Introduction
Having discussed in the previous chapter the rather abstract notions of structure and agency in relation to political and socio-economic change, social science and World Politics/IPE in particular, my argument here proceeds to discuss more concrete and recognisable objects of analysis and normative lines of inquiry. What follows remains largely at the theoretical level but works toward developing an account of the more ontologically solid concerns associated with Marxian political analysis such as class and state. As suggested in the previous chapters, the analysis is honed to the identification of a dominant transnational class and the neoliberal/global state and how these (structures/agents) are becoming enmeshed with the power of neoliberal ideas and the discursive construction of consciousness, common sense, subjectivity and/or 'knowledge'. As such it works toward introducing some theoretical/practical ‘praxeological’ and methodological links and distinctions between the connected concepts of ideology and discourse to be further developed in chapter six.
In the development of this argument I will also extend Gramsci's key concept of hegemony in the light of more recent work of neo-Gramscian scholars in the direction of transnational classes (Overbeek 1993; Sklair 2000; Van der Pijl 1998), re-ordered relations of capital and forms of governance and state emerging at the global level (Robinson 2001, 2005; Shaw 2000; Hardt and Negri 2000) since the international restructuring and rescaling of the 1970s and the end of the Cold War.43 This has been recognized variously and sometimes a little crudely as a shift from Fordism to
43 Robert Cox was probably the first to bring the insights of Gramsci to the the attention of mainstream IR/IPE See Cox 1979, and also Gill, Gill and Law, Morton, Rupert, 1998; Sklair, 2001. There is also considerable overlap here with the Amsterdam School and the French Regulationist or Annales School.
More recently the work of Polanyi has found a place in this canon (Mittleman and Chin; Burawoy), It is perhaps amiss to speak of ‘schools’ at all but I wish to highlight the interwoven and overlapping lines of enquiry which these apply to IR/IPE and World Politics.
120 post-Fordism and from Keynesianism to a post-Keynesian neoliberal ‘new right’ since the 1970s (Harvey 1990) and the supposed triumph of liberal capitalism with the collapse of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet bloc and its satellite states (Fukuyama 1991; Little 1995). The focus on transformation is intended to point towards the significance of crisis periods in which the potential for new ideas and values to take root is enhanced.
In this chapter I will outline some of the theoretical and historical roots of this approach in the Marxian conceptions of ideology and how various subsequent critiques, refinements and elaborations in the vein of ‘Western Marxism’ have led to significant developments in our understanding of ideology and, more importantly, the performativity of ideational factors in relation to forms of political power. Such an analysis contributes to contemporary debates on power relations and political struggle through a reconsideration of the debates around ‘the relative autonomy of the state’, (specifically, Jessop's 'strategic relational approach' (2007) and how these can shed light on new transnational regimes, institutions of global governance and emergent discourses and practices of neoliberal governmentality.
In this and subsequent chapters however, I will attempt to integrate these theoretical debates and developments (new forms of class and state institutions) with the historical contexts and processes in which they continue to play out. As such, the arguments follow partly from the assertion of Kees van der Pijl that
only when the space in which economy and politics interact is extended to cover entire historical eras and larger-than-national complexes of states and society, can the cohesion underlying such interaction be defined in terms of the rise and decline of social classes. (1998:3)
Just what exactly might count as an appropriate temporal bracketing for tracing this process is obviously a matter of considerable importance and so debate around such an exercise has been wide ranging. As Bentley notes, “periodisation ranks among the more elusive tasks of historical
121 scholarship” (1996: 749). Without wishing to revise such worthwhile debates at length, a historical periodization of some kind must inevitably take place and the two main considerations would appear to be that it should be: a) brief enough to allow for an effective focus on key events and b), sufficiently broad in order to provide the necessary context for a better understanding of how such events are connected and constituted through other processes and events. As such, the approach followed herein is influenced in part by the work of Fernand Braudel and his 'three levels' approach, drawing a version of his second level which attempts a blend of the structural with the conjunctural or in Braudel's own words “the permanent and the ephemeral, the slow moving and the fast. These two aspects of reality [...] are always present in everyday life, which is a constant blend of what changes and what endures” (1972: 353).44 I will begin by sketching out what I consider to be the key aspects of the period which provide the early context for the emergence of some of the theoretical developments which inform this study.
