The policy regime of neoliberalism has proven to be highly durable, even in the face of the crisis that has beset the global capitalist economy since 2007...Those who predicted that the crisis signaled the end of neoliberalism have been hard-pressed to explain its subsequent resilience. One reason for this, I believe, is that they grounded their analysis primarily in the realm of ideas. In doing so, they mistook the decline in legitimacy that neoliberal ideas certainly underwent after the onset of the crisis, for a retreat from neoliberalism more generally. Such commentators missed the ways in which the neoliberal policy regime has become deeply socially embedded, not simply in a pervasive ideological framework, but also within new institutional rules and a reshaped set of class relations. This has given it enormous inertia. By institutionally embedded I mean not only that states have developed new neoliberal regulations but, more importantly, they have enacted or signed up to a framework of rules that commit governments to further neoliberalisation, irrespective of their political colours. Competition policies and the articles and rules of supra-national institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the economic constitution of the European Union, and the numerous ‘free trade’ agreements to which states are increasingly signatories are examples of this institutional embedding of neoliberalism. As for the embedding of the neoliberal policy regime within class relations, this refers to ways in which the profit making strategies of capital have come to depend upon the maintenance or extension of neoliberal forms of economic regulation, as well as the fact that the ability of capital to achieve this goal has been bolstered by the strengthening of its political power, and well as its power within the employment relationship.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 11:12:14 +0000
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