Thinking critically with Neil Davidson about neoliberalism

'Neoliberalism' risks becoming a fetish word. Neil Davidson applied a long-term perspective to neoliberalism, with the dissolution of national autarchy incubated by the long boom of post-war Western economies (not ‘globalisation’). Neoliberalism developed opportunistically and pragmatically, later hardened into a totem, and was contingent on the poly-crisis of 1970s and 1980s. These were conceptualised by Davidson as 'regimes of reorientation' and 'regimes of consolidation' in a manner not dissimilar to the phases identified by geographers Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore:
i. Vanguard neoliberalism 1980s – (roll back - deregulation, privatisation, anti-union laws, coercive state)
ii. Social neoliberalism 1990s (roll out – Third Way as ‘best shell’ of governance)
iii. Crisis neoliberalism 2010s (roll over – nihilistic rampage)

For almost half a century neoliberal political economy has attempted to re-engineer the human soul through compulsory commodification of subjectivity via self-governing human capital, the ‘callous credit nexus’ of personal debt, and the hollowing out of politics. Ontological insecurities and social suffering are generated by tensions arising from demands for docile labouring bodies and demands for omnivorous consumption, continually repositioning people between anomie, atomisation and alienation:
i. Individual as sovereign consumer (anomic)
ii. Individual as compliant worker (alienated)
iii. Individual as depoliticised monad (atomised)

Politics became increasingly performative. Political elites surrendered their traditional representative function to the void of a self-contained professional-managerial universe, consolidated by the social neoliberalism or ‘progressive neoliberalism’ of New Labour.
Worsening material inequalities were pardoned by progressive values at the symbolic level, giving rise to temptations of conspiratorial thinking by outsiders as the misplaced concreteness and personifications of figurational processes.

False choices are instead posed of Progressive v. Reactionary neoliberalism. Instead of pessimism all along the line, more reality congruent thinking is needed, as Davidson argued, to conceive of neoliberalisation as a process rather than neoliberalism as a reified, noun-like thing and, as Peck and Theodore argue, to understand that ‘the politics of naming, specification, reach, and relevance [of neoliberalism] remain open, contested, and demanding’.

This presentation was delivered at the Thinking with Neil Davidson: Neoliberalism, Activism & Bourgeois Revolution event, University of Glasgow, UK, 29 May 2024.