Bringing in the ‘neoliberal model of development’

Abstract

This article brings in the concept of the ‘neoliberal model of development’ as a corrective to the prevailing emphasis in the literature that usefully describes neoliberalism as a nationally diverging phenomenon but does not adequately examine the mid-range trans-national/global regulatory connection or the logics of national convergence. By extending the concept of regulation and specifying the national trans-national connection, this article revises the original Parisian French Regulation School conception of a ‘model of development’ and makes it applicable to the contemporary neoliberal era. It then applies this revised conception to help explain contemporary patterns of national convergence and divergence. In particular, with reference to Marx’s theory of the ‘relative surplus population’, this article explores capitalism’s uneven development as a form of national variation intensified by the neoliberal model of development. This revisionist analysis of model of development also demonstrates how its praxis dimension is significant for explaining past and present mid-range variations of capitalism, and more importantly for making a mid-range counter-hegemonic future.

Keywords

model of development neoliberalism regulation theory relative surplus population uneven development

Introduction

Neoliberalism is widely appreciated across many schools of thought as a nationally variegated phenomenon (e.g. Boyer 2005; Brenner et al. 2011; Hall & Soskice 2001; Jessop 2011, 2014; Soederberg et al. 2005). Correspondingly, globalist accounts of the neoliberal era are often criticised as monolithic meta-narratives that under-estimate the continuing causal significance, and variations in the form, of the national state. Some writers do identify with aspects of the process by which trans-national forces of ‘neoliberal globalisation’ drive the convergence of countries into ‘competition states’, while also recognising national ‘divergence within convergence’ or ‘variegated neoliberalisation’ (Soederberg et al. 2005, see also Brenner et al. 2011; Hirsch 1997; Neilson & Stubbs 2016; Ryner 1997). However, none of these approaches deals adequately with the trans-national dimension. This article addresses this gap by critically revising the (Parisian) French Regulation School’s (FRS) concept of ‘model of development’. This innovative revision facilitates a deeper examination of the integral connections between the trans-national neoliberal project that has globally unleashed capitalism’s logic and variegated forms of national neoliberalisation.

Schematically, the contemporary regulatory form of the national/trans-national nexus, or ‘neoliberal model of development’, fills a gap between neoliberal ideology, which has inspired the neoliberal model of development’s formulation as a regulatory blueprint, and neoliberal globalisation and variegated neoliberalisation that are central effects of its practical deployment (Neilson 2012). The neoliberal model of development’s global unleashing of capitalism has made it necessary for all countries, at radically uneven stages of capitalist development, to prioritise national competitiveness. The competitiveness imperative drives international convergence towards the neoliberal national template, but there are national variations especially in the extent of retention or adoption of non-neoliberal regulatory forms (Brenner et al. 2011; Neilson & Stubbs 2016). Moreover, the aggressive locational competition between nation states unleashed by the neoliberal model of development drives a zero-sum logic of international competition that expresses the contemporary logic of capitalism’s uneven development. Thus, national variegation takes the form of unevenly developing nation states that diverge radically in their economic performance and resulting social effects. In particular, this article draws attention to the widely diverging national forms and sizes of the ‘relative surplus population’ (see Neilson 2018; Neilson & Stubbs 2011).

Standard regulation theory under-theorises the trans-national connection and does not recognise a ‘neoliberal model of development’, only a ‘post-Fordist era’ with ‘out-of-regulation’ national variety. The initial task for refitting the standard FRS model of development for contemporary deployment is extending the scope of ‘regulation’ so that it refers not just to institutional forms that ‘counteract’ but also to those that ‘pro-activate’ capitalism. The second major task, hitherto restrained by the FRS’s methodological nationalism, is to bring in the trans-national aspect of a model of development. In addition, bringing in the trans-national dimension triggers the praxis concept that, due to the hegemonic influence of Althusser’s theory of the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s writing, is missing from the standard FRS canon (see Neilson 2017).

In sum, this article revises and refocuses ‘model of development’ by bringing in what is missing in standard regulation theory. Thus, a model of development is conceptualised here not just as the nation state–based coupling of regulation and accumulation that arises as a structurally contingent ‘chance discovery’ as in standard regulation theory. This article’s revised approach also brings in the consciously deliberate trans-national specification and management of this coupling. Applying this revised conception to the contemporary era contributes to current literature on neoliberalism by bringing out the under-theorised trans-national aspect that is driving contemporary patterns of national divergence and convergence. This reformulation also makes ‘model of development’ applicable to and enables comparison between the past and the present. Most importantly, it brings forward a hitherto missing prospective tool that can be deployed to change the world.

