The Facts and Acts of Neoliberalism
Mohsen Adollahi, Ph.D.
Assistant professor of political science at Lorestan University, Khorram Abad, Iran
Abstract Neoliberalism, a current political economic paradigm in 21st century, has been described as an ideological dominant culture in that when neoliberal policies are criticized a common response is that “there is no alternative”. Neoliberalism is largely unused by the public in the United States, but it shows a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal benefit. It is embraced by parties across the political arena, from right to left, in that the interests of wealthy investors and large corporations define social and economic policy. The free market, private enterprise, consumer choice, entrepreneurial initiative, deleterious effects of government regulation, and so on, are main principles of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal economic policy, which serves the interests of the wealthy elite, is good for everyone but neoliberal economic policy has created social and economic inequalities among individuals and nations. The wealth gap of neoliberalism is particularly large for African Americans and Latinos, as long as all other third world countries. Neoliberal economic policies have reproduced these inequalities among nations. These policies have damaged the economic sectors of countries like Brazil and Mexico, whereas local elites and transnational corporations are the main interest groups. Neoliberalism also works as a political system but the citizens remain spectators, diverted from any effective participation in decision making. Neoliberal democracy is a minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. The neoliberalism in capitalist regimes, in the late 1970s, has been subjected to a number of insightful analyses and a growing number of wide-ranging critiques. It is defined by the ascendency of financial over industrial and other forms of capital, increasing indebtedness, public and private, rapidly growing and extreme wealth inequalities, increasing the rate of financial crises and ideological commitment to welfare state and privatization of public goods and benefits. Key words: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, Democracy, Political Economy, Capitalism, trade
1. Introduction and the facts Neoliberalism is, in the first instance, a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions for their own benefit. Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common. Almost all states, from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in other instances in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly. Post-apartheid South Africa quickly embraced neoliberalism, and even contemporary China, as we shall see, appears to be headed in this direction. Furthermore, the advocates of the neoliberal way now occupy positions of considerable influence in education, in the media, in corporate boardrooms and financial institutions, in key state institutions as treasury departments and the central banks, and also in those international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, that regulate global finance and trade. It has become hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. (Harvey, 2005: 11-12) Efforts to offer a comprehensive definition of neoliberalism are frustrated by different views existing within this philosophical and political camp. Based on a range of common principles that form no more than a smallest common denominator, a diverse group of academics and intellectuals have succeeded in establishing and developing a family of neoliberalism, including the Austrian and Chicago Schools, Ordoliberalismus as well as Libertarianism, some of which have been accommodated in quite diverse political systems and by now inform the positions of both advocates and critics of neoliberalism to a greater or lesser extent. In addition, influential contemporary paradigms that claim to be critical of neoliberalism, e.g. communitarianism, display a certain amount of overlap and compatibility with neoliberal philosophies. (Plehwe et al, 2006:2) It is an ideology which legitimates individual competition and questions collective structures; it is a political project of institutional transformation, against any attempt to institute collectivism and against the types of capitalism, which had resulted from the various social- democratic compromises, in particular, in the post-war period, such as redistributive social protection, workers collective rights or legal protection of employment and economic status; it can also be seen as a ‘form of existence (Dardot and Laval, 2009), as a norm of life characterized by a generalized competition with others, than being defined as the set of discourses, practices, devices which determine a new mode of governance of humans
according to the general principle of competition. Neoliberalism is distinct from classical liberalism and above all from the simple laissez faire vulgate which conceives self-regulating markets as a natural reality and consequently regards public intervention as a negative of the market. This vulgate propagates a discourse based on simplistic opposites such as state versus market, constraint versus freedom, closed versus open or flexible versus rigid (Bourdieu and Wacquandt, 2001). Moreover, Neoliberalism is a revival of liberalism. This definition suggests that liberalism, as a political ideology, has been absent from political discussions and policy-making for a period of time, only to emerge in more recent times in a reincarnated form. It suggests, in other words, that liberalism has undergone a process of initial growth, intermediary decline, and finally a recent rejuvenation. Alternatively, neoliberalism might be perceived of as a distinct ideology, descending from, but not identical to liberalism proper. Under this interpretation, neoliberalism would share some historical roots and some of the basic vocabulary with liberalism in general. This interpretation places neoliberalism in the same category as American neo-conservatism, which is an ideology or political persuasion somewhat similar to and yet markedly different from much conventional conservative thought, and often hardly recognizable as a genuinely conservative ideology (Wolfson 2004, Fukuyama 2006). The concept of neoliberalism suggests a particular account of the development of liberal thought. It suggests that liberalism was at one point in time an influential political ideology, but that it at some point lost some of its significance, only to revive itself in more recent times in a new form. As it turns out, however, liberalism has dominated normative political thought as well as practical politics in the West for the past sixty years, up to the point in which it has become a shared inheritance among political theorists, professional politicians, and nearly all significant political movements in its native countries. This is attested by the fact that hardly anyone speaks out against freedom or democracy anymore, which are the primary values of liberalism, as identified in the dictionary definition quoted above. Neoliberalism could therefore scarcely be understood as the recovery of a lost tradition of liberal, political thought. It should, in our view, instead be seen as an ideology different from, and often opposed to, what is more commonly described as liberalism. But Classical liberalism is often associated with the belief that the state ought to be minimal, which means that practically everything except armed forces, law enforcement and other non-excludable goods ought to be left to the free dealings of its citizens, and the organizations they freely choose to establish and take part in. This kind of state is sometimes described as a night-watchman state, as the sole purpose of the minimal state is to uphold the most fundamental aspects of public order. (Ibid, 3-4). David says that Harvey neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defense, police and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist, then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions for their own benefit. (Harvey
2005:2) Anna-maria Blomgren also believes that neoliberalism is commonly thought of as a political philosophy giving priority to individual freedom and the right to private property. It is not, however, the simple and homogeneous philosophy it might appear to be. It ranges over a wide expanse in regard to ethical foundations as well as to normative conclusions. (Blomgren, 1997:224) Under Blomgren’s view, Hayek, Friedman and Nozick all give separate theoretical groundings to neoliberal evaluations and policies. Friedman is, for instance, on the surface a typical representative of consequentialist neoliberalism. He seems to favor neoliberal policies such as deregulation, privatization, and radical tax cuts because of the perceived positive consequences such courses of political action will have for the overall economic situation. When Blomgren delves deeper into the matter, however, she finds that his policy recommendations are actually ultimately based on a conception of natural law. This means that Friedman in the end wants to bring about the neoliberal package of policies and economic practices because human beings are by nature social, and that their social nature dictates a certain way of organizing society which places a great emphasis on individuals being free to choose (cf. Friedman, 1962; 1980). Hayek, on a similar note, comes across as a more conservative type of neoliberal, who, while approximating at places a utilitarian argument in favor of neoliberalism, also at the end of the day bases his political thought on an idea of natural law. Central to Hayek’s theory is the notion of a ‘spontaneous order’ of social life, which is better than any kind of artificially created order when it comes down to securing individual liberty and well-being (cf. especially Hayek, 1944; 1973). Nozick is, finally, in his earlier works in political philosophy at least, a representative of a deontological kind of neoliberalism. He advocates much of the same policies as Friedman and Hayek, but grounded in an idea which states that a set of immutable natural rights have been conferred to all human beings, and that these rights makes it difficult to see that the state could have any legitimate role to play at all (Nozick, 1974). Nevertheless, Nozick wants the state to rectify past injustices, even if this will mean much government intervention in the economy. Unlike Friedman and Hayek, Nozick does not allude to the purportedly good consequences of neoliberal policies when he argues in their favor, but is instead focused on such policies being the right measures for creating a society in accordance with his conception of justice and natural rights. In short, neoliberalism is not a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties, but it is a name for a premise that has come to regulate all we do and believe. That competition is the only legitimate organizing principle for human activity. Neoliberalism is seen as a stage in the development of capital, which travelled through different phases to take the current avatar in order to expand and sustain itself. At a much more general level it is seen as a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. This, neoliberals argue, can be done by minimizing the role of state as an agent of people and, instead, making it a facilitator for expansion of the rule of capital. In this sense, capital, through the state, uses all its resources and structures at its disposal to achieve its expansionary In order to achieve its goal “neo-Liberalism gives priority to capital as money rather than capital as production. In a period of rapid restructuring this has the advantage of enabling policies to be adopted which clear the decks, removing subsidies and protection, and freeing up capital from fixed positions. Hayek is the grandfather of neoliberalism. In the next part of this article, I am trying to have a survey on theory of neoliberalism.
2. Neoliberalism in Theory The success of post-war capitalism rested on a distinct structural, institutional, and class foundation. This state led monopoly capitalism and was marked by the socialization of economic activity, in which the state took an active role in the accumulation process. Economic socialization helped offset the unproductive costs of accumulation and the reproduction of the labor force. Through a wide variety of non-market mechanisms, the state balanced the social nature of production with the private appropriation of capital. As the 1974–82 economic slump dragged on, and Keynesian orientation failed, employers and their governments increasingly focused on the perceived causes of economic rigidities and market imperfections. In reconfiguring the conditions of profitability, the political strategy of neoliberalism aimed to reestablish capital’s structural and relational power vis-a-vis labor. Neoliberalism intended to reorder the political economy of post-war capitalism – modifying its existing class relations, its organizing structures, and its institutions of accumulation. Although the socialization of economic activity was profitable for a time, it did generate impediments to industrial adjustment, capital movement, labor market flexibility, and public sector efficiency. During the 1974–82 crisis, economic socialization was equated with market impairment and distortion, forcing employers to reconsider what Marx called capital’s inner nature and essential characteristic – competition. For capital, competition embodies the tendency toward expansion of the mass of capital value at the same time as it also guarantees a form of reciprocal interaction (Marx 1973; Shaikh 1980). Competition can act as a mechanism by which workers and units of capital are compelled to act. With neoliberalism, capital and its agents re-injected market competition by redefining the boundaries of government intervention. Through the workings of this coercive competition, there were significant shifts in the relational and structural power between collective actors and in state-economy relations. Neoliberal coercive competition changes the boundaries of capital accumulation at the same time as it now regulates economic activity. Neoliberalism, in the texts that have critically confronted it, is generally understood as not just a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology in terms of its conditions and effects. In terms of its conditions, it is an ideology that is generated not from the state or a dominant class, but from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended across other social spaces, the marketplace of ideas, to become an image of society. In addition, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a reality; human nature. As Fredric Jameson writes, summing up this connection and the challenge it poses. The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that can-not be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time. A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social existence rather than a political program. Thus it is not enough to contrast neoliberalism as a political program, analyzing its policies in terms of success or failure. An examination of neoliberalism entails a reexamination of the fundamental problematic of ideology, the intersection of power, concepts, modes of existence and subjectivity. It is in confronting neoliberalism that the seemingly abstract debates of the last thirty years, debates between poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and neo-Marxists such as Antonio Negri about the nature of power and the relation between ideologies or discourses and material existence, cease to be abstract doctrines and become concrete ways of comprehending and transforming the present.
3. Neoliberalism and act of Democracy A main question is whether neoliberalism is an act of democracy or not? Neoliberalism as an ideology, set of ideas, a form of governance, a policy agenda, a project, or culture is facing many different challenges. Despite the competing definitions, majority of writers about neoliberalism would probably agree that at a minimum focus on individual responsibility rather than collective needs. (Macgregor, 2005) and tends to be characterized by a hostility to the public realm representing a combination of anti-welfare and anti-state programs. So, neoliberalism is a set of ideas to influence the formulation and implementation of social policy, focusing on the permutations and manifestations of actually existing neoliberalism. I understand how neoliberal social policies are shaped by the specific context and local histories and also political struggles as main obstacles, mostly to be concerned concretely with austerity policies and welfare cuts, and sometimes with privatization policies, and with increased poverty and inequality as a result of such policies. Another consideration is the quality of democracy which they understood as undermined by the weak accountability of political elites and the growing influence of corporations and private interests in policy shaping. Moreover, the concept of freedom is integral to the whole conception of human rights. Human rights are essentially designed to guarantee human freedom; freedom to express your religious or political thoughts and to experience your own cultural identity. These rights are bestowed with a kind of naturalism. They lean on the notion of a rational subject, who needs freedom to exercise rationality. It is worth mentioning then that it thus contains within itself a kind of individualism which lends itself to the individualizing demands of global capital. On the other hand, because of legal articulation of human rights in the, human rights imply a suspicion of government as a force to act against freedom. Human rights were conceived as protection of certain freedoms from governments. We can observe a similarity between human rights and civil society, which Foucault saw emerging in the 18th Century, and this perhaps feels a little uncomfortable. So, a number of scholars of neoliberalism argue that civil society actors, and in particular social movements, have an important role to play in articulating challenges against neoliberal ideas and policies. Crouch refers to civil society as a fourth force which is beyond the triangular confrontation among the state, market, and the corporation and which can criticize, harry, and expose the misdeeds and abuses of the cozy triangle (Crouch 2011: x). Thatcher and Schmidt argue that there has not been a Polanyian countermovement to the rise of neoliberalism, but hold out hope that new ideas and interest coalitions will emerge and identify social movements as demonstrating the greatest move away from neo-liberal ideas, at least at the level of political discourse (Thatcher and Schmidt, 2013: 421-426). Critical scholars have examined the relationship between democracy and neoliberalism, arguing that democracy will be in crisis until such time as the problems created by capitalism and neoliberalism are addressed. They warn of the hollowing out of the democratic state by late neoliberal capitalism and recognize the importance of movements in challenging prevailing views, but acknowledge how inequalities of power between movements and market and state institutions may limit their impact (Badiou and Gauchet, 2016). Accordingly, when the financial crisis that began in August 2007 eventually submerged the world economy, many commentators began to predict that the end of an epoch had come. The great crises of capitalism had tended invariably to generate a new form of governing and the wider context in 2008 appeared likewise to suggest the beginning of a new era. However, while the resistance to neoliberalism had a unique opportunity to prevail, it only emerged weakened from the crisis, a crisis that eventually resulted in a series of superficial regulatory changes. Although change had previously
characterized the history of the modern art of governance. It is the preservation of neoliberal model as if capable of resisting opposition under any circumstances and emerge strengthened from such resistance. The succeeding crises helped neoliberalism to strengthen its hold. Thinking to democratic politics in the context of the city-region is difficult to avoid the issue of neoliberal globalization. When democracy is used in the common-sense fashion mentioned in the literature review, democratization resists neoliberal achievements. So a return to pre-neoliberal era, more nearly social-democratic regimes in Europe that seem to have been toppled by neoliberal thinkers. Neoliberal achievements is an equally complex set of political and economic processes, so it is not possible to define in general what their relationship is. There is a great potential in using democratic principles to imagine alternatives to neoliberal development. Consequently, asking the first question about democracy helps to answer the second about democracy resisting neoliberalism. Democracy in this frame has close partnership with the open markets, individual economic agents, and property rights associated with the neoliberal agenda. If we imagine the people to be those currently marginalized by the capitalist global economy, then democratization would mean a thoroughgoing end to capitalist economics. Such a result would clearly be antithetical to neoliberalism, in whatever sense we might use that term. However, the socio-democratic alternative to neoliberalism is currently in such rapid ideological retreat. It is difficult to see how it holds much immediate pragmatic potential. For other forms of democracy, the relationship would be less obvious. Participatory democracy’s stress on process could produce a range of outcomes. Citizens building their democratic capacities through political participation could produce hostile and friendly decisions to any of neoliberalism’s principles. The goal is to include poor and uneducated residents in decisions at the urban and regional scale, so they will be able to follow their interests. As a result, to the extent poor to advocate for their interests, they directly counteract neo-liberalization’s tendency to increase capital’s influence over public investment decisions. One participant might advocate greater environmental regulation, but other participants might raise the specter of capital flight and the loss of jobs in local economy. The deliberative model is similar to the participatory model, except that it lacks the latter’s progressive overtones. Here the emphasis is less on mobilizing and developing the political potential of people and more on generating inter-subjective understanding, on coming to a shared framing and solution to public problems. For deliberative democrats, it is critical to seek out and include as wide a range of stakeholders. Therefore, deliberative democracy, managed thoughtfully, can be a particularly powerful tool for advancing the neoliberal agenda. It cannot produce a raw, Dickensian neoliberalism in which corporations rule absolutely, but produce a much more sustainable neoliberalism in which capital is able to consolidate its recent gains in influence. No fundamental challenge to the existence and interests of capitalism, e. g. revolutionary democrats imagine, could be brought successfully under the deliberative plan, since public decision makings cannot run strongly counter to the interests of any certain group. While radical pluralists share some of deliberative democracies on players remaining in the game, they are far more attuned to the need to restructure power relations in more progressive directions. Also radical pluralists reject as antidemocratic the unitary vision of revolutionary democracy. However, they also reject deliberative democracy’s claim that it is possible, through better communication, to reach public decisions that equally benefit all groups. Rather, all politics are seen as struggles for hegemony in which some groups win and others lose. Such a politics cannot take the form of a war of existence in which some groups and social relations are expunged from the polity, as in the revolutionary model. For radical
pluralists, the goal of such movements would not be revolution. Here radical pluralism shares important elements in which urban social movements agitate for greater collective service provision and consumption. Such a democratic politics resists neoliberalism in the sense that it advocates a radical pluralizing of power in the current political economy. The current hegemony of neoliberal tenets such as property rights, capitalist economic relations, deregulation and competitive relations among cities would be challenged. However, neoliberal strategies could be quite a lot more compatible with radical pluralism. And a revolutionary democrat would point out that radical pluralism qualifies a more complete opposition to neoliberalism, which revolutionary democracy offers. 4. Conclusion 1. Neoliberalism is a revival of the liberal doctrine of the 18th century, which became popular again in the 1970s. The main values that neoliberalism advocates are individual freedom and liberty, and its followers believe that this individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved by an institutional structure, made up of strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. A world in which individual initiative can develop. The implication of that is that the state should not be involved in the economy too much, but it should use its power to preserve private property rights and the institutions of the market and promote those on the global stage if necessary. So the role of the state changes under neoliberalism from controlling the market into serving it. In order to expand the market activity, it has to be freed of any interference. Neoliberalism is a theory that was developed in opposition to utilitarianism, communism, fascism and all repressive ideologies reducing individual freedoms, but also in opposition to the strong welfare states which were constituted in postwar Europe. The emphasis on the individual is the basis of neoliberalism. During Margaret Thatcher, a number of neoliberal reforms including tax reduction, reforming exchange rates, deregulation and privatization were achieved, these reforms were continued and supported by John Major. They were largely left unaltered when the latter returned to government in 1997. Instead, the Labor government under Tony Blair finished off a variety of uncompleted privatization and deregulation measures. Adam Smith Institute, a United Kingdom-based free market think tank and lobbying group formed in 1977 and a major driver of the aforementioned neoliberal reforms, officially changed its libertarian label to neoliberal in October 2016. Although neoliberal achievements in UK, with main drivers such as financial services, retail, property and construction in the private sector, and education, health, and universities in the public sector had remarkable success for economy from 1990s to 2007, but it couldn't overcome the contradiction between debt and growth. However, despite these obstacles, the problems are not intractable. It is worth recalling the last major political‐economic transition. The Keynesian welfare state worked exceptionally well during the long postwar progressive programs. Democratically elected politicians found true countercyclical spending to lead to an upward spending ratchet. Consequently, governments were faced with rising distributional demands and reduced resources. Politics changed to an upset state and analysts began to speak of democracies. Inflation increased wage demands, outpacing productivity gains, which undermined competitiveness and profitability. Attempts in the UK to assert authority over or negotiate with the unions to control wages failed. By increasing the crisis, confidence in the model waned. Leaders turned to monetarism and the market, absolving themselves of responsibility for distributional decisions. The result was Thatcher, Reagan, and neoliberalism. Britain and America were not capable of managing the crisis of 1970s within the Keynesian theory. In USA, Early roots of neoliberalism were laid in the 1970s during Carter administration. This trend continued into the 1980s
under Reagan administration, which included tax cuts, increased defense spending, financial deregulation and trade deficit expansion. During the 1990s, the Clinton administration also embraced neoliberalism by supporting the passage of NAFTA, continuing the deregulation of the financial. The neoliberalism of the Clinton administration differs from that of Reagan as the Clinton administration purged neoliberalism of neo- conservatism positions on militarism, family values, opposition to multiculturalism and neglect of ecological issues. As the neoliberal economies of the UK and US embraced the market, many European economies transformed rather than discarded the Keynesian welfare state, while the political systems, social structures, and economic institutions were not well suited to a corporatist orientation. They were facing a moment of choice whether to follow neoliberalism or not, and how to abandon it? Any political and economic transitions is so difficult, damaging and expensive. The postwar welfare state was accompanied by balance of payments crises and rationing. Thatcher’s neoliberal program faced real unemployment and political demands. The effect of neoliberalism on global health, particularly the aspect of international aid, involves key players such as NGOs, IMF and the World Bank. Neoliberal emphasis has been placed on free markets and privatization which has been tied to the new policy agenda, in which NGOs are seen as being able to provide better social welfare than governments. International NGOs have been promoted to fill holes in public services created by the World Bank and IMF through their promotion of structural adjustment programs, which reduce government health spending and are unsustainable. The reduced health spending and the gain of the public health sector by NGOs causes the local health system to become fragmented, undermines local control of health programs and contributes to local social inequality between NGO workers and local individuals. The argument asks whether there is an alternative in reforming neoliberalism or not and which framework corresponds much more appropriately with recent political and economic sectors. Instead of following ideal and utopian alternatives, we should make a real and practical plan. Theretofore, any deconstructive policy is not recommended.
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