History, Theory and Culture
In order to appreciate and account for the rise to dominance of neoliberal ideas and ideology during the latter decades of the twentieth century, it is helpful to begin by tracing the historical contexts for the theoretical developments of ideological analysis that took place in the early to middle decades of crisis in 'the West' (1914-45) and in particular through the work of Antonio Gramsci. I will proceed to outline some of these contexts briefly here before considering the work of Marx and Engels and the ways in which their theories of ideology were enhanced elaborated by Gramsci and others who subsequently took up his ideas.
As I maintain, the significance of the changes touched upon above must be appreciated within a longer historical context than that since the nonetheless crucial crisis period of the 1970s (upon
44 See also Macfarlane, A. (1996) Fernand Braudel and Global History. pdf available at:
http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/BRAUDEL_revised.pdf
122 which much 'neo-Gramscian' and regulationist work tends to focus)45 ranging back at least as far as the First World War (1914-18) and thus considering the collapse of the late nineteenth century liberal capitalist order and the emergence of a new Keynesian/Fordist compromise which sought to recover some sense of order from the chaos and ruins of 1914-45. My interpretation of this conjuncture also owes much to the work of Karl Polanyi and his (1944) magnum opus The Great Transformation which has come to prominence among the widespread attempts to account for the
more recent return to laissez-faire ideas and principles of a self-regulating market which characterise the dominant ideology and practices of contemporary world politics.46
The collapse of Polanyi's four key pillars of nineteenth century civilisation, which, he argued, led into the catastrophe of WWI and the subsequent political and socio-economic turmoil across Europe, saw the end of the unbounded optimism, certainty and confidence in the progress and expansion of western civilisation. More specifically and almost universally, following the Great Crash of 1929, it led to a decline in the appeal of so-called 'self-regulating markets' as reliable means to organise production and distribution. Polanyi took these four key institutional pillars to be: the self-regulating market, the balance of power system, the liberal state and the international gold standard,
But the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation which gave rise to a specific civilisation. The gold standard was merely an attempt to extend the domestic market system to the international field; the balance of power system was a superstructure erected upon and, partly, worked through the gold standard; the liberal state was
45 A good deal of regulationist and neo-gramscian historical analysis in IR/IPE focuses predominantly on the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the period following the collapse of fixed exchange rates. I concur that this is indeed a crucial factor and draws much attention as it marks the genesis of neoliberal practice in the Hayekian turn taken in the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan Governments from 1979 and 1980 respectively.
46 Bloch, F. provides a good critical analysis of The Great Transformation and its importance for
understanding the role of ideas in the construction of a market society. See 'Karl Polanyi and the Writing of the Great Transformation' in Theory and Society, 32/3 (2003) pp. 275-306
123 itself a creation of the self-regulating market. The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century lay in the laws governing market economy.(1944:3)
Polanyi here betrays some considerable Marxist influence in his singling out of market economics as a key, while not explicitly determinant, factor in understanding processes of socio-historical change. While not known for expressing an explicit account of the role of ideology in its negative Marxist formulation, Polanyi identified the disembedding of the economy in what he termed
‘market society’ as a result of a particular set of powerful ideas associated with classical economic liberalism. He argued that such a process would entail a ‘double movement’, whereby society would react to this disembedding in an effort to re-situate economic processes in the wider social and cultural milieu. Polanyi's background in economic history and anthropology led him to this conclusion as much as (and perhaps more than) his Marxist influences. His extensive research into various economic cultures through history, where production and exchange were found to be almost universally embedded within deeper social and cultural practices and institutions, led Polanyi and his colleagues to consider a disembedded market society, akin to the contemporary neoliberal economic orthodoxy, as inherently unsustainable and dangerously unstable. In addition Polanyi rejected the economism, both of the neoclassical economics of von Mises but also the economic determinism which he saw in much of the work of Marx and stressed the importance of cultural factors in social change (Carlson 2006: 32).
As such, his ideas have been usefully developed in combination with those of Gramsci, most notably by Birchfield (1999) and Burawoy (2003). Despite their own reservations regarding Marx, his work has also informed the analysis of key neo-Marxists focusing on state forms such as Block (2003) and Jessop (2001, 2007). My brief point here is that to concentrate upon a critique of the capitalist mode of production, or market society, need not compel one to any kind of strictly determinist Marxist analysis. Indeed, Polanyi’s work is useful for the task of cleansing such doctrines of the
124 economistic fallacy which have in many instances, bedevilled them. Block suggests that in a striking similarity to Gramsci, “Polanyi insisted that the working class had to win leadership of society by representing the interests of society as a whole.” (2003:278).
Indeed, the secret of success lies rather in the measure in which the groups are able to represent - by including in their own - the interests of others than themselves. To achieve this inclusion they will, in effect, often have to adapt their own interests to those of the wider groups which they aspire to lead.(Polanyi, 1934 in Block 2003: 278)
This notion of intellectual leadership, combined with Polanyi's sensitivity to cultural considerations drawn from his background in economic anthropology seems to resonate clearly with Gramsci's own concept of hegemony. It seems possible that, like Gramsci, Polanyi had come under the influence of Marx's then only recently published Early Manuscripts and the German Ideology and it is likely that for him also, these were crucial to a fuller understanding and contextualisation of the later works of the mature Marx.
Both thinkers (Gramsci and Polanyi) provide important and complimentary historico-political insights for understanding the crucial shift from Fordist to post-Fordist systems of production and the construction and collapse of the Keynesian 'consensus'.47 This period ran roughly from Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s in the US, through the Marshall Plan for Europe and Beveridge in the UK, and right up until the widespread state/capitalist crises of the 1970s and the subsequent entrenchment of a neoliberal global political economy or ‘regime of accumulation’. This period represents the conjuncture which this thesis posts as its socio-historical backdrop and will be examined further in the following chapters, providing a context for my historico-theoretical process-tracing and discursive analysis of neoliberalism.
47 Their insights are also useful for the study of political transformation more generally
125 The importance and contemporary significance of Polanyi's work is summed up in Block and Somers who assert his:
account of the 1920s and 30s analyses the incompatibility of international capitalist arrangements with both democracy and the social reforms that had been won by the European working classes. This argument speaks directly to the present period in which the conflict between "legitimation and accumulation", "the limits of legitimacy", and the "crisis of democracy" have become central themes of social sciences; once again there appears to be a contradiction between the imperatives of the capitalist world system and the achievements of democratic politics.(1984:48)
Polanyi sought to develop a post-Marxist political and theoretical position, and an explicitly anti-capitalist socialism, which retained a strong commitment to individual freedom. His perspective then was something akin to that more recently outlined by Daniel Bell (1976) in that it combined an unrelenting socialist economics with a rather liberal outlook on politics. This kind of economic/politico-theoretical marriage is also ascribed to the Gramscian R. W. Cox by Susan Strange in her (1988) review of his seminal Power, Production and World Order. Due to my primary concerns with ideology and hegemony, this chapter is concerned more with the work of Gramsci but I will return later to some of the historical and anthropological arguments of Polanyi in my later discussion of Hayek and the historical emergence of neoliberalism through the activities of a transnational capitalist class/movement, where the insights of his economic anthropology provide a useful foil to the positions of the early neoliberals and the Austrian school of economics.
