Often it is difficult to know where to start when writing articles and book chapters, and sometimes even more so for blog posts summarising those articles and book chapters. Therefore, in keeping with a few examples such as here, here and here citing other bands, many thanks to Ultha for inspiration for this post’s title and section headings and for being happy with me invoking them so liberally.
This post summarises and expands a little on two journal articles I published in 2024. Both had the same goal – to make the case against the hardwired notion that neoliberalism = free markets. This argument might seem familiar to people who know my work – for instance, my 2019 articles with Kathryn Starnes and on my own. Yet there was always an unfinished sense in the aftermath of these publications, and for two reasons: (i) I needed to expand on both the neoliberal-philosophical and neoliberal-empirical dimensions of the arguments; (ii) despite thinking that I had been clear enough in these two pieces, I still nevertheless would be cited and have my work discussed as a critique of ‘free-market’ neoliberalism.
While I readily acknowledge that I was not as explicit on this in my earlier publications, mainly because my focus was elsewhere, I thought I had done enough in these 2019 pieces. Clearly not! Therefore, my article in Review of Social Economy focuses at length on the neoliberal-philosophical dimensions while also asking how/why the association of neoliberalism with free markets is so hard to shake off. The companion article in Competition & Change offers a fine-grained analysis of the neoliberal-empirical dimensions through a consideration of the Big Society agenda in England in the 2010s.
We Knew and Did Not Know Neoliberalism
The core aim of the article on the neoliberal-philosophical dimensions was to make use of an exhaustive study of ‘in principle’ writings by a range of canonical neoliberal intellectuals, in order to argue that there is no redemptive ‘free market’ moment for neoliberalism. Borne out of notes taken from more than 150 sources – ranging from short chapters to lengthy monographs – of which 50 are cited in the article, and covering the Austrian (AS), Chicago (CS) and Ordoliberal (OS) schools, I show that free markets have never been valorised. While there might be some rhetorical invocation of free markets, much more significant is the endorsement of monopolistic corporations. To be clear, monopolistic corporations are most enthusiastically discussed by Austrian authors and in the most qualified manner by Ordoliberals, but the effect is analogous: as far as neoliberals are concerned, they represent the ideal form taken by markets.
I therefore advocate a ‘unity in diversity’ vantage point, understanding neoliberalism as a constellation of variegated yet strongly inter-related philosophical elements. Their differing starting points – such as the strong differences between AS and CS authors on the notion of ‘equilibrium’ – lead to substantial convergence on shared terrain. The perceived dangers posed to market process (AS), market efficiency (CS) and market order (OS) by state and/or trade union action are threatening enough to lead neoliberals towards a spectrum of endorsements of corporate monopoly.
The pro-corporate monopoly view hides in plain sight across numerous publications, many of which have never been out of print. Hence, the article asks why there is nevertheless a strong critical consensus that the way to critique neoliberalism is to identify and forefront the perceived contradictions between its valorisation of free markets in theory and the messy neoliberalising processes that we see in practice. Many of the authors most prominently associated with this consensus have performed a great service over the years – such as in demonstrating that state activism often entailed the intensification and extensification of neoliberalising tendencies after 2007 rather than their weakening. But we can and should go further than this.
So why is neoliberalism still positioned as, somehow and somewhere, ‘really’ about free markets? Drawing on Jana Bacevic and Matthew Watson, I argue that the critical consensus on neoliberalism embodies an epistemic attachment to the neoliberalism = free markets couplet. Even when evidence is presented to the contrary, such as in my previous work, this imagery remains at the core of the critiques that are offered. Interestingly, some of the more important publications in the 2010s strongly implied an affinity with the argument I deploy, for they discuss discourses about ‘free markets’. But as Samuel Knafo has convincingly argued (p.201): ‘concepts are never innocuous. They frame our perception of history and what we look for when analysing it…The concepts of the Market and its various offshoots will thus have real effects on the analysis.’ In other words, the couplet must be rejected.
The Big Society Avarist
The core aim of the article in Competition & Change on the neoliberal-empirical dimensions was to recast how governmental restructurings should be understood. Basing my argument on the observation that the how of austerity needs to be studied just as much as the what (i.e. divestment of resources), the article enquires into the supposed failure of the ‘Big Society’ agenda during the 2010-15 coalition government. Here, I draw on David Ruccio’s critique of assessments of ‘failures’ of structural adjustment programmes in Latin America in the 1980s. Ruccio asserts that supposed policy failures (e.g. on inflation) could be understood as successes if we take a broader view – for instance, if the programmes’ main impact was to increase societal exploitation. At most, the Big Society agenda is judged to be a rhetorical cover for the often-brutal period of austerity-as-divestment in the 2010s. But could there have been more to it than this?
