In 2014’s We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social
Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, Alf Gunvald Nilsen and I argued
that neoliberalism, like other forms of capitalism before it, had entered an
organic crisis characterised both by a crumbling of the social alliances
underpinning neoliberalism as a strategy for accumulation and by a global
“movement of movements” against neoliberalism, running from global justice
struggles around the turn of the millennium to contemporary anti-austerity
movements. Indeed the widespread usage of the term neoliberalism itself is in
large part a reflection of its adoption as a term enabling alliance formation
between very different social movements. Underpinning this analysis is our
wider rereading of Marxism as a theory of collective human action, in which
both social order and social change are produced by the conflictual
interactions between “social movements from above” such as that which gave rise
to neoliberalism as an effective political project, and “social movements from
below”, operating on many different scales from the local to the global.
Since
writing the book, we have seen the EU’s austerity policies encounter crisis
after crisis around the European periphery, while core EU states have seen
multiple challenges from the right as well as the remarkable French experience
of Nuit Debout. In the UK and US
neoliberalism has been challenged on the left by Corbyn and Sanders and on the
right by Trump and Brexit. The US election and British referendum neatly
illustrate the operations of social movements from above, as well as the
increasing difficulty of securing consent for neoliberal accumulation
strategies; meanwhile in Ireland popular resistance to water charges has
produced a situation of near-paralysis of state power in the attempt to impose
neoliberal measures. The twilight of neoliberalism is precisely this situation
– shared with some other world regions – where a once-hegemonic strategy of
accumulation cannot sustain the social alliance it requires for longer-term
consent and new initiatives. Meanwhile, new models – whether serious new elite
strategies or powerful movements from below – are not yet able to impose
themselves sustainably.
In this
context, I argue that it is important to take social movements and collective
action – from above and below – seriously, rather than naturalising and
eternalising the institutional structures of a particular historical period
whose continuation, in the last analysis, depends on the outcome of these
conflicts. To quote We Make Our Own
History,
“[W]hether neoliberalism is ending is perhaps not the main question we
should now be asking. Such hegemonic projects have relatively short
shelf-lives, induced by their declining ability to meet the interests of the
key members of the alliances that underpin them. The real question is more one
of how much damage neoliberalism will do in its death agonies; and, even more
importantly, what (or more sociologically, who) will replace it and how.”
Laurence Cox