The first section of the article builds on the original FRS conception of a model of development by extending the meaning of regulation and bringing in both the national trans-national connection and praxis. The second section deploys this concept to recent historical practice since World War II (WWII). A special tribute is paid to Keynes’ pioneering praxis, but focus is on the revised concept’s application to the current neoliberal era. In particular, Marx’s concept of the ‘relative surplus population’ focuses attention on nation variegation driven by the logic of uneven development unleashed by the neoliberal model of development. The concluding section returns briefly to the praxis theme as it considers elements of a socially progressive post-neoliberal counter-hegemonic model of development.

Building on the FRS conception of ‘model of development’

Key figures in the founding generation of (Parisian) FRS theorists define ‘model of development’ as the coupling of ‘mode of regulation’ and ‘regime of accumulation’ (Boyer & Saillard 2002; Lipietz 1988b). This conceptual framework is standard FRS canon to the present, but ‘model of development’, understood in the standard sense as a set of converging modes of national regulation that deliver stable accumulation, has slipped into dis-use because stable accumulation is absent in the present ‘post-Fordist’ capitalist world. Correspondingly, while second generation work has offered innovative analysis, including of capitalism’s financialisation (Boyer 2000) and of the spatiotemporal dimensions of capitalism’s contemporary globalisation (Jessop 2002), it does not deploy the ‘model of development’ concept. In contrast, this article outlines an alternative trajectory of FRS innovation that though based in, critically builds on, the first-generation discovery. In particular, ‘model of development’ is re-specified here so that it applies in the present neoliberal era. As well, this re-specification adds new dimensions for analysing the past Fordist era, and for making the future.

In standard regulation theory to the present, the causal basis, and thereby the presence or absence, of a model of development is ‘regulation’. In the original analysis of the post-WWII Fordist era, FRS thinkers derived the concept of ‘regulation’ by comparing the more or less converging experiences of advanced capitalist countries. This comparative strategy consolidated into an ideal-typical composite model or ‘mode of regulation’ that more or less reflected the post-WWII experiences of advanced capitalist countries. It refers to a national institutional framework that counteracts capitalism’s contradictory logic to deliver a stable and socially progressive pattern or ‘regime of accumulation’. Standard regulation theory derives the existence or absence of a model of development by the presence or absence of converging forms of counteractive regulation (Boyer & Saillard 2002; Lipietz 1988b). Contemporary analysis of the ‘post-Fordist’ world confirms this binary by contrasting the converging ‘in-regulation’ national experiences that define the post-WWII Fordist model of development with diverging ‘out of regulation’ national experiences that define the absence of a model of development for the after-Fordist world (Boyer 2005).

This article revises the FRS conception of a model of development and then deploys it to fill a significant gap in the current literature on neoliberalism. There are three major steps in this revision: the first extends the scope of the ‘regulation’ concept so that it refers to ‘proactive’ as well as ‘counteractive’ forms of economic coordination. The second step extends the meaning of ‘model of development’ by bringing in the trans-national dimension that has remained undeveloped in standard FRS ‘methodological nationalist’ accounts. This activates introduction of the third step of innovation: praxis.

Extending the scope of ‘regulation’

Underpinning the FRS’ discovery of ‘regulation’ is the observation that advanced capitalist countries in the post-WWII era converged, albeit unevenly, towards stable accumulation and social progress. The original analysis ties regulation to the stability that more or less characterised advanced capitalist countries in the post-WWII era. Stability is defined by steady and even growth, underpinned in particular by the calibration of increasing productivity with increasing wages and reflected in the stable circumstances of capital and labour. In contrast, the present era is characterised by wages lagging behind productivity increases, uneven growth punctuated by recurring accumulation crises, precarious circumstances for both capital and labour, and intensifying uneven development across the world’s nation states.