Rarely mentioned but acknowledged in the work of both Cox (1996:51) and Hudson (1999: 938) is the historicist influence upon Polanyi which also aligns him with Gramsci and those who have followed this line of scholarship in post-/neo-Marxist tradition of anti-capitalism. I should say something of these historicist developments of the post-WWI era before proceeding further, for
126 there is some connection between this theoretical turn in the study of history and the greater attention given to 'superstructural' elements of society than in western Marxism than that often attributed to the work of Marx himself. In short, the notion of meaning in historical analysis requires that at least some consideration of ideas and ideology be brought into such analyses and meaning as I have already intimated, is shaped by context.
Historicism
In terms of theoretical developments through this post-WWI era, the concept of historicism is key to understanding the antecedent roots of constructivist thought. It is also important in order to recognise the challenge to rationalism which the catastrophe of WWI had brought about in the intellectual circles of Europe and perhaps particularly in Germany.48 Many of the key intellectual and political figures of the subsequent decades would have had direct experience of the human carnage permitted by modern industrialised warfare. The war also marked the disintegration of proletarian internationalism and the demise of the second international. The seemingly irrational descent into horror and mass slaughter, which ended the so-called Belle Epoque, had the effect of leading history, philosophy and socio-political thought to ask new questions and offer new kinds of answers beyond rationalism and logical positivism. In short, a (re)turn to historicism and a concern for the pivotal role of culture and meaning in social and historical analysis. The 1917 October revolution in Russia and the subsequent formation of the Soviet Union also cast a long and stark shadow across the fields of left/radical social theory and political practice throughout what Hobsbawm (1994) has termed 'the short twentieth century'. This inter-war period then is once again stressed as a key historical interregnum in which ideology seems to have gained a much more public and consciously deliberate form and essence. It must itself be considered in the light of preceding events.
48 See Carlnaes, 1981: 172-180 on Mannheim and historicism in post-war Germany more generally
127 Particularly in Germany, but generally speaking of nineteenth century historiography, the study of history had been stripped of its philosophical garb and reduced to a rather crude fact-based affair in which cold detailed description and nothing more should be the object of history. To derive meaning from such developments ran against the reigning positivist orthodoxy of science. Thus, as R.G. Collingwood notes:
This led historians to adopt two rules of method in their treatment of facts: (i) Each fact was to be regarded as a thing capable of being ascertained by a separate act of cognition or process of research, and thus the total field of the historically knowable was cut up into an infinity of minute facts each to be separately considered. (ii) Each fact was to be thought of as not only independent of all the rest but as independent of the knower, so that all subjective elements (as they were called) in the historians point of view had to be eliminated. (1946: 131)
A key proponent of this approach to history was the German historian Leopold von Ranke who, according to E.H Carr, “piously believed that divine providence would take care of the meaning of history if he took care of the facts” 49 (1961:19). Indeed, according to Carr, this liberal nineteenth century perspective on history bore a close affinity with the conventional wisdom of laissez-faire economics which also stemmed from the serenity and self-confidence of that era.
The facts of history were themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress toward higher things. This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. (ibid. 20)
49 Carr has been almost exclusively restricted in the realist tradition of IR to his Twenty Years Crisis which is invoked as a damning indictment on the liberal idealism which reigned supreme in the discipline during its early years but failed along with the League of Nations to provide an acceptable account of the causes of WWII. His work is therefore rarely considered in the critical/radical approaches which has been something of a considerable loss to this vein of international studies.
128 However, “the nature and outcome of the war [...] made a renewed inquiry into the meaning of history a seemingly ineluctable task” (Carlsnaes 1981: 173). The importance of morals, values and ideas began again to be recognised by historians and social theorists in their return to an historicism (or ‘historism’) that would be central to Western Marxism and the cultural/ideological analyses of
128 However, “the nature and outcome of the war [...] made a renewed inquiry into the meaning of history a seemingly ineluctable task” (Carlsnaes 1981: 173). The importance of morals, values and ideas began again to be recognised by historians and social theorists in their return to an historicism (or ‘historism’) that would be central to Western Marxism and the cultural/ideological analyses of