The coalition's neoliberal agenda is the most radical social
revolution in decades ? with the dismantling of the tyrannical state
at its heart. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall looks at the rapid advance
of the ideology and asks: can it be reversed?
Stuart Hall
Tuesday September 13 2011
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals
We are living through an extraordinary political situation: the end of
the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10, the defeat of
New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic
coalition. What sort of crisis is this? Is it a serious wobble in the
trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust economic model that has
dominated global capitalism? Does it presage business as usual, the
deepening of present trends, or the mobilisation of social forces for
a radical change of direction? Is this the start of a new conjuncture?
My argument is that the present situation is another unresolved
rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as "the long march of
the Neoliberal Revolution". Each crisis since the 1970s has looked
different, arising from specific historical circumstances. However,
they also seem to share some consistent underlying features, to be
connected in their general thrust and direction of travel.
Paradoxically, such opposed political regimes as Thatcherism and New
Labour have contributed in different ways to expanding this project.
Now the coalition is taking up the same cause.
Neoliberalism is grounded in the "free, possessive individual", with
the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in
particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern
society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private
property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-
given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led
"social engineering" must never prevail over corporate and private
interests. It must not intervene in the "natural" mechanisms of the
free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market
capitalism's propensity to create inequality.
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state mistakenly
saw its task as intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth,
universalising life-chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the
socially vulnerable, ameliorating the condition of oppressed or
maginalised groups and addressing social injustice. Its do-gooding,
utopian sentimentality enervated the nation's moral fibre, and eroded
personal responsibility and the overriding duty of the poor to work.
State intervention must never compromise the right of private capital
to grow the business, improve share value, pay dividends and reward
its agents with enormous salaries, benefits and bonuses.
The formation of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in May
2010 was fully in line with the dominant political logic of
realignment. In the spirit of the times, Cameron, with Blair as his
role model, signalled his determination to reposition the Tories as a
"compassionate conservative party", though this has turned out to be
something of a chimera.
At the same time, many underestimated how deeply being out of office
and power had divided the Lib Dem soul. Coalition now set the
neoliberal-inclined Orange Book [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Orange-Book-
David-Laws/dp/1861977972" title="] supporters, who favoured an
alliance with the Conservatives, against the "progressives", including
former social democrats, who leaned towards Labour. A deal ? its
detail now forgotten ? was stitched up, in which the social liberals
were trounced, and Cameron and Clegg "kissed hands" in the No 10 rose
garden [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPgvhrHTVic" title="">Cameron
and Clegg "kissed hands] (the former looking like the cat that had
swallowed the cream). The Lib Dems thus provided the Cameron
leadership with the fig leaf it needed ? while the banking crisis gave
the alibi. The coalition government seized the opportunity to launch
the most radical, far-reaching and irreversible social revolution
since the war.
Coalition policy often seems incompetent, with failures to think
things through or join things up. But, from another angle, it is
arguably the best prepared, most wide-ranging, radical and ambitious
of the three regimes that, since the 1970s, have been maturing the
neoliberal project. The Conservatives had for some time been devoting
themselves to preparing for office ? not in policy detail but in terms
of how policy could be used in power to legislate into effect a new
political settlement. They had convinced themselves that deep, fast
cuts would have to be made to satisfy the bond markets and
international assessors. But could the crisis be used, as the
rightwing economist Milton Friedman [http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/
2006/nov/17/guardianobituaries.politics" title="] had suggested, to
"produce real change"?
The legislative avalanche began immediately and has not let up. It
begins negatively ("the mess the previous government left us") but
ends positively, in embracing radical structural reform as the
solution. Ideology is in the driving seat, though vigorously denied.
The front-bench ideologues ? Osborne, Lansley, Gove, Maude, Duncan
Smith, Pickles, Hunt ? are saturated in neoliberal ideas and
determined to give them legislative effect. As One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest put it: "The crazies are in charge of the asylum." They
are single-minded about the irreversible transformation of society,
ruthless about the means, and in denial about the fallout. Osborne ?
smirking, clever, cynical, "the smiler with the knife" ? wields the
chopper with zeal. Cameron ? relaxed, plausible, charming, confident,
a silver-spooned patrician, "a smooth man" ? fronts the coalition TV
show. This crew long ago accepted Schumpeter's adage that there is no
alternative to "creative destruction" [http://
transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/
materials/schumpeter.html" title="">"creative destruction]. They have
given themselves, through legislative manoeuvring, an uninterrupted
five years to accomplish this task.
Its wide-ranging character must be judged in terms of the operational
breadth of the institutions and practices they aim to "reform", their
boldness in siphoning state-funding to the private sector, and the
number of constituencies they are prepared to confront. Reform and
choice ? the words already hijacked by New Labour ? are the master
narrative. They may be Conservatives but this is not a conserving
regime (it is a bemused Labour that is toying with the "blue-Labour"
conservative alternative now). Tories and Lib-Dems monotonously repeat
the dissembling mantras of their press and public relations people:
"We are clearing up the mess inherited from the previous government."
But the neoliberal engine is at full throttle.
We cannot deal with the cuts in any detail here. They have only just
started and there is much more to come. Instead we limit ourselves to
tracking the neoliberal logic behind the strategy.
First, targeted constituencies ? ie anyone associated with, relying or
dependent on the state and public services. For the rich, the
recession never happened. For the public sector, however, there will
be massive redundancies, a wage freeze, pay running well behind the
rate of inflation, pensions that will not survive in their present
form, rising retirement ages. Support for the less well off and the
vulnerable will be whittled away, and welfare dependency broken.
Benefits will be capped, workfare will be enforced. The old must sell
homes to pay for care; working parents must buy childcare; and
incapacity-benefit recipients must find work. Sure Start, the schools
refurbishment programme and Independent Maintenance Grants are on
hold. Wealthy parents can buy children an Oxbridge education: but many
other students will go into lifelong debt to get a degree. You cannot
make ?20bn savings in the NHS without affecting frontline, clinical
and nursing services. Andrew Lansley, however, "does not recognise
that figure". Similarly, though everybody else knew that most
universities would charge the maximum ?9,000 tuition fees, David "Two-
Brains" Willetts doesn't recognise that figure. Saying that square
pegs fit into round holes has become a front-bench speciality.
Women stand where many of these savage lines intersect. As Beatrix
Campbell reminds us, cutting the state means minimising the arena in
which women can find a voice, allies, social as well as material
support; and in which their concerns can be recognised. It means
reducing the resources society collectively allocates to children, to
making children a shared responsibility, and to the general "labour"
of care and love.
Second, there is privatisation ? returning public and state services
to private capital, redrawing the social architecture. The Blair
government was an innovator here. To avoid the political hassle of
full privatisation, it found you could simply burrow beneath the state/
market distinction. Outsourcing, value for money and contract
contestability opened the doors through which private capital could
slip into the public sector and hollow it out from within.
Privatisation now comes in three sizes: (1) straight sell-off of
public assets; (2) contracting out to private companies for profit;
(3) two-step privatisation by stealth, where it is represented as an
unintended consequence. Some examples: in criminal justice, contracts
for running prisons are being auctioned off and, in true neoliberal
fashion, Ken Clarke says he cannot see any difference in principle
whether prisons are publicly or privately owned; in healthcare, the
private sector is already a massive, profit-making presence, having
cherry-picked for profit medical services that hospitals can no longer
afford to provide; while in the most far-reaching, top-down NHS
reorganisation, GPs, grouped into private consortia (part of whose
profits they retain), will take charge of the ?60bn health budget.
Since few GPs know how, or have time, to run complex budgets, they
will "naturally" turn to the private health companies, which are
circling the NHS like sharks waiting to feed. Primary Care Trusts,
which represented a public interest in the funding process, are being
scrapped. In the general spirit of competition, hospitals must remove
the cap on the number of private patients they treat.
Third, the lure of "localism". In line with David Cameron's Big
Society, "free schools" (funded from the public purse ? Gove's
revenge) will "empower" parents and devolve power to "the people". But
parents ? beset as they are by pressing domestic and care
responsibilities, and lacking the capacity to run schools, assess good
teaching, define balanced curricula, remember much science or the new
maths, or speak a foreign language, while regarding history as boring,
and not having read a serious novel since GCSE ? will have to turn to
the private education sector to manage schools and define the school's
"vision". Could the two-step logic be clearer?
Fourth, phoney populism: pitching communities against local democracy.
Eric Pickles intends to wean councils permanently off the central
grant system. Meanwhile, social housing is at a standstill, housing
benefits will be cut and council rents allowed to rise to commercial
levels in urban centres. Many will move to cheaper rentals, losing
networks of friends, child support, family, school friends and school
places. Parents must find alternative employment locally ? if there is
any ? or allow extra travelling time. Jobseekers' allowances will be
capped. As the private housing lobby spokesperson said: "We are
looking forward to a bonanza." Since the early days of Thatcher we
have not seen such a ferocious onslaught on the fabric of civil
society, relationships and social life.
Fifth, cutting down to size state involvement in quality of life.
Amenities such as libraries, parks, swimming baths, sports facilities,
youth clubs and community centres will either be privatised or
disappear. Either unpaid volunteers will "step up to the plate" or
doors will close. In truth, the aim is not ? in the jargon of 1968
from which the promiscuous Cameron is not ashamed to borrow ? to
"shift power to the people", but to undermine the structures of local
democracy. The left, which feels positively about volunteering,
community involvement and participation ? and who doesn't? ? finds
itself once again triangulated into uncertainty. The concept of the
Big Society is so empty that universities have been obliged to put it
at the top of their research agenda on pain of a cut in funding ?
presumably so that politicians can discover what on earth it means: a
shabby, cavalier, duplicitous interference in freedom of thought.
What is intended is a permanent revolution. Can society be permanently
reconstructed along these lines? Is neoliberalism hegemonic?
The protests are growing. Weighty professional voices are ranged
against structural reforms, and the speed and scale of cuts in a
fragile economy. There are pauses, rethinks and U-turns. Finally,
there are unexpected developments that come out of the blue, such as
the phone-hacking scandal that enveloped Rupert Murdoch's News
International. In the free-for-all ethos of neoliberal times, this
sordid affair blew the media's cover, compromised the Cameron
leadership and penetrated echelons of the state itself. As Donald
Rumsfeld ruefully remarked, "Stuff Happens!" If the Lib-Dem wheeze of
delivering cuts in government and campaigning against them at the next
election fails to persuade, they face the prospect of an electoral
wipe-out. The coalition may fall apart, though at an election the
Conservatives might get the majority they failed to muster last time.
What happens next is not pregiven.
Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No
victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be worked
on, maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded social forces, whose
consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into
account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative
strategies and visions ? and the struggle over a hegemonic system
starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams [http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams" title="]called "the
emergent" ? and the reason why history is never closed but maintains
an open horizon towards the future.
However, in ambition, depth, degree of break with the past, variety of
sites being colonised, impact on common sense, shift in the social
architecture, neoliberalism does constitute a hegemonic project.
Today, popular thinking and the systems of calculation in daily life
offer very little friction to the passage of its ideas. Delivery may
be more difficult: new and old contradictions still haunt the edifice,
in the very process of its reconstruction. Still, in terms of laying
foundations and staging the future on favourable ground, the
neoliberal project is several stages further on. To traduce a phrase
of Marx's: "Well grubbed, old mole." Alas!
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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