Stop blaming neoliberals for neoconneries

One of the things long-time followers on Twitter know about me (besides the most important fact that I am the Stakhanov of the dad joke) is that I like to come up with definitions for neoliberalism. Some of these are funny, some are serious, some are trollery, but they are all part of an attempt to put firmer contours around a term that I think has now mostly degenerated into a generalized term of abuse. I should also note that these are very much my own definitions, which might not be more widely shared; this in turn might have something to to do with my belief that I am one of about five true neoliberals on the planet, leading me to mutter (or shout) Pretender, Heretic, Hypocrite, Apostate, Imbecile at most of those who sport the Globe emoji.  Below is a random sample of some of my pronouncements on the subject.

1. “A neoliberal is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This is obviously a riff on Oscar Wilde’s classic definition of a cynic, but one that captures the centrality of market mechanisms.

2. “A neoliberal is someone whose heart races upon hearing the words, “from status to contract.” Similar to the above, but drawing on Henry Maine’s classic description of the transition from feudalism, something that I hope conveys the emancipatory potential of the creed.

3. “Neoliberalism is the belief that capitalism is a revolutionary force; that the nation-state is a transitory historical formation, and that peasant and petit-bourgeois politics alternates between atavism and outright reaction. So it’s basically just Belle-Epoque Marxism.” Pure trolling designed to annoy at least two different sets of people (Marxists and the “false neoliberals”) but intended to convey an idea that proper neoliberals not only see their ideology as a form of historical materialism, but also share the internationalism of pre-world-war 1 Marxism.

4. “Neoliberalism consists of all three of the following beliefs—the centrality of markets as an allocation device; the encasement of markets in public systems of regulation and adjudication; and the shrinking relevance of national borders for regulation and adjudication. The first belief is what differentiates it from socialism; the second is what differentiates it from libertarianism; and the third is what differentiates from classic 19th century national (or paleo) liberalism.”

(This is my most serious attempt at a definition, and I do believe it both captures the essentials of neoliberalism and the features that differentiate from ideologies that share at least one element with it).

5. “Neoliberalism is capitalist internationalism that accepts the guardrails of a supranational technocracy.” (Similar to 5, but attempts to combine this with some rudimentary elements of a practical sociology).

6. “True neoliberalism has never been tried, because that would require that the World Trade Organization have a monopoly of legitimate violence.” Mostly auto-trollery, but also partly an expression of Utopianism.

7. “The problem with nation-states is that they are historically fictitious and economically frictitious.” Pretty much sums up all of the above.

Underneath all this, many readers will have noted the influence of Quinn Slobodian, whose book Globalists helped me to solidify various previously inchoate beliefs. Admittedly, this took the form of me making mental notes while muttering under my breath every few pages—“yes, of course, but stop saying that like it’s a bad thing.” My response falls under the Seinfeldian category of the “Not there’s anything wrong with that” or NTTAWWT, an abbreviation I will be using again. Anyway, Slobodian’s argument locates the origins of neoliberalism in the decades following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy as a group of ideologues wished to recreate the sundered economic unity of the Danubian Basin by allowing “the persistence of all the accouterments of nationhood, including flags, anthems, postage stamps” while ensuring that such “sovereignty would be ornamental, undermined wholly by the authority of the central government.”. Institutions would be structured such that “there would be free trade and free movement of labor overseen by a strong central state was primary, allowing for a shifting a landscape of decentralized nations and cultural institutions that would rethink main secondary. Mises’s Habsburg Empire reborn for the 20th century was an invisible government of the economy first, and a visible government of neutered nations second.”

Slobodian’s seeds fell on fertile ground. As an undergraduate and in early graduate school, I studied late Habsburg history with the late Istvan Deak, who emphasized the contingency, plasticity and multiplicity of group identification(s)  in central Europe. And my temperament led me to (mis?)read The Passions and The Interests as a guide to the civilizing potential of Exchange versus the threat of barbarism implicit in the emotional ecology of Allegiance. Deak also insisted that everyone who took his course read Josef Roth’s Radetzky March and Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday —books impossible to read without thinking not just about the economic losses but the immense human havoc that stemmed from the nationalisms of central and eastern Europe. And before I studied European history in the US, I grew up in India, a country I have referred to in the past as a “reasonably successful multilingual and multiethnic post-imperial successor state” in an implicit comparison meant to convey my optimism about the EU project. Indeed, as I never tired of pointing out, a Indian Rupee note has almost as many scripts on it as a Euro note has languages. And the internal market of the EU, of course, is the closest thing to Neoliberalism definition no. 5 in practice — capitalist internationalism that accepts the guardrails of a supranational technocracy (the European Commission).

What I’ve said so far should not really be surprising to people who have read other things I’ve written. I am known to be distressed about various strands of what is called post-neoliberalism,  and have complained at length that it aims to halt or even roll back an enormously beneficial process of technological diffusion into developing economies. And while I will continue to defend it, I will at at least acknowledge that this process has been controversial and may seem reprehensible to some, insofar as it reflects an alleged lack of patriotism among corporations and their defenders. Purely financial neoliberalism (i.e., the free flow of portfolio capital across borders) preceded large-scale outbound FDI neoliberalism motivated largely by Unit Labor Cost arbitrage by a couple of decades and huge ebbs and flows in portfolio capital unconnected to trade in manufactured “widgets” have been destabilizing to  big chunks of the global economy. And of course, neoliberal market “revolutions” since the late 1970s have been accompanied by large cutbacks in the welfare state

But all this said, I will adamantly maintain that the one thing it is wrong to blame neoliberalism for is wars. I have quipped in the past that people who go to great lengths to self- or other -define with exquisite precision when it comes the angels-on-pinheads arcana of leftist thought will use neoliberal and neoconservative interchangeably as if they meant the same thing. And this drives me batsh*t crazy. Some of the strongest and most prescient arguments against the 2nd Gulf War came from the Cato Institute, which I consider the most neoliberal of the big DC think-tanks (my one big complaint against it is that it  also exhibits a disturbing nostalgia for the classic gold standard). And to this day it remains MUCH more skeptical about imposing geopolitical constraints on the international trading order than most other institutions in DC.

I think this is also where the distinction I made between 19th century paleoliberals (or national liberals) and 21st century neoliberals becomes most important. The first great age of globalization was also an age of an expanding global economy, but one in which corporations, their leading personnel, and their goods (but not raw material) supply chains and even their markets were more anchored in domestic politics and economics than they are today. Nevertheless, there was a truly internationalist wing of capital. Describing the years before the First World War, Karl Polanyi noted that “by functional determination it fell to haute finance to avert general wars”…and “The influence that haute finance exerted on the Powers was consistently favorable to European peace.” (The Great Transformation, Chapter 1). I do recognize not only that this did not work in August 1914, but also that the description of an internationalist haute finance is deeply problematic because of how easily it lent itself to pre-war and interwar anti-Semitic discourse, but I still think Polanyi is making a useful point about the inclinations and interests of a sector. Now, as Polanyi notes, the sector did not oppose all wars and was perfectly willing to finance imperialist expansion, but remained wary of the economic dangers to its own interests from a general European (or World) War. Something similar is likely the case today (NTTAWWT), judging from the inclinations of Wall Street, but as noted above, large sectors of industrial capital also operate multidimensionally on a global scale now, as I explored here, which in turn has made them less willing to be pressed into national(list) projects.

Conversely, I would argue that today’s neoconservatives are the real inheritors of the mantle of 19th century paleo- (or national) liberalism. They think of the economic interests of individuals or corporations as operating primarily not just within the borders of their nation-state and its current or future overseas possessions (whether formal or informal), but also in concordance with, and on behalf, of the nation-state. This obviously makes neoconservatism more explicitly nationalist than neoliberalism, but beyond this similarity lies another one that harks back the ideologies of the late 19th century—a commitment to a Mission Civilisatrice most evident in the runup to the second Iraq War. The neoliberal equivalent, to the extent it exists (or is taken seriously rather than being just a cynical bromide) is Wandel durch Handel—a nod to the power of commerce to force change. For my own part, I have taken the view regarding China in particular that while economic opening to the rest of the world might not have led to political change, it has led to profound sociological and ideological changes, most evident not just in the number of billionaires in the country, but also in the Party, indicating its decision that it is not even going to pretend any more that it is a proletarian vanguard.

This does not mean that neoliberalism is not responsible for wars—I would argue that it can be, but that’s a more a function of its failure to recognize that other people, places or parties might be less susceptible to Vulgar Economism (This is at best a partial NTTAWWT). The sins of neoliberalism then (and I will admit to this) are more those of omission than of commission. And deep down, I still believe in the creed. —

Commerce. Just Doux It.