The Problem of Neoliberalism
Almost unused as a term in the twentieth century and never unequivocally deployed by the historical figures now routinely taken as its exemplary advocates, âneoliberalismâ has, nonetheless, become a standard keyword to categorize the present regime of accumulation, especially after the 2008 financial crash that made the term âglobalizationâ seem inadequate. Thanks to a wide spectrum of critics such as David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Jamie Peck, Jason W. Moore, Neil Smith, Philip Mirowski, Anatole Kaletsky, and GĂ©rard DumĂ©nil and Dominique LĂ©vy, we have developed a synoptic familiarity with the term and a commonsensical understanding of its manoeuvres as characterized by a nexus of practices and axiomatic assumptions about recent modes of capitalist commerce.
Features of neoliberalism include state deregulation of markets, privatization, and anti-labour and social welfare strategies; the ascendancy of finance capital; the renewed imperialism of law-and-order schemes on the global level (as in the endless âwar on terrorâ) and in domestic arenas (as with the creation of a prison industrial complex); the elite project of wealth redistribution through new forms of ecological enclosure and accumulation via dispossession; the proliferation of metrics that spur competition in new realms of social life and administrative oversight; the exploitation of crises and disasters to force the imposition of austerity and structural adjustment; the increased biopolitical control of individuals by the state; the redefinition of individuals as quantums of human capital rather than subjects of interior development or political representation; the deployment of mass personal debt in ways little foreseen by prior macroeconomics; and the emergence of new algorithmic technologies of surveillance and financialization that have penetrated everyday life.
Yet, as the term spreads through academic and media apparatuses, it is in danger of becoming so ubiquitous that its historical insight is blurred and its analytical edge is blunted or lost. As Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse observe:
As an academic paradigm referring to cultural production, the descriptor neoliberal is frequently used in literary criticism as a mere successor to âpostmodern,â an earlier term also meant to be periodizing, yet which itself lacked a historical exit. This usage can be seen in the proliferation of curiously ahistorical critiques of neoliberalism which do not name capital, and tend to theorize neoliberalismâs novelty solely in terms of governmentality rather than capital accumulation of affects and ontologies of the entrepreneurial self, rather than class exploitation. Such a theoretical tendency has a cultural logic of its own, corollary to the post-1970s retreat from class as a category of analysis and the subsequent illusion of âposthistory.âNeoliberalism is commonly used in at least five different ways in the study of developmentâas a set of economic policies, a development model, an ideology, an academic paradigm, and an historical era. Moreover, beyond a shared emphasis on the free market and frequent connotations of radicalism and negativity, it is not immediately clear how these varied uses are interconnected. (Boas and Gans-Morse 2006: 38, cited in Mirowski 2009: 433â34)
Detached from materialist analysis of the wider world-economy in relation to capitalismâs long modernity, these kinds of exegeses of âneoliberal cultureâ focus instead on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliberalism as they are experienced in post-Fordist core nation-states of Europe and America (and overemphasize post-Fordism as a phenomenon), rather than critiquing the processes of neoliberalization from a world-historical perspective of capitalismâs developmental cycles. This is not dissimilar to the pitfalls of earlier varieties of postcolonial criticism, which focused on culturalist critique of imperialism, to the exclusion of capitalism (thus foregoing understanding of the specific role of imperialism within capitalist accumulation).
Conversely, critiques of neoliberalism from the social sciences often concentrate solely on the analysis of political elites, economists, or electoral parties, assigning them primary credit for the development and implementation of neoliberal ideologies and policies, while failing to examine how culture plays a constitutive role in generating and stabilizing the socioeconomic relations on which neoliberal hegemony depends, or how the ideological innovations and development projects of political elites are necessarily bound up with the complex causality of capitalismâs historical cyclical crises.
Consequently, a common response by many left critics to recent discussions about neoliberalism is that the term has lost its utility as a means of characterizing the current phase of capitalism, and should be discarded for its failure to clarify the features of the purported period in relation to the overall operations of capitalâs logistic across centuries. However, we feel this momentary exhaustion to be tactically clumsy and analytically misguided. Given the difficulty the left has historically had in Anglo-American societies in getting its terminology broadly accepted as objective in ways outside its otherwise limited congeries, we should pause before abandoning a term simply when a limited group of commentators has become distracted or bored by the lack of novelty. As Mathias Nilges suggests in this volume, neoliberalism can retain its use as a âKampfbegriff, a term of struggleâ that enables us to frame both critique and resistance.
An additional semantic confusion emerges over whether neoliberalism ought to be considered a break from postmodernism or if, in retrospect, as we would argue, postmodernism can be now perceived as the cultural logic of incipient or insurgent neoliberalism. In âPeriodizing the 60s,â Fredric Jameson defines that decade as the moment in which âthe enlargement of capitalism on a global scale simultaneously produced an immense freeing or unbinding of social energiesâ in both the First and Third Worlds, leading to monetary, social, and cultural inflationary pressures that were subsequently reined in by the early 1970s (1984: 208). Writing from the vantage point of 1984, Jameson predicted that âthe 80s will be characterized by an effort on a world scale to proletarianize all those unbound social forces which gave the 60s their energy, by an extension of the class struggle, into the furthest reaches of the globe as well as the most minute configurations of local institutions (such as the university system)â (208). Jameson is of course one of the foremost theorists of âpostmodernismâ as the cultural logic of âlate capitalism,â but the passages here seem presciently indicative of the onset of what we now call âneoliberalism,â at a time when that terminology was not readily available.
For whatever objections about the specificity of the term neoliberalism can be raised, it seems clear that in many ways the current phase of capitalism is different in noteworthy ways from the prior Fordist and Keynesian phase. Surely, some terminology must exist to register the differences if any activist response is to be successfully mounted. The challenge then is to forge a better framework of terms to help convey what is both distinctive and familiar about the last few decades up to and including the contemporary period. There remains a pressing need to underscore the continuities of capitalist predicates, while also discerning its historical formations and reformations.
A major motive for this collection, therefore, is to prevent âneoliberalismâ from becoming a âquicksand termâ that indiscriminately sucks all commentary into its maw without regard to temporal or spatial particularity; that acts as a vacuous counterpart to âpost-postmodern,â or even âlate-late capitalism.â In our estimation, the way forward is to think through issues of historical alteration through a greater horizon of the capitalist world-system. Hence, this volume mobilizes a collection of essays that seek to periodize the different phases of neoliberal accumulation leading up to the current moment, restoring the horizon of capitalism as the primary object of their critique, while at the same time exploring how neoliberalization is differently experienced and mediated in cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries of the world-system. As Matthew Eatough writes in his contribution to this volume, any account of the culture of neoliberalism requires us to formulate a working definition of what neoliberalism is in its local expression and âwhat distinguishes it from the normative Euro-American model of neoliberalism.â
Most collections on neoliberalism and literature published thus far have had an exclusively North American or British focus, which we seek to challenge in this volume through a comparative approach that juxtaposes scholars from American and British studies with those from postcolonial and world-literary studies and area studies. Thus, our contributions concentrate on a wide range of literary and cultural production from global settings in both cores and semiperipheries, and frequently make comparisons between them, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Italy, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, and India.
In this volumeâs conceptual endeavour to redefine neoliberalism, our main aims are threefold. Firstly, we seek to rehistorize neoliberal movements within a world-systems perspective that may better link together, rather than split apart, the insights of Foucauldian accounts of governmentality and Marxâs critique of the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Such a world-systems perspective enables a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which capitalism requires structural inequalities that are produced through the constellation of a core-zone, semiperipheries, and peripheries. This perspective requires an attentiveness to the ongoing and interwoven role of regions beyond the âwhiteâ Euro-American nation-states that have not only often been treated in isolation from one another (as if their dynamics are not shaped by inter-core competition) but also disconnected from other regions, which are often considered as instances of note only to the degree they develop in ways that emulates or reproduces the logistics of the core nations (often frequently those of their former colonial occupiers).
Secondly, we seek not only to differentiate a neoliberal period from prior periods in capitalismâs history but also to grasp the temporal shifts and differentials within this phase. The enactments during the 1980s are different from recent ones, even while both are best grouped within a larger context. To foreshadow our argument, we contend that one source of confusion in scholarly discussions of neoliberalism has been the lack of consideration for the nested, rather than linear and sequential, quality of the roughly post-1970s period. Just as there are mini-cycles or conjunctures within this phase, this phase is a segment within other longer cycles. While what has been called neoliberalism deserves to be analysed as different from and in opposition to the mid-twentieth century formations that we will broadly call Keynesian and Fordist, it also exists as a cadenza within a greater phase that arose in the late nineteenth century in the period after Marxâs analysis of capital as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century.
As Kennedy and Shapiro argue, neoliberalism ought to be seen as containing 40â50-year cycles that are stitched together by an overlapping âhingeâ or âSattelzeitâ period (Kennedy and Shapiro 2019). The first phase runs from the 1930s through the mid-1960s, wherein different, but often inter-dependent, responses to the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the political one involving the rise of right-wing politics are exemplified by the Nazi, Fascist, and Falangist regimes. Hence, in many ways, neoliberalism can be understood as developing alongside Keynesianism, and not simply or clearly afterwards. In this way, the present moment may stand potentially as a conclusion to both neoliberalism and a greater duration of approximately 90 years.
When this first phase of neoliberalism came into crisis (more below), there ensued a contested decade from the mid-1960s to the early/mid-1970s in which there arose both avenues to overcome neoliberalism and neoliberal preparations for a substantive move to become a more dominant force, as would historically occur. A second phase then runs from the early/mid-1970s until roughly the 2008/11 crisis. As before, the current moment is likewise a mixed moment that contains both substantive efforts to displace neoliberalism, while also presenting aspects of what may emerge as a third longer phase (Shapiro 2019).
Yet, even this frame might not be expansive enough, since our current moment of âlateâ neoliberalism may also mark the movement of capitalist core hegemony outside of the dominant states of Western Europe and North America towards East and South Asia, meaning that for the first time in about 500 years, capitalismâs lodestar will no longer be easily conflated with Anglo-European primacy. The synchronization of these differently lengthened spirals of capitalist expanded reproduction has meant that some critics mistake differences where they should espy continuities and vice-versa. To better understand the general logistic of capitalism in its neoliberal particularities, we will discuss below the difference between periodization and periodicity. Due to the nested quality of capitalismâs cycles, we prefer the term âlong spiralâ to the more conventional, but in our minds overly sequential and two-dimensional, âlong wave.â The keyword lo...