David Neilson

Relative surplus population and uneven development in the neoliberal era: Theory and empirical application

This paper offers the groundwork of an alternative to mainstream (un)employment theory that builds on Marx’s account of the ‘active army’ and ‘relative surplus population’. With special application to the current neoliberal era, Marx’s long-range labour market analysis is connected to a mid-range account of capitalism’s uneven development in historical practice. This alternative approach is then adapted to an ‘empirically adequate’ statistical mapping of the relative surplus population’s contemporary global composition. Under neoliberal global capitalism, the relative surplus population is identified as being larger than the active army, and is unevenly composed and distributed across developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.

Remaking the Connections: Marxism and the French Regulation School

The current Robert Boyer-led French Regulation School (FRS) characterizes the contemporary era as a diversity of national capitalisms. Boyer’s new approach displaces the original FRS focus on “models of development.” This article rallies against the current direction and re-engages the FRS’s earlier mid-range Marxist-influenced account of capitalist development. In particular, key concepts of “regulation” and “model of development” are reworked in the context of a revised account of the Fordist model of development. These concepts are then adapted to work up an outline of the “neoliberal model of development.” JEL classification: B50, F59, O57

Formal and real subordination and the contemporary proletariat: Re-coupling Marxist class theory and labour-process analysis

Having seemed to offer so much in the 1970s, neo-Marxist class theory went into significant decline in the decades that followed. This paper begins with a critique of E. O. Wrights 1980s detour via a reworking of central aspects of Marxs class theory. Specifically, Marxs concepts of formal and real subordination provide the basis for a re-coupling of labour-process themes with a class analysis of contemporary capitalism.

Class, precarity, and anxiety under neoliberal global capitalism: From denial to resistance

Circumstantial precarity correlates with anxiety, but the relationship is complex because people often quell anxiety by denying precarity. This article focuses in particular on how in this neoliberal era such psychological responses to precarity are class variegated and articulated with neoliberal ideology. Because this field of research is largely uncharted, this paper pays considerable attention to developing a conceptual framework appropriate to this task. This framework is based in the distinction between “ontological security” and “existential anxiety” that is correlated with an innovative account of the contemporary global class structure presented as a stratification of security/precarity, and linked with an adaption of Gramsci’s theory of ideology. From this basis, likely collective subjective responses are “imputed,” adapting Lukács’ theory, from different strategic vantage points within the contemporary neoliberal form of the global class structure. As part of the project to resist neoliberalism, final discussion focuses on how anxiety might be quelled without resort to denial.

Competition states in the neoliberal era: Towards third-generation regulation theory

The Varieties of Capitalism approach envisages a process by which national capitalisms converge towards two distinct institutional formations. In contrast, it is argued here that countries singularly converge towards the regulatory bias of the prevailing model of development, but divergence exists within this convergence because unevenly developing countries respond contingently to the regulatory dilemmas of capitalism. This claim is empirically assessed for the neoliberal model of development. The findings show that countries prioritize competitiveness by pursuing differing mixes of neoliberal and non-neoliberal elements. This variation is mapped onto a six-pronged typology of ‘competition states’. Overall, this revised regulation approach broadens and deepens insights into national regulatory dilemmas and responses to the prevailing model of development.

The Neoliberalisation of Sustainability

Sustainability – embedded in intergovernmental global agreements and filtering, reassuringly, into ‘common sense’ – is now the globally dominant environmental discourse. However, this dominance does not equate with the mainstreaming of its original meaning that is tied up with a radical critique of capitalism that crystallised in movements of both the South and the North in the 1970s. Rather, radical sustainability discourse has been effectively neutralised by its ‘articulation’ with the neoliberal capitalist project. This article examines this articulatory shift, focusing particularly on a post-Marxist neo-Gramscian inspired discourse analysis of the key documents of intergovernmental global agreement. The article argues for the rearticulation of sustainability to a new counter-hegemonic ‘reimagining’ of nature.

In-itself for-itself: Towards second-generation neo-Marxist class theory:

First-generation neo-Marxist class theorists advanced some way beyond the orthodox Marxist account that is grounded in a particular reading of the Communist Manifesto. However, capitalism’s changing reality since then has revealed the limited extent of their break with orthodoxy. With the support of Bhaskar’s critical realism and Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, this article addresses these limitations to facilitate movement towards second-generation neo-Marxist class theory. Rather than following first-generation neo-Marxist Poulantzas who dismissed the ‘class-in-itself’/‘class-for-itself’ distinction as a non-Marxist Hegelian residue, this article treats it as the central problematic of Marx’s class theory. Bourdieu’s subjectivist reformulations of the distinction that resonates with Marxist interpretations that run counter to the neo-Marxist social scientific aspiration are also critically engaged. The innovative conceptual framework arising from the article’s critical engagement with these diverging intellectual trajectories is applied to sketch ‘class effects’ in-themselves especially around the theme of the ‘relative surplus population’. Expected class effects implied by the core dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, and then contemporary empirical effects generated by neoliberal-led global capitalism, are outlined. This re-conceptualisation is then supplemented by critically examining Beck’s argument that individualisation leads to capitalism without classes-for-themselves. The article concludes by reconsidering class-for-itself in the light of the preceding discussion.