Between regulation and deregulation

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neoliberalism
Going after
Neoliberalism on the loose
Jamie Peck University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jamie Peck University of Wisconsin-Madison
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The diffusion of economic freedom
Economic freedom top 10 Hong Kong, Singapore,
New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia, UK,
Denmark, Switzerland, USEconomic repression top
10 North Korea, Libya, Zimbabwe, Burma, Laos,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Venezuela,
Tajikistan

• A loss or relative lack of economic freedom
  usually calculates into a lower GDP. As the
  worlds freest economy, Hong Kong has an
  attractive environment for business and
  enterprise, whereas Zimbabwe has an environment
  that can be characterized fairly as both statist
  and anti-business.
• (Due to political instability, scoring was
  suspended this year for Iraq)

Index of economic freedom is produced in an
effort to trace the path to economic prosperity
by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street
Journal
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Positionalities

• A (somewhat jaundiced) view from somewhere

• The view from the British coalfields
• Political economic clumping
• Political economic geographies

• Search, not for a single historical-geographical
  wellspring, but for abstract tendencies
  recurrent forms of neoliberalization
• Concern with the connections and family
  resemblances between local neoliberalisms
  their extralocal features their interdepenence

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Encountering neoliberalism

• The first of many clarifications
• Neo, as in post-Keynesian
• Liberalism, as in liberal economics
• Neoliberalization as the tendential ascendancy of
  a market-oriented capital-centric political
  order over the past three decades
• Totemic policy positions (all somewhat flexible)
  include free trade, flexible labor markets,
  small government, fiscal conservatism,
  privatization, deregulation (all appropriately in
  scare quotes)

• Different readings of neoliberalism
• late 1980s Britain the politics of crisis?
• neoliberalism in the mirror of Keynesianism
• 1990s misunderestimating neoliberalism
• neoliberalism and American growth
• reproducible neoliberalisms?

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Neoliberalism all over the place?

• Perry Anderson in New Left Review
• What is the principal aspect of the last decade?
  Put briefly, it can be defined as the virtually
  uncontested consolidation, and universal
  diffusion, of neo-liberalism.
• Thomas Friedman in The lexus and the olive tree
• Ideologically speaking, there is no more mint
  chocolate chip, there is no more strawberry
  swirl, and there is no more lemon-lime. Today
  there is only free-market vanilla and North
  Korea. There can be different brands of
  free-market vanilla and you can adjust your
  society to it by going faster or slower. But, in
  the end, if you want higher standards of living
  in a world without walls, the free market is the
  only ideological alternative left. One road.
  Different speeds. But one road.

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Neoliberalism as a critics term

• As a politically correct synonym for corporate
  globalism and late capitalist hegemony?
• extended commodification of social and natural
  worlds
• financialized and externally-oriented economies
• conservative and capital-centric ideology
• As a form of near-terminal convergence a
  neoliberalized planet
• conservatives inherit the earth?
• Another world is possible
• As an omnipresent monster
• Sometimes attacking, always lurking
• Taking many forms, with (somewhat) variable
  effects
• Imposing laws of the jungle, often only
  observable in the breach

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Hunting for neoliberalism (1)

• New Labour has a long-term strategy, a
  project the transformation of social
  democracy into a particular variant of free
  market neo-liberalism. Thus New Labour has
  workedboth domestically and globallyto set the
  corporate economy free. It has renounced the
  attempts to graft wider social goals on to the
  corporate world. It has deregulated labour and
  other markets, maintained restrictive trade union
  legislation, and established weak and compliant
  regulatory regimes However, New Labour has
  adapted the fundamental neo-liberal programme to
  suit its conditions of governancethat of a
  social democratic government trying to govern in
  a neo-liberal direction while maintaining its
  traditional working-class and public sector
  middle-class support. It has modified the
  anti-statist stance of American-style
  neo-liberalism by a reinvention of active
  government
• (Stuart Hall, 2003).

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Hunting for neoliberalism (2)

• Bushs governing strength is anchored in the
  long, hard-driving movement of the right that now
  owns all three branches of the federal government
  The movement's grand ambitionone can no longer
  say grandioseis to roll back the twentieth
  century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate
  the federal government and reduce its scale and
  powers to a level well below what it was before
  the New Deal's centralization.
• Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as
  the essential predicate for dismantling the
  progressive income tax
• Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement
  system, starting with Social Security
  privatization
• Withdraw the federal government from a direct
  role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the
  poor and many other long-established social
  priorities
• Restore churches, families and private education
  to a more influential role in the nations
  cultural life
• Strengthen the hand of business enterprise
  against burdensome regulatory obligations by
  introducing voluntary goals and market-driven
  solutions
• Smash organized labor (William Greider, 2003).

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Hunting for neoliberalism (3)

• The imposition of a flat tax in Iraq is
  extremely good news. It might be a hint to the
  rest of us Somehow, its easier when you start
  from scratch (Grover Norquist, 2003)
• Starting from scratchflat tax havens Russia,
  Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Iraq

• I dont want to abolish government, I simply
  want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it
  into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub
  (Grover Norquist, 2001)

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Neoliberalism redefined

• Specific form of market-oriented politics,
  established as a reaction against Keynesianism
  and developmentalism
• Deference to naturalized, out there global
  economic forces, insulating economic
  decision-making from earthly politics
• Rather than unbridled deregulation and
  marketization, neoliberalism implies a
  qualitative reordering of state/economy relations
• Associated with an experimental policy
  repertoire, held together by a strong discourse
  of market progress

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Neoliberalization

• Neoliberalization as the mobilization of state
  power in the extension of market (or market-like)
  rule
• Abstract/generic features include privileging
• economic logics over political logics
• international policy audiences over domestic
  policy audiences
• finance capital over productive capital
• profit restoration over demand maintenance
• atomized relations over socialized relations
• elite interests over mass interests
• market distribution over social redistribution
• These abstract features are contingently realized
  across a variegated institutional landscape in
  hybrid, but connected, formations

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Creatively-destructive neoliberalization

• Processes of neoliberalization have taken
  historically-specific forms
• pre-historical period of development from
  1930s, but particularly during early 1970s
• destructive and deregulatory moment (roll back)
  dominant in 1980s, based on crude marketization
• creative and proactive moment (roll out) since
  early 1990s, involving increased deployment of
  social flanking mechanisms, both ameliorative and
  regressive
• The origins of neoliberalism are as diffuse and
  complex as its contemporary expressions

• Ordos group and the social
• market
• Chicago schools monetarism
• Mont Pelerin Societies anti-
• totalitarianism

• neoliberal state formations
• (NZ, UK, Chile)
• transnational think tank
• networks
• libertarian philosophies

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• Roll-back neoliberalization
• the destructive and deregulatory moment
• State withdrawal
• Deregulation
• Ideological conviction
• Vanguardist politicians
• Explicitly programmatic
• Economic policy
• Selective givebacks
• Cold bath monetarism
• Cuts
• Mass unemployment
• Deunionization
• Retrenchment
• Liberalization
• Structural adjustment

• Roll-out neoliberalization
• the creative and reregulatory moment
• Governance
• Experimental reregulation
• Pragmatic learning
• Technopols
• Institutionally embedded
• Social and penal policy
• Systemic regression
• Prudence
• Fiscal responsibility
• Full employability
• Flexibility
• Workfare
• Standards and codes
• Social capital

Mode of intervention Market regulation Political
style Change agents Ideological program Front
line Taxation Monetary policy Public
expenditure Labor-market regime Employment
relations Social policy Financial
regulation Development ethos
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Spatializing neoliberalism

• Uneven shift from neoliberalism-in-place to
  neoliberalization-across-space
• From disintegrated local experiments to
  integrated neoliberalization
• From Thatcherism, Reaganism, etc. as national
  neoliberal projects
• To WTO, structural adjustment, circulation of
  expert knowledges and market metrics, etc. and
  the transnationalization of neoliberalism
• From shallow to deep neoliberalization
• Increasingly interconnected hybrid formations

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Once more on neoliberalization

• Neoliberalization as process
• As an abstract tendency, this will be associated
  with unevenly realized effects (cannot simply be
  defined by empirical generalization)
• And this process is contradictory in practice,
  increasingly consumed in managing its own
  contradictions
• Neoliberalism as discourse
• It rests onand partly made coherent by
  discursive formations organized around narratives
  of competitive progress, individual freedom, and
  state failure
• These mobilize liberation narratives and market
  teleologies
• Neoliberalism as practice
• While the rhetorics appeal to a utopian
  free-market system, in practice this requires
  continuous statecraft
• Neoliberalization, consequently, is focused on
  the nexus of statecraft and market-making

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Claims, contradictions, caveats

• Neoliberalism is not a force of nature, but a
  capital-centric political project
• It is contradictory and flawed, but at the same
  time deeply entrenched and adaptable
• Local failures can be surmounted
• The rules of the game have been neoliberalized
• Fault lines and contradictions
• Contradictory dependency on the state power
• Tensions between economic rationalism, social
  conservatism, and cultural liberalism
• Proneness to financial instability
• Erosion of working-class consumption
• Contingent class formation?
• Repoliticizing centers of neoliberal
  decisionmaking

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Open questions (after neoliberalism?)

• How far can weand should westretch the concept
  of neoliberalization?
• Beyond its political economic essence?
• What if this essence is predicated on
  extra-neoliberal flanking mechanisms?
• Does neoliberalism contain its own double
  movement of market-making and market-containment?
  
• What significance should we attribute to local
  failures or, or transformations in,
  neoliberalism?
• Are some hybrids more extralocally significant
  than others?
• What does the continued evolution of hybrids
  reveal about neoliberalization-in-the-abstract?
• Are softer variants of neoliberalism, often
  posing as third-way pragmatism, more or less
  pernicious?

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And what should we make of this?