Last Orders

The Dutch journalist and author Rutger Bregman has been in the papers recently puffing his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History. Following the sunny optimism of his advocacy of a liberal UBI in Utopia for Realists, his latest is a Pinkerish celebration of human progress and decency: a humanist teleology that has inevitably found favour with the liberal establishment. One of the central parables (it's that sort of book) is about the "real" Lord of the Flies, a group of Tongan youth who survived a 15-month shipwreck in 1965-6 through cooperation and ingenuity, which stands in clear contrast to William Golding's bestseller (which was an actual parable, rather than an exercise in misanthropy that revealed its author's tendency towards child abuse and Nazism, as Bregman bizarrely imagines). Just as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is emblematic of the transition from mercantilism to capitalism and imperialism, so this meta event (forget the book - that's not important) is typical of contemporary neoliberalism, from Bregman's privileged position (he has spoken truth to power at Davos, naturally) through the amelioration of selfish human capital by pro-social teamwork represented by the lads' tale to the market for the film rights.

Bregman is typical of the media milieu now asking whether neoliberalism "is gasping its last breath" in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic (of course liberals like Joe Stiglitz have been asking the question since the millennium). He explains its original triumph in the 1970s as the result of crisis (barely explained) prompting governments to adopt "the ideas that are lying around", in Milton Friedman's phrase. This obviously obscures the reality that classical liberal ideas about prices and revealed preference were current from the 1940s, even as he provides a whistlestop tour of the history of the Mont Pelerin Society, but it also ignores that what made liberalism "neo" was the splicing of free markets and unfettered capital with the activist government and welfare state that arose in Western Europe and the US in the twentieth century. As to the ideas that are lying around today, his survey alights on the need to tax wealth more (Piketty, Saez and Zucman), to leverage the entrepreneurial capacity of the state (Mazzucato), and to be more forgiving of public debt (he cites MMT advocate Stephanie Kelton). All of these are "radical" ideas only insofar as they nudge up against the outer limits of conventional liberal thought. There is no suggestion here that property relations or the power of the state are intrinsically problematic.

Neoliberalism will remain hegemonic until the material and political conditions that gave rise to it - the combination of captalism and democracy - change. A crisis may interrupt that hegemony, even require it to be temporarily suspended, as happened in 2009 and is happening again today, but the very responsiveness of capital and the state in a period of crisis is an indicator of its persistence. If Gordon Brown hadn't "saved the world", somebody else would have. The material conditions and the levers of state power were in place, and the commitment to international cooperation was instinctive. Neoliberalism's champions during the twentieth century emphasised its internationalism for two reasons. First, because that reflected the material reality of rapidly advancing globalisation and the free movement of capital. Second, because it provided a way of disciplining nation states (The Washington consensus, "market sentiment" etc). That second reason in turn meant that a revolution against neoliberalism was unlikely to succeed at a national level. As global revolution was now improbable, and frankly inconceivable after 1989, it was reasonable to think that this marked "the end of history". 

The political rise of the xenophobic right over the last decade does not represent a turning away from neoliberalism but a conservative reframing of it in order to secure democratic legitimacy ("neo-illiberalism", perhaps). Likewise, the progressive proposals for a modest tax on wealth, for greater pro-social state activism and a more sophisticated view of public finances are a liberal reframing that seeks democratic legitimacy for the continuation of the capitalist system. At the material level, the nationalistic turn of neoliberalism reflects the slowing of globalisation since 2000, measured in terms of trade and complex supply chains, and the political ramifications of the global savings glut and its associated current account deficits. The former has fuelled divisions over international dependency (most starkly in the debate over Brexit), while the latter has led to talk of "trade wars" and competitive international rebalancing, employing the language of a century ago while blithely ignoring the ground reality of a highly-integrated world system. Globalisation is running out of puff because it has succeeded, not because it has failed. 

Neoliberalism isn't beleagured, let alone in reverse. It is adapting its form while preserving its central tenets, such as the universal applicability of markets, the superiority of the price signal over planning, and the management of atomised labour as human capital. All of this is visible in the British government's immigration bill, with its emphasis on the demands of "the economy", its dropping of targets (proving that these were merely a technocratic fetish) and its adoption of a points-based valuation of the individual (you as an applicant now have your own target). The Conservative government will not regress to some older political order, such as authoritarian nationalism, even if it does adopt some of the characteristics and indulge the fantasies of reactionary groups on the right. What it will do is carefully read public opinion in order to assess the optimum degree of xenophobia or authoritarianism to deploy, as we've seen in its decision to exempt workers in the NHS and care sector from the migrant healthcare charge. This is being presented as a victory for virtue (and "forensic" opposition) by the liberal press, but it's merely a distraction from a proposed system that is far more liberal than conservative.

The "return of the state" commentary that has become popular during the pandemic is partly an anticipation of a more interventionist Tory government, committed to regional rebalancing and large infrastructure projects, and partly a relief at the end of the Corbyn interlude and the associated assumption that managerialism and technocracy have reasserted their grip on the Labour party. This nostalgia for the high neoliberal era is fundamentally no different to the nostalgia for "our finest hour" or the "spirit of '45". The past is always employed as a lever for the present, but our selective use of it clearly indicates an agenda, and what the current agenda points to is the maintenance of the neoliberal ideal of government as the guarantor of markets and the manager of human capital. For example, consider how fetishising the "national story" can be used to reconcile the conflicting demands of the people for social protection and the demands of capital for deregulation and personal risk-taking, which has reached surreal heights in the UK with the government's strategy of elevating the defence of the NHS above the defence of the public.

Viewed through the prism of humanism, neoliberalism is always with us. This is true in two senses: the liberal tenet of the responsible and free individual and the associated idea of governmentality - the way in which society is managed towards an assumed optimum without recourse to the blunt discipline of systematic coercion or the prohibitions and obligations of law. For Michel Foucault, homo economicus was not merely a rational agent, produced by Enlightenment theories such as Utilitarianism, but a form of subjectivity whose genealogy can be traced back to the displacement of the pagan view of sexuality as experience (ars erotica) by the Christian hermeneutics of the self and its techniques of confession and the pastorate, which eventually leads to the scientia sexualis of the 19th century and the biopower of capitalism. He didn't live to see the FitBit, but he wouldn't have been surprised by that "technology", with its combination of penance, personal confession and competition.

For all its softly disciplinary nature, Foucault also saw the emancipatory potential of neoliberalism for minorities: "a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players,and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals" (the Birth of Biopolitics, pg 259-60). This is more than an oblique celebration of the San Francisco bathhouse scene of the 1970s. The key point here is that concept of environmental intervention: the network of power relations that simultaneously liberates the individual from older forms of subjectivity (such as Christian guilt or the normative discipline of the Enlightenment) while constraining social action against the system itself. Foucault was attracted to the former - the ability to create the subject without recourse to law or morality - but he didn't neglect the latter. 

What Foucault's reading of Gary Becker and other Chicago School thinkers suggested was that neoliberalism provided a space for resistance and autonomy in a way that previous regimes of governmentality didn't. This can be bracketed as simply another contradiction of capitalism, but it also helps explain the tenacity of neoliberalism today. For many (albeit in reality predominantly white, western, well-off etc) this has been an era of personal freedom and rapid material gain. The social liberalism that produced gay marriage and "wokeness" has been substantial and will not be reversed by atavistic bigotry. The ultimate winner of the culture wars is certain, if only because of the obvious generational divide that the conflict reflects. Like it or not, this "progress" has been a triumph for neoliberalism. Consequently, we shouldn't be surprised if there is a reluctance to concede that neoliberalism is passing from history, nor that many staunch defenders of the status quo still claim that neoliberalism isn't even a thing, which is the best evidence of its continuing hegemony.