never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for âcommercial confidentialityâ, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism.
Appropriately seeking to make the connections to social work, the Social Work Action Network (SWAN, 2017) concluded
The fire at Grenfell was not a random event; it was a disaster waiting to happen. It was the result of cuts, of austerity, of privatisation of council housing, of deregulation, of out-sourcing and of inequality ⌠The fire, and the deaths, stand as a symbol of all that is wrong with new-liberal social policy ⌠[The] unnecessary deaths of ordinary working people by a system skewed to meet the interests of the wealthy ⌠SWAN denounces the system of cuts, privatisation and deregulation that led to the catastrophe.
Although the inquiry announced by Prime Minister Theresa May in late June 2017 is still to produce findings and all relevant details are not â and probably will never be â known, sufficient evidence is already available to suggest that the process of eroding âembedded liberalismâ by incrementally stripping away solidaristic forms of âprotective coveringsâ contributed to the fire and the ensuing fatalities at Grenfell Tower.
This dis-embedding of liberalism can also be associated with a fresh and reinvigorated emphasis on competition across all areas of society, including those previously perceived as outside the parameters of commodification (Brown, 2015). For example, within the university sector, tuition fees of up to ÂŁ9,000 a year in the UK have, of course, also created immense financial difficulties for students and their families. Similarly, the âde-funding of âpublicâ US colleges and universities means that, as of 2015, students pay nearly 50% of the costs of their education at these institutions, up from 20% just 25 years agoâ (Myers, 2017, p. 304).
As Therborn (2007, p. 75) put it, the âsurvival of the fittest and Social Darwinism have been given a new impetus by neoliberal globalization, after their post-Fascist quarantineâ. Relatedly, neoliberalisation is a process entailing much âcreative destructionâ (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). Moreover, the aim has been to install a new âcommon senseâ to try and ensure that people are led to think and act in a manner conducive to neoliberalism. Indeed, it has been argued that neoliberalism
has been ingested into the body politic so successfully that it has become the prevailing commonsense of everyday life ⌠Just as in the aftermath of the Second World War we all became âsocial democratic subjectsâ in one way or another, we may have now become similarly constituted as âneoliberal subjectsâ, in ways that we do not fully recognise. (Thompson, 2008, p. 68)
In this way, neoliberalisation can be perceived as bound up with an individualâs sense of self, setting in motion and sustaining a multiplicity of âidentity projectsâ that are compatible with capitalism. Related to this, in terms of working practices, neoliberalism favours âflexibilityâ and is hostile to all forms of social solidarity and identification that can potentially restrain capital accumulation.
Neoliberals endeavour to remake work and workscapes and alter the aims, aspirations and affiliations of a range of professional groups (Garrett, 2005, 2009, 2014a). However, across different fields, this project is likely to prompt resistance. For example, people involved in social work â be they the providers or users (and these categories are, moreover, fluid) â are apt to âfind ways of surviving, negotiating, accommodating, refusing and resistingâ and do not merely âact like automatons envisaged in the governmental plans and strategies of the powerfulâ (Clarke, 2005, p. 159).
Putting the state to work for capital
The core function of the neoliberal state is to furnish an âapparatus whose fundamental mission [is to] facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capitalâ (Harvey, 2005, p. 7). Pervasively, the remaking of state apparatuses involves a âdramatic shift in government commitments from securing the welfare of citizens to facilitating the flow of global capitalâ with this âaccomplished through a depoliticizing discourse of deficits, competitiveness, and balanced budgets, surrounded by an aura of technocratic neutralityâ (Baker, 2009, p. 70). Significant in this respect is the drive toward corporatisation, commodification, and privatisation of hitherto public assets. This entails the opening up of ânew fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitabilityâ (Harvey, 2005, p. 160). Moreover, the state
once neoliberalized, becomes a prime agent of retributive policies, reversing the flow from the upper classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism. It does this in the first instance through the pursuit of privatization schemes and cutbacks in those state expenditures that support the social wage. (Harvey, 2005, p. 163, emphasis added)
A misguided perspective maintains that neoliberalism heralds an irrepressible ârolling backâ of the state with the âmarketâ and âmarket mechanismsâ being entirely left to âtake overâ society. However, within the neoliberal paradigm, the state continues to play an active role in that it creates and preserves an âinstitutional frameworkâ for capital (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Writing in a US context, Myers (2017, p. 307) observ...