Aglietta’s (1979, 1998a) introduction to the revised edition of his original pioneering classic, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The USA Experience also clarifies the links between regulation and social progress. Social progress is defined here as inclusive sustainable material security founded in stable permanent full employment, decent secure work, universal social protection (welfare state), reducing material inequality and adequate free time. In contrast, social regression characterises the contemporary era. Social regression refers here to deeply unstable, unequal and unsustainable growth that delivers uneven but universal increases in precarity; increasing working time; retrenchment of the institutions of social protection; deepening patterns of inequality centrally linked with an internationally unequal growth in labour’s oversupply, and various forms of competitive exclusivity between individuals, groups, and nation states (see Neilson 2015, 2018).

Social progress historically manifested but with socially conservative limitations in what Aglietta names as Fordist ‘wage earner society’ (Aglietta 1998a; Lipietz 1994). In the standard narrative, this version of social progress was enabled by the Fordist model of development that resulted from the negotiated institutionalisation of nationally specific class compromises. In effect, the Fordist model of development delivered the conditions of social security and inclusive solidarity across advanced capitalist countries by actively calibrating increasing productivity with rising wages, including a social wage, and full employment. In sum, though capitalist imperatives are in tension with social progress, the Fordist model of development made them somewhat compatible for a time.

For Aglietta (1998a), capitalist social relations drive extended material accumulation that is an economic pre-requisite of social progress. However, capitalism is a ‘blind force’ which, though delivering economic growth and ‘technical progress’, also brings economic instability, ecological unsustainability, and social regression. By counteracting capitalism’s blind logic, regulation can bring technical progress with social progress. In turn, democratic agency grounds this regulation driven social progress:

The mode of regulation [delivers social progress] by managing the tension between the expansive force of capital and the democratic principle. (Aglietta 1998a: 53)

‘Regulation’, originating in the counter-capitalist and socially progressive ‘well spring’ of the democratic project, progressively stabilises capitalism’s economically unstable and socially regressive logic. First-generation regulation theory thus offered mid-range foundations for a ‘complete alternative’ to neoclassical economics (Aglietta 1979: 13). For neoclassical thinkers, the market is characterised as a stable and socially progressive economic order that arises spontaneously from micro-foundations. This ‘methodologically individualist’ view couples economic and social stability with the absence, and instability with the presence, of regulation. In the exactly opposite FRS view, the absence of regulation is associated with the inherently unstable and socially regressive effects of capitalism’s spontaneous form. Correspondingly, the stabilisation of capital accumulation as an ‘accumulation regime’ is associated with capitalism’s interruption by a ‘mode of regulation’. For the FRS, ‘in-regulation’ ‘contains’, while the absence of regulation summed up as ‘out of regulation’ ‘expresses’ capitalism’s contradictory logic:

[C]risis is only the other side of regulation: the one expresses and the other contains the original conflictual nature of [capitalist] social relations. (Lipietz 1988a: 15, 1988b: 20)

Boyer’s second-generation analysis associates ‘regulation’, and thus ‘regime of accumulation’ and ‘model of development’, only with the stabilising interruption of capitalist relations that occurred during the Fordist post-WWII era. In contrast, the absence of regulation, and therefore the absence of an accumulation regime and model of development, is associated with the unstable capitalist crisis form of the after-Fordist world (Boyer 2005). While the mode of regulation is causal, the evidence of its presence or absence is the stability or instability of the accumulation pattern. Thus, if mode of regulation (MR) is present, then accumulation regime (AR) and model of development (MR + AR) are also present, but if no accumulation regime, then no mode of regulation and no model of development. In short, the core discoveries of first generation FRS research only apply to the capitalist crisis logic of the after-Fordist capitalist world in the sense of their absence.

In the perspectives of leading FRS writers of the post-Fordist world, the conceptual tripod of regulation/accumulation/model of development has been largely displaced by, but is still formally incorporated within, Boyer’s original five institutional forms model (Boyer & Saillard 2002; Jessop 2013). The forms comprise ‘the monetary constraint’, ‘the wage labour nexus’, ‘forms of competition’, ‘methods of insertion into the international regime’ and ‘forms of the state’.¹ For Boyer, a ‘mode of regulation’, implying a model of development, is the effect of the ‘co-evolution’ of these ‘institutional forms’ towards a ‘complementary configuration’ that coherently ‘reproduces’ and ‘steers’ (Boyer & Saillard 2002: 334) the ‘accumulation regime’ defined as the ‘set of regularities that ensure the general and relatively coherent progress of capital accumulation’ (Boyer & Saillard 2002: 341).

