⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

Quinn Slobodian is the author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023). He holds the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College, co-edits Contemporary European History and co-directs the History and Political Economy Project.

His previous book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize and has been translated into seven languages.

For issue #32 of The Internationalist, the PI’s General Coordinator David Adler sat down with Slobodian to discuss his new book, the recent transformations of global capitalism, and the potential lessons from his historical research for the present pursuit of a new international economic order.

David Adler: Your scholarship has traced the origins of the “neoliberal order” and the dream of its architects to create a frictionless global economy for the flow of goods, money, and even people. Today, though, we hear about all sorts of economic frictions —even its potential fragmentation through trends like decoupling, near-shoring, and emergent multipolarity. What would the old neoliberals say if they were to awaken from their graves to see the geopolitical situation today?

Quinn Slobodian: I think that the “old neoliberals” who lived through two world wars would be mouthing many of the same opinion lines that we read in the newspaper today: that we are courting a return to the 1930s, a disruption of the delicate globe-spanning latticework of exchange created by private market actors and supported by sympathetic governments upon which we all depend—and that down this road lies only dragons. 

The similarity between this reanimated neoliberal and today’s pundit is not coincidental. As I showed in Globalists, one of the main terms used now to criticize policies —“economic nationalism”— was coined and popularized as a way to discredit efforts at nationalizing privately-owned industries in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was deliberately intended to render alien other “experiments” in national self-sufficiency as J. M. Keynes famously called them. The fact is that economic nationalism as a category tells us little about the content of the politics involved. Scale is only one part of a description of an economic program. 

To automatically default to the global as the only stratum at which exchange should be organized is itself a political claim that comes camouflaged as a neutral one. It is because we remain trapped in the binary categories mainstreamed by neoliberals and their allies a century ago that keep me trying to break out of what Hedley Bull called the “tyranny of existing concepts.” 

DA: Much has been made of the “death of neoliberalism.” Philanthropic foundations have invested millions of dollars in research for a new economic paradigm; policymakers across the G7 have heralded a new “Cornwall Consensus” about green investment and social protection to replace the old “Washington Consensus” that once mandated privatisation and liberalisation. Do you think that neoliberalism—in its ideas and its institutions—is really dead? Or just mutating?

QS: To certify the death of neoliberalism requires an assumption about its birth. Those think tanks who are loudly proclaiming the death of neoliberalism are following a certain narrative according to which neoliberalism began at the top with a small number of intellectual conspirators and was then pushed down the pyramid through ever-broader strata of influence from journalists and policymakers to rival think tanks to eventually become policy and the laws of the land. 

I have called this elsewhere an anthrax theory of neoliberalism, a belief in patient zeros and with it the possibility of mapping the spread. I think we need to treat this narrative with caution. It is undeniably true that there are a set of assumptions about the way the world economy works that used to dominate elite discussions, which now no longer do so. The naturalization of global economic competition is no longer the default setting for those giving (or writing) speeches at the G7 or the UN. Instead, there are a new set of buzzwords, about resilience, strategic autonomy, and even the return of long-taboo terms like industrial policy. 

Two questions need to be asked about the supposed paradigm shift. The first is the degree to which rhetoric is transformed into action. The second is about the degree to which the transformation of rhetoric into action follows or does not follow, pre-existing channels of influence and enrichment. As critics of the supposedly new paradigm are quick to point out, the large asset managers that have done so well under the existing paradigm are also being tapped as to intermediate the new flow of subsidies, investments, and transfers. Mapping out the effects of these investments and the degree to which they transform people’s everyday lives will be one way to assess whether neoliberalism has only died in the frontal lobes of the policymakers, or if it is also transformed and metabolized down to the ends of the limbs that push and pull people in there every day lives in workplaces. A final reckoning should not measure only shifts in verbiage at the top of the pyramid of influence, but verifiable changes in the balance of power for the least well-resourced citizens globally.

DA: For many countries—in the Global South in particular— eradicating neoliberalism is not as simple as changing the “consensus.” Between treaties, memorandums, and bailout packages, they face all sorts of constraints in their policymaking and consequences for challenging the economic status quo. How powerful are those constraints? Who is responsible for imposing them? Where should we look to find the most durable architecture of the neoliberal order?

QS: As you point out correctly, the path dependencies and hierarchies of power that defined the world system are not easily swept away by a change of buzzwords. As many people point out, insofar as there is a U.S. empire in the world today, it has both a military component—in armed intervention and global bases—and a monetary component—in the still-unchallenged status of the dollar. The everyday mechanisms and incentive structures of global finance under the dollar are stubborn and tilted heavily towards reproducing the status quo. 

