From
David Harvey's A
Brief History of Neoliberalism
Part
2 - How neoliberalism penetrated ‘common-sense’ understandings
How,
then, did neoliberalism negotiate the turn to so comprehensively
displace embedded liberalism? In some instances, the answer largely
lies in the use of force (either military, as in Chile, or financial,
as through the operations of the IMF in Mozambique or the
Philippines). Coercion can produce a fatalistic, even abject,
acceptance of the idea that there was and is, as Margaret Thatcher
kept insisting, ‘no alternative’. The active construction of
consent has also varied from place to place.
Furthermore,
as numerous oppositional movements attest, consent has often wilted
or failed in different places. But we must look beyond these
infinitely varied ideological and cultural mechanisms –– no
matter how important they are –– to the qualities of everyday
experience in order to better identify the material grounding for the
construction of consent. And it is at that level –– through
the experience of daily life under capitalism in the 1970s ––
that we begin to see how neoliberalism penetrated ‘common-sense’
understandings. The effect in many parts of the world
has increasingly been to see it as a necessary, even wholly
‘natural’, way for the social order to be regulated.
Any
political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is
vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold. The worldwide
political upheavals of 1968, for example, were strongly inflected
with the desire for greater personal freedoms. This was certainly
true for students, such as those animated by the Berkeley ‘free
speech’ movement of the 1960s or who took to the streets in Paris,
Berlin, and Bangkok and were so mercilessly shot down in Mexico City
shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games. They demanded freedom from
parental, educational, corporate, bureaucratic, and state
constraints. But the ’68 movement also had social justice as a
primary political objective.
Values
of individual freedom and social justice are not, however,
necessarily compatible. Pursuit of social justice presupposes social
solidarities and a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs,
and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say,
social equality or environmental justice. The objectives of social
justice and individual freedom were uneasily fused in the movement of
’68. The tension was most evident in the fraught relationship
between the traditional left (organized labour and political parties
espousing social solidarities) and the student movement desirous of
individual liberties.
The
suspicion and hostility that separated these two fractions in France
(e.g. the Communist Party and the student movement) during the events
of 1968 is a case in point. While it is not impossible to bridge such
differences, it is not hard to see how a wedge might be driven
between them. Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis
upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism,
identity politics, multi-culturalism, and eventually narcissistic
consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social
justice through the conquest of state power.
It
has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example,
to forge the collective discipline required for political action to
achieve social justice without offending the desire of political
actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression
of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these
distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.
In the
early 1970s those seeking individual freedoms and social justice
could make common cause in the face of what many saw as a common
enemy. Powerful corporations in alliance with an interventionist
state were seen to be running the world in individually oppressive
and socially unjust ways. The Vietnam War was the most obvious
catalyst for discontent, but the destructive activities of
corporations and the state in relation to the environment, the push
towards mindless consumerism, the failure to address social issues
and respond adequately to diversity, as well as intense restrictions
on individual possibilities and personal behaviours by state-mandated
and ‘traditional’ controls were also widely resented. Civil
rights were an issue, and questions of sexuality and of reproductive
rights were very much in play. For almost everyone involved in the
movement of ’68, the intrusive state was the enemy and it had to be
reformed.
And on
that, the neoliberals could easily agree. But capitalist
corporations, business, and the market system were also seen as
primary enemies requiring redress if not revolutionary
transformation: hence the threat to capitalist class power. By
capturing ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the
interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist
class interests could hope to protect and even restore their
position. Neoliberalism was well suited to this ideological task. But
it had to be backed up by a practical strategy that emphasized the
liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular
products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression,
and a wide range of cultural practices.
Neoliberalization
required both politically and economically the construction of a
neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated
consumerism and individual libertarianism. As such it proved more
than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called
‘post-modernism’ which had long been lurking in the wings but
could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and an intellectual
dominant. This was the challenge that corporations and class elites
set out to finesse in the 1980s.
None of
this was very clear at the time. Left movements failed to recognize
or confront, let alone transcend, the inherent tension between the
quest for individual freedoms and social justice. But the intuitive
sense of the problem was, I suspect, clear enough to many in the
upper class, even to those who had never read Hayek or even heard of
neoliberal theory. Let me illustrate this idea by comparing the
neoliberal turns in the US and Britain in the troubled years of the
1970s.
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