Damien Cahill

Beyond Neoliberalism? Crisis and the Prospects for Progressive Alternatives

The onset of the current global economic crisis was hailed by many as signalling the demise of neoliberal hegemony. Two years on however, neoliberalism appears to be quite durable. Indeed, after a brief period of Keynesian-type responses, states, on the whole, have embraced neoliberal solutions to the fiscal problems generated by the crisis. Greece, for example, is now following an IMF programme of privatisation and cuts to social expenditure, while other European nations are pursuing austerity policies. In the USA, state and municipal governments are selling off public assets in response to mounting deficits. This paper explains the durability of neoliberalism and the opportunities and challenges it creates for non-neoliberal progressive policy agendas. Drawing upon Karl Polanyis conceptual framework, this paper argues that neoliberalism is best understood as a historically specific process of state and economic restructuring that is socially embedded through three mechanisms: ideological norms, class relations, and institutional rules. This paper examines responses by states to the crises and concludes that, although the ideological legitimacy of neoliberalism has been somewhat weakened, there is little evidence to suggest that the three mechanisms, through which neoliberalism is socially embedded, have been significantly eroded. The implication for progressive politics is that, just as neoliberalism is socially embedded, so would a successful progressive non-neoliberal political programme need to be socially embedded: through the articulation of a coherent alternative ideology; through the mobilisation of social forces; and through the institutionalisation of non-neoliberal rules and norms within the apparatuses of the state.

‘ACTUALLY EXISTING NEOLIBERALISM’ AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

This article assesses claims that the global economic crisis heralds the end of neoliberalism as the dominant logic of policy-making. It does so by examining three major competing conceptions of neoliberalism—‘neoliberalism as laissez faire’; ‘regulatory capitalism’; and ‘actually existing neoliberalism’—and uses these to identify the core components of the neoliberal shift in state-economy relations. The article then assesses the extent to which the core components of neoliberalism have been eroded in the wake of the global economic crisis, with a specific focus upon Australia, in particular the sphere of industrial relations.

The End of Laissez-Faire?

When the global financial crisis hit in 2007, many commentators thought it heralded the end of neoliberalism. Several years later, neoliberalism continues to dominate policy making. This book sets out why such commentators got it so wrong, and why neoliberalism remains so durable in the face of crisis.

Ideas-Centred Explanations of the Rise of Neoliberalism: A Critique

This article critically examines the assumption that the spread of neoliberal policy programs of privatisation, deregulation and marketisation is explained principally by policymakers coming under the influence of fundamentalist neoliberal ideas and the think tanks through which they were proselytised. The article outlines the conditions that must be satisfied for this thesis of ideational causation to be considered plausible. By examining the relationship between neoliberal think tanks and the Howard Coalition government in Australia, the article offers indicative evidence against this dominant conceptual framework for understanding the rise of neoliberalism. It concludes that this narrative offers a poor guide to understanding actually existing neoliberalism. 本文批评了一种观点，该观点认为新自由主义的私有化、解除管制、市场化之类政策的推广缘于政策制定者受了原教旨新自由主义思想及思想库的影响。作者指出了这一思想因果关系若要成立须满足的条件。通过分析新自由主义思想库与霍华德政府的关系，本文反驳了这种有关新自由主义的流行观点，认为这种叙述无益于指导对真实存在的新自由主义的理解（Brenner and Theofore 2002）。

How Labour Made Neoliberalism

Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this article focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983–1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour’s active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be ‘written in’ to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.

The rise and fall of the Australian Greens: the 2002 Cunningham By-election and its implications

This article examines the 2002 by-election in the Australian federal seat of Cunningham, in which the Australian Greens secured their first and only member of the House of Representatives. This case study of Greens voting suggests that the electoral support base of the Greens in Cunningham was consistent with what is known about the support base of the Greens elsewhere in Australia. At the same time, it makes the case that local factors were at least as important as national issues in explaining the high Greens vote in Cunningham. A suburb-by-suburb analysis of Greens voting in the 2002 by-election suggests that traditional markers of Greens voting, such as higher than average incomes and educational qualifications, were a necessary, but not a sufficient, explanation of Greens voting in the case of Cunningham.

Market Society: Growth, accumulation and crisis

IN THE PREVIOUS chapter we discussed the character of the commodity-based production system that underpins market societies. The ability of such societies to generate substantial and long-term economic growth is one of their most striking and impressive features. Economic growth has transformed our way of life, leading in many countries to a material standard of living unprecedented in history. When growth is high the economy seems to work well, delivering profits, higher incomes and jobs. However, economic growth sometimes falters. Periods of low growth, or ‘recession’, can lead to wider economic crises giving rise to unemployment, hardship and social misery which can also generate more serious society-wide crises. Managing the cycles of economic growth and decline has therefore become a central preoccupation of governments. In this chapter we consider the nature of economic growth and how it is measured and potential problems generated by growth in affluent societies. We also examine some of the different understandings of growth and the political implications of such analyses. Finally, we address the periodic crises that are a feature of capitalist economies as well as the relationships between economic growth and political legitimacy.

Questioning the utopian springs of market economy

This volume brings together papers that were initially presented, or otherwise have their origins, in an international conference ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’, held at the University of Sydney (15–16 August 2014). The occasion was to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of two seminal political economy texts, namely Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom that were both published in 1944. The conference was organized around three keynote plenaries – delivered by Philip Mirowski, Sandra Halperin and Gareth Dale – of which revised versions appear in this issue. There were also a number of parallel paper sessions over the course of two days. The idea of pairing the two books as the topic of a conference was experimental but the energy that pervaded the conference convinced us of the intellectual significance and political usefulness of considering these interventions side by side and this is what led us to continue the project after the conference by curating this special issue. We would like to thank everyone who was involved in the conference for contributing to the project. In many ways, both Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom could not be more antithetical, indeed antagonistic. The purpose of this journal special issue is to revisit these magnetic poles of political economy as a compass for questioning the market economy of the twenty-first century. For Polanyi, the utopian springs of the dogma of liberalism existed within the extension of the market mechanism to the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour, and money. There was nothing natural about laissez-faire. The progress of the utopia of a self-regulating market was backed by the state and checked by a double movement, which attempted to subordinate the laws of the market to the substance of human society through principles of self-protection, legislative intervention, and regulation. For Hayek, the utopia of freedom was threatened by the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism. The tyranny of government interventionism led to the loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, and the despotism of dictatorship that led to the serfdom of the individual. Economic planning in the form of socialism and fascism had commonalities that stifled individual freedom. Against the power of the state, the guiding principle of the policy of freedom for the individual was advocated. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was thus a broadside against what he viewed as the ‘collectivist’ consensus of the time. Both the left and right of politics, Hayek argued, had a misplaced faith in economic planning. In this sense social democracy, communism and fascism were all varieties of a collectivist orientation that subordinated markets and individual liberty to politics. With the end of the Second World War approaching and many turning their minds to the problem of ‘winning the peace’, Hayek’s intervention was designed as a warning against the inevitable drift towards authoritarianism, should the collectivist trend prevail. Polanyi was very much part of that collectivist consensus. In The Great Transformation, he attributed the human disaster of two world wars and the

Polanyi, Hayek and embedded neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Written originally on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, this article critically analyses how the ideas of Hayek and Polanyi have been deployed to understand neoliberalism. It argues that dominant scholarly interpretations tend to miss the significance of each thinker to an understanding of neoliberalism, as well as some of the key dynamics of neoliberal forms of capitalist regulation. Drawing upon the work of Polanyi, the article advances the concept of embedded neoliberalism. From the 1970s neoliberal regulations became deeply embedded in a series of institutions, class relations and ideological norms. This helps to explain both the durability of neoliberalism, and the onset of crisis in 2008. In this context, Hayek’s ideas are best understood as providing a malleable set of concepts underpinning neoliberal ideology, rather than the chief causal agent in the neoliberal transformation of states and economies.

The Spectre of Collectivism: Neoliberalism, the Wars, and Historical Revisionism

With considerable justification, Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 22) described the period between 1914 and 1945 as ‘that of the thirty-one years’ world war’. World War I created the context for World War II by embedding a similar axis of conflict within the architecture of peace: ‘the Versailles settlement could not possibly be the basis of a stable peace. It was doomed from the start, and another war was therefore practically certain’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 34). The combination of world wars one and two and the global economic depression which punctuated them was catastrophic: