Neoliberal co-optation and authoritarian renewal: social entrepreneurship networks in Jordan and Morocco

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes social entrepreneurship networks (SENs) – composed of social entrepreneurs, business and political elites, and international actors – in Jordan and Morocco and how they foster processes of authoritarian renewal through neoliberal forms of co-optation. I argue that these new neoliberal networks and pre-existing patterns of social interaction complement each other, fostering linkages between well-established elites and hand-picked social entrepreneurs as well as societal groups. The two case studies illustrate different trajectories of the development of SENs and their embeddedness in the respective political, social and economic contexts. Importantly, such trajectories indicate a similar direction of travel: social entrepreneurship, rather than acting as a driver of progressive change, has been aligned with the authoritarian regimes and cements neoliberalism as a mode of governance. This mutation of neoliberal tactics towards more inclusionary and consensual patterns seeks to ensure the survival of both neoliberalism and of authoritarian governance. Thus, the article brings to light repertoires of authoritarian neoliberalism that have hitherto been under-studied. Moreover, it offers a critical perspective on social entrepreneurship as an increasingly popular phenomenon that, in academia and beyond, has all too often been approached from an uncritical and apolitical perspective.     

Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry

ABSTRACT

There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about ‘free markets’ stands in considerable tension with ‘really existing’ neoliberalizing processes. However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between ‘pure’ economic and political theory and ‘messy’ empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term ‘science’, techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the ‘pure’ neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.     

Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America: urban in/security and austerity in Oaxaca

ABSTRACT

There is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in the intermediate city of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. I argue that Oaxaca’s austerity programmes and its rescaling of security provision are two intertwined, rather than parallel, processes. The paper builds on and aims to advance the authoritarian neoliberalism literature by linking it to literatures on the postcolonial Latin American state and urban studies. The article makes two contributions: first, it identifies and carves out multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism (by speaking to the urban realm); second, it contributes to the authoritarian neoliberalism literature on the ‘South’. Hence, the aim is to reveal the multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism and to illustrate its explanatory power in the global South.     

Work,culture, and play in the neoliberal condition

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s [2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the collège de France 1978–1979. New York, NY: Picador] lectures on neoliberalism present a powerful challenge to the Marxist critique of capitalist work as alienating and dehumanizing. Foucault suggests that neoliberalism allows work to be seen in terms of an individual’s pursuit of personal happiness. Seminal cultural theory in Hoggart [1957/2009. The uses of literary: Aspects of working-class life. London: Penguin] and Williams [1961. The long revolution. London: Chatto & Windus] view working-class culture as a matter of tacit rules and a ‘structure of feeling’ that permeates everyday life. Adorno’s critique of the capitalist ‘culture industry’, by contrast, suggests that a culture of neoliberal capitalism would be an oxymoron. This perspective is self-defeating, I argue, as we then essentially give up the task of understanding how neoliberalism translated into a pervasive social psychology. Following Richard Sennett’s [2008. The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 2012. Together. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press] work on craft and cooperation, I examine some elements of such neoliberal culture. Across many contemporary cities, there is a clear trend of local small-scale production that stands at odds with the aesthetics if not the underlying reality of the globalized economy. This suggests that utopian counter-currents to neoliberal governance are better drawn from reconfiguration rather than abandonment of work.     

The power to transform? Mexico’s ‘Fourth Transformation’ under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador

ABSTRACT

We engage in a conjunctural analysis of political change (Gramsci; Hall), power (Lukes) and transformation (Polanyi) to inquire into López Obrador’s political project; ‘The Fourth Transformation’ from July 2018 until December 2019. We analyse characteristics and consequences of the use of power by López Obrador as concerns the ‘power to do what?’ in the name of the 4T, shadowed by structural constraints. Additionally, inquiring the paradox of neoliberal ideas underlying changes in the Federal Public Administration in the name of austerity and the fight against corruption. We conclude that López Obrador is not exploiting this historical conjuncture to bring about ‘the primacy of politics over economics,’ and that signs have yet to emerge of a comprehensive transformation of the neoliberal economic foundations, from a structural analysis perspective. The paradox of neoliberal ideas underlying the 4T is coupled with a peculiar, backward-looking vision for national transformation; a ‘retro-formation’ in the making.     