This conceptual framework has the advantage of grounding inter-era comparison, and schematically has flexibility because it focuses on processes that may (or not) lead to an in-regulation, that is, model of development, outcome, including in the present ‘post-Fordist’ world. Nonetheless, Boyer’s framework, consistent with the regulation/regime/model of development causal circle, premises a model of development on counteractive regulation. That is, an in-regulation outcome is only possible when the five forms cohere as a ‘complementary configuration’ evidenced by an ‘accumulation regime’. Thus, while the architecture of national institutional formations that proactively facilitate capitalism may represent a particular configuration of the five institutional forms, they will be unstable in accumulation outcomes and thus equal the absence of a model of development. In short, there can be no ‘neoliberal model of development’.

The initial innovation proposed here is that a model of development should refer to the prevailing institutional architecture regardless of its stability. After all, both eras since the end of WWII are more or less unstable, and neither era simply comprises stabilising institutional forms. Rather than a simple dichotomy between regulation and its absence, all periods of capitalist development are treated here as ‘with-regulation’: understood as politically driven institutional formations which, in various ways, practically modify capitalism’s basic socio-economic structure and the downstream material consequences of its extended reproduction.

The difference between Fordist and neoliberal experiences is not between the absence or presence of institutional intervention into core capitalist relations and logic. Rather, the key differences are in form and direction of regulation. These differences can be theoretically distinguished within the classificatory parameters of opposite poles. At one theoretical pole, regulatory projects interrupt capitalism by offsetting its relations and effects in ways that counteract, compensate or even replace market logic and capital’s power. At the other pole, regulatory projects formalise, support, legitimate, unleash, intensify and embed market principles and forms of capitalist power. This framework is schematically, but I stress incompletely, summarised in the following table.¹

Table 1.

Forms of regulation (from Neilson & Stubbs 2016: 126).

Proactive regulation (Neoliberal model of development)	Counteractive regulation (Fordist model of development)
Pro-market regulation	Counter-market regulation
Activating market mechanisms that coordinate capital accumulation	Counteracting market mechanisms to promote stable capital accumulation
(i) External component:	(i) External component:
- Trade liberalisation	- Trade protectionism
- Financial liberalisation	- Financial controls
(ii) Domestic component:	(ii) Domestic component:
- Privatisation	- Public investment
- Market coordination of private enterprise	- State coordination of private enterprise
Pro-capital regulation	Counter-capital regulation
Facilitating capitalist power over labour in work and employment	Protecting labour from capitalist power in work and employment
- Enterprise autonomy and flexible labour markets	- Labour rights and participation in the workplace
- Individual employment relations	- Collective employment relations
- Retrenched and commodified welfare	- Extended and de-commodified welfare

While a model of development still refers here to the coupling of regulation and accumulation, the revised perspective loosens the criterion of stable accumulation. Just as there is not simply regulation or its absence, there is not simply proactive or counteractive regulation, and there is not simply stable or unstable accumulation. In short, different couplings of regulation and accumulation unfold in practice as more or less (un)stable trajectories.

Nonetheless, there are clear differences in regulatory direction and associated forms of (in)stability and social progress/regression that distinguish Fordist and neoliberal eras. The Fordist era was characterised by national convergence but with variations towards more counteractive regulation across advanced capitalist countries that generated economic stability and social progress. However, the basic institutions of private property central to upholding the contradictory structure of the capitalist mode of production remained mostly in place. Contrastingly, in the current neoliberal era, convergence towards more proactive regulation, which has generated economic instability and social regression, has occurred across nearly all countries in the world. Nonetheless, proactive regulation occurs in varying combinations with persisting or (re)introduced forms of counteractive regulation (see Neilson & Stubbs 2016). This broadening of the scope of regulation makes ‘model of development’ applicable to the current ‘post-Fordist’ era. Specifying the trans-national connection also extends the meaning and applicability of the standard FRS concept of ‘model of development’.

Beyond methodological nationalism

In the mainstream, a model of development refers to an exemplary national experience, such as Japan’s ‘developmental state’, which is emulated by other countries in the region. The standard FRS conception of a model of development resonates with this meaning insofar as it refers only to national experience and does not explicitly integrate the trans-national relation. The standard FRS account of the Fordist era is also consistent with the mainstream concept insofar as the former treats the US hegemonic experience as the exemplar that other countries were encouraged to follow. In both cases, though involving a group of countries, a particular national model anchors a model of development.

The FRS approach is analytically innovative beyond the mainstream meaning because it has drawn out functional similarities that were present, more or less, across a group of countries to derive an ideal-typical national composite model of regulation that generated stable accumulation, which defines the standard FRS meaning of a model of development. The Fordist model of development thus resonates with multiple national experiences, though refers to none of them exactly. As a retrospectively constructed mid-range conceptual abstraction, the Fordist model of development is a yardstick against which concrete national experiences can be individually analysed and compared.

Regulation theory ‘rests on the primacy of the national dimension and regards the world economy as a system of interacting social formations’ (Aglietta 1982: 6). However, drawing on Poulantzas, Aglietta implicitly recognises that the hegemonic nation state has a trans-national, regulatory role. The hegemonic nation state is the ‘main external factor of cohesion’ within a system of nations ‘that secures smooth national accumulation’ (Aglietta 1982). Consistent with other neo-Marxist approaches, Aglietta treats a leading hegemonic nation state as the hub of a specific capitalist era that stamps its trans-national and national projects onto other nation states within its ambit (see Arrighi & Silver 1999; Wallerstein 2004). The US hegemon has also pursued such strategies (see Corbridge 1994; Rupert 1995).

While Aglietta implicitly recognises a deliberate trans-national dimension to the role of the hegemonic nation state, the FRS has not built on or integrated this dimension into its conception of a model of development. Boyer and Saillard (2002) have no glossary entry for an ‘international regime’, but presumably, it refers to stable trans-national accumulation. In addition, Boyer (2005) treats ‘method of [national] insertion into the international regime’, his fourth institutional form, as ‘largely a matter of choice’ (p. 52).²

Boyer assumes, without deeper analysis, considerable national choice and a stable trans-national environment. Yet, the trans-national configuration is central to defining the terrain on which both capital and nation states operate, and as such, it is bound to limit the ways that capital and national states can function especially because of the terms of their interaction. It is thus fundamental to consider in depth the ways in which different trans-national environments variously frame and constrain national choices. Furthermore, separately chosen national choices do not simply imply international accumulation stability.

Jessop (2014) argues that the stable regulation of the contradictory logic of capitalism is provisional, temporary and limited. In his 2014 article, he considers instability in the relation between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ modes of national development and the European regional ‘mode of integration’. In addition, his comments on the relation between mode of global market integration and the unstable relations between China and the United States also raise the theme of international instability as a process of uneven development between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ nation states (see next section). This direction of innovation, which intersects with this article’s revised conception of a model of development, also raises the related question of the extent to which a model of development is a form of praxis. That is, to what extent is a national trans-national regulatory nexus deliberately designed, and then managed, in order to achieve specific economic and social outcomes?

Bringing back praxis

The problem is that Althusser, and then Poulantzas following, has blocked consideration of this path by dismissing praxis as part of the non-Marxist residue represented by Marx’s early work (Neilson 2017, 2018). These highly innovative French neo-Marxist theoreticians, whose contemporary influence remains considerable, also framed the neo-Marxist orientation of first generation regulation theorists, for example, Aglietta and Lipietz. Although positively inspiring ‘regulation’ (Lipietz 1993), Althusser’s concept of overdetermination and related neo-Marxist analyses have dismissed the causal significance of knowledge in the form of conscious intentional design.

Lipietz (1987b) adapts Poulantzas’ neo-Marxism, which powerfully uncovers the contingently overdetermined nature of the class struggle, to the claim that the Fordist mode of regulation was a ‘chance discovery’. That is, though the structural logic underpinning class struggle defines a limited set of possible outcomes, an actual outcome is the unplanned and overdetermining outcome of power struggles between different political agents of class positions located within separate nation states. Thus, the Fordist model of development, considered as an international configuration of converging forms of national regulation, is the politically contingent but unintentional effect of national class compromise outcomes of class struggles that serendipitously led to advanced capitalism’s stabilisation in the post WWII period.

