Wednesday 24 August 2011

The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism by Colin Crouch

Just as it appeared with the financial crisis of 2007-08 that Neo-Liberalism had taken a firm, apparently fatal knock-out blow and all us, as we saw it lying on the boxing ring floor, were about to wake up and finally able to see the odious ideology for all the sham and elitist self-serving twaddle that it is... well back it bounces all shiny and new, ready to fight another round as if secretly pumped with steroids to help it along the way.

Well not exactly secretly; the political elite makes no bones about it's love affair with Neo-Liberalism; in fact our political class on not just both sides of the Atlantic but now the Channel as well, are well and truly incorporated within the ideological clutches of the Neo-Liberal behemoth and, because of that, it's not difficult to feel as if the developed world in the 21st century is going to remain thoroughly fucked for the foreseeable future.

But let's not feel too pessimistic on this wonderful summer's day as the rain streams down outside and our wonderful government- the very same one that last year was telling us we were nearly bankrupt from ridiculous socialist policies, but can then find a billion quid to bomb civilians with in Libya- crows about a successful campaign of war in the ME.  Let's turn to this rather excellent work in question.

Colin Crouch’s book takes it’s cue from George Dangerfield’s 1936 classic ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England,’ in which Dangerfield tried to explain the sudden collapse in the early 20th century, of the political ideas and a party that had dominated the late Victorian Age and pre-WW1 Britain. With Neo-Liberalism, he does however turn this analysis on it’s head; his aim is to explain why, following a huge economic and political crisis based fairly and squarely within the ideologies of Neo-Liberalism, it hasn’t collapsed and, indeed, hasn’t just survived but is getting back on it’s feet again determined to get back to business as usual.

This resilience of Neo-Liberalism is a fascinating phenomenon and a rich seam of socio-political analysis to mine, and Crouch does an admirable job of it. He charts the fundamental aspect of Neo-Liberalism that is simple but rarely acknowledged- either through myopia on the Left, or wilful masking and divertive myth-making on the Right, that actually existing- as opposed to ideologically pure- Neo-Liberalism is in no way as devoted to free markets as it relentlessly professes to be.

Crouch clearly explains how the trans global corporation is the true embodiment of Neo-Liberal economic theory, and that in reality has nothing to do with maintaining open, free markets in a democratic, ‘libertarian’ political structure free of overt influence from the state. It is more to do with transferring power from the state- which by definition is believed by Neo-Liberals to be at best inefficient, at worst corrupt and nothing but self-serving, as well as naturally erring towards the creation of monopolies at the expense of consumer choice- to the private sector. but the shape of this private sector is not one of a raft of competing small-medium size enterprises, but that of a small number of increasingly inter-related, planet-striding corporations. He also interestingly explains a key aspect of Neo-Liberalism that the ideology uses at the core of all it’s arguments to explain away this process: when cornered on such issues, they carefully describe the process of corporatism as one of enhancing consumer ‘welfare,’ not consumer 'choice.' So, as long as wealth is being created somewhere in the system- even if it is concentrated amongst only a select few- it enhances consumer welfare no matter what.

The irony of this anti-state rhetoric- that everything characteristically wrong with the state in Neo-Liberal analysis has in fact, been merely transferred to the private sector- is still strangely lost on many people, but Crouch successfully shows us how this is in fact the reality of the 21st Century. At the core of Neo-Liberalism is not the urge to free everyone from the shackles of a nanny state into a vibrant world of competing privately run firms, but the direct aim to privatise power into a small group of the global elite. And this privatisation process can be seen at work relentlessly around us day in day out. The turning of private, corporate debt into public debt in the aftermath of the 2008-09 crash; the switching of corporate failure and market inefficiencies into an issue of overtly expensive and un-necessary public services; the process of now moving that public state debt onto the ordinary citizen through forcing them further into debt; the eroding of their living standards by high inflation/low interest rates etc., and so it goes on…

Colin Crouch has therefore provided us with a timely, much needed and erudite analysis of how a political ideology that, in the ‘normal’ state of affairs would be on it’s knees gasping it’s last breath, has perversely emerged stronger from it's crisis primarily because unlike in previous crises, where the key players where toppled by world events- such as the Keynsians in the 70s- the key players and proponents of Neo-Liberalism, namely the corporations, were saved and maintained by the state to get back to what they do best: creating profit for themselves and themselves alone.

Not just the Left, but the moderate Right needs to understand this, and must get to grips with the neo-Liberal phenomenon and fully understand it before our social democracy and values are made even more difficult to repair, and this book is a good starting point from which to do just that.