Reproducing authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey: urban governance and state restructuring in the shadow of executive centralization

ABSTRACT

The implosion of popular struggles against the erosion of economic and democratic rights in the Middle East has thrown into sharp relief the co-constitutive character of neoliberal reforms and authoritarian state practices. This article zooms in on this relationship, and traces the consolidation of a core component of authoritarian statisms by examining how the ruling AKP government in Turkey has facilitated executive centralization. This process refers to a form of state restructuring whereby key decision-making powers are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the central government while democratic avenues to contest government policies are curtailed through legal and administrative reforms, and the marginalization of dissident social forces. I unpack the mechanisms of executive centralization in Turkey by exploring the transformation of urban governance under AKP rule, which has promoted a spectacular degree of state-led commodification of land and housing while simultaneously recentralizing key decision-making powers. The investigation demonstrates that executive centralization in urban governance has paved the way for the swift implementation of contested urban transformation projects marked by a non-participatory approach to urban ‘renewal’, the reconfiguration of the state’s redistributive function vis-à-vis low-income households, and a tendency to exacerbate existing patterns of inequalities in the housing market.     

Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue takes as its point of departure three centres of gravity that have shaped the study of neoliberalism but have also established barriers to further progress in these debates. By promoting an intersectional materialist research agenda which challenges extant ideational, modernist and empiricist tendencies in scholarship on neoliberalism, the essay contextualizes the special issue articles by outlining and clarifying key aspects of our understanding of authoritarian neoliberalism. In particular, we reflect on themes related to conceptualization and periodization, which are of importance for both this special issue but also for broader questions of knowledge production and praxis. Through doing so, we argue that there are two distinct yet connected trajectories within the research agenda on authoritarian neoliberalism: one which focuses on the intertwinement of authoritarian statisms and neoliberal reforms; and another which traces various lineages of transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces). Recognition of this spectrum of authoritarian neoliberal practices is important as it helps us uncover how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and pushes us to consider more fully how other worlds can be made possible. Nevertheless, it is affirmed that we must remain open to what an emancipatory society might look like, and what struggles would be most appropriate, in and across various socio-spatial contexts.     

Rethinking the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ thesis

ABSTRACT

Numerous scholars have identified the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ as the key driver of the neoliberal transformation. These accounts emphasize the building of neoliberal hegemony through the mobilization of this collective, and the New Right parties who aligned to these ideas. We argue that Australia's corporatist road to neoliberalism pushes against this thesis, as the movement found little sympathy among policy makers. Rather, the thought collective acted more like a ‘ginger group’, attempting to radicalize public debate and create space for new neoliberal arrangements. In Australia, successive centre-left Labor governments rolled out neoliberalism in a series of formal corporatist arrangements with the trade union movement. This paper sets out a reconsideration of the role of the thought collective, on the basis of the Australian experience, and argues this can move us beyond the ideational determinism that has come to characterize key accounts of how neoliberalism developed.     

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.     

Bureaucratic encounters “after neoliberalism”: Examining the supportive turn in social housing governance