Boyer (2002: 330) offers a non-Marxist variation on this theme. Contra neoclassical thinkers, he treats institutional forms as central, but drawing on evolutionary theories, he views their ‘co-evolution’, like neoclassical thinkers, as an unplanned ‘trial and error’ process arising from micro-foundations. Reinforced further by treating ‘forms of the state’ directly as an institutional form, rather than a site or mechanism, of regulation, Boyer retreats from the neo-Marxist sense of regulation as state-led macro-intervention that overdetermines all mid-range forms of the capitalist mode of production.

From a neo-Marxist standpoint, the standard FRS conception of a mode of regulation refers to the unexpectedly stabilising mid-range form of capitalism’s overdetermining political and ideological superstructure. More fully, a mode of regulation can be summarised as an ideologically and functionally coherent ensemble of state-led nationally coordinating institutional forms operating through laws, policies, organisations, and ideological discourses internalised in matching expectations and norms, which coordinate capitalist social relations (Lipietz 1988a).³

The revised conception of a ‘model of development’ developed here shares the neo-Marxist disposition that the state is a key agency of macro-intervention that overdetermines capitalist social relations. However, contra first generation neo-Marxists, it seeks to inject praxis into the process of political intervention especially with respect to trans-national political agencies. Marx’s original thesis eleven statement of praxis read here, as ‘the point [of knowledge] is to change it [the world]’ directly inspires this revision. A ‘model of development’ is at the outset a knowledge-based intentional trans-national regulatory design that is subsequently deployed in practice in order to change the capitalist world.

Nonetheless, this article’s second-generation neo-Marxist perspective still follows Althusser’s view that the genius of Capital Vol. 1 is that in it Marx reveals capitalism’s ‘laws of motion’ as a structural ‘process without a subject’. However, following Marx (1976, Preface), this article methodologically distinguishes capitalism’s unintentional ‘abstract’ logic from its concrete historical process. In historical practice, the dynamic of capitalism integrally includes intentional human subjectivity that wilfully interacts with capitalism’s structural logic. In particular, praxis refers here to intentional subjectivity as conscious, creative and determined knowledge, in the form of mid-range regulatory projects, which aspire to change the world by deliberately overdetermining capitalism’s unintentional structural logic. In sum, while outcomes are indeed the overdetermined contingent effect of struggle that is constrained by capitalist structural logic, they also involve wilful contest between competing intentional designs.

Gramsci, who names Marx’s Marxism as the ‘philosophy of praxis’, views hegemony, defined minimally here as the prevailing model of development plus world outlook, as the class compromise outcome of a contest between competing hegemonic projects. The prevailing hegemonic project contingently expresses the will of a dominant capitalist class fraction articulated with the interests and outlooks of subaltern classes to form a ‘social bloc’. As the FRS also argue, the prevailing hegemony is the compromise outcome of this contingent class struggle. However, contra FRS discourse, Gramsci emphasises that this struggle is centrally about the ‘war of position’ between competing projects that integrally involve the intellectual labour of intentionally determined designers. In short, though contingently compromised by struggle, outcomes tend to align with the ascendancy, and practical deployment, of one design. Class compromising counteractive regulation, as the contingent outcome of class struggle, is thus reconciled with the incorporation of praxis understood, following Gramsci, in terms of the material causality of ideas. Specifically, the outcome of a hegemonic social bloc plus model of development can only occur with the wilful input of intellectual designers and constructive strategists. Jessop (2014) comes closest to expressing this position:

[W]hile capital’s contradictions cannot be reconciled in all respects, social forces can moderate them provisionally through specific visions, projects and strategies that selectively reconcile some particular interests rather than others, and link them to an inevitably partial construal of the general interest. (p. 53)

Model of development: a revisionist proposal

In standard regulation theory, a ‘model of development’ is the outcome of a contingent national class struggle logic of unintentional discovery that is retrospectively conceptualised as a national ideal-composite. In contrast, this article’s revised approach proposes that at the outset, a model of development is a conscious theoretical construction of a national trans-national connection that is deliberately designed to achieve calculated economic and social effects. Though contingent class struggle and the nation state remain central to explaining outcomes, the focus shifts in that a national model of regulation is also associated with a prospective regulatory template that multiple nation states are encouraged to adopt as part of a purposeful trans-national project.

