Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Vishanthie Sewpaul, School of Applied Human Sciences, Howard College Campus, University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban,
South Africa
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This article teases out the concept of neoliberalism as ideology, as a form of governmentality, and as a policy paradigm. It
provides a brief history of neoliberalism and then discusses the consequences of neoliberalism in respect of unfair trade, the
destruction of domestic production and markets, poverty, and inequality. It concludes with the argument that despite the
ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, the current crisis and trends of global social justice movements, which social workers
can be engaged in, hold potential to create alternative socioeconomic and political systems in support of a more just world.
Introduction
Neoliberalism has its ideological roots in classical liberalism
articulated by early theorists such as John Locke, Adam Smith,
and David Ricardo and in the twentieth-century theories of
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman (Harvey, 2005;
Pierson, 1991; Steger and Roy, 2010). The neoliberal revolution was consolidated during the regimes of Margaret Thatcher
in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States
from the early 1980s onward. A related signicant event during
this period was the opening up of the economy of China, the
worlds emerging superpower, by Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
According to Harvey (2005), events in the United Kingdom, the
United States, and China during this period spread and
reverberated to remake the world around us in a totally
different image (p. 1). The breakdown of Soviet communism
also played a decisive role in entrenching neoliberalism as the
dominant ideology. The past few decades have witnessed the
increasing dominance of neoliberalism as discourse and practice on a global level, which has remolded health, education
and welfare, and global ows of nance, trade, and labor
(Abramovitz and Zelnick, 2010; Schram and Silverman, 2012;
Sewpaul, 2008; Rowden, 2009).
Classical liberalism is characterized by a global laissez-faire
that holds the market to be sacrosanct, self-regulating, and
entirely rational. This was the appeal of Adam Smiths idea
that markets and the pursuit of self-interest would lead, as if
by an invisible hand, to economic efciency (Stiglitz, 2006:
p. xiv). Referring to contemporary neoliberalism, the collapse
of markets; the implosion of the American nancial system,
beginning with the subprime mortgage crisis that began in
August 2007; and the bail-out of banks, Gray (2009)
reiterated his belief of 1998 that: Todays regime of laissezfaire will be briefer even than the belle poque of 1870 to
1914, which ended in the trenches of the Great War (p. xii).
Obamas (2009) inaugural address in which he warned that,
without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control
also made some people believe that the end of neoliberalism
was imminent. Yet, the world failed to shake the
Washington Consensus (Bond, 2010: p. 59) a consensus
between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank (WB), and the United States Treasury that fostered
scal austerity, privatization, and market liberalization
462
Conceptualization of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism refers to a combination of socioeconomic and
political discourse and policy choices based on the values of
an unregulated market; the rarefaction of individual freedom
and choice; as well as the faith that market fundamentalism,
and not state intervention, would promote economic growth,
efciency, progress, and distributional justice, primarily
through trickle-down effects. Harvey (2005) denes
neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices
(p. 2), rather than an unadulterated political ideology.
Although neoliberalism has its roots in classic liberalism, it
has come to span diverse political leanings and is associated
with center-left politics, moderate right-wing conservatism,
and autocratic dictatorships, embraced by and/or imposed
on almost all countries across the globe. The author draws
on the works of Larner (2000) and Steger and Roy (2010)
to conceptualize neoliberalism as an ideology, as a form
of governmentality, and as a policy paradigm. These
dimensions are mutually constitutive and overlapping.
Neoliberalism as Ideology
Dumnil and Lvy (2011) maintain that the neoliberal revolution was engineered by class and imperialist objectives,
serving the interests of a privileged minority and a few powerful
countries, with the United States occupying a unique
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 16
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.28062-8
Neoliberalism
hegemonic power. They argue that ideology was not the engine
of the neoliberal revolution but that the hegemony of the
upper classes was deliberately restored [.] A neoliberal
ideology emerged, the expression of the class objectives of
neoliberalism (p. 18). Whether a precursor to and/or an
outcome of the neoliberal revolution, ideology has come to
play a huge role in its reproduction. While the crisis that began
in 2007, with the crash in October 2008, held the potential to
create cracks in the consciousness of people about the moral
and pragmatic limits of a system regarded as inviolate
(Sewpaul, 2008), the opportunities seem to be lost. Although
Stiglitz (2006) claimed that there is little intellectual defense of
market fundamentalism left, a claim supported by a reading of
the vast body of literature that almost unanimously speaks
of the negative consequences of neoliberalism, there is yet
a marked failure to disrupt the Washington Consensus. Given
the power of ideology, the disjuncture between popularly
held neoliberal values and empirical data, and the lack of
political debate on neoliberalism in mainstream politics, this
is understandable.
