Long live neo-liberalism?
| Author | Leighton, Dan |
| Position | Features |
We are still very much in the midst of the financial crisis triggered by the sub-prime crash and collapse of Lehmans. With the markets in turmoil at the prospect of sovereign debt default in the eurozone and the downgrading of US bonds, the way out remains anything but obvious. Yet as a private debt crisis has mutated into a sovereign debt crisis, two things at least seem clear.
The first is that the centre-left has to date been utterly incapable of capitalising on the crisis, both electorally and intellectually. Secondly, despite the neo-liberal paradigm being 'mugged by reality', the primary agents of the financial crisis that survived have come out of the situation stronger than before, and their frameworks dominate practical prescriptions on what needs to be done to bring about recovery. George Osborne's defence of his strategy of austerity is that bond markets approve - yields on British bonds are now the lowest on any country. While the basic bargain of neo-liberalism's trickle-down economics seems to have broken down, its criteria still frame the limits of the politically possible.
The salient fact about the financial crisis to date is that both the power and the narrative of neo-liberalism remain intact. In The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism, Colin Crouch, Professor of Governance and Public Management at Warwick Business School, and one time chair of the Fabian Society and editor of the Political Quarterly, provides a guide to the perplexed as why this is the case (Crouch, 2011).
Crouch is a noted authority on the comparative sociology of capitalist economies, penning compendious tomes on the subject for primarily academic audiences (most recently Crouch, 2005; in these pages see Crouch, 2008a). Yet every few years he surfaces with books and pamphlets intended for a wider public that compress his academic learning into a more acutely political direction (for example Crouch 2000; 2003; 2008b). He has a knack of coining terms and concepts that help the general reader understand the complexities of contemporary political economy, which help hone a more effective strategic understanding of power relationships, possibilities and the limitations of political change.
Yet the tone and intent is what could be called strategic clarification for ordinary citizens, rather than blueprints for immediate action by activists or policy prescriptions for policymakers. This civic humility is neatly encapsulated in the opening paragraph of his latest book:
Most literature about subjects of this kind is written from the standpoint of someone showing how the world might be changed, either by the authors themselves if they ever got the chance, or by political leaders whom they hope to address. But very few people are ever in a position to change the world; among those few are many who would change it for the worse. There is a far bigger audience of people who have to cope as best they can with the world they find. It is for them that this book is written. (Crouch, 2011, xi) Crouch's key claim is that the conventional polarities of state vs. market that is characteristic of debate between left and right ill-serves those seeking to understand the world as it currently exists. Both principled defenders and critics of the market have fallen to prey to a sleight of hand in which neo-liberal rhetoric about markets camouflages the reality of a political and economic regime in which the giant corporation dominates public life.
In Post-Democracy (Crouch, 2004), which started life as Fabian pamphlet (Crouch, 2000), Crouch highlighted how the global corporation had superseded political parties, amongst other formal political actors, as the key political institution, in a manner which hollowed out the meaning and power of liberal democratic polities. In the Strange Death, he extends the argument to claim that under corporate-dominated neo-liberalism 'democracy is joined by the market as a kind of victim' (Crouch, 2011, ix). This only becomes visible when the dualism of state/market is replaced with a 'triangular confrontation' among state, market and corporation.
Yet Crouch doesn't go in for the anti-capitalist radicalism that seeks to rid society of giant corporations or carry any faith that the Labour Party could be the vehicle for a new social democratic settlement. In a manner that might disappoint those expecting to see the overthrow of neo-liberalism, Crouch places his bets in favour of a 'fourth force, the busy but small voices of civil society, not to abolish but to criticise, harry and expose the misdeeds and abuses of the cosy triangle' (Crouch, 2011, x).
In the following interview we discuss some of Crouch's key concepts for understanding today's political economy, the constraints and political possibilities that flow from this understanding, and the need for repoliticising the workplace as a space in which people's interests can be transformed once more into a source of progressive political identity.
Identities and interests
At the height of New Labour's time in power you wrote a pamphlet called Coping with Post-Democracy (Crouch, 2000). What did you mean by the term and how does it relate to the various diagnoses out there that speak to a crisis of liberal democratic institutions?
I'm using 'post-' in the same way others have used 'post-industrial' and, to some extent, 'post-modern'. When we use the term 'post-industrial' it doesn't mean we no longer use products made in a factory; but the dynamism of the economy has shifted away from industry to services.
What I mean by 'post-democracy' is a system in which all the institutions of democracy are in place, they are functioning - sometimes quite well at times - but the creative energy of the polity is moving off somewhere else. In particular it is moving beyond the reach of the nation-state and towards corporations, towards capital and away from the reach of ordinary citizens.
I don't say this is a state we have fully reached. In some ways it's a dystopia - I'm saying, 'is this what you want to happen?' If not, we need to do something about it. It is still possible to see vibrant democratic movements in a society like ours - environmentalism and feminism, for example. My argument differs from other claims concerning the crisis of democracy, as I'm not saying there is necessarily a decline; energy is happening in places other than parties.
But what exactly is the role of parties in post-democratic polities? Does the dominance of corporate agendas mean they are too constrained by unequal power to raise certain issues, or is there something intrinsic to the organisation of parties which means they can't adapt to a globalised world?
The power of corporations and globalisation are clearly important. But there is a third force at work, which is the declining capacity of industrial societies to produce social identities around economic interests, apart from those of an elite. Throughout the twentieth century this capacity to relate to identities gave political parties their rootedness in society. We get angry with politicians when we feel they are all afraid to be different, aping each other's rhetoric and so on. But they can only work with the society they've got and the society we have is one in which, apart from ethnic or regional identities, many people probably don't have an identity which means a lot to them, an identity that can take them to a set of interests which can be politically defined. It's actually a bit of luck when societies have this - one of the curiosities of the late-nineteenth through to the late-twentieth centuries. It happened to produce clearly defined sets of interests.
And this was the tragic error of the British left, the left of the Labour Party at the end of the last century; it believed it was speaking for a great movement out there and believed that getting motions passed through the machinery of its committees somehow represented a huge social force. It didn't - it just represented the people who were talking about it.
So it's not simply about domination from capital, but sociological shifts which create a much more difficult environment for parties to work with. The machinery we have for doing this is premised on an environment that no longer exists.
That's right; but it's interesting to note that there is in fact something like a global business class that shares an identity through a highly conscious sense of its own interest. They have shared symbols and publications - Business Week and The Economist are its ideological organs. It has dedicated social spaces and gatherings. For example, an enormous culture shift was the move in the centre of gravity of London's cultural life from the South Bank to the Barbican - from Labour territory to the heartland of the financial capital.
The top end of society does not therefore have the problem of being unable to tie together their interests into a coherent identity. This links up with the sheer facts of corporate power to explain a whole series of things in the way society functions and different people within it relate to it.
Corporate power and market forces
So in the classic Marxian sense the global business elite is a class for itself as well as a class in itself, and the rest of society lack this self-conscious understanding of their position and associated interests.
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