It is well established that encounters between welfare bureaucracies and their clients have been reconfigured under neoliberalism to address the problem of “welfare dependency.” Contemporary bureaucratic encounters therefore entail measures to activate clients’ entrepreneurial/self-governing capacities, and conditionality/sanctioning practices to deal with clients who behave “irresponsibly.” Despite the dominance of the neoliberal model, recent research has identified a counter-trend in the practices of housing services away from entrepreneurializing and punitive strategies and towards a more supportive approach. This paper examines this counter-trend and its implications for neoliberal welfare governance. To do this, it presents findings from research into social housing governance in Queensland, Australia, where the neoliberal focus on welfare independence, conditionality and sanctioning has been tempered by a new supportive approach focused on assisting vulnerable clients to maintain and benefit from access to welfare/housing support. Following Larner, we argue that this shift signals the emergence of an “after neoliberal” governmental formation, wherein key features of neoliberal governmentality are replaced by, or redeployed in the service of, progressive initiatives that address neoliberalism’s failings at the street level, but leave broader neoliberal policy settings undisturbed. We also challenge recent sociological accounts that construe supportive welfare practices as a function of an all-encompassing neoliberal project, arguing instead for appreciation of the contingency of these developments and the progressive political affordances that they entail.     

The Global Uprising of Labour? The Korean Labour Movement and Neoliberal Social Corporatism

The role of organized labour as expression of dissent or social resistance to neoliberal economic globalization has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Several writers have argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘global uprising of labour’. In particular, reference is made to the labour movements of the industrializing semiperiphery, such as South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil, which are argued to show a way forward for the labour movements of the North. Such analysis as above, however, focuses on only one aspect of labour movements at the expense of their larger historical context and position within the capitalist world system. By privileging the strictly ‘global’ level of analysis, it ignores a key transformation in the nature of national state-society configurations in the semiperiphery, i.e. the general trend towards both democratization and neoliberal restructuring. Through examining the case of South Korea, I argue that the transition from developmental authoritarianism to neoliberal democracy has dramatically narrowed the terrain from which militant unionism might be expected to emerge. Since the 1980s, the Korean labour movement has undergone a transformation from a militant and almost revolutionary movement, to being co-opted, albeit imperfectly, into the new capitalist democracy. Thus, the threat of neoliberal restructuring has led not to resistance but to labour to seeking a role as responsible partner to government and business in pseudo-social corporatism forums, despite the fact the striking thing about Korean industrial relations is the absolute absence of prerequisites for such a system of social agreement politics. This co-optation reflects general political conditions in the semiperiphery, where simultaneous processes of democratization and neoliberal restructuring have made the assumption of unified resistance to globalization more problematic.     

Against exceptionalism: the legitimacy of the neoliberal age

ABSTRACT

After the financial crisis of 2007–08, many commentators, adopting a broadly Polanyian logic of reasoning, expected a departure from neoliberalism. The failure of this shift to materialize has typically been accounted for in ‘exceptionalist’ terms: the persistence of neoliberalism is understood not as a function of a specific legitimacy it has itself engendered, but in terms of external interventions by elites who manage to ‘capture’ executive and regulatory institutions and so to bypass democratic pressures. This paper argues that such an approach underestimates the endogenous sources of legitimacy and resilience that neoliberal governance commands. It criticizes the idea that neoliberalism is at its core dependent on a Schmittian exceptionalism and suggests a perspective on Hayek's articulation of neoliberalism that dissociates it from such an exceptionalist approach. The article proceeds to interrogate the rationality of neoliberalism by examining its distinctively secular temporal logic, rooted in speculation, preemption and reaction.     

Labor after Neoliberalism: The Birth of the Insecure Class in South Korea

Abstract

This article examines the rise and fall of organized labor in post-democratization, neoliberal Korea and traces the process through which a new labor underclass has been created since the late 1990s. Under the sweeping implementation of neoliberal policies, Korean labor has become increasingly fragmented, stratified, and marginalized both in the market and political arena. In this polarizing process, an ‘insecure class’ was born, consisting of irregular workers and the low-income self-employed. These working people are characterized by precarious labor conditions, bare social protection coverage, and frail organizational–political representation. This study explicates such a drastic restructuration of the Korean working people from the interaction of chaebol-centered economic structure, labor unions' organizational narrowness, and unrepresentative political parties devoid of programmatic competition. The examination of the insecure class in Korea casts light on the significance of class issues in neoliberal political economy and the analytical importance of rethinking social class in contemporary capitalist societies.     