Fortunato Jr. (2005) described the manufacture of
consent (p. 4) by the mass media that serves the interests of
the corporate world and political elites and that ensures that
capitalism succeeds through ideological control of consciousness designed to make us believe that neoliberalism is in our
interests and is inevitable. Neoliberalism was engineered and
gained ground primarily on account of the lure of the language
of liberal theory with its emphases on individualism, ownership, choice, exibility, and competition that mask the grim
realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class
power (Harvey, 2005: p. 119). It is not only the manufacture
of consent that is created by the media but also the manufacture of desire (Leonard, 1997: p. 37) as the market seduces
people into constructing themselves as good consumers where
their moral worth is determined by their ability to make the
right purchasing choices (Bauman, 1992). Bauman (Bauman
and Tester, 2001: p. 87) speaks of the disguise of the individuals freedom of choice, which is so taken for granted that it
seldom has a chance of being examined and questioned [.]
an old sinister temptation [.] left to be exploited by
commercial markets. These views are suggestive of Gramscis
(1977) thesis of ideological hegemony exercised by the state
and civil society to control the consciousness of people, not
through repression or coercion but by gaining popular consent
in the reproduction of class relations.
While most theorists are quick to comment on the dangers of
neoliberalism, few are willing to critique the liberal democracy
that underpins it. There is a general taken-for-granted
assumption of a convergence between the market and
democracy, with American liberalism and capitalist hegemony
touted as the source of morality and democratic practice,
which is furthest from the truth (Amin, 2001; Fortunato Jr.,
2005; Harvey, 2005). Samir Amin (2001), a postcolonial
writer, cogently raises a number of critical questions in relation
to liberal democracy and neoliberalism, concluding that
Convergence theory the notion that the market and
democracy converge is today pure dogma with much of the
talk about democracy reecting the imposition of policy
makers who have usurped power in the United States (p. 9).
Gray (2009) declares that democracy and the free market are
463
Neoliberal Governmentality
The treatise on neoliberalism as a mode of governance borrows
from Foucaults concept of governmentalities that provides
a means of understanding the relationships between knowledge, power, and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1984;
Leonard, 1997; Lemke, 2002). From this perspective, neoliberalism refers to a political rationality that tries to render the
social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare)
state services and security systems to the increasing call for
personal responsibility and self-care (Lemke, 2002: p. 203).
While neoliberalism guarantees personal and individual
freedom, each person is held responsible for his or her own
actions and well-being. Thus, poverty and hardships are seen as
personal failings rather than being attributed to any structural
barriers to unemployment and the consequences of exclusions
based on race, class, caste, gender, and/or disability. Steger
and Roy (2010) assert that:
A neoliberal governmentality is rooted in entrepreneurial values
such as competitiveness, self-interest, and decentralization [...]
Rather than operating along more traditional lines of pursuing the
public good (rather than prots) by enhancing civil society and
social justice, neoliberals call for the employment of governmental
technologies that are taken from the world of business and
commerce. (p. 12)
464
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism as Policy
As a policy package, neoliberalism is associated with spread of
global capitalism and consumerism that has engineered the
attacks on, and dismantling of the welfare state (Chomsky,
1999; Harvey, 2005; Steger and Roy, 2010), expressed in
what Steger and Roy (2010: p. 14) call the D-L-P formula,
which is deregulation of the economy, liberalization of trade,
and privatization of state assets, which provided the
ideological basis for the restructuring, privatization, and
retrenchment of social policy and welfare programs, and for
managerial approaches to social work practice (Clarke, 2007).
