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Neoliberalism
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Bob Jessop
What is neoliberalism?
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fuzzy’ role in economic, political and ideological contestation and a correspondingly
problematic status in guiding social science research. This helps to explain why
some commentators and critics argue that one should refer to neoliberalisms in the
plural or to diverse patterns of (always incomplete) neoliberalization rather than
ascribe to neoliberalism an unchanging, context-free essence (e.g., Peck, 2010).
Turning from two of the several sources of neoliberal philosophy, policies, and
practices to its social scientific analysis, we find five main theoretical treatments. It
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can refer to: (1) an intellectual-professional project or epistemic construction
promoted by a ‘faith community’ of Ordoliberals and Neoliberals in a long war of
intellectual position before its time eventually came during economic crises in the
1970s (see Bourdieu, 1998; Foucault, 2008; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009); (2) an
epoch, starting in the 1970s, characterized by the advance of globalization based on
free trade, transnational production, and the free movement of financial capital (e.g.,
Cerny, 2008; Gray, 2009); (3) the form taken by a capitalist offensive against
organized labour after the crisis of the post-war mode of growth in advanced
capitalist economies, with neoliberal globalization helping to shift the balance of
power towards capitalist interests, especially those of transnational commercial,
industrial, and financial capital (Harvey, 2008; Duménil & Lévy, 2004, 2010); (4) a
distinctive set of economic policies intended to extend market forces, including into
areas once regarded as extra-economic, with different instantiations in advanced
economies, transitional economies, and emerging markets – in the latter two sites, it
is associated with the Washington Consensus (Jessop, 2002; Williamson, 1990);
and (5) a style of politics characterized by market-centrism, conviction politics, and
an authoritarian populism that can be moralizing, polarizing, and punitive (e.g.,
Larner, 2000; Mudge, 2008; Wacquant, 2010).
Variants of Neoliberalism
Given the polyvalence of the core term, diverse typologies of neoliberalism exist.
Here I present one developed from a critical political economy perspective
concerned with the economic and political dimensions of neoliberalism and its
changing fortunes. It identifies four main forms of neoliberal regime that developed in
the ‘neoliberal epoch’ beginning in the 1970s. None involves a simple return to the
19th century liberalism analysed so well by Polanyi (1944), even if some of its crisis
symptoms have re-appeared in neoliberal guise. All four forms emerged in reaction
to the crisis of post-World War II models of capitalist development: Atlantic Fordism
in advanced capitalist economies, import-substitution industrialization in Latin
America and sub-Saharan Africa, export-oriented growth in East Asia, and, in a quite
different but related context, state socialism in the Soviet Bloc, China, and Indo-
China. They are best understood as partially overlapping spaces along a continuum
rather than in terms of chronological succession.
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The most radical form was neoliberal system transformation in the successor states
that emerged from the former Soviet Bloc: Russia and Poland are two cases with
contrasting outcomes. Russia adopted a tabula rasa approach based on shock
therapy in which ‘creative destruction’ of state socialist institutions was expected to
lead to the spontaneous emergence of a fully functioning liberal market economy
and a more gradual development of liberal democracy. Poland had previous
experience of market institutions and soon pursued ‘market therapy without shock’
based more on Ordoliberal than Chicagoan ideas.
Next in the continuum come neoliberal regime shifts. Breaking with the post-war
Atlantic Fordist settlements, based on an institutionalized compromise between
capital and labour, these shifts introduced liberalization, deregulation, privatization,
market proxies in the public sector, internationalization, and cuts in direct taxation.
These policies were intended to modify the balance of forces in favour of capital and
have largely succeeded in this regard, as reflected in stagnant real wages, cuts in
welfare, increasing personal debt, and a growing share of income and wealth in the
hands of the top decile (especially the top percentile) of their respective populations.
Well-known cases are Thatcherism and Reaganism but similar shifts occurred in
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and Iceland. While often identified with
right-wing parties, neoliberal regime shifts have also been supported by centre-left
parties, often under a ‘Third Way’ label. Moreover, with a little help from northern
friends and/or military dictatorships, many Latin American economies undertook
such shifts (albeit in a context of crises, especially when they involve high levels of
debt and high inflation, in the previously dominant import-substitution growth model
rather than in reaction to the crisis-tendencies of Atlantic Fordism) from the 1970s
through to the 1990s (for a discussion of some intellectual, professional, and imperial
roots of neoliberal regime shifts in North and South, see Delazay & Garth, 2002).