Neoliberalism and altered state developmentalism in the twenty-first century extractive regime of Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article examines neoliberal leverage, states and ‘deep marketization’ in relation to resource extraction in Indonesia. The concept of ‘altered’ state developmentalism within a world-historical analysis of the semi-peripheral zone of the world-economy is introduced to address how much and in what ways resource extraction persists and even continues to expands. While most theories of development assume either that natural resource extraction will gradually fade or that the ‘curse’ of natural resources requires institutional reform, Indonesia’s ‘extractive regime’ persistently and under different political systems relies on extraction of land, forest, and mineral resources. Altered state developmentalism occurs, from this perspective, within a world-historical cycle of resource nationalism (CRN) as US hegemony declines. In contrast to the A first CRN’s put more emphasis on nationalizing ownership, e for progressive redistribution aims and industrial transformation. In contrast to the first CRN's emphasis on nationalizing ownership, empirical evidence from the oil, mining, and oil palm sectors illustrate how the advance of neoliberalism is tempered in the second CRN by altered developmentalism that aspires for growth and poverty reduction in a more market-oriented direction pushed by neoliberal leverage. While accommodating some pressures for land rights against the expansion of extractive frontiers, the overall thrust expands the conditions for yet more deep marketization.     

Politics after National Development: Explaining the Populist Rise under Late Capitalism

Ten years after the global financial crisis, the world is living through times of great political uncertainty and turbulence. While the current historical juncture has presented renewed opportunities for progressive articulations against marketisation and the individualisation of risk (i.e. neoliberalism), more prominently it has awoken the ghosts of nationalism and various reactionary forms of populism. This article’s contribution is in contextualising this novel momentum within late capitalism. We argue that the combination of techno-logistical transformations in production and pro-market policy sets that facilitated the globalisation of capital, and which dealt a death blow to national development strategies, was met by elites with intensified efforts to dislocate politics from society through processes of ‘depoliticisation’ that in turn allowed for further marketising efforts. However, this dislocation has dovetailed with a formidable social crisis characterised by unprecedented levels of inequality and vulnerability amid immense wealth, calling into question the elite consensus around neoliberalism. While the leaders of the current political reawakening often distinguish themselves against post-political forms of neoliberal governance, they remain confronted by powerful interests and significant structural constraints as they promote solutions for global problems within the anachronistic confines of the nation-state.     

Managerial power in the German model: the case of Bertelsmann and the antecedents of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Our article extends research on authoritarian neoliberalism to Germany, through a history of the Bertelsmann media corporation – sponsor and namesake of Germany’s most influential neoliberal think-tank. Our article makes three moves. Firstly, we argue that conceptualizing German neoliberalism in terms of an ‘ordoliberal paradigm’ is of limited use in explaining the rise and fall of Germany’s distinctive socio-economic model (Modell Deutschland). Instead, we locate the origins of authoritarian tendencies in the corporate power exercised by managers rather than in the power of state-backed markets imagined by ordoliberals. Secondly, we focus on the managerial innovations of Bertelsmann as a key actor enmeshed with Modell Deutschland. We show that the adaptation of business management practices of an endogenous ‘Cologne School’ empowered Bertelsmann’s postwar managers to overcome existential crises and financial constraints despite being excluded from Germany’s corporate support network. Thirdly, we argue that their further development in the 1970s also enabled Bertelsmann to curtail and circumvent the forms of labour representation associated with Modell Deutschland. Inspired by cybernetic management theories that it used to limit and control rather than revive market competition among its workforce, Bertelsmann began to act and think outside the postwar settlement between capital and labour before the settlement’s hotly-debated demise since the 1990s.     

