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How to build market societies: The paradoxes of neoliberal revolution

Since free-market ideologies reclaimed the ascendancy within the policy-making communities of Western governments and more broadly within the political life of Western industrial economies in the 1970s, the theorists and supporters of this revolution initially assumed that an inexorable global convergence towards markets would follow, driven by the costs of resisting its natural efficiencies and the benefits offered to those who embraced it. Three decades on, programmes of economic deregulation, privatisation, the principles of macroeconomic austerity and the ideologies of individualism and consumerism have undoubtedly made deep inroads into the old social democratic amalgams of the West as well as into various systems of state-led capitalism and predatory populism that prevailed elsewhere. But the consequences have, in critical instances, been both unexpected and seemingly counter-intuitive. While it may have been relatively easy to roll back entrenched regimes and enact market reforms, building the systems of political and social governance that would secure a broader neoliberal agenda has proved to be a more difficult matter. Far from ushering in the decline of the state it would seem that the rise of markets has often been accompanied by a dramatic centralisation and extension of state power, not least in the heartlands of the market revolution; in Britain, the United States, Australia and other (Anglo-Saxon) Western industrial economies. As we shall see, this techno-managerial mode of protecting markets from politics, even where it involved the enhancement of state power, was to be a favoured neoliberal mode of governance. Elsewhere, the sort of political and social governance systems that accompanied the spread of markets was more alarming for neoliberals. Attempts to force reforms through episodes of ‘shock therapy’, in Russia and Indonesia, have produced powerful social and political oligarchies as the apparent heirs to the old centralised authoritarian political regimes. In Africa, too, three decades of structural adjustment seem only to have consolidated New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2005