Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism1 (also spelled neo-liberalism) defies simple definition. In the Marxian literature, it has been understood in four closely related ways: as a set of ideas inspired by the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics and German Ordoliberalism and elaborated under the umbrella of the Mont Pèlerin Society; as a set of policies, institutions and practices inspired and/or validated by those ideas; as a class offensive against the workers and the poor, led by the state on behalf of the bourgeoisie in general or finance in particu- lar; and as a material structure of social, economic and political reproduction, in which case neoliberalism is the mode of existence of contemporary capitalism or a system of accumulation. The differences between these understandings of neoliberalism are symp- tomatic of the distinct methodologies and viewpoints within contemporary Marxism, their relationship with influential non-Marxist approaches in the social sciences, and the complexity of neoliberalism itself. From a Marxian perspective, these analytical tensions can be felt at three closely related levels. First, all neoliberal experiences share significant commonalities; some are relatively abstract and universal, for example the growing power of finance and the curtailment of political democracy, while others are relatively con- crete and (country-)specific, such as privatisation and the spread of non- governmental organisations into areas that, previously, were the domain of state institutions. While these commonalities imply that neoliberalism cannot be adequately described in purely contextual terms, they are also insufficiently general or historically distinctive to define a new mode of production. Inevita- bly, then, analyses of neoliberalism straddle across levels of abstraction within capitalism, including (some understanding of) such basic concepts in Marxist theory as the commodity, value and labor power all the way to conjunctural description, by way of specific understandings of exploitation, class, competi- tion, price formation, finance, the state and international trade. Second, Marxist analyses are by definition systemic, and seek to encompass the economic, sociological, institutional, political, legal, cultural, ideological and other aspects of neoliberalism. This necessarily includes how, why and to what extent the neoliberal ‘reforms’ have transformed economic and social

1 Originally published as: ‘Neoliberalism’, in D.M. Brennan, D. Kristjanson-Gural, C. Mulder, E. Olsen (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics. London: Routledge, 2017.

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reproduction after the disarticulation of the Keynesian-social democratic compact in the leading capitalist economies, the paralysis of developmental- ism, the implosion of the Soviet bloc, the dramatic transformations in China and the crises in the European periphery. This historically grounded and inter- disciplinary approach is both superior to and incompatible with the narrow focus provided by most traditional disciplines in the social sciences. Among its many advantages, it allows Marxist explanations to offer more comprehensive and logically coherent explanations of the origins of neoliberalism and its re- current crises than rival interpretations can provide. Nevertheless, the contributions of those social science disciplines inevitably remain influential in the background. This helps to explain the distinct conceptualisations of the key features of neoliberalism observed in the Marxist literature and the diverse understandings of their articulation and relations of determination. It follows that Marxist analyses can more or less legitimately reach very different conclu- sions about the vitality of contemporary capitalism, its vulnerability to crisis, the scope for electoral politics, the feasibility of radical alternatives, and so on. Third, while the schematic depiction of the key ideas underpinning neoliberalism can plausibly eschew the domain of the ‘international’ by focusing, instead, on the realm of ideas or the description of stylised institutions, ac- tually existing neoliberal experiences are completely inseparable from high- ly complex global processes, especially imperialism and globalisation. From this angle, too, neoliberalism cannot be encapsulated into a soundbite: it can neither be defined purely conceptually, nor captured inductively through the description of historical experiences. Identification of these analytical difficulties can help to contextualise the Marxist understandings of neoliberalism identified above; it can also support claims for the potential superiority of Marxist views over rival explanations of neoliberalism. For example, while Marxist analyses are necessarily systemic, class-based and nested on a grand theory (in the sense of Mills 1959), compet- ing interpretations tend to be either middle-range or descriptive, unsystematic and (sometimes despite appearances to the contrary, as in many varieties of Keynesianism) methodologically individualist.

1 Neoliberal Ideas

As a system of ideas, neoliberalism draws upon the contributions of a wide spectrum of variously talented, frequently inconsistent and sometimes spec- tacularly cantankerous writers, including Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig Erhard, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan,