Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism

Propaganda and finance in Al Qaeda and Islamic State

Imogen Richards

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526143228
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Few social and political phenomena have been debated as frequently or fervidly as neoliberalism and neo-jihadism. Yet, while discourse on these phenomena has been wide-ranging, they are rarely examined in relation to one another. Neoliberalism and Neo-jihadism examines political-economic characteristics of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century 'neo-jihadism'. Drawing on Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist ideas, it investigates how the neo-jihadist organisations, Al Qaeda and Islamic State, engage with the late modern capitalist paradigm of neoliberalism in their anti-capitalist propaganda and quasi-capitalist financial practices. An investigation of documents and discourses reveals interactions between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism characterised by surface-level contradiction, and structural connections that are both dialectical and mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism here is argued to constitute an underlying 'status quo', while neo-jihadism, as an evolving form of political organisation, is perpetuated as part of this situation.Representing differentiated, unique, and exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, Al Qaeda and Islamic State are demonstrated to be characteristic of the mutually constitutive nature of 'power and resistance'. Just as resistance movements throughout modern history come to resemble the forms of power they sought to overthrow, so too have Al Qaeda and Islamic State reconstituted the dominant political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism they mobilised in response to.

1

Neoliberalism, Bourdieu, and neo-Marxism

In Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism, AQ and IS’s propaganda and finance are analysed through a lens of Bourdieusian theory and with reference to a neo-Marxist interpretation of neoliberalism. Ideological and philosophical tenets of Marxist-Leninism are relevant to the historical dimension of this book’s investigation, including the evolution of neo-jihadism since the formation of AQ in 1988, at the close of the Cold War (Burke 2004). Marxist theory has long been the dominant epistemological critique of capitalism, and neo-Marxist ideas are a foundational antagonist of neoliberal capitalism. They are to this end reflected in popular anti-capitalist commentary, including neo-jihadist organisations’ political-economic campaigns.

Extending Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist theory from a criminological perspective, the approach to the investigation of AQ and IS’s propaganda and finance outlined here is overtly critical in nature, purposefully investigating the deleterious outcomes of neoliberalism and the anti-capitalist bases on which these organisations campaign. In doing so, this chapter establishes a frame of inquiry through which dialectical engagements between neo-jihadist organisations’ anti-capitalist posturing and their quasi-capitalist practices are investigated. After a descriptive section on neoliberalism’s origins, I outline neo-Marxist principles on the geo-economics of neoliberalism, and the relevant aspects of Bourdieusian theory. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas, I then describe the research design as well as the discourse and documentary methods used in the analysis.

Neoliberalism in history

Proponents of neoliberal policies often trace their ideological roots to the principles of classical economic liberalism laid out in Adam Smith’s The wealth of nations (1776). As David Harvey has highlighted (2005), though, Smith’s text predated the vital economic restructuring that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, and, as such, a more material history of neoliberalism might be constructed with reference to the financial catastrophe of the 1930s. Following the Great Depression, ‘neoliberalism’ denoted a series of re-regulatory reforms implemented in developed Western countries to curb the apparent crisis tendencies of unrestrained capitalism. In the 1940s, these reforms were guided by the protectionist welfare principles recommended in John Maynard Keynes’ The general theory of employment, interest, and money (1936). After several decades of Keynesian influence, a global order characterised by relatively unrestricted markets with allowances for state capital controls came to be described as ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982). While for some, contemporary neoliberalism represents an extension and intensification of nineteenth-century early modern capitalism and twentieth-century embedded liberalism (Rowthorn 1980), as Harvey (2005) and others highlight, certain distinct political-economic traditions that might be defined as ‘neoliberal’ emerged in the Thatcher and Reagan administrations.

The post-1980s incarnation of ‘neoliberalism’ to which this book refers entailed drastic reductions in Keynesian welfarism, widespread international trade, privatised services, and deregulated capital controls, along with a cohort of other context-specific methods. Following the international proliferation of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s, their harmful socio-political and socio-economic effects included degradation of the environment (Gonzalez 2004), community and household marginalisation (Brenner et al. 2010), a lack of ready public access to basic services, and exacerbation of wealth disparity in domestic and international settings (Navarro 2007). Neoliberalism’s advocacy of competition and autonomy was revealed through ethnographic research to produce an erosion of social cohesion, civic functionality, and awareness of the ‘common good’ (Brenner and Theodore 2005). In a high-profile twenty-first-century example of their social and economic effects, the profit-driven policies of neoliberal financialisation were deemed by scholars and economists to be the primary impetus behind the 2008 GFC (Mirowski 2013).

The Thatcher and Reagan governments are often cited as the context in which neoliberalism emerged. Thatcherism is generally understood to entail significant reductions in public expenditure combined with tax benefits for large commercial entities, whereas Reaganomics is typically explained via the logic of supply-side, or trickle-down, economics (George 1999). Under monetarist economic policy management during these years, the UK saw interest rates rise to 17 per cent, while the US witnessed a decrease in tax rates to 20 per cent, from 78 per cent, for the country’s wealthiest citizens (Reitan 2003, 29; Dorian 2010, 166). Although the tactics and diplomacy of the administrations differed in several respects, both operated according to a belief that rapid fiscal growth would trickle down from major industries and benefit their respective countries. Both administrations also committed to neoliberal programmes under the influence of the Viennese economist Friedrich Hayek (1937) and the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman (1962).

Following the widespread international adoption and acceptance of neoliberal policies in decades since the 1980s, critics have deconstructed its ‘ostensibly rational response to the “crisis of Atlantic Fordism”’ (Jessop 2002, 4; Brenner et al. 2008). These deconstructions contradict the conservative notion that undesirable economic conditions in developed Western countries during the 1970s, such as stagflation, were the result of taxes imposed on the wealthy, strict regulation, and the suppression of free markets (Stiglitz 2011). In one example, Paul Krugman (1987) (an economic advisor to Martin Feldstein during the Reagan administration) blamed the conditions prior to US neoliberalism on expenditure during the Vietnam War and the country’s resulting balance-of-payments deficit. Later, he suggested that unhinging the dollar from the gold standard, rather than crippling regulation, caused US share worth to plummet internationally (Krugman 2009). In relation to the UK, cultural theorist Stuart Hall put forward a similar argument, that structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) led by the UK ‘provided the catalyst’ Margaret Thatcher needed to debilitate trade power, create nationwide stagflation, and introduce ‘get on your bike’ neoliberal policies (2011, 707). Collectively, these accounts demonstrate how economic emergencies during the 1970s, and the apparent recovery of the US and UK economies, appeared to vindicate Milton Friedman’s (1962, xvi) statement that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’.

Beyond the US and UK, a pattern of crisis-producing neoliberalism materialised in a number of ways. While the broad-based impacts of neoliberal policies in domestic and international settings are explained in more detail in Chapter 2, further to Klein’s (2007) explication of ‘disaster capitalism’, Iain Boal and his co-authors offered a compelling explanation for the role that neoliberal policies play in wartime situations. The Retort activists who authored Afflicted powers (Boal et al. 2005) argue that oil exists within the broader landscape of neoliberal economic restructuring that occurred in Iraq and elsewhere in the nascent days of the GWOT, a US empire of capital accumulation they describe as ‘military neoliberalism’. For Boal et al. (2005, 45) this characterises a ‘deadly alchemy of permanent war, capitalist accumulation, and the new enclosures – all now conducted under conditions of spectacle’. Here, ‘political Islam’ assumes the form of a distinctly modern resistance movement, outfitted with a revolutionary vanguard, despite Bin Laden’s significant inheritance from his family’s construction business and AQ followers’ ostensible interest in financial markets. Far from a single determinative commodity that yields political-economic effects only in the extent of its ‘facticity’, for Boal and his co-authors oil represents:

Neoliberalism mutating from an epoch of ‘agreements’ and austerity programmes to one of outright war; the plural and unstable relations among specific forms of capital, always under the banner of some apparently dominant mass commodity; and those periodic waves of capitalist restructuring we call primitive accumulation. (Boal et al. 2005, 52; my emphasis)

Drawing on ideas such as those set out by Boal et al., the analysis in this book does not attempt to establish historical cause and effect, nor does it assume that neoliberalism is mono-faceted. For the sake of exploring the noteworthy political-economic connections, a number of debates must inevitably be omitted. There is, for example, little space given to accounting for Aiwa Ong’s (2006) resistance to institution-centric explanations of ‘big N’ neoliberalism, or Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2009) elaboration of de-politicised financialisation. It is also impractical to differentiate between paleoliberal economics and neoliberal structuralism, or to explain the advent of German ordoliberalism, regardless of their ongoing social and political influence.

This book also rejects the notion that neoliberalism has experienced a linear developmental trajectory since the late 1980s. Neoliberalism is, in short, understood in Jamie Peck’s (2010, 7, 9; see also Connell and Dados 2014) terms as a ‘messy hybrid’ of ideological principles, expressed through ‘philosophy, politics, and practice’. To demarcate ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002), it explicitly investigates AQ and IS’s political-economic behaviour, as represented through their propaganda and finance, with discourse and documentary evidence.

