Neo-liberalism is a term that kept coming up last year. Often it seemed like an overly simple explanation or accusation. The AAUP criticized PSU administrative actions as driven by neo-liberal ideology, which didn't seem like a particularly accurate explanation (some of the issues had to do with very rigid embedded financial arrangements for administration that were decidedly non-responsive to anything like a market signal), and didn't help much in identifying what should be done. I've pretty well lived through neo-liberalism, watching market-based approaches to government come in during the Carter years in the Washington bureaucracy where my father and neighbors worked, and then living through each step of its progress. Still, I figured I should spend some time to think about some more, hence a run through David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
The fundamental idea is that market mechanisms are better than planning, therefore the government should turn over everything it can to the private sector, relax regulation on capital, businesses, and resource exploitation, permit frictionless capital flows between nations, and promote the freest trade possible. Its leading figures were Thatcher and Reagan, followed by many others in the US, UK and elsewhere.
All of my working career has occurred during this period, so I take much of it for granted as just representing the system we live in. My job is typically to help institutions figure out how to do the best for themselves and their stakeholders under these conditions. I don't see great opportunities for a single institution to decide it is going to play by different rules, although this is precisely why I want to come up with models that are not premised on resource growth.
I have to admit, I'm soft on markets. I think they have their place--and not a small place--and they have been with us a very long time. The alternatives in history--say a feudal system of mutual economic obligations--are not better.
The last 40 years have unquestionably seen government force services into market-based mechanisms where they don't work . For example, by and large we don't set up markets for the armed forces, but where we've moved towards private contractors it moves quickly into criminality. We haven't had great success with market systems for a road system--even in the Seattle area, surge pricing for highway tolls has been a huge flop. Few of the conditions for a competitive market could be met in these area. Healthcare sucks as market-based as we are--consumers/citizens can't effectively shop.
Garbage pickup may work OK under a market. When I was a kid, the sanitation crews were full-time government jobs, and you recognized the guys on the trucks jumping off to empty the cans into the truck. Now garbage service is outsourced to private contractors with much more capital intensive operations--specialized trucks with long arms pick up standardized receptacles, humans rarely touch the cans. Let's assume it is cheaper. While the loss of solid government jobs is harmful to the community, I'm not sure it makes sense for society to dedicate more resources than necessary to this function.
With universities, there is a market. No one really is interested in monolithic government provision of education--we have lots of diversity, even within the public university sector, and a valuable private non-profit sector exists and is still seen as having value. So greater market emphasis in public sector higher ed creates new challenges, but doesn't result in pure dysfunction the way it does say in prisons.
One interesting thing this year is that we did not talk or read much about class. Harvey talks about class, and the need for "a rejuvenated class politics," but his concept of class seems more positional than functional--he makes reference to multiple classes, who seem defined by where they fall in an income distribution. There are also references to the "ruling class" but I did not see a definition of that. I see class as being defined by a specific relationship to political power and the means of production and wealth generation. In this case, the ruling class would be those people who by virtue of wealth and other factors are in a position to wield power and control the economy, and there would be a small number of other classes defined by their relationship to those factors and to the ruling class--one formulation is working class, subsumed class (or classes), and perhaps an utterly dispossessed group. One of my assignments for myself for this summer is to get to a book that has been on my shelf a long time, Resnick and Wolff's Knowledge and Class (1987), which I've always understood addresses just these sort of definitions.
Harvey talks about Neoliberalism being a departure from Embedded Liberalism, but I don't see him treating the period pre-1976 as a golden era. These regimes were the ones that brought you nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and were the object of Marcuse's critique. In my sector, higher education, there does seem to be some interest in going back to an old way, in which most of the costs of public education were picked up by state appropriations, and public institutions were assigned defined geographic and programmatic areas, insulated from competition. Some movement towards de-privatizing public higher ed funding might be possible--Biden seems to want to go there, but I'm not sure he will get anything past Congress. It doesn't seem like a clock you can turn back. So I think you go forward with competition and markets, but perhaps different configurations of the entities in the market and different regulation of the markets.
The 2005 pub date of the book comes out a few ways. Some of his predictions about the weakness of the neo-liberal order don't seem to have some to pass--China for one continues to be able to adapt and stay one step ahead of its structural issues. But what is the timeline required? The problem of tech monopolies was not as visible then. Today, in these hugely important sectors, more competition not less would be good. And I don't think I want to see government confiscation of social networks--you could argue you've seen that in China. He actually does a good job of identifying the inclination of neo-liberalism towards authoritarianism--the tendency was visible enough in Bush and Cheney and the doctrine of the unitary executive--but now that has emerged full-formed, and like any authoritarian regime it is not married to a specific ideology or economic program.
My biggest question about neo-liberalism is the extent to which it represents a break from what preceded. It can represent a continuation of a strongly free-market polity that goes back a 100 years or more. But there was a change in the regime of consumption--to use Regulation school terminology--from the Fordist period dedicated to increasing the wealth and consumption power of workers in the West, to the end of that and a regime more geared towards diminishing the living standards of workers. In terms of Skowronek's political time, there is a regime change with Reagan, raising the question of the extent to which we are dealing with political or economic changes. Yes, they are connected, but they are different.
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