Trans-national agents within trans-national forums design, implement, and manage a model of development in order to achieve calculated national-trans-national regulatory and accumulation effects. The model design, once deployed in practice, transforms the national-trans-national regulatory terrain. In turn, this terrain defines the environment on which capital, nation states and the labouring population act, and on which unfold specific national-trans-national patterns of accumulation and associated social effects. In short, this article’s praxis-based ‘methodological globalism’ seeks to supplement, rather than displace, the FRS toolbox.

This revised proposal schematically emphasises the following basic steps of what is actually a more complicated and historically varying process. Intellectual agents of a hegemonic project transform its normative imaginary or ‘world outlook’ into the blueprint of a practical regulatory project that has been designed and predictively calculated to deliver a national-trans-national configuration of regulation and accumulation. Critical to the blueprint is the regulatory national template, functionally equivalent variations of which need to be widely adopted in order to construct the model of development in practice.

Paradoxically, the result, empirically observable as the aggregate effect of individual national actions, is a trans-national regulatory framework that sets limits and possibilities of national actions. Unfolding practically over time and place, the prevailing model of development consolidates and formalises as a national-trans-national regulatory framework, and an associated accumulation process. Its dynamic stability is dependent on maintaining complementarity between national and trans-national dimensions. However, feedback mechanisms that enable on-going project modification are essential because, following Marx’s ‘worst architect’ tale in Capital Vol. 1, actual models of development are bound to be flawed.

At one conceptual pole is located the ideal progressive model of development. It is formally defined as a national trans-national regulatory framework that – consistent with dynamically stable trans-national systemic reproduction – facilitates positive-sum cooperation between nation states in the form of sustainable social progress for all the world’s countries. The negative ideal model of development, at the directly contrasting opposite pole, coerces nation states into unstable and socially regressive courses of action as part of a zero-sum competition between winner and loser countries. Relatedly, its ‘extended reproduction’ takes the form of an unstable, uneven, unequal and crisis-prone national-trans-national accumulation process. Though actual models of development will fall somewhere between these two conceptual poles, the ideal-typical progressive mode is the hypothetical yardstick against which actually existing models of development can be assessed and modified, and according to which the design and pursuit of a future counter-hegemonic model of development should be guided.

From the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development to the neoliberal model of development

The practical crux of the neoliberal project, like its Keynesian predecessor, is the deliberate design and implementation of a national-trans-national nexus. However, these projects are fundamentally opposite in both intention and outcome. Directly contrary to the intention of Keynes’ blueprint, the neoliberal project has sought to subordinate nation states to, by enlisting them in the construction of, a global model of capitalist development. The economically stable and socially progressive effects of the counteractive regulatory bias of the Keynesian-led model of development contained capitalism’s contradictions and gave countries the opportunity to achieve social progress for a while. In contrast, the neoliberal model of development’s proactive pro-capital regulatory bias has driven unstable economic growth, ecological destruction and social regression. An outline of the original Keynesian-led Fordist model of development frames discussion of the neoliberal model of development.

The Keynesian-led Fordist model of development

Keynes validated the principle, beyond methodological individualism, that the state needs to engage in deliberate counteractive regulatory intervention at the macro-level in order to stabilise market capitalism’s inherent instability. This much is widely understood. However, beyond both mainstream and FRS orthodoxies, he also made another epistemological leap by specifying a conscious and deliberate trans-nationally coordinated approach to support his national state proposal. In short, via his pioneering praxis, Keynes conceptually and practically discovered what is named here as a ‘model of development’.

From the early 1930s, to the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, and until his death in 1946, Keynes consistently argued for a national regulatory template that would increase employment by macro-national engineering domestic aggregate demand for goods by raising wage levels, lowering interest rates and increasing public investment. In short, he advocated for a policy framework that would lead to increased levels of employment. However, Keynes was acutely aware that his nation-centric template could only be viable within a facilitating trans-national environment. Keynes tirelessly advocated for a complementary trans-national regulatory framework, understood here as comprising the aggregate effect of the widespread adoption of his national template combined with global regulatory agencies dedicated to counteracting uneven development across nation states.

