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Thirteen Things You Need to Know About Neoliberalism
Ben Fine
Department of Economics
SOAS, University of London, UK
bf@soas.ac.uk
Alfredo Saad-Filho
Department of Development Studies
SOAS, University of London, UK
as59@soas.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This article examines the theories and practices of neoliberalism across thirteen aspects of
(‘things you need to know about’) neoliberalism. They include the argument that
neoliberalism is not reducible to a cogent ideology or a change in economic or social policies,
nor is it primarily about a shift in the relationship between the state and the market or
between workers and capital in general, or finance in particular. Instead, neoliberalism is a
stage in the development of capitalism underpinned by financialisation. Neoliberalism by its
nature is highly diversified in its features, impact and outcomes, reflecting specific
combinations of scholarship, ideology, policy and practice. In turn, these are attached to
distinctive material cultures giving rise to the (variegated) neoliberalisation of everyday life
and, at a further remove, to specific modalities of economic growth, volatility and crisis.
Finally, this paper argues that there are alternatives, both within and beyond neoliberalism
itself.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, Capitalism, Crisis, Keynesianism, Marxism.
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Introduction
Oh no, not another piece on neoliberalism, synthesising what has gone before, adding its own
particular angle, and thereby compounding the confusion as much as clarifying what has gone
before.
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And, what’s more, written with a popular title along the lines of Ha-Joon Chang’s
(2011) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. But appearances can be deceptive.
For, whilst this is a stocktaking exercise, delivered to some degree in popular and stark form,
it gains depth from three sources. One is longstanding scholarship on neoliberalism itself.
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Another is being able to view, and to present, neoliberalism in light of the global crisis. The
third is to have illustrated the nature of neoliberalism through comparative case studies
around housing, health, pensions and water, themselves situated in the broader context of
study of the impact of financialisation on economic and social functioning.
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This intellectual exercise is both significant and timely because the current ‘age of
neoliberalism’ has already lasted beyond one generation – exceeding the lifetime of the
preceding Keynesian ‘golden age’ – and there are no signs that it is about to give way. The
solidity of neoliberalism, its continuing ability to renew itself and intensify its hold on
governments and societies despite economic volatility and the depth of the current crisis,
warrants recognition and detailed investigation. We offer our contribution in what follows.
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The first thing you need to know about neoliberalism is that it represents a new stage in the
development of capitalism emerging in the wake of the post-war boom.
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In the social sciences literature, neoliberalism has generally been understood in four
closely-related and not always easily separable ways: (a) as a set of economic and political
ideas inspired, unevenly and often inconsistently, by the (neo-)Austrian School and
monetarism;
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(b) as a set of policies, institutions and practices inspired and/or validated by
those ideas;
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(c) as a class offensive against the workers and the poor led by the state on
behalf of capital in general and finance in particular (this attack is normally justified by
recourse to neoliberal ideas and carried out through so-called economic ‘adjustment’,
especially in developing but increasingly in developed countries in crisis),
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and (d) as a
material structure of social, economic and political reproduction underpinned by
financialisation, in which case neoliberalism is the current phase, stage, or mode of existence
of capitalism. Each conceptualisation of neoliberalism necessarily involves a further issue:
does this concept offer anything of substance or coherence in understanding the
contemporary world as opposed to ‘free market’ capitalism, post-fordism (underpinning
postmodernism), the ‘knowledge economy’, the ever popular consumer society, or
whatever?
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Our own starting point is to characterise neoliberalism in light of approach (d). This
immediately raises three further questions. First is how do we define a stage of capitalism.
This is done through the distinctive ways in which economic reproduction (the accumulation,
distribution and exchange of value) is organised and reorganised and its implications for
social reproduction (the structures, relations, processes and agents that are not directly or
predominantly economic, including the political and the ideological). As Dardot and Laval
(2013, p.14) rightly put it, ‘the originality of neoliberalism is precisely its creation of a new
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set of rules defining not only a different “regime of accumulation”, but, more broadly, a
different society’.
Second is how do we characterise previous stages of capitalism. This is to some
degree academic as there tends to be uniformity over the periodisation of capitalism into
separate stages even if slightly different criteria from ours are used to do so.
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Some sort of
laissez-faire period in the nineteenth century is presumed to give way to a more monopolistic
stage in the first half of the twentieth century which then passes to a stage in which state
intervention is significant, conventionally termed the Keynesian or Fordist period.
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More
significantly, stages of capitalism are distinguished by global and not merely a collection of
national conditions, so it would be inappropriate to start inductively from the classification of
countries into those that are more or less (neo)liberal, Keynesian or whatever. Rather,
different countries exist within, and influence, the dominant stages of global capitalism in
different ways, and the same is true of the economic, the political and the ideological more
generally at different levels and in different arenas.
The third issue is why should neoliberalism be considered a new and separate stage of
capitalism. Our answer is to be found throughout what follows but is fundamentally based
upon the insight that the most salient feature of neoliberalism is financialisation. As is shown
in the fifth thing, the rise of financialisation over the past thirty years, defined as the
intensive and extensive accumulation of interest-bearing capital, has transformed profoundly
the organisation of economic and social reproduction. These transformations include not only
outcomes but the structures, processes, agencies and relations through which those outcomes
are determined across production, employment, international integration, the state and
ideology. The term financialisation, then, encapsulates the increasing role of globalised
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finance in ever more areas of economic and social life. In turn, financialisation underpins a
neoliberal system of accumulation that is articulated through the power of the state to impose,
drive, underwrite and manage the internationalisation of production and finance in each
territory, often under the perverse ideological veil of promoting non-interventionism.
Our favoured approach, then, not only claims that neoliberalism is the current stage,
phase or mode of existence of capitalism but also explains how it should be understood as
such. It also implies that the starting point in specifying neoliberalism must have both logical
and historical content. The former concerns the nature of economic reproduction under
neoliberalism, while the latter focuses on the (uneven) ways in which neoliberalism exists
across different countries including both social and economic reproduction. For, as will be
seen under the tenth thing, neoliberalism is distinctive but not homogenising. Instead, it
fosters diversity and differentiation underpinned by common aspects. It is the latter that have
to be identified in the first instance, together with their internal contradictions, tensions and
sources of dynamics and, consequently, potential to realise uneven outcomes and the
mechanisms and determinants through which they do so in specific instances. In contrast, the
commonly held presumption that neoliberalism is homogenising is grounded at an
excessively concrete level and in a selective manner, either missing out on the diverse
consequences of the common drivers of neoliberalism, or inevitably concluding that it is an
incoherent specification of contemporary capitalism in light of this diversity.
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This approach to neoliberalism informs a specific understanding of two key features
of the contemporary political economy. These are, first, that financialisation has transformed
the global patterns of growth. The rates of investment and GDP growth in the advanced
economies have tended to decline since the crisis of the so-called Keynesian, Fordist and