My argument is that the Big Society’s impact ought to be understood as a recomposition of public-institutional spaces. Of particular significance was the growing role in the delivery of public services of private, profit-making companies on the one hand, and of voluntary, charitable work on the other. This means that a generalised logic of marketisation cannot be ascribed to the restructurings: more accurate is to identify and forefront parcellised corporatisation via contracting and imposed social-reproductive burdens on wider society. Hence, there is no market when there is only one bidder for the public service contract, or when unpaid work is the only means by which provision can be offered. Moreover, the rise of private contracting and of unpaid provision must be considered together, as part of the same agenda for change: I show this in the article in various ways, but it is interesting to note that this agenda was prefigured in and demanded from the inception of the neoliberal project (I focus on Hayek).
On the more concrete aspects of these processes, which form the bulk of the discussion, I rely on two sources of inspiration in addition to Ruccio. First, more cultural-materialist commentaries on how certain mobilisations of linguistic terms – such as Big Society – can be reiteratively articulated across time and different spaces/scales with the aim of rendering them more commonsensical and potentially more acceptable to the wider population. This was embodied in the Big Society’s articulation as an agenda to enhance local autonomy and freedom in the making of economic, political and social choices, such as those regarding effective and equitable delivery of public services. And second, literatures on how legal mechanisms make some rather than other outcomes more likely, meaning that such mechanisms could be harnessed in the name of particular political and social projects and their specific worldviews. Bringing these two sources of inspiration together enables me to establish both the Big Society’s neoliberal essence and its wide-ranging legal sedimentations that gradually, unevenly yet cumulatively recomposed public-institutional spaces in England (I focus on domains such as healthcare, local governance, schools, and welfare-to-work).
I therefore argue that the Big Society ought to be considered an important keyword in the lexicon of neoliberalism. This is because the autonomy and freedom that it promoted was corporate autonomy within and freedom to extract value from public-institutional spaces, and the ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’ for society to deplete itself in the exhausting process of reproducing some of the conditions of life. This leads to two main concluding observations: (i) there are multiple austerian legacies in 2020s England that can be traced to the Big Society agenda, as graphically shown during the COVID-19 pandemic; (ii) my emphasis on the how as well as the what of austerity widens the scope for research enquiries into austerity’s (after)lives in and across multiple local, regional and national contexts (which has been confirmed by feedback I have received since the article’s publication).
Dispel
While I am unable to cover all aspects of the articles in this blog post, it is hopefully clear that much is at stake when we misrecognise neoliberalism’s essence and subsequently analyse in the same manner. For instance: if welfare spending increases, but the extra money is used to entrench workfarist tendencies across ‘social’ programmes that are contracted out to profit-making ‘public service’ companies; if banks and other financial institutions are bailed out, but households are condemned to exist in and through perpetual austerity programmes; and if ‘anti-neoliberal’ leaders such as Donald Trump deliver massive tax cuts for corporations and rich individuals and leave other communities and societal sites in various states of survival; how can we most effectively reflect on more recent developments, such as the emergence of large-scale Big Tech and AI companies, so-called Green New Deals, and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic?
It might mean we conclude that, far from witnessing a move away from neoliberal principles, recent years have actually brought us closer to the worldview of the intellectuals surveyed above. Indeed, the broligarchy that has come to characterise Trump’s return to the US Presidency, and the executive orders that he issued post-inauguration, are indicative of this. Neoliberalism is far from done.
Therefore, we urgently need to dispel the neoliberalism = free markets couplet and re-evaluate how we assess neoliberalism – in theory and in practice. Implications include recasting neoliberalism as a constellation of philosophical principles which has strived, and continues to strive, for the coercive, unequal and non-democratic reorganisation of society; and connecting this (re)definition with ongoing conversations about what anti-neoliberal recompositions of public-institutional spaces, which centre on emancipatory lexicons and keywords, might look like. Despite a voluminous and long-standing literature on neoliberalism, much work still lies ahead of us.
Set Image: Licensed from Adobe Stock by Koshiro K
Comments