It’s Alive

Why neoliberalism is not dying, only the leftist interpretation of it

(co-written with George Hoare)

The latest item of leftist common sense, it appears, is that the neoliberal era is over – it has been destroyed by Covid. The dollars gushing out of the US Treasury’s money printers have suffocated the Reaganites; the Thatcherites have finally been forced to take their well-thumbed copies of The Road to Serfdom and fuck off, knowing that their small state project has sunk on the rocks of Covid. According to Adam Tooze, markets are over, having received their final and definitive coup de grace from Covid, with the necessity of intervention being obvious to all those with eyes to see.

That global capitalism has been brought to its knees not by the working class but by a not even particularly virulent virus will come as a relief to many on the left. The overall sentiment here seems to be that rigorous self-criticism requires us to accept that changing the world was easier than we ever thought, and that all that talk of uniting the workers of the world, building a revolutionary party and all that bullshit was an embarrassing historical sideshow. We really ought to have invested our hopes since the late 1970s not in the organised working class but in a more virological agent of change – one, thank God, that is not racist, xenophobic, and crypto-fascist like the actual working class.

Of course, in the real world, Covid has ended nothing about neoliberalism, but instead has deepened everything about it. The encasement of economic decisions from working class democracy is greater than it has ever been – there was no democratic scrutiny of massive bailout programmes anywhere in the world, and a blackmailed and fear-mongered working class was far from mobilising opposition to the new model of accumulation represented by Covid capitalism. Remembering the financial crisis and the ensuing bailout of 2010 onward with the German Banks alone receiving 646 billion Euros in tax money (following the neoliberal playbook of privatising wealth and socialising debt), the appeal to “save the health system” by restricting demand after decades of wrecking public health care rings like a paradigmatic neoliberal move. After all, the public sector is not as dear to the neoliberal mind as the Deutsche Bank. But no more is the Covid health regime about “individual responsibility”. This is about “solidarity”, and the blackmail of having to endure social ousting if one does not follow the rules is peaking with the medical racism and discriminatory politics around vaccine passports today. With biopolitical authoritarianism, neoliberalism has come onto its own.

What is over – or more accurately, has never really begun - is the Mont Pelerin society-version that largely exhausts the Left’s interpretation of neoliberalism: the freedom of the individual, the no-go of state interventionism. In fact, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the last 42 years has consciously diverted from this ideal, and not only because the economic foundations of neoliberalism are – both in theory and practice – unfeasible without a coercive and interventionist state that will also restrict “freedom of thought and expression”[1] of the individual as it sees fit. What defines neoliberalism in practice is not the utopian form that the left now declares to be dead. To the contrary: neoliberalism has never been alive like this before. But one has to see neoliberalism clearly as what it is: a political project to consolidate the conditions for capital accumulation and the power of economic elites – as pointed out by David Harvey, Gérard Dumenil and Dominique Lévy (and others). Especially the latter have shown that the neoliberal project from the beginning aimed at achieving the restoration of ruling class power after the Keynesian class compromise and “embedded liberalism” of the 40s to 60s not only gave more bargaining power to the working class, but stifled compound growth to threaten marginal gains.[2]

The neoliberal project successfully replaced the government with “governance” (a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society, as Harvey notes[3]), promotes monopolisation in the highest return-yielding industries, such as online retail and pharma, advocates the rule of experts against democratic decision-making, resorts to coercion and stifling of the “dominant narrative” by imposing restrictions to free speech up to intervening in the personal life of individuals – all of this within the institutional framework of the state, without which it could not even so much as blink. It therefore also reconfigured the role of the state to answer to the interests of corporations, and not to the political sovereign – the people. Just Google it! (you get the pun).

The marriage of statism and neoliberalism is neither forced nor artificial, but a pragmatic one, aiming at nothing but the complete economic, political, and moral defeat of the working class in order to further restore the class power of elites. The contradiction between the neoliberal project and the state exists only in theory, not in practice. And as we know today, while the stupefying numbers regarding the upward transfer in private wealth since 2020 roll in one by one, there is not a period in modern history that the project of neoliberalism has been as successful in doing so as with the rise of authoritarian biopolitics. All of this is accompanied by the almost “pre-emptive” crushing of resistance, with the help of the lackeys in left-leaning media and academia who regularly mistake the bourgeois state for a well-meaning cohort of tea-drinking and jumper-knitting volunteers for Amnesty International terribly concerned about human rights and health, and ready to denounce anyone daring to express opposition to this convoluted view of the bourgeois state as a “red-brown” third positionist or Querdenker.