Because the current shift to post-neoliberalism is also manifesting as a re-orientation towards national rather than global concerns. The danger certainly exists that a pivot from neoliberalism is also an even more profound neglect of the global sphere of responsibility that the United States otherwise intermittently attends to. One of the advantages of neoliberal globalism was its foregrounding, in an economic register, of the idea of a planetary community of fate. If a new political-economic paradigm narrows that down to regions or nations, then no points of pressure will exist to extract more equitable policies or outcomes for poorer countries. 

In that sense, what Daniela Gabor calls the Wall Street consensus is arguably the most durable axis around which the neoliberal order continues to turn, and until that is challenged, we can expect little truly revolutionary reversals of power in the global economy. By the same token, how one would contest the dollar dominance remains very much an open question. As I joked once, the only thing more common than dollar-denominated transactions are columns in the financial press claiming the supposedly imminent end of the dollar system. The evidence so far is thin and alternatives are underdeveloped.

DA: This century has seen some of the most severe financial crises in the history of capitalism. Yet capitalism as an economic system remains as resilient, flexible, and adaptable as ever. The dream of socialism, in the meanwhile, remains out there on the political horizon. How do you think this is possible? How are the managers of the capitalist economic system making sense of that imperative of adaptation? And how do they continue to generate public support for it? 

QS: The secret of capitalism’s durability is one that thinkers like Friedrich Hayek understood well: its anonymity. Capitalism thrives under the illusion that the world’s inequalities are natural outcomes uncoordinated by any centralized authorities. It is an ideology that leads us to believe that the market’s uneven rewards are the outcome of a combination of our own hard work (or sloth), our own natural ability (or lack) along with some measure of good fortune. This is a recipe for permanent global gaps in the exposure to early death but also a remarkably open matrix onto which people project all kinds of supplementary ideologies whether religious, astrological, racial, cultural, or national. Capitalism tells us that things are the way they are because we earned them—with the parameters of that “we” always shifting according to circumstance. The real message of the Cold War and its denouement was not that capitalism had provided a better standard of living than communism as much as the fact that it had been better at hiding the face of the perpetrators of injustice. If you failed in East Germany, you could rail against the state and seek to break through the wall. If you failed in West Germany, the fault was only your own. Even as the role played by what the economist Branko Milanovic calls “the citizenship premium” of where one is born globally rises, so too will “the ecological premium” of the security of one’s location and its ability to withstand meteorological shocks and trends. Even if people feel resentful or angry about being born into circumstances that are unfavorable, it is unclear who exactly one should inveigh against or which authority one should seek to overthrow. 

The popularity of conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic is one symptom of this. People who otherwise might have become part of mass movements organized under leftist parties, for example, instead, atomized and online, identified shadowy cabals planning a “Great Reset” from Davos, Bilderberg, and Bohemian Grove. Until we can figure out ways to build parallel structures of finance, communication, and social organization that give people a sense of control over their lives, people will remain ping-ponged between exposure to privately-owned companies that only function because of the backstop offered them by the public authorities and a quixotic search for the centre of the origin for their discontent. 

DA: What does all of this mean for progressive forces? This newsletter will reach so many readers who are outraged by the injustices of the existing international economic order, and eager to build a new one in its place. What do you see as the main barrier to the construction of a new international economic order? And what can parties, movements, unions, and lonely activists do to transcend it?

QS: Unfortunately, I have no patent medicine to offer the world’s progressive forces. As a historian, I am predisposed to a melancholy view of the past on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, a conviction that new forms of politics appear when they are least expected. The 20th century has been a story of the appearance on the world stage of parts of humanity that had been dismissed as non-political, from the surprise of a non-industrialized country being the first to carry out a worker’s revolution one hundred years ago to the reformatting of peasants as the primary forces for revolutionary change in China and elsewhere to the transformation of subjects into citizens and (in the minds of the metropole) of natives into people in the course of decolonization. 

What should be retained from the history of the last century is that the emergence of new insurgent forces is always possible but is equally susceptible to capture and co-optation, whether through corporate branding campaigns, bribery, rechanneling into xenophobic or exclusionary formations, or the irrigation of the venal appetites of a new set of elites. The 21st century and its centring of indigenous rights, land claims, climate-based activism, redefinitions of gender, and digital mobilization, and the way this has often clashed with—but also been re-combined with—more traditional class-based mass party politics and ideas of constitutionalism is both mindbendingly complex but also a sign of the fertility of the present moment. 

If neoliberalism is mutating, then progressive politics is too and we should remember what the genetic scientists tell us: mutation is good, it’s where we find adaptations that are better fit for an ever-changing world.

The Internationalist Archive