Capital,conflict and convergence: a political understanding of neoliberalism and its relationship to capitalist transformation

ABSTRACT

In this article we argue against influential analyses of neoliberalism that prioritize variegation and the role of ideas as key theoretical foci relevant to understanding neoliberalism’s diffusion into myriad national and political settings. Rather, we contend that crucial to understanding neoliberalism is the role of politically-produced convergence around market rationality that reflects two core processes: the reorganization of production and the ascendency of financialization. We present a theorization and analysis of neoliberalism’s political production and diffusion over time, explaining its contested evolution and impact across diverse settings (both ‘North’ and ‘South’) and emphasizing its ever-intensifying symbiotic relationship with the consolidating world market in which the former has increasingly come to serve as the latter’s operating system (OS). Further, we posit that neoliberalism’s form, function and impact demand analytically prioritizing the leverage of constellations of ideological and material interests within the contradictory context of consolidating relations of production and financialization. Our analysis thus challenges many previous expositions of neoliberalism for their failure to locate neoliberalism’s manifestation as arising out of social conflict within particular junctures that privilege certain social forces and ideas over others. We also distinguish our position by highlighting how manifestations of neoliberalism in various settings have combined to yield a greater world market in which variegation has gradually given way to ever-intensifying disciplinary pressures towards market-policy conformity (mono-policy). While current populist movements may well turn out to be important counter movements to neoliberal hegemony, especially if they can internationalize, the disciplining effect of the world market renders many nationally-oriented policy alternatives costly and politically fraught.     

The Scylla State. A gendered understanding of the experiences of marginalised women in the United Kingdom

Since the formation of the 2012 Coalition government, the UK has been subject to 12 years of neoliberal policy enacted with ferocity and vigour. This has comprised austerity measures including the retrenchment of welfare via the reshaping of the welfare state and public services according to business practices, ideals of individual responsibilisation and overwhelmingly, the notion of reducing the state's ideological and fiscal responsibility for equity and social welfare. The neoliberal state has been conceptualised by Loic Wacquant as a Centaur, boasting a liberal head, yet one atop an authoritarian body whose focus is the designated ‘underclasses’, the socially and economically non-compliant. The Centaur takes away with one hand while ruling punitively with the other, specifically via ‘prisonfare’ and ‘workfare’ to compel submission to precarious and sub-par employment. Although compelling, the Centaur State is justifiably critiqued for its blindness to gender and focus upon the manifestation of neoliberalism in the States. By exploring the stories of 23 women in the UK with histories of survival sex working and problematic drug use, a distinct gendered alternative reality emerges of the operation and machinations of the neoliberal state. Rather than a Centaur, marginalised women experience the Scylla State, a covert, hydra-headed beast motivated by neo-Victorian ideals of ‘womanfare’. The operations of the Scylla State are unpredictable, replicate traumatising interpersonal experiences and variously involve surveillance, coercion, conditionality and the responsibilisation of victimhood to justify increasingly punitive responses to women's survival strategies in the face of increasing trauma and deprivation.     

Governmentality,subjectivity, and the neoliberal form of life

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today.     

Uneasy passages between neoliberalism and feminism: Social inclusion and financialization in Israel's empowerment microfinance

This article focuses on feminist non‐governmental organizations advocating for economic empowerment of women (EEW) through microfinance, using Israel as a case study. Through fieldwork, interviews and documents, we investigate the institutional practices, cultural discourses and struggles that EEWs develop in order to expose the particular ways in which feminist organizations interact with the world of finance and state institutions. Our analysis points to the complex power dynamics of mediation, suggesting that there are ‘uneasy passages' between neoliberalism and feminism, ones that help re‐signify the meaning of financial discourses while re‐politicizing women's social and economic exclusions. Simultaneously, however, this relation induces a series of compromises, whereby EEWs adopt neoliberal modes of governance. Rejecting the notion that contemporary feminism has simply been co‐opted by neoliberalism or the perception of EEW microfinance as a mere expansion of neoliberal rationalities, we reveal new sites and ways in which feminism both colludes and collides with neoliberalism.