Perhaps more presciently than anyone else, in 2005 Harvey saw the alleged tension between neoliberal policy and state authoritarianism as a pseudo problem (Scheinproblem). While “the more neoliberalism veers towards authoritarianism, the harder it becomes to maintain its legitimacy”[4], it implements structural preconditions that clearly make it impossible to make “choice” a vector in personal liberties. “It is one thing to maintain, for example, that my health-care status is my personal choice and responsibility, but quite another when the only way I can satisfy my needs … is through paying exorbitant premiums to … highly profitable insurance companies. When these companies even have the power to define new categories of illness to match new drugs coming on the market then something is clearly wrong.”[5] Just as clearly we have to concede that if these lines were written today, Harvey would have been called a conspiracy theorist or Querdenker.

The early fears of Karl Polanyi that liberalism will turn authoritarian, forceful, and anti-democratic at the very moment when “humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to offer freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes”[6] have been grimly and more forcefully than ever confirmed with the Covid regime.[7] But this development has never been a contingent one. It is within the logic of neoliberal rule itself – a structurally necessary feature of capital under the pressure of new accumulation regimes, be it the Covid biopolitical state or the Green New Deal. That is why it has never been contentious for a Marxist like David Harvey to clearly see that “if necessary … the neoliberal state will resort to coercive legislation and policing tactics (anti-picketing rules, for example) to disperse or repress collective forms of opposition to corporate power. Forms of surveillance and policing multiply: in the US, incarceration became a key state strategy to deal with problems arising among discarded workers and marginalized populations.”[8]

But this view of the marriage between neoliberalism and authoritarianism seems to be highly contentious with the leftists in the Covid era: for it is the Left, unsurprisingly, who are the true Thatcherites, the true Hayekians, and the true Reaganites. They, as partisans of a state that all Marxists know to be not neutral, celebrate it as giving them the mother’s milk of the transfers to their NGOs, or, in a Corbynite fever dream, as providing (universal! fast!) broadband to the huddled and unconnected masses, were only ever able to imagine neoliberalism as a project that attacks the state. Petty bourgeoisism is a heady and addictive drug; here, the Leftist takes a fat line of theory at the Verso loft and suddenly vivid shapes and notions appear: austerity is over because of Covid relief… Johnson has stolen all of Corbyn’s best policies… the world is turned upside down and neoliberalism is over…

The irony of this situation is that it reveals the truth that leftists have, shame-ridden, tried to hide over the past five years. Because leftists like neoliberalism; they need neoliberalism. It provides them with a nemesis, and a source of all evils, a locus of all enmities. But it’s also true that they hate neoliberalism, their politics are all about opposition to neoliberalism. Declaring neoliberalism to be over allows them to draw a definitive line (it was something which only a Black Swan virus could beat after all), and to redouble efforts in fighting the real enemies: the fascists, the extreme Right, the Covid deniers, and the working class. The Right might have been sneaky in taking all the Left’s best ideas, but that is what hegemony looks like – first they laugh at you, then they steal your policies, and then you win. For every clear-headed person it is obvious that the ease with which austerity was discarded by the ruling class in the face of what should have been a trivial public health challenge shows how little the ruling class ever needed austerity for austerity’s sake. It is working class democracy that they fear, and any danger of that through “populism” was very successfully dismantled as lockdowns made political activity of any sort illegal. Well, almost any political activity, that is – leftists who bravely resisted the fascist non-mask-wearer by berating a temporarily expanded audience on their social media home turf were an exception. It was only leftists, then, who ever needed austerity as a thing to struggle against and as a way to distinguish their own pro-state neoliberalism from the anti-state neoliberalism of the Right. It is the Left’s neoliberalism, then, that’s over.

Neoliberalism is here to stay, we could say, but the branding is now different. After issuing a hasty but ultimately successful product recall, the ruling class (who made billions from Covid, who lived comfortably breaking any and all social distancing rules while saluting “essential workers”, and who are now going to push the “podbug” life of living in our pods and eating our bugs) has now been able to rebrand neoliberalism in the US and the UK as Something Completely New. It’s a Levelling Up, a Build Back Better, a Communities Fund, a State Investment and a whole new ballgame. The reality, if it needed saying, has always been that the working class alone can break us out of neoliberalism.  Anything else is a shittier version of what we had before, at a higher cost for the side of labour.

Neoliberalism? It’s not a download anymore - it’s a subscription model.

[1]          Mont Pelerin Society declaration 1947, at https://www.montpelerin.org/statement-of-aims/ [2]          See e.g. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, Cambridge 2004. [3]          David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford 2005. [4]          Harvey 2005, 77. [5]          Harvey 2005, 79-80. [6]          George W. Bush, “Securing Freedom’s Triumph”, New York, Norton 2003. [7]          See The Great Transformation, Boston, 1954, pp. 256-8. [8]          Harvey 2005, p. 77.