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November 29, 2006
This picks up on this post on Neo-liberalism and the Restoration of Class Power---- by David Harvey, written for a workshop on neo-liberalism at Princeton University in 2004. The previous post texplored neo-liberalism as an ideal type. Harvey says that:
This "ideal-typical" account is unduly functionalist. It is important, therefore, to round out the picture through consideration of the fundamental structural contradictions within neo-liberalism. Authoritarianism (embedded in dominant class relations whose reproduction is fundamental to the social order) sits uneasily with ideals of individual freedoms. While it may be crucial to preserve the integrity of the financial system the irresponsible and self-aggrandizing individualism of operators within the financial system produce speculative volatility and chronic instability. While the virtues of competition are placed up front the reality is the increasing consolidation of monopoly power within a few centralized multinational corporations. At the popular level, however, the drive towards freedom of the individual person can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. The need to perpetuate dominant power relations necessarily creates, therefore, relations of oppression that thwart the drive towards individualized freedom.
To all of these contradictions we must then add the potentiality for a burgeoning disparity between the declared public aims of neo-liberalism - the well-being of all - and its actual consequences - the restoration of class power.clearly, neo-liberalism must be seen as an unstable and evolving regime of accumulation rather than as a fixed and harmoniously functional configuration of political economic power.
However, neo-liberalism is more than a unstable and evolving regime of accumulation: it is an unstable and evolving regime o f governance.
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