Choices of crisis

Work by Wendy Larner on the neoliberal condition often provides a welcome pause in times of systematic overproduction of ‘case studies’ that confirm the existence of ‘neoliberalism’ in some part of the world. This text, once again, forces the reader to reflect on the basic question why we use the term ‘neoliberalism’ in the first place, and, when we do, in what ways we can add to an already extensive understanding of neoliberalism. Larner’s authoritative bird’s eye view makes the enterprise of researching neoliberalism purposeful by avoiding lazy case studies that see neoliberalism everywhere (just like ‘gentrification’ or ‘innovation clusters’). Based on an impressive historical review of the knowledge formation around neoliberalism, she warns against epochal thinking and a fetishist search for ‘the new’, or things radically different from ‘the old’ – so typical in much of social science. Larner stresses the need to regard neoliberalism as a political assemblage constantly in the making. By implication, we should constantly reflect not only on where exactly the disjunctures lie, but also what the continuities are. Larner’s reflections on the hybrid nature of neoliberalism (for example, Larner, 2003) have strongly helped me to realize that the neoliberalisation of Swedish cities, if anything, should be understood as a (radical) reworking of social-democratic urban policies, architectures, and modernities to suit new interests, rather than a clear break with its apparently opposite predecessor: social democracy (Tasan-Kok and Baeten, forthcoming). With a Foucauldian conceptual apparatus at hand, Larner convinces the reader of the ‘mongrel’ nature of a neoliberal condition under continuous (trans)formation.

There is a good deal of academic sophistication in ‘assemblage thinking’, and it indeed enables us to identify, accept and examine ‘multiple, uneven and paradoxical expressions of governmental and political power’. But in what ways do these ‘deep understandings’ based on ‘weak theory’ contribute to the wider political goal of bringing down this clearly deeply unjust political arrangement known as ‘neoliberalism’? I, for one, am not interested in a better understanding of neoliberalism per se; I am not even specifically interested in whether we call the contemporary political condition ‘neoliberal’ or something else. Obviously, the geography of crisis is such that vast amounts of wealth have been and are being transferred from the masses to the financial few; it is this gross injustice (among other gross injustices) that needs to be exposed, analysed, attacked and, ultimately, overthrown.

I believe ‘neoliberalism’ still is a conventional and convenient concept to bring together analysis, anger and activism under one intellectual heading that remains a resource for academics, journalists and activists alike. ‘Neoliberalism’ allows to connect intellect, discontent and activism, and, if I may, seeing neoliberalism as ‘multiple, uneven and paradoxical expressions of power’ appeals more to the intellect than it would trigger anger or action. If the point is to change it, as Larner underwrites elsewhere (Castree et al., 2009), then the purpose of our ongoing research on neoliberalization should be to always keep in sight this clear political goal. If neoliberalism is about the restoration of class power (Harvey, 2005), then the aim of our academic effort should ultimately be to reverse this restoration. I miss that somehow in Larner’s text (the same comment would apply to other people’s work, including some of my own).

Besides the question of how to analyse neoliberalism in a way that opens up for radical change, I am one of those non-Anglo-American readers who often gets slightly confused when reading Anglo-American texts. The very use of the prefix Anglo-American to single out a certain part of geographical knowledge may create more confusion than clarification since the Anglo-American tradition is strongly embedded in European continental philosophical traditions (Samers and Sidaway, 2000). But Anglo-American dominance in the analysis of neoliberalism does produce a deeply uneven and strangely twisted understanding of neoliberalism’s history. To come back to the Swedish case, the foundation of so-called wage-earner funds in the beginning of the 1970s triggered a strongly neoliberal response. Wage-earner funds were financed by taxation of corporate profits, and were meant to enable workers to systematically buy out company owners and install workers’ ownership of the means of production. Designed by Rudolf Meidner, then chief economist of the national labour union association, wage-earner funds provided nothing less than a peaceful path to socialism in Sweden. This would obviously make the capitalist class redundant, and the financial and economic elites responded in various ways in an attempt to ‘restore class power’. Funds were released to finance several conservative think tanks that would produce a powerful counter discourse (in which the advanced Swedish welfare provisions would be portrayed as undermining work ethics, and so on). The Swedish National Bank shamelessly borrowed the name of Alfred Nobel to install a ‘Nobel prize of economics’, with Hayek and Friedman among its very first laureates in 1974 and 1976, respectively (see Blyth, 2002, for an account in English). In other words, this piece of recent Swedish history shows that neoliberalism is multirooted – there were moments of neoliberalization, following from moments of crisis, that were not primarily connected to events in the Anglo-American world. It puts the commonsense understanding of neoliberalism’s history of dissemination from Pinochet’s Santiago to Reagan’s Washington and Thatcher’s London, and then to ‘the rest of the world’, into question. In addition, today’s ‘global financial crisis’ did not directly affect the economies of Sweden (and Norway and other countries), as their banks were not strongly involved in subprime mortgage markets (Swedbank with its subprime mortgage markets in the Baltic countries being an exception). It asks, indeed, for a more complex, multiple and contradictory understanding of the birth, dissemination and crisis of neoliberalism. The universalization of particular Anglo-American academic story lines is a bit of an old sore, of course, and can be applied far beyond the Anglo-biased writing of neoliberalism’s trajectory. However Larner, an author who is so rightly concerned with hybridities, varieties and complexities, and who is active in the very field of geography, should perhaps show more sensitivity towards the very geography of crisis, growth and the place of neoliberalism therein. The understanding of neoliberalism is now ‘governed at a distance’, if you like, from the cores of Anglo-American knowledge formation, with non-Anglo-American academic correspondents testing ‘the theory’, emanating from the core, in ‘the rest of the world’. Larner acknowledges this basic problem of the geography of geographical knowledge, but she does this strangely from an Anglo-centric viewpoint, by arguing that ‘those of us who remain in comfortable Anglo-American niches will need to “get out more”’. And the rest of the world cannot ‘simply be “our” case studies’. It is formulations like these that confirm the hierarchical geographies of ‘theory’ and ‘case’, with academic journal procedures one of the principal techniques to reproduce this unequal relationship.

A final point I would like to raise is about Larner’s choice of ‘crises’, which eloquently can be reduced to ‘five Cs’ (credit crunch, climate change, China and BRIC economies, crusades, cyborgism). Some of these may be not interpreted as crisis by some – rather the opposite. The growing wealth of China and the BRIC economies will be highly welcomed by local economic elites and rapidly growing middle classes. Second, Larner’s choice of ‘crises’ is highly heterogeneous and the connections are vague. Why these? As the author herself admits, others could have been listed. While not contesting that Larner’s list highlights some of the most poignant issues of our time, the eclectic nature, the lack of justification why these ones were selected, and the ways in which these issues are part and parcel of some state of generalized crisis, leaves the reader with unanswered questions. But then again, as with most of Larner’s writings, it forces us to critically consider our academic choices.