Neoliberalism is a discourse and practice, which rarees
individual interests where transnational corporations (TNCs)
and a few, rich powerful elites dominate the market primarily
interested in prot making. Following this individualistic
logic, the state uses neoliberal socioeconomic policies to
allow it to abdicate its responsibilities in relation to the
welfare of its people. Evocative of Foucaults (1984)
governmentality and technologies of the self, the most
dominant neoliberal discourses in social work and welfare
have been on the promotion of self-reliance, the importance
of individuals and families taking responsibility for their own
well-being, and shifting responsibility from the state to local
communities. This neoliberal policy doctrine is reected in
the voice of a manager in the South African context: The
State is an entrepreneur of its own. It must make a prot
where it can [.]. The state must be minimalist, it must really
do the least and the last. Civil society, empowered civil
society is to do the most (Sewpaul and Hlscher, 2004:
pp. 8485), a doctrine that had become quite universal in
the 1990s, reecting the hegemony of neoliberalism. Apart
from the use of ideological manipulation that engineered
this, there was the use of military force and sanctions, or
threats of sanctions by the United States against governments
in the developing world that deviated from the US ideal
of liberal capitalist democracy (Harvey, 2005; Sewpaul,
2006; Steger and Roy, 2010). In some countries like the
United Kingdom, there continues to be the strategic use of
budgets and legislation, thus avoiding political discourses on
the nature of the welfare state and of social work.
Neoliberalism
465
466
Neoliberalism
Consequences of Neoliberalism
The current crises, which is seeing marked decreases in the living
standards of people, has reverberating effects in all parts of the
globe, as reected in the crises of Wall Street, the deepening of
the Eurozone crisis, the economic slowdown of some of the
Asian countries including India and China, and the entrenching
of uneven development and greater inequality within and
across countries. Dumnil and Lvy (2011) contend that, as
a class project, neoliberalism has been exceptionally successful
as it has worked in the interests of privileged minority capitalist
classes with the divides between the rich and the poor having
deepened. Neoliberalism has contributed to distorted development between the North and the South, to greater levels of
inequality within nation-states, to the further marginalization of
women and to a greater feminization of poverty, especially
among Black women (Dominelli, 2002; Gibson, 2009; Lara,
2011; Sewpaul, 2005; Stiglitz, 2006; Gray, 2009; Steger and
Roy, 2010). The World Commission on the Social
Dimensions of Globalization (2004) concluded that the levels
of global imbalances were morally unacceptable and
politically unsustainable (p. x), while some authors like
Dominelli (2012) and Nixon (2010) warn that the great
threat is also against environmental sustainability. In a survey
of 73 countries, the Commission found that apart from
South Asia, the United States, and the European Union,
unemployment increased between 1990 and 2002, with
global unemployment reaching a high of 185.9 million, and
that 59% of the worlds people were living in countries with
growing inequality.
While countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have long
been the biggest losers within global capitalism with austerity
measures imposed as conditionalities of structural adjustment
programs (Dominelli, 2008; Rowden, 2009; Bond, 2005;
Stiglitz, 2006; Gray, 2009), patterns of capital accumulation
and consumption are now becoming more complex, with many
of the rich core capitalist countries now being subject to stringent austerity measures. There are new congurations of global
power with, for example, a growing Chinese imperialism that
Neoliberalism
Conclusion
The austerity measures imposed by the WB and the IMF and
liberalization of trade continue to have devastating effects upon
people, culminating in the current neoliberal crisis, which
heralds a new multipolar world with the emerging economies
of China, India, and Brazil being less dependent on the United
States (Dumnil and Lvy, 2011), and which has generated
a range of oppositional movements. From small-scale protest
actions in various parts of the world to the Arab Spring and
the international Occupy Movement, lies the core-underlying
theme of citizen intolerance of political authoritarianism,
poverty and inequality, and exclusion in its various forms
(Tormey, 2012; Wight, 2012). However, whether or not the
current neoliberal crisis will allow for a transition toward
a new world order beyond neoliberalism is open to question.
Steger and Roy (2010: p. 137) predict that if the crisis
continues or deepens both third-wave neoliberalism (of
a more moderate kind than its two predecessors) and
a global new deal (built on Keynesian principles) are distinct
possibilities for the second decade of the twenty-rst century
(p. 137), while Dumnil and Lvy (2011) are optimistic that
the crisis might favor a transition evocative of the New Deal
(p. 333). Given the hegemony of neoliberalism and its
entrenched institutions and practices in favor of capitalist
elites, who are not willing to give up their privileged
positions, this will require a very strong counterhegemonic
discourse to neoliberalism, envisioning another and a better
world based on egalitarianism and emancipatory politics
(Stiglitz, 2006; Nixon, 2010) and ensuring that popular
global justice movements continue the pressure in
467
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