The geo-economics of neoliberalism

To illuminate similarities and differences between the political economy of AQ and IS, and variegated neo-jihadist engagement with the paradigm of neoliberalism, the analysis of propaganda and finance also reflects on these organisations’ geo-economic orientations. Drawing on Harvey (1995, 2003, 2005), it compares AQ and IS’s global interests with their internal, centrifugal concerns, including their differentiated interactions with territorial and economic priorities characteristic of nation states or international financial institutions (IFIs). In the first instance, I emphasise Harvey’s explanation that the interests of states and IFIs converge correlative to neoliberalism’s divergent agendas, as they are bound both by spatial and temporal fixes, and by territorial and capitalist logics of power. Where fixes are economic managerial measures designed to rectify the inherent ‘crisis tendencies’ of capitalism (Marx 1992), territorial and capitalist logics refer to the key actors, main logic, core features, role of space and territory, secondary logic, interdependencies, mode of steering, crisis reactions, and imperialist tendencies of political-economic entities (Harvey 2001, 2003; Jessop 2006). To conceptualise the relative importance of territory and economy for AQ and IS, the following chapters also draw on Bob Jessop’s (2006) theoretical revision of ideas set out by Harvey (2001, 2003).

In the first instance, Harvey suggested that capitalism always takes political precedence over territoriality in neoliberal societies, which is explained as the implementation of ‘spatio-temporal fixes’, or ‘solutions to capitalist crises through temporal deferment and geographical expansion’ (Harvey 2003, 65, cited in Jessop 2006, 152). One example of a spatio-temporal fix in the US-led GWOT, which Harvey (2003) terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’, is ‘the transfer [of] assets and channel [of] wealth and income either from the mass of the population towards the upper classes or from vulnerable to richer countries’ (Harvey 2007, 34).

Diverging from Harvey, Jessop then offers a new interpretation of how, in conditions of neoliberal governance, capitalism and territoriality become mutually interdependent. Jessop (2006) argues that territoriality and capitalism interrelate, but that territoriality itself should not necessarily be interpreted as subsumed within the overarching precepts of economic capitalism. First, he asserts that the ‘fictitious’ price-setting of non-commodities such as land, labour, and money is needed for the effective functioning of capitalism, as is diplomacy that will regularise political governance and alleviate ‘strategic dilemmas inherent in the capital relation’ (Jessop 2006, 162). Second, Jessop suggests that capital accumulation demands a ‘regional structural coherence’, whereby state and non-state ‘alliances emerge to defend regional values and coherence and to promote them … through the provision of new economic and extra-economic conditions favourable to further accumulation’ (2006, 153, 260). I raise Jessop’s ideas for the purpose of considering how neo-jihadist organisations are economically interdependent with certain local US-allied nation states and their representatives, ‘diplomacy’ through neo-jihadist propaganda operating to normalise and extend a neoliberal status quo within the region.

Lastly, in combination with insights from Harvey and Jessop, Jamie Peck’s (2010) concept of neoliberal ‘layering’ is incorporated to explain how the evolution of neo-jihadism is built off the back of a history of US neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East and elsewhere. Neoliberalism is here understood as an amorphous hybrid of philosophies, policies, and practices, which chronologically constitute a series of ‘prosaic forward failures’ (Peck 2010, 25). Following Peck (2010, xi, 7–8), neoliberalism is neither capable of autonomously reproducing itself, nor of existing without ongoing political antagonism. The investigation also considers that Peck’s theory derives from John Clarke’s (2008) reflexive multiplication and doubling theory, in which a process of ‘part–whole doubling’ occurs and individual cases of neoliberalisation are both influenced by and constitutive of a transnational neoliberal ‘whole’. Extending this primarily temporal understanding of economic development, Peck (2008, 2010) argued that the process involves a ‘redoubling’, or ‘doubling back’, whereby a series of re-regulatory and deregulatory tendencies accumulate within specific geographies to create layers of successive neoliberalisation. In this book, these layers of neoliberal policies, evoked in neo-jihadist propaganda and practice, are contextualised with reference to neoliberalism’s overarching political and philosophical dimensions. These dimensions are then interpreted as part of a broader transnational neoliberal paradigm, which has permeated neo-jihadist modes of organisation.

Although this theory of neoliberal ‘redoubling’ is useful for framing the political-economic approach of this book, as Jessop (2011) remarked in relation to Constructions of neoliberal reason (Peck 2010), Peck’s overwhelming concern with macroeconomic policy renders his investigation both abstract and inattentive to neoliberalism’s extra-economic social and political effects. While Harvey has pai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Neoliberalism, Bourdieu, and neo-Marxism
• 2 Neoliberalism in action
• 3 Al Qaeda’s political-economic propaganda
• 4 Islamic State’s political-economic propaganda
• 5 Al Qaeda’s financial practices
• 6 Islamic State’s financial practices
• Conclusion
• References
• Index