Whereas the second form largely emerges from domestic politics, whether in liberal
democratic or authoritarian regimes, the third form comprises economic restructuring
processes and regime shifts that were primarily imposed from outside by
transnational economic institutions and organizations backed by leading capitalist
powers and local partners among domestic political and economic elites. This form
typically involves neoliberal policies in line with the ‘Washington Consensus’ as part
of a quid pro quo for financial and other assistance to crisis-ridden economies in
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parts of Africa, Asia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Latin America (e.g., Gowan,
1996; Gwynne & Kay, 2000; Robinson, 2008; Saad-Filho & Johnson, 2005; Sader,
2008; Veltmeyer, Petras & Vieux, 1997). Whether neoliberalism originates mainly in
domestic or external political processes and whether its associated policies are
pursued through democratic or authoritarian political devices and measures, the
policies adopted in the second and third forms of neoliberalism often overlap when
they occur outside advanced capitalist economies.
Fourth, there are more pragmatic and potentially reversible neoliberal policy
adjustments. These comprise modest changes deemed necessary to maintain
alternative economic and social models in the face of internationalization and a
global shift in the balance of forces. By analogy with ‘Keynesianism without
Keynesians’, these adjustments seem to be based on ‘neoliberalism without
neoliberals’ (Mudge, 2008). The Nordic social democracies and Rhenish capitalism
provide some examples (cf. Becker, 2007; Lavelle, 2007; Streeck, 2009). These
adjustments can nonetheless cumulate over time despite the fluctuating political
fortunes of the parties more favourably included towards them.
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export-oriented economies to build large reserves to defend themselves against
speculative capital inflows.
These tendencies towards neoliberal disappointments and failure do not mean that
neoliberalism can be dismissed or regarded as just one trend among many. First,
even using a restricted typology of neoliberalisms or forms of neoliberalization, it is
clear that there was a highpoint of neoliberal experimentation that emerged in a
specific global conjuncture and created important path-dependent geo-economic and
geo-political effects. These include the global financial crisis that emerged in 2007-
2008 and political instability generated by the uneven impact of neoliberal
globalization within and across local, regional, and national economies. Second,
despite signs of failure, there have been continuing efforts up to and beyond 2007-
2008 to ‘roll-forward’ neoliberalism (Peck & Tickell, 2002) and to introduce flanking
and supporting mechanisms and policies to maintain the momentum of
neoliberalization in the face of mounting resistance and/or growing signs of failure.
Third, while there was a brief period when the global financial crisis was interpreted
as a crisis of neoliberalism, massive state intervention has since created conditions
for a return to neoliberal ‘business as usual’ in those societies where market
fundamentalist regime shifts occurred. Elsewhere, it has led to Ordoliberal policy
adjustments alongside efforts to maintain free trade, extend it to services, facilitate
non-speculative capital flows, and find market solutions to climate change and other
global challenges.
Neoliberalism is not, of course, co-extensive with the global economy. This takes the
form of a variegated world market that is based on interaction within a space of flows
articulated to regional and national ‘varieties of capitalism’ and other forms of
economic organization. This raises crucial questions about the impact of neoliberal
globalization on the variegated world market. Among other effects, it has reduced the
frictions associated with national ‘power containers’ or analogous borders,
strengthened the logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated competition within the
world economy, and reinforced the influence of world market dynamics in world
society more generally. These tendencies are particularly associated with the
promotion of liberalization, de-regulation, privatization, expansion of market-proxies
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in the residual state sector, internationalization, and the lowering of direct taxes.
Along with commitment to shareholder value, this benefits hypermobile financial
capital, reinforcing its competitiveness and ratcheting up its ability to displace and
defer problems onto other economic actors and interests, other systems, and the
natural environment. Yet, as Marx foresaw, this also enhances the scope for the
contradictions and dilemmas of a relatively unfettered (or disembedded) capitalism to
shape the performance of other systems, undermining crucial extra-economic
conditions for accumulation. This section develops these arguments.
Despite the passing of the neoliberal highpoint, there are significant path-dependent
effects from the crisis-tendencies associated with each form and their temporary
confluence. These effects are political and ideological as well as economic. This is
evident in the ways that neoliberal policies have shaped the forms, timing, and
dynamics of economic crises (broadly understood) not only in countries where
neoliberalism was adopted, imposed, or adapted but elsewhere too. Thus, in addition
to the legacies of neoliberalism where it directly shaped politics and policies, it has
also tended to disrupt the structured coherence of modes of regulation and/or
governance where alternative policies prevailed. This can be seen in the wider geo-
economic and geo-political effects of failed neoliberal system transformation and
structural adjustment programmes and in the uneven terrain on which struggles over
the economic, political, and social effects of neoliberalism are being contested.
To establish why neoliberalisms and neoliberalization have been and, despite their
respective crisis-tendencies, remain so influential on a world scale, we must look
beyond domestic and international politics and relate them to the logic of capital.
Here we can draw on, and develop, Marx’s distinction between the use-value and
exchange-value aspects of the commodity. In the first instance, then, the commodity is
both a use-value and an exchange-value: without use-value, it would not be purchased;
without exchange-value, it would not be produced. Analogous properties can be
identified in other dimensions of the capital relation. The worker is both a concrete
individual with specific skills, knowledge, and creativity and an abstract unit of labour
power substitutable by other such units (or, indeed, other factors of production); the
wage is both a source of demand and a cost of production; money functions both as
a ‘national’ currency circulating within a monetary bloc and subject to state control
7
and as an international money exchangeable against other monies in currency
markets; productive capital is a more or less concrete stock of time- and place-
specific assets undergoing valorization and abstract value in motion (notably as
realized profits available for re-investment); land is a gift of nature and a monopolistic
claim on revenues; knowledge circulates as part of the intellectual commons and can
also become the object of intellectual property rights; and so forth. In each case,
neoliberalism privileges exchange-value over use-value. It emphasizes cost
reduction and cost recovery and subjects all economic activities to the treadmill of
matching or exceeding the prevailing world market average rate of profit. Such one-
sided treatment can only disguise, but not suppress, the significance of the use-
value aspect of these relations. Eventually its importance to the reproduction of
capitalism (and social life more generally) is reasserted and, in the absence of
appropriate ways to handle the contradictions between use- and exchange-value,
crises emerge that effect a forcible re-imposition of the unity of the capital relation.
Neoliberalism tends to judge all economic activities in terms of profitability and all
social activities in terms of their contribution to capital accumulation. For it is capital
in its exchange-value aspect that is most easily disembedded from broader socio-
spatial-temporal contexts and thereby freed to 'flow' relatively smoothly through
space-time. In this sense, compared to the largely intermediary role of finance in the
structured coherence of Fordism and in the prospective coherence of a more
productivist, post-Fordist knowledge-based economy, neoliberalism promotes a
finance-dominated accumulation regime. This increases the significance of the
financial sector relative to the non-financial sector. Specifically, it tends to privilege
hypermobile financial capital at the expense of capitals that are embedded in
broader sets of social relations and/or that must be valorized in particular times and
places; it creates the conditions for differential accumulation in favour of the financial
sector based on financial innovation and speculation; and it increases inequalities of
income and wealth, limiting the impact of the wage as a source of demand (cf. Dore
2008; Krippner 2005). Its destructive impact is reinforced through the neoliberal
approach to accumulation through dispossession (especially the politically-licensed
plundering of public assets and the intellectual commons) and the dynamic of
uneven development (enabling financial capital to move on when the disastrous
effects of financialization weaken those productive capitals that have to be valorized
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in particular times and places). And it is also a powerful mechanism of world market
integration, for good or ill, affecting different varieties of capitalism in different ways
and transmitting crisis-tendencies through diverse mechanisms.
One way to interpret the rise and impact of neoliberalism is through the notion of
ecological dominance. Developed in the biological sciences, this concept concerns
the relative dominance of species in an ecological system. In the social field, it
signifies the relative dominance of one institutional order in a self-organizing ecology
of institutional orders. It refers to the capacity of one order to shape the development
of other orders more than they can shape it, including through its harmful as well as
beneficial effects. Ecological dominance is not a new way to defend ‘economic
determination in the last instance’. There is no automatic, one-sided relation of
domination in which the economy (or another subsystem) always and everywhere
imposes its logic on other subsystems. And critical conjunctures can alter the
primacy of systems, e.g., existential threats to societies from civil war or invasion. In
addition, capital cannot escape its material dependence on the existence and
performance of other institutional orders (e.g., protection of property rights and
contracts, basic education, legislation and its enforcement, scientific discoveries).
Ecological dominance is always differential, relational, contingent, and reversible and
is also open to reflection, contestation, and attempts at limitation (including self-
limitation). Indeed, as Polanyi (1944) noted for liberalism, ‘society can fight back’ and
seek to limit an ecologically dominant order by re-embedding it. He contrasted
communism, fascism, and the ‘New Deal’ in this regard; Ordoliberalism was another
response, developed in opposition to all three.
Ecological dominance involves the positive and negative externalities of the profit-
oriented, market-mediated, and crisis-prone logic of capitalism for other social
relations. It is especially relevant to the global roll out of neoliberalism as economic
project and policy set because accumulation is more dominant when capitalist
relations are disembedded from the wider society and so freed to operate relatively
unhindered by extra-economic factors and forces.
Seven mechanisms are relevant here. First, as the disembedding of the market
economy from the wider society occurs, external pressures on its organization and
performance become less significant compared with the impulses of internal
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competition. Indeed, external pressures are mediated increasingly through inter-
capitalist competition to profit from them and/or to move capital (including in liquid
form) to escape them. This increases the ‘indifference’ of the profit-oriented, market-
mediated economy to its social (and natural) environment. Second, the anarchy and
flexibility of market forces, and the role of the price mechanism in re-allocating
capital and facilitating learning, mean that capitalism tends, other things being equal,
to have greater (but by no means infinite) resilience in the face of exogenous
disturbances than other systems.
Third, because money dissociates economic transactions in time and place, capital
can pursue time-space distantiation and/or time-space compression to extend and
intensify its operations in these dimensions. This facilitates real-time integration in
and across the world market and gives capital greater flexibility to reorganize its
activities. Fourth, relatedly, global economic integration in real time tends to weaken
the structural constraints associated with other societal subsystems or institutional
orders and/or to limit their agents’ efforts to control the economy. This is especially
true of international finance, which is more tightly integrated – for better or worse –
on a global scale than other forms of capital. Key mechanisms here include capital’s
internal operations in time (discounting, insurance, risk management, futures,
derivatives, hedge funds, etc.) and/or space (capital flight, relocation, outsourcing
abroad, claims to extra-territoriality, etc.).
Fifth, compared to natural evolution, social agents can reflexively redesign their
environment, their own evolutionary potential, and even modes of social evolution. In
addition to boosting capacities for technological and economic innovation, they can
redesign the rules that govern the market economy and the manner of its social
embedding. This is highlighted in interpretations of neoliberalism as a class offensive
by capital against labor. It also informs accounts of neoliberalism as an epistemic-
intellectual project to rewrite the economic constitution (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009)
and/or to institute a form of ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ based on a ‘new
constitutionalism’ (Gill, 1995).
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and moral leadership. Transnational power blocs are especially powerful here. The
global dominance of financial capital over other fractions of capital and US
hegemony as an imperial power played key roles in constructing neoliberal reason
and marginalizing (in some cases, repressing) opposition from other economic
forces and less powerful states.
Finally, seventh, as the other factors indicate, an ecologically dominant system is the
primary source of external adaptive pressure on other systems. So, as the world
market grows more complex, the environment of other institutional orders,
institutions, organizations, and networks also becomes more complex. To remain
operationally autonomous, they, in turn, must develop greater internal complexity
(requisite variety relative to the environment) and resilience to cope with external
shocks, such as a loss of economic resources and revenues resulting from capital
mobility, economic downturns and crises. For example, the recent global recession
has forced accommodations to the logic of capital in the form of bailouts, welfare and
entitlement cuts, and major adaptations in other institutional orders. It is also seen in
‘blowback’ effects as the crisis-tendencies and contradictions of neoliberalism have
emerged in the economies that experienced neoliberal regime shifts, damaging their
own growth dynamics (e.g., USA, UK, Iceland, Ireland, and the Baltic republics).
Conclusions
Outside Germany, neoliberalism has rarely been realized in the form envisaged by
its initial Ordoliberal advocates because of the greater global influence of the
Chicago School and Washington Consensus and, more significantly, to the capacity
of financial interests to shape economic and political strategy following the crises of
different post-war modes of growth. Following the highpoint of neoliberalism in the
1990s and the global financial crisis, there is even more recognition of the need for
close regulation plus flanking and supporting mechanisms to ensure that market
failures and the effects of ‘blow-back’ neoliberalism do not undermine the market
economy and threaten the cohesion of market society. Yet less regulated variants of
neoliberalism seem to have survived in the Anglo-American heartlands thanks to the
continuing domination of finance-led accumulation in the process and practices of
crisis-management. This is related to the weight of the US economy (linked to its
pathological co-dependence with China) in the world market and with the role of the
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American state in helping to displace and defer the contradictions of neoliberalism
onto other spaces and times. In short, even after neoliberalism’s contradictions came
into play, as evidenced, inter alia, by the global financial crisis, neoliberal logic still
dominates world society through mechanisms such as the path-dependent effects of
policies, strategies, and structural shifts that occurred during the neoliberal highpoint,
continuing attempts to impose that logic despite its failures, and the measures taken
to restore finance-dominated accumulation and renew global neoliberalism after the
crisis.
The global financial crisis has prompted reflections on what might follow
neoliberalism, i.e., alternative scenarios for post-neoliberalism (Brand & Sekler,
2009; Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009). This was first seriously debated in Latin
America (Macintosh & Ruckert, 2009) and is now being raised in many other parts of
the globe. Important practical experiments are being conducted at national and
regional level in Latin America, as left-wing parties have been elected to power, and,
at the local and urban scale, in many other sites around the world. Among key issues
on the agenda are demands for re-industrialization, proposals for a Green New Deal,
and promotion of the globalizing knowledge-based economy as the material and
ideological expression of productive capital. Nonetheless, even if neoliberalism is
less pervasive overall, ecological dominance is not confined to success but includes
the impact of failure. It will prove hard to reverse the legacies of roll-back, roll-
forward, and blowback neoliberalism on a world scale and/or to tame it through new
flanking and supporting mechanisms. It is particularly worrying that the ecological
dominance of neoliberalism may be ended by the growing environmental crisis to
which it has contributed.
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