In terms of the latter, first, Keynes unsuccessfully proposed at Bretton Woods and elsewhere an International Clearing Union that would aim to balance accumulation across unevenly performing countries, especially focusing on helping debtor nations (Corbridge 1994; Sidelsky 2005). Relatedly, and second, he more successfully advocated for capital controls. At least as early as 1933, Keynes was arguing for national autonomy and stability against ‘economic internationalism’ by seeking to prevent nation states from ‘being at the mercy of world forces working out, or trying to work out, some uniform equilibrium according to the ideal principles, if they can be called such, of laissez faire capitalism’ (Keynes 1933: 59). Further, he later writes that ‘It has been an inherent characteristic of the automatic international metallic currency to force adjustment in the direction most disruptive of social order and to throw the burden on the country least able to support it, making the poor, poorer’ (Keynes 1971: 29, see also Helleiner 1995: 317–318). More basically, failing national economies undermine trans-national aggregate demand.

Even more precisely, the foreword to the Government’s 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy (UK Government 1944) usefully summarises Keynes’ sense and advocacy of a ‘model of development’. That is, via this document, Keynes advocates a cooperative trans-national environment based in the widespread adoption of his national template that he predicts will generate positive-sum progressive effects for all countries:

A country will not suffer from mass unemployment so long as the total demand for its goods and services is maintained at a high level. But in this country we are obliged to consider external no less than internal demand. The Government are therefore seeking to create, through collaboration between the nations, conditions of international trade which will make it possible for all countries to pursue policies of full employment to their mutual advantage.

In order to constrain capital flows from higher to lower waged economies, which would act to undermine trans-national aggregate demand, all participating nation states needed to follow Keynes’ national template especially by engineering wages upwards. Keynes’ also realised that participating countries needed to similarly adopt internationally restricting finance and trade regulation in order to insulate them from destabilising disruptions, and loss of national autonomy, caused by the free movement of capital. First, the trans-national flow of money would be constrained by capital controls that would increase the autonomy of national accumulation strategies by reducing the power of finance capital. Second, local firms would be protected from imported goods in order to counter export-led national accumulation strategies. The immediate problem being addressed is that the higher rate of capital accumulation implied for firms in countries following export-led strategies is a clear incentive for them not to follow Keynes’ template. In particular, Keynes wanted to discourage such strategies because they would undermine his wage-led domestic demand increasing national template while validating utilisation of the demand present in other countries. The aggregate effect of nation states utilising external rather than internal demand would be a systemic trans-national demand deficit.

In sum, Keynes calculated that the widespread adoption of the complementary domestic and international components of his national template would generate a stable national-trans-national regulatory nexus and correspondingly stable national-trans-national accumulation regime. However, there is a ‘logic of collective action’ problem (Olson 1971). That is, stability is premised on participating countries following the template, because when some countries ‘free ride’, not only are the latter advantaged and the former disadvantaged, but systemic instability is implied. In order for stable trans-national accumulation to occur, and at the same time be compatible with nation states having room to pursue stable and progressive nation-centric accumulation regimes, participating countries needed to follow both domestic and external aspects of Keynes’ national template. As Lipietz (1987b) acutely observed, ‘Keynesianism in one country’ is unsustainable.

In practice, external and domestic aspects of Keynes’ national template were more or less accepted (Neilson & Stubbs 2016). Non-allied countries, especially Japan, Germany and other non-aligned, and less aligned, northern European countries, were not so clearly committed to Keynes’ autocentric emphasis. Nonetheless, the Keynesian-led Fordist mode of development, articulated with the productivity-wages class compromise, still delivered stable accumulation and national social progress across the advanced capitalist countries for about 30 years. Institutionally expressed as the ‘Keynesian Welfare State’ (Jessop 1991), this ‘wage earner society’ (Aglietta 1998a) increased the labouring population’s security, solidarity, equality and participation. The economic basis of this social progress was universally improving employment levels, income security and living standards; universal access to free or subsidised health and education; progressive income redistribution and increased participation and protection for organised labour. These outcomes were possible because the Keynesian-led Fordist mode of development made rising wages, including the social wage, compatible with capitalist profitability. In addition, by facilitating a healthy and skilled workforce, the Keynesian welfare state delivered the needs of both labour and capital.

The Keynesian-led Fordist model of development offered only a temporary fix for capitalism’s contradictions. As Keynes famously quipped, ‘in the long run, we are all dead’. By the 1970s, unintended effects on the supply side, notably declining productivity, but without corