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John Clarke
© John Clarke 2009
This paper was presented as a work in progress and is not for quoting without permission. An edited version will appear in Soundings 43, to be published in November 2009.
This paper explores some aspects of the present crisis, including the problem of how to think about crises in the current conjuncture. It has four main parts: the first and second explore the changing imagery of markets as disenchantment sets in; the third considers what sort of crisis is taking place; and the fourth and final part of the paper considers how innovations and interventions directed at solving the crisis are being framed. It concludes that being 'after neo-liberalism' may not be the same as the disappearance of neo-liberalism.
For the last thirty-five years, political, policy and popular narratives have centred on the magic of the market. Unlike cumbersome, intrusive, domineering states, markets were the flexible friends of humanity. Markets, we were told, made things work. They offered the most efficient and effective means of coordinating human action. They were dynamic and responsive; innovative and open. Thomas Frank captures something of this rise of market imagery:
Wherever one looked in the nineties entrepreneurs were occupying
the ideological space once filled by the noble sons of toil. It was businessmen
who were sounding off against the arrogance of elites, railing against
the privilege of old money, protesting false expertise and waging relentless,
idealistic war against the principle of hierarchy wherever it could be
found. They were market populists, adherents of a powerful new political
mythology that had arisen from the ruins of the thirty-year backlash.
Their fundamental faith was a simple one. The market and the people -
both understood as grand principles of social life rather than particulars
- were essentially one and the same. By its very nature the market was
democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery
of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet. In
fact, the market was more democratic than any of the formal institutions
of democracy - elections, legislatures, government. The market was a community.
The market was infinitely diverse, permitting without prejudice the articulation
of any and all tastes and preferences. Most importantly of all, the market
was militant about its democracy. It had no place for snobs, for hierarchies,
for elitism, for pretense, and it would fight these things by its very
nature. (Frank, 2001: 29)
Frank's discussion of market populism points to the strange and compelling interplay between academic (neo-classical economics, especially), political and popular discourses in disseminating market imagery. And although Frank is primarily addressing the rise of market thinking in the US, there is certainly good reason to talk seriously the transnational circuits through which market populism has circulated, not least the apparatuses of globalising economic and social policy (World, Bank, IMF, WTO and more).
Here I want to build on Frank's argument by pointing to several key features of this market-centric thinking and drawing out two of the vital elements of the magic of markets. The first key feature concerns the unboundedness of markets: the potential of markets knew no limits because their dynamic character resembled a principle of perpetual motion. Nowhere could resist the arrival of market relations (a geo-political point underlined by the fall of communism and the transformation of former socialist societies to varieties of market economy). The point about unboundedness clearly has a spatial referent - nowhere in the world could remain immune. But it also referred to spheres of human activity. Some critics have pointed to the capacity of market logics to subsume, rather than just subordinate, 'non-economic' domains of social life:
…the market's principles and mechanisms expand beyond their
place in the economic sphere to convert other nonmarket spheres of life
to their organizing logic. The sites of market "invasion" are primarily
the state and civil society and their ideational and discursive regimes.
This drive to invade and convert noncontractual sites entails marketization,
contractualization, and privatization. Since market fundamentalism is
a regime on the move, it is always involved in an effort to gain the balance
of power by subjecting both polity and civil society to contractual powers
and principles. (Somers, 2008: 38)
For market enthusiasts, there was no domain of social life that could not be improved by its engagement with market dynamics. While this was perhaps most visible in relation to state-related practices, such as social welfare or public service provision, it was claimed to extend to questions of sexual relationships, partner choice and household organization.
Markets could play these roles partly because their dynamics and logics were consistently identified as being 'pre-social'. Denise Riley (1983) uses this phrase to describe the relationship between biology and the social in theories of child development, such that biology always precedes the action of the social. In the context of the market, the basic dynamics of the market are represented as preceding the social by virtue of being natural forces - competition being the key referent that links biological, economic and psychological evolutionary theories (see, for example, Shermer, 2009). Markets are thus associated with pre-social human conditions and dynamics - and, of course, not just human but natural: evolution through competition is the basic matrix. The pre-social characterization of markets also enables them to be represented as a-political. The market mechanism also precedes politics. This double movement is most visible in the typical juxtaposition of market logics and 'social engineering' - the latter representing 'external interference' (usually by governments or states) into natural processes. Such interference is doomed to failure or worse since it will disturb the delicate dynamics and balances that only markets can combine. 2
However, there are two other significant elements that contribute to the perceived magic of markets. The first is the promise of possibility: that tomorrow will be better. Market magic works on this promise - that disappointment or frustration can be overcome. This sense of deferred possibility links individuals and markets - individuals can have another chance to test their capacities; markets can always be perfected even if a particular example may not have functioned perfectly. 3
The other promise is that markets are expansive. They create more: more wealth, more goods, more results, more possibilities. This conception links the search for personal satisfaction, especially through consumption, to an urban landscape of growth and dynamism, and to the promise that freeing markets will reduce global poverty by creating more wealth (on the imaginary of growth and dynamism, see Pile, 2005). The promise of the endless creation of new wealth has been counterposed to the 'social engineering' of redistributing actually existing wealth. Whether the crisis of global indebtedness will break or merely defer this promise remains to be seen.
But in these two promises - of possibility and of expansion - the magic of markets is bound up with a particular temporal logic. Market thinking is profoundly future oriented - but it is a future whose framing logics are relatively unchanging. The drive towards possibility and expansion is conditional on the basic mechanism of possibility and expansion - the market - remaining free to work its magic. The projections of the future in market thinking are thus both fantastic (wealth beyond your wildest dreams; or just the holiday of a lifetime) and banal - the future looks like the present, but larger.
Market populism has been associated with a language that is noticeably virile. Testimony is made to the rational, efficient and effective qualities of market but these are virtues that exist in combination with the restless striving and boundless energy of markets - always dynamic, innovative and expansive. Market magic is also associated with power and potency - the ability to make things happen, to turn fantasies into realities, while nevertheless being 'hard headed' and geared to the 'bottom line'. We might trace this virile language a little further into the recurrent trope of 'market penetration' and recognize this as a profoundly masculinized discourse. These are masculine characteristics (from competition to penetration), even if, of course, they are contradictory ones. Hard-headed rationality sits alongside visionary entrepreneurialism; efficient allocation alongside fantasies of infinite (and infinitely expanding) wealth. 4
But now, it seems, markets are not what they
used to be. They are a shadow of their former virile selves, no longer relentlessly
expanding but slipping into a period of decline, decay and, above all, depression.
Depression is an interesting concept in relation to markets because it condenses
two rather different, but significant sets of meanings. On one hand, we
encounter the hard evidentiary science of economics - in which depression
refers to a specified trend in economic activity, measurable by a set of
particular indicators
In these troubled and turbulent times, we have become accustomed to hearing about markets that are anxious, nervous, and unsettled. They are, it seems, prone to bouts of panic and hysteria in which they are infected by collective mood swings and a sort of viral irrationality. These mood swings of markets - moments of manic recovery offset by plummeting spirits - are leading us all into depression. There are several things that might be said about this shift, but here I want to concentrate on just two: engendering crisis and the question of faith.
By comparison with the virile, expansive and penetrative markets of the past, these currently enfeebled markets are being discursively feminised. Their irrationality and their instability are couched in the language of emotional and affective conditions that are - in Western cultures - coded as feminine (from the hysterical condition onwards). In contrast to the hard calculative logics that supposedly drove market expansiveness, the current markets are vulnerable entities. They are vulnerable to some characteristically feminine problems of gossip and loose talk that may precipitate a sudden decline in confidence. Lack of confidence can lead to a more generalized lack of faith, trust and confidence. These intangible conditions turn out to be at the core of our present troubles. For example, a recent BBC News viewpoint by Sir David Tang (Entrepreneur) merged both senses of depression into a compelling narrative about pessimism:
Pessimism is the most serious cause for the global economic tsunami.
There is an ocean of people who are now feeling so depressed that not only have they become resigned to the fact that they are in deep trouble, but they have told everybody else that they are also in deep trouble.
Pessimism has an uncanny knack of being self-fulfilling.
No wonder almost every single quoted share in the world has gone down significantly, mostly by half, if not much more. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7785564.stm; 31/01/2009)
Meanwhile, a Guardian report on declining confidence managed to go further by weaving into its story the meteorological reference for depression in a distinctive variant of the pathetic fallacy. It also contained an interview in which the mediation of declining confidence was identified as a major contributor to, if not direct cause of, the present difficulties:
Manchester's weather yesterday was a reflection of opinion on the streets about the economy: leaden clouds and persistent drizzle.
"I think there is a lack of belief in anything financial at the moment," said Neil Baldwin, an investment banker. "All the trouble with the banks, the way it has been reported by the BBC and Robert Peston in an almost gleeful way, has not helped.
"When there is a downturn in the stockmarket the negative news is reported extensively but when it bounces back up it is not reported as much. There seems to be a constant desire for negative stories.
"Do I have faith in the government? Not at all, they have not got a clue."
He said negativity in reporting stockmarket falls has eroded consumer confidence. As a result, people had reduced their consumption of items such as holidays, new cars and sofas. (Carter, 2009) 6
This marks a further turn in the discourses circulating around the 'credit crunch' and its aftermath - a discourse of belief and faith, associated with questions of trust and confidence, but on what seems to be a grander scale. What emerges is large scale disenchantment - the loss, or at least decline, of belief and faith in the key agents of contemporary economic and social life. This was best express in a Guardian report (on the 14th January 2009) of an international survey, under the following heading:
Britain loses faith in economy
Global poll shows UK least likely to trust politicians, banks or markets
The story continued:
British economic confidence has been shattered by the financial crisis, according to a unique international poll published today. It shows that people here are now less likely to trust banks, the stockmarket or the government's economic management than people in comparable nations…
On most measures, British people emerged as among the most pessimistic of the 14,555 people questioned around the world. (Glover, 2009)
The article moves between ideas of confidence, trust, belief and faith, but the mobilization of the concept of faith here is an interesting one, given the increasing salience of Faith as a governmental category in public and social policy (Faith schools, Faith communities, community cohesion and integration in a multi-Faith society and so on). But the loss of faith in the economy, markets, the banking system and government is a fairly spectacular national achievement. This prevailing scepticism about economic and political institutions is clearly widespread, according to the report, but concentrated in a particularly dense form in the UK.
What are we to make of this loss of faith? Is it just a temporary disenchantment - a moment in which the obvious failures of market and market related institutions and processes are simply and directly reflected in popular attitudes? Such a view would hold out the possibility of confidence being restored, faith renewed and magical enchantment restored. While not wanting to deny such possibilities, not least because forms of magical thinking often have ways of accommodating failure within their framing system, I want to take this moment of disenchantment to consider a rather different possibility. Is it possible that the discursive, political, policy and cultural dominance of market populism might have led both enthusiasts and critics to overstate its hold on the popular imaginary? Might people have been less in thrall to the magic of the market than we supposed?
I think there are two rather different points to be made here. The first is that descriptions of people's relationships to systems of thought (whether they are magical thinking, market populism or neo-liberal ideology) tend towards a rather binary view, with on/off settings. We might be better served by a more differentiated view of attachment and belief, being able to distinguish between enthusiasts or visionaries, their followers or acolytes, calculating converts, conditionally compliant audiences, keep your head down sceptics - as well as the heretical opposition. Identifying such positions might allow a more differentiated view of how people relate to particular discourses or ways of thinking - including market populism. But it tends to treat the field of belief as organised around a single pole and doesn't offer a sense of the multiple, overlapping, disjunctured discourses that formed what Gramsci thought of as common sense - that 'collection of traces without an inventory'. From such a starting point, we might view the spread of market populism as a partial colonization of common sense - building on, working with, and speaking through existing traces (after all market populism did not invent market thinking for the first time). Market populism - as the Frank quotation earlier makes clear - also involved harnessing or articulating other elements of Euro-Atlantic common sense to the logics of market populism: anti-elitism; questions of equity; desires for progress and pleasure and so on.
In this perspective, we might treat the present 'loss of faith' as the simultaneous dis-articulation of aspects of market populism and the revival of repressed or de-mobilised aspects of common sense, or, at least, those elements that circulated below the level of public discourse. Some involve other forms of anti-elitism (who trusts bankers, financiers and others who announce themselves as masters of the universe?); some concern other questions of equity and equality (the unequal distribution of risk, insecurity, vulnerability and misery); some address the corruptions and incompetence of 'politics' and 'politicians'; and some are about the lack of fit between market logics and other domains of social life.
Studies of popular conceptions of public services in the UK regularly point to a distinction between using public services and 'shopping' and a resistance to a consumer identity (e.g., Clarke et al, 2007; Needham, 2007). People sometimes insist on aspects of privacy and intimacy against the intrusion of the market; they are sometimes cynical about the collapse of all value judgements to price; and they sometimes believe that 'economic' motives may not be trusted in matters of social or public interest. None of this is to argue that there is a state of 'original innocence' or proto-socialist ethics to offset against market populism, but it is to insist that thinking about the popular might try harder to escape the binary distinction between belief and non-belief, and that Gramsci's way of viewing common sense as a field of political struggle might be a productive way of doing so. It is, I think, also a methodological point: the dominance of dominant ideas should not be treated as only a question of their colonization of public discourse and the institutions through which such discourse circulates. There is a further question about the relationship between publicly circulating discourse and popular thinking that should not be short-circuited by only tracking the texts.
This question was provoked by reading Michel Foucault's recently translated 1978-9 lectures at the Collège de France (Foucault, 2008). In them, he makes a passing, but characteristically provocative, distinction between a crisis of capitalism and a crisis of governmentality (quote). The distinction is an interesting one and made me ponder how many types of crisis might be at stake in the present, as well as how they might be distinguished and related. As an obsessive crisis watcher, I began accumulating types of crisis (and I have no reason to assume that the list in Table 1 is exhaustive)
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Table 1: what sort of crisis have you got? A financial crisis An economic crisis A crisis of confidence A crisis of capitalism A crisis of regulation A crisis of governance A crisis of government A global crisis |
I also assume that as recession deepens and depression looms, more and more types of crisis will be discovered. The temptation, of course, is to construct a model in which most of these are facets or aspects of a deeper, more fundamental crisis - a crisis of global capitalism, perhaps. I want to resist that temptation, not least because capitalism can be understood as endemically crisis prone. That is, if crisis is endemic to the system dynamics of capitalism, then discovering a crisis of capitalism may not be a big step forward. Nor do I really want to get to grips with tracing the specific dynamics of this crisis - whether this be a question of the autonomization of finance capital; the technologies and devices of securitization; or the perverse of effects of virtual globalization. 7
Instead, I want to focus on two rather different things in the remainder of this paper. The first concerns a question about how many crises might be condensed in this conjuncture - and what trying to think about their multiplicity might involve. The second aspect addresses the 'modes of thought' about the crisis and its resolution that currently dominate. Let me turn first to the political, institutional and discursive features of this crisis-ridden conjuncture. Thinking conjuncturally implies examining the multiple - and potentially heterogeneous - forces, tendencies and trajectories that are compressed or condensed into a particular moment. These tendencies have different weights, different effectivities, different histories and even different rhythms - but it is their combination or coming together that constitutes a conjuncture (see Clarke, 2007; Grossberg, 2006). In such a perspective, the search for the primary cause represents a mistaken analytical route - even if a prime mover was identifiable, it only gains its significance in its articulation with the other tendencies that together make up this specific conjuncture.
So, with this in mind, let me trace some of the tendencies that seem to be condensed in the present conjuncture of crisis. It is worth returning to disenchantment or the crisis of market magic (sometimes signalled, as we have seen, as a crisis of confidence, or a loss of faith or trust). It appears that key economic agents or actors in the global economic system have lost confidence (traders, shareholders, market makers, investors, as well as 'the markets' themselves in their strangely personified or anthropomorphised form). Nevertheless, there are many who believe that the magic might be restored by staying within, but renewing the faith. So, a few judicious sacrifices (senior executives, corporate bodies, even governments) might assuage anger and overcome doubt. Alternatively the refurbishment of some basic rituals and magical devices might revitalise confidence - the fetishes of transparency, openness, accountability and regulation have been waved with increasing vigour and the promise that both the magic and the (suitably controlled) virility of the market might be renewed. 8
But such strategies may not overcome widespread disenchantment and the sentiments of popular dismay, outrage and scepticism that have flowed into the spaces vacated by magical thinking (or perhaps that were already there but suppressed by the discursive weight of market populism). If indeed, people have 'lost faith' in markets, economies (and governments), this is a significant feature of the conjuncture. The crisis of magic might be a fertile ground for the construction of new popular political imaginaries - though by no means a landscape necessarily to be occupied by progressive popular politics. I will return to these issues in the final section, but there are some other crisis tendencies that are worth some attention that cluster together around the sign of the 'post'. In particular, I am intrigued as to whether the conjuncture is marked by the interwoven crises of post-fordism; post-national globalization and post-welfarist government.
In each of these formulations, the 'post' signified a movement beyond formations that had stabilised a certain sort of Northern capitalist system, in which fordism, national territorial units, and welfarism provided what Jessop (2002) nicely terms a 'spatio-temporal fix', or following Gilroy (1993) we might call a particular formation of Atlantic modernity. Of course, the 'post' did not necessarily signify that these formations had gone away, just that their central places in the articulation of this 'spatio-temporal fix' had been displaced or dislocated in the search for new formations that could secure economic, social and political integration - on a global scale and with decreasing constraints on the desires of capital. Are e now encountering a crisis of the 'posts' - a failure to discover, stabilise and install a new 'spatio-temporal fix' that provides the conditions of economic, social and political integration? From the 'flexible accumulation strategies' of post-fordism, the global North is increasingly haunted by fears about the condition of 'the real economy', while the export of mass manufacturing away from the Euro-Atlantic bloc is itself threatened by the volatility of global capital in crisis (e.g., reports of 20 million unemployed among China's 130 million migrant workers in China in January 2009 see: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/06/business/06yuan.php?page=2).
Despite the rhetorical flourishes about globalization and the 'end of the nation' (or nation-state), nations were never wholly displaced as economic, cultural territorial or governmental entities, sites of action, or objects of attachment. They were certainly exposed to new politics of scale - with shifting configurations of forms of power, but 'post national' did not denote a 'non-national' world. Nevertheless, as I will argue more fully in the next section, the current crisis has exposed the unfinished business of constructing a 'new world order' in which the new scales of power, decision-making and authority have been effectively re-stabilised. Certainly nation-states have remained - albeit unevenly - the locus of a variety of politics, forms of power and types of public engagement (Newman and Clarke, 2009).
These include the persistence of some varieties of collective welfare provision in the face of reform, retrenchment and reconfiguration. While Anglophone states have led the way in making welfare more conditional, more targeted and more oriented to market logics, other states have persisted with more universalist and more welfarist forms of provision. This is not the place to explore the comparative dynamics of welfare systems, but it needs to be noted that they continue to involve high levels of public spending, that they have not all been subject to market logics (of either policy or system governance); and that such universalist public services tend to command strong popular support. As with post-national, we might treat post-welfarist as denoting a period of unresolved tendencies - but where welfarism remains a feature of institutional arrangements (more strongly in some places than others) and persists as a resource in popular discourse and popular memory that can be invoked in times of economic and social uncertainty.
These unresolved 'posts' suggest one way of addressing the question of whether we are 'after neo-liberalism'. They point to some of the potential failures of neo-liberalism as a political project that sought to liberate capital from the national and statist 'shackles' of Atlantic Fordism and make the world safe for accumulation. In such terms, it might be argued that the attempt to construct new systemic conditions (of post-national scales and spaces, of post-welfarist approaches to governing the social and of post-fordist institutionalizations of capital) has - at best - engendered new contradictions, antagonisms and blockages.
However, the problem of even posing the question of 'after neo-liberalism', much less answering it, centres on whether there is any settled definition of neo-liberalism. As I have argued elsewhere (Clarke, 2008), there are several, possibly overlapping but not coherent, conceptions of neo-liberalism. These range from a coherent class project on the part of capital to subjugate new spaces and sites to the process of accumulation (Harvey, 2005) to a new political strategy of regulation to revive accumulation, creating the conditions for what Jessop calls the 'societalization' of a new regime of accumulation. But neo-liberalism is also used more broadly to refer to the processes of subjecting or subordinating social and political domains to the logic of the market and/or capital. Here there is a point of intersection - around logics of economization - between Marxist and Foucauldian derived ideas of neo-liberalism. Brown, for example, treats neo-liberalism as destructive of democratic sites and logics by elevating the calculative logics of economic relations over political ones (2005); while other Foucauldians stress the trajectory of an advanced liberal governmentality that summons agents to think of themselves as economic actors, as 'individuals' in their enterprising, self-directing, contracting, working and consuming selves (e.g., Rose, 1999).
This intersection raises two significant points. First, both political economy and governmentality approaches point to significant changes in the place, scope and character of the 'economic'. Second, what the economic means in these two approaches is radically different - where the former designates a real and fundamental economy composed of specific forces, relations and practices, the latter treats the economic as a modality of governing. People and other forms of agency are invited or incited to them of themselves as economic actors, engaged in economic relationships and practices, internalising economic logics or frameworks of calculation. I don't mean to deny that they have been made to blur, merge and mutually inform each other in much writing, but here I want to hang onto this difference because I think it illuminates different aspects of the current crisis. The distinction between the material economic and governing through economic subjects makes visible different dynamics of the last few decades - and might allow us to think about how they are entangled.
So the present crisis might be a crisis of neo-liberalism in the political economy sense - the interruption, or even collapse, of a regime of capital accumulation under the weight of its own social, spatial, political and economic contradictions. This crisis is global (in terms of the systemic regime and its dissemination of the consequences) and unevenly distributed - a reminder that globalization did not abolish space or territorial distinctions (regions, nations, etc) so much as rework and re-order them. Nevertheless, the instability and vulnerability of this regime suggests that new strategies may be needed to recreate value, restart accumulation and restore profitability. Will such strategies be 'post-neo-liberal'?
But we might also think of the current conjuncture as a crisis of neo-liberal governmentality in which the modes, sites and discourses of governing the present have become destabilised. Distance from, or scepticism about, economised subjectivity and government are widespread (and not merely the effect of the present). Alternative discourses are circulating more widely - about global governance, nationalisation, ethical or moral capitalism, environmental alternatives and the relationship between faith and economic practices. 9 How is neo-liberal rule to be sustained when its articles of faith seem undermined, and its perceived material effects form a powerful and visceral contrast to its promises of autonomous, self-directing and enterprising agency?
Trying to hold onto such distinctions may seem a little arcane, but I think that trying to specify the meaning of neo-liberalism (its logics and its limits, Clarke, 2004a) might prevent some unproductive discussion about whether what emerges is the continuation of neo-liberalism, the reinvention of neo-liberalism or even the renewal of neo-liberalism under another name. At least we might take up Foucault's challenge to think about the distinction between a crisis of capitalism and a crisis of governmentality - and how they are articulated in the conjuncture.
In a characteristic comment, Gramsci observed that crisis 'creates a terrain favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought' (1971: XXX, check). In this final section, I want to explore some of the 'modes of thought' that have been circulating on the terrain of this crisis, particularly in the Anglo-American political and policy discourses that I am most familiar with. The first, and most striking, feature has been the 'nationalisation' of the crisis (despite some difficulties with the word nationalisation). Although the scale, scope and even causes of the economic crisis are widely understood as 'global', the effects of, and responses to, it have been primarily defined in national terms: the conditions of the national economy, the fate of vital national industries, the loss of jobs in national economic sectors, the role of the national central bank, the failures and promises of national financial regulators and, above all, national governments expending national public resources on rescuing 'our' banks and other institutions.
Here is the inversion of the 'post national' world of corporate globalization: the nation - and in particular that much derided entity, the nation-state - becomes the means of salvation. The institutions of regional and global governance have played small parts in the unfolding drama of this crisis by contrast with the national focus and the immense use of national public resources to try to stabilise the financial sector, shore up ailing industries and stem the loss of jobs. In all of this talk and action, the nationalisation word has continued to be a source of distress for national political and governmental factors who take care to insists that, however large the public stake in a financial institution may be, this is 'not nationalization'. Indeed on March 8th, Lord Mandelson (Secretary of State for Trade) insisted that bank nationalization was neither 'necessary nor desirable'. 10 Governments now find themselves negotiating a landscape structured around the national question: protectionism versus free trade; transnational capital versus national industries; state investment versus nationalization; global flows versus national regulation; the absent global governance versus interstate collaboration (between national governments).
The nationalisation of crisis is also, of course, the 'statalisation' of crisis as the state comes to be regarded as a powerful, resourceful political and economic agent that is also the site for managing the popular experiences of, and responses to, the crisis. Populations are reinstated as national (with particular implications for migrant workers). Such nationalisation has been articulated in the slogan of 'British jobs for British workers' that has echoed its way around the British political scene - here voiced by striking workers, there mouthed by Prime Minister Brown and emerging from the depths of the British National Party. Nationalism and globalization have been deeply intertwined for the past twenty years (Kalb, 2005) alongside other framings of anti-globalization (Gilbert, 2007). But in the present, the nationalization of the crisis and nationalism come together to form a potentially dangerous point of political articulation.
Perhaps the dominant discourse circulating is the expressed desire to get back to 'business as usual'. This is a difficult discourse to put to work given that it was business that got us here in the first place. But 'business as usual' tries to mark the crisis as the result of abnormal business, pathological practices and errors of judgement. Anyone who has studied the sociology of deviance will recognise these devices: they are regularly deployed in the defence of systems, institutions and organisations that find themselves 'in the dock'. Systemic violence, institutional racism, deep-rooted corruption - not so, just a 'few bad apples' that can be ejected and restore the sanctity and purity of the system. This time, it is true, the scale of bad apple-ness seems a little larger than usual and the demands of restoration are proving a difficult challenge. But the model is the same: the system must be saved, even from itself.
Nevertheless, governments find themselves placed in the front line of managing this feat and having to negotiate some contradictory pressures as a result. In one corner we have the immediate demands for financial stabilization (for the international system and 'domestic' banks), combined with the demands fro financial 'rescue' (or 'bails outs') from other enterprises, with the car industry in the vanguard. 11 Second, there are the demands to install new national, and possibly international, systems of regulation, surveillance, and scrutiny that will rein in the excesses of greed, gambling and risk-taking identified as causes of the present crisis. The search for regulation almost immediately meets its opposite - the insistence that only the freedom of the market can ensure that growth can be renewed and profits can be distributed.
Woven into the regulatory desires are the claims that a newly 'moral' or 'ethical' capitalism needs to be constructed. The 'casino capitalism' of the past needs to be tamed, restrained and made more people-friendly by injections of morality, ethical standards and a sense of social responsibility. So far, the politicians demanding such moralisation - itself an uncanny echo of neo-conservative demands that the poor needed to be remoralised in the 1980s and 1990s - have been less than specific on the means by which such moral character might be induced. 12 But these calls for a moral capitalism represent a sort of muted political echo of popular scepticism and outrage about the crisis of the present - and the extent to which it combines broken promises (the 'property owning democracy' at the core of Anglo-American politics for the past three decades), political betrayal and corporate greed. Here, fleetingly perhaps, is one basis for a genuinely popular anti-capitalism - but the danger is that it might decompose into other directions (regressive nationalism, political authoritarianism, moral Puritanism - the elements of the 'other' strategy of the 1930s).
Finally, governments encounter profound demands for security - but not the securitization of the property market, nor the safety/security nexus of the modernised state in the struggles against the anti-social threats outside and within the nation. This is the return of the old discourse of security - sometimes known as 'social security' - the collective provision by the state of resources that protect individuals, families and whole societies from the vagaries and vicissitudes of markets, whose profound and unpredictable dynamics once persuaded people that they could not be trusted to guarantee economic and social security or human welfare. Which brings us to the strange and deeply uncomfortable return of welfarism - or at least some of the words associated with welfarism.
Both the US and UK governments (under Obama and Brown respectively) have been deploying the language of the 'New Deal', promising to create a new new deal. 13 The specific national proposals are different, with the Obama plan having aspects of a public works programme more reminiscent of the original New Deal; while the UK programme still focuses on a mix of welfare-to-work and intensified conditionality (not to mention trying to engage private capital in providing services). The current and threatened depth of the crisis, however, makes both the language and the plans somewhat unstable. Brown, just prior to a visit to the USA, tried to register the scale of the crisis - and the reach of a renewed US-UK alliance - by promising a 'global new deal':
I believe there is no challenge so great
or so difficult that it cannot be overcome by America, Britain and the world
working together. That is why President Obama and I will discuss this week
a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa
to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York- and giving
security to the hard-working families in every country. (Sunday Times, 01.03.2009:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/
article5821821.ece
I will only note that the global reach of this new deal is somewhat compromised by its characteristic New Labour framing - only 'hard working families' need apply. This points to a more general paradox of the possible new new deals - they are being invented on the cusp between neo-liberal anti-welfarism (or workfare, Peck, 2001) and the possible need for post-neo-liberal strategies that can address questions of social security and social order. In the UK, the persistence of the concerns with tightening conditionality and getting people into work already looks odd in the context of rising unemployment, income insecurity and homelessness.14 Such concerns have dominated New Labour's approach to 'welfare reform', but are being enlarged through the promised extension of psychotherapeutic counseling to the unemployed. 15
If nothing else, though, this circulation of the imagery of the New Deal should give us pause for thought. What is being named and claimed through this idea? What sort of 'progressive imaginary' is being memorialized and revived? The New Deal was certainly a significant piece of state intervention into an economic and social crisis, all the more remarkable for overcoming (or at least temporarily suppressing) the objections of a US political class to collectivism in any form. But it may also be worth remembering that this was not a 'welfare state' in any developed sense - rather it was, as Edwin Amenta's study (2000) clearly demonstrates, a 'Work and Relief state', involving a variety of questions about compulsion, about inclusion and exclusion and about other areas of support or provision that we might now count as welfare. Not surprisingly in the US, questions of racialised and gendered divisions were central to the functioning of the New Deal (and the Aid to Dependent Children programme that was later added, see, for example, Mink, 1990; Quadagno, 1996).16 How will the new new deals address the complex 'landscapes of inequality' that neo-liberalism has reshaped globally, nationally, locally (Collins, di Leonardo and Williams, 2008)? How will they contribute to the new landscapes of inequality that are being produced by the current crisis?
The answer to this question clearly depends, as I have suggested, on what one means by neo-liberalism. Certainly many of the features attributed to neo-liberalism are in crisis, or in suspension, and lack political, much less popular, credibility. The concentration of the search for solutions on previously denigrated and discredited terrain - the nation, the nation-state, public spending and public welfare - suggests that, at least, neo-liberal logics and orientations are not in good health. Declining faith in markets and financial institutions suggests that there are some limits to market populism's reach. But other aspects - the commitment to enterprise, a market-centric understanding of choice-as-freedom, and a scepticism about both the capacity and trustworthiness of government, politics and politicians (that neo-liberal protagonists did much to encourage) - seem only muted, rather than exhausted. Equally, its governmental logics - the quest for a narrowly defined efficiency, the drive to cheapen the cost of public services, the love affair with managerialism in its many forms - seem likely to become even more significant as the crisis of public indebtedness takes its place among the many crises that constitute the present conjuncture.17
In this moment, it may be that answering the question of whether we are 'after neo-liberalism' also turns on the meaning of the words 'after'. Some time ago, I argued that neo-liberalism needed to be thought of as a globalizing and universalising would-be hegemonic project (2004). It is, at least, no longer hegemonic - it fails to command popular and political assent; it cannot sustain its normalization and institutionalization as the dominant principle of common sense. That does not imply it has been replaced by some other organising project or logic; nor that it has disappeared from political, governmental or popular thinking. On the contrary, many of its elements - not least the desires it names, articulates and promises to fulfill - remain in circulation. But they remain so as elements, fragments, or traces rather than a coherent and cohering project.
This may be another way of making the link between crisis and faith or belief. There is no single compelling (if contradictory) project, vision or story that binds individuals, families, nations together in the pursuit of a future. There are elements, fragments, possibilities that swirl around as different problems, possibilities and potential projects clamour for attention, consent and resources. Fractured and devalued fractions of capital seek to restore themselves and the possibilities of accumulation, but are willing to admit errors and miscalculations in return for a temporary period of recovery on public funds. Governments find themselves negotiating national economies, transnational flows of goods, capital and people (some of which are profoundly disrupted), national populations concerned with new insecurities, and, not least, national electorates that appear angry and resentful. They also have to negotiate the indeterminate and problematic space of the global or at least try to fill it with international/interstate institutions, relationships, policies and pacts.
Finally, publics are sceptical or faithless (though I suspect they always were - existing in conditions of what I have called passive dissent, but Jeremy Gilbert has referred to more interestingly as 'disaffected consent'18 ). They are summoned in contemporary governmental discourse to perform the most abject role: they are the public whose future is almost entirely enfolded into the problem of public debt. They are also outraged, anxious and insecure - and such collective emotions are directed at heterogeneous targets: bankers, governments, migrant workers, and 'the system'. Most worryingly, these publics are also deeply sceptical or cynical about politics - a problem for those who would construct political alternatives and political solutions.
Notes
1. This paper is based on a lecture given at the Central European University on 2nd March 2009, given while I was a visitor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. It also draws on a presentation to a workshop on Culture (and Cultural Studies) After the Crunch, organised by The Pavis Centre of the Open University and the Department of Sociology of the University of East London. I am deeply grateful to the many people at both events who offered comments and questions to help me think about these issues.
2. Of course, arguments persist in practice among market populists about what forms of state and government action are tolerable, ranging from the minimalist 'nightwatchman' state required to preserve the institutions of private property and the nation from predators to a more recent enthusiasm for a contracting state that can provide new sources of profit for predatory corporations.
3. There is some ambiguity about what it is that the market rewards - particularly between skill, enterprise and good fortune. References to casino capitalism tend to emphasise the 'chance' element - and the mystery - of contemporary market-driven rewards. But this exists in an uncomfortable relation with any notion that markets should deliver just and proportionate outcomes. There is a persistent, if subordinate, belief that rewards should be 'earned' that has resurfaced in popular anger about disproportionate rewards in the financial services sector, and about rewards such as bonuses being paid for 'failure'.
4. Like others who have commented on this gendered language of markets, capital and capitalism, I want to point to the ways in which such terms are shared by enthusiasts and critics alike (see Gibson-Graham, 1996 and Morris, 1998, for example).
5. Although the definition (and the indicators) turn out
to be contested: see, for example, Associated Press' sampling: 'Recession,
depression, take your pick' at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/
ALeqM5hySoApuU4iyBTZ6lZsCM5OrlWgrAD96M43380.
6. I am particularly taken with the paradox in which someone being interviewed by a journalist blames the media for the circulation of 'negativity', while denouncing the government for not having a clue.
7. There are two main reasons for not taking this route. The first derives from the limits of my knowledge about these specific formations and dynamics. The second emerges from my reluctance to have the crisis 'economised' - understood as an economic phenomenon, explained by economic causes, and seen as resolvable by economic expertise. I am interested in treating the social, cultural and political dimensions of the crisis as something other than either the epi-phenomena of the real processes, or merely their effects (bad things happen in a crisis…). How we came to think of the economy as a separate and pre-social sphere is another matter.
8. A third strategy has been the rather more materialist approach of 'throwing money at the problem'. After decades of being told that ' throwing money' at a variety of social or public problems is both wrong and counterproductive, there is a perverse pleasure in seeing the device being reinvented and on a scale that could not have been imagined previously (albeit not very successfully).
9. A different articulation of faith and the economic was provided in claims made by the Indonesian President at the World Islamic Economic Forum in Jakarta, March 2009, that Islamic banks were performing better in the crisis. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7918129.stm
10. In an interview on the Andrew Marr Show, reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7931142.stm.
11. At this point, the car industry - with its extensive horizontal integration on a global scale - has become a series of 'national' car industries. Saab is cut adrift from General Motors to make its plea for protection to the Swedish Government, and so on. Bizarrely, the BBC (10.02.2009) reported that the 'Chinese car industry overtakes the US', although this referred to news that more cars were sold in China than in the USA. The Chinese car industry involves some significant international partnerships, including General Motors. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7879372
12. Lest we forget, the neo-conservatives answers to demoralization among the poor included the withdrawal of public support, the enforced learning of independence, the discovery that actions or choices were consequential for personal well-being - and, of course, that hard work and marriage were the foundations of a successful life and a successful society.
13. For policy aficionados, there is the critical point that the UK has already had new new deals (for young people, for the unemployed, for lone mothers, for disabled people and so on). So the present promise is (at least) a new new new deal. It is not recorded what Marx thought about history repeating itself more than once.
14. See, for example, Madeleine Bunting 'Workfare has arrived in Britain' The Guardian, 23.02.2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/madeleine-bunting-welfare-reform.
15. The Observer reported ministers promising to train an extra 3,600 counsellors (based in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) and to open psychotherapy centres in every primary care trust in the NHS: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/08/recession-therapy-nhs-mental-health.
16. Aid to Dependent Children subsequently became Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) which was the programme that President Clinton abolished through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 when claiming to 'end welfare as we know it' (Mink, 2002).
17. The problem of defining neo-liberalism becomes particularly important here, not least for the purpose of distinguishing between the persistence of neo-liberalism and the persistence, or renewal, of capitalism. The dominance of the concept of neo-liberalism in the last decade has tended to blur this distinction. I am grateful to Luisa Steur for reminding me of the significance of separating the two.
18. 'Disaffected consent' was a thought-provoking part of his contribution to an event on 'Culture (and Cultural Studies) after the Crunch' in London on 4th February 2009. Passive dissent appeared in the last chapter of Clarke, 2004b.
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