Neoliberalism, Community Power, and Some Strange Bedfellows
Are think-tanks waking up to a broader conception of neoliberalism?
In the last few years, Britain’s think-tanks have finally started to wake-up to the concept of neoliberalism.
On the left, opposition to neoliberalism helped frame a lot of Corbynite approaches to policy development (as discussed in a recent blog about community wealth building). On the right, the taboo around naming a set of ideas long presented as a kind of common sense has began to break down, with the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) officially ‘coming out’ as neoliberal in 2016.
This engagement with reality is to be welcomed. However, the conception of neoliberalism that exists within the policy world is still, unfortunately, quite narrow. When the idea is discussed, it tends to be imagined as a set of economic principles. As the ASI imagines it, the policy dimensions of neoliberalism are about as being “pro-markets, pro-growth [and] pro property-rights”.
Neoliberalism is a word that’s used in conversations about austerity, regulation and the desirability of GDP growth. It is a word we use to describe things that states do in relation to the economy. It’s rarely used to discuss wider policy, and it is almost never a word we use to describe how states function. We use it to describe a limited set of outcomes. We do not use it to discuss process.
This is a shame.
Neoliberalism vs democracy
Beyond economics, there is a rich academic literature on neoliberalism as a mode of governance. Consequently, by focusing on fiscal and monetary policy, and failing to explore the ways that neoliberalism extends beyond laissez-faire market principles, we miss the neoliberalism’s relationship to democracy. By talking only about austerity, we don’t talk about, for example, what David Harvey identified when he wrote in his Brief History of Neoliberalism:
“Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury… Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites.”
Our focus also ignores much of what neoliberal founding fathers actually said about their aims and principles. Where, in the think-tank austerity discourse, do we find the time to consider the implications what Friedrich Hayek meant when he said: “It is at least possible in principle that a democratic government may be totalitarian and that an authoritarian government may act on liberal principles”.
The academic consensus is that the effect of neoliberal governance is to continually squeeze the space of democracy within the state – de-politicising matters of public interest and handing management of them over to technocrats and bureaucracies.
This manifests most obviously in things like making central banks ‘independent’ of government, but can also be seen in general efforts to centralise and mystify power and control. As William Davies wrote in The Neoliberal State: Power against ‘politics’, a central effect of neoliberalism is that “public sector workers and professions feel that their spaces of autonomous judgment are shrinking all the time, while the stress of constant audit” endlessly ratchets up. These new accountabilities that are placed on doctors, nurses, social workers and teachers do not flow to the public, but to acronymed, arms-length organs of the state – safely out of the line of direct political or democratic control.
Thus, neoliberalism cannot be understood simply by talking about privatisation. Central to it as a system of government is the disempowering of front line workers and public service users, and the process of hoarding power in government departments and QUANGOs. This is why it is so misleading to think of neoliberalism as being a ‘small state’ ideology. Neoliberalism wants to unleash the power of the market and to inflict its logic on every aspect of life. But it recognises that there is no way to do this without harnessing the blunt force of a mighty central bureaucratic apparatus.
‘Community power’ and its strange bedfellows
Whilst the centralising and anti-democratic character of the modern British state is rarely raised in discussions about neoliberalism, it is something that is noted more generally. And the think-tank agenda that engages with these issues most seriously is ‘community-power’.
Community power is an approach to the public sector that is all about “the belief that people should have a say over the places in which they live and the services they use”. It’s associated with ideas like co-production, local area coordination, deliberative democracy and devolution. Think-tank reports that advocate community power approaches to policy areas tend to end up recommending public servants to listen to the general public more, empower front line staff and do something to redress where power lies in public service design and delivery.
Community power does not explicitly identify itself as standing in opposition to neoliberalism - instead it tends to say that it is defining state or market ‘paradigm’ approaches to public service design and/or delivery. However, as a programme of state reform, the ideas of community power would go a long way to reversing the technocracy, centralisation and power hoarding that have characterised the last 40 years in Britain. In this way, it would strike just as important a blow against neoliberalism as anti-austerity politics.
As such, you might expect community power to be a movement championed by the radical left. But you’d be wrong. The factions that are currently aligning around community power involve the Labour right groupings around Keir Starmer’s leadership, and a small number of Conservative MPs associated with The New Social Covenant Unit. The latter group have put out a recent paper calling for ‘community powered Conservatism”. The former are headlining New Local’s community power conference later on this month.
Neither of these factions can really be understood as anti-neoliberal. Neither seem to have much interest in changing the foundations of British economic policy or state craft. The Labour leadership has been trying desperately to position itself as ‘pro-business’ and demonstrate to economic interests that it is not a threat to the status quo. The New Social Covenant Unit argue that community power has a lineage to Thatcherism, and present it as a form of common-sense-balance-the-books conservatism.
So what gives?
It’s too early to tell. But somebody here must be wrong. Either I am wrong to see community power as powerful and necessary part of anti-neoliberal policy development in this country, and the theorising posited above is misguided. Or the politicians latching onto community power are wrong to think they can harness it for their political projects. Then there’s an ever-present possibility… that politicians are not being wholly transparent about their intentions.
Wonk Watch watches with interest.