David
Harvey on what neoliberalism actually is — and why the concept
matters.
Eleven
years ago, David Harvey published A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
now one of the most cited books on the subject. The years since have
seen new economic and financial crises, but also of new waves of
resistance, which themselves often target “neoliberalism” in
their critique of contemporary society.
Cornel
West speaks of the Black Lives Matter movement as “an indictment of
neoliberal power”; the late Hugo Chávez called neoliberalism a
“path to hell”; and labor leaders are increasingly using the term
to describe the larger environment in which workplace struggles
occur. The mainstream press has also picked up the term, if only to
argue that neoliberalism doesn’t actually exist.
But
what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism?
Is it a useful target for socialists? And how has it changed since
its genesis in the late twentieth century?
Bjarke
Skærlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and
History of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to
discuss the political nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed
modes of resistance, and why the Left still needs to be serious about
ending capitalism.
The
ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named
Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far,
that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize
the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
Ideas were
also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time
was that universities were impossible to organize because the student
movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they
set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the
Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought
in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side
economics.
The idea was
to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did —
for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a
privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough
research. This research would then be published independently and it
would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and
infiltrate the universities.
This process
took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t
need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities
have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects
surrounding them.
With respect
to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with
global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for
example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian
labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of
dissatisfaction and unrest.
Instead they
chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor
forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs
and empower finance capital |8|, because finance capital is the most
mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating
currencies became critical to curbing labor.
At the same
time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created
unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs
abroad, and a third component: technological change,
deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the
strategy to squash labor.
It was an
ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what
neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think
the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion
bit by bit.
I don’t
think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they
just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?”
And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which
would support that.
[...]
What’s
missing here is the way in which the capitalist class orchestrated
its efforts during the 1970s and early 1980s. I think it would be
fair to say that at that time — in the English-speaking world
anyway — the corporate capitalist class became pretty unified.
They agreed
on a lot of things, like the need for a political force to really
represent them. So you get the capture of the Republican Party, and
an attempt to undermine, to some degree, the Democratic Party.
From the
1970s the Supreme Court made a bunch of decisions that allowed the
corporate capitalist class to buy elections more easily than it could
in the past.
For example,
you see reforms of campaign finance that treated contributions to
campaigns as a form of free speech. There’s a long tradition in the
United States of corporate capitalists buying elections but now it
was legalized rather than being under the table as corruption.
Overall I
think this period was defined by a broad movement across many fronts,
ideological and political. And the only way you can explain that
broad movement is by recognizing the relatively high degree of
solidarity in the corporate capitalist class. Capital reorganized its
power in a desperate attempt to recover its economic wealth and its
influence, which had been seriously eroded from the end of the 1960s
into the 1970s.
[...]
One of big
moves of neoliberalization was throwing out all the Keynesians from
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1982 — a
total clean-out of all the economic advisers who held Keynesian
views.
They were
replaced by neoclassical supply-side theorists and the first thing
they did was decide that from then on the IMF should follow a policy
of structural adjustment whenever there’s a crisis anywhere.
In 1982,
sure enough, there was a debt crisis in Mexico. The IMF said, “We’ll
save you.” Actually, what they were doing was saving the New York
investment banks and implementing a politics of austerity.
The
population of Mexico suffered something like a 25 percent loss of its
standard of living in the four years after 1982 as a result of the
structural adjustment politics of the IMF.
Since then
Mexico has had about four structural adjustments. Many other
countries have had more than one. This became standard practice.
What are
they doing to Greece now? It’s almost a copy of what they did to
Mexico back in 1982, only more savvy. This is also what happened in
the United States in 2007–8. They bailed out the banks and made the
people pay through a politics of austerity.
[...]
The other
thing I think is crucial is that the neoliberal push of the 1970s
didn’t pass without strong resistance. There was massive resistance
from labor, from communist parties in Europe, and so on.
But I would
say that by the end of the 1980s the battle was lost. So to the
degree that resistance has disappeared, labor doesn’t have the
power it once had, solidarity among the ruling class is no longer
necessary for it to work.
It doesn’t
have to get together and do something about struggle from below
because there is no threat anymore. The ruling class is doing
extremely well so it doesn’t really have to change anything.
Yet while
the capitalist class is doing very well, capitalism is doing rather
badly. Profit rates have recovered but reinvestment rates are
appallingly low |18|, so a lot of money is not circulating back into
production and is flowing into land-grabs and asset-procurement
instead.
[...]
I think it’s
possible that you can make a better capitalism than that which
currently exists. But not by much.
The
fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no
way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong
anticapitalist movement. So I would want to put things in
anticapitalist terms rather than putting them in anti-neoliberal
terms.
And I think
the danger is, when I listen to people talking about
anti-neoliberalism, that there is no sense that capitalism is itself,
in whatever form, a problem.
Most
anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless
compound growth — ecological, political, and economic problems. So
I would rather be talking about anticapitalism than
anti-neoliberalism.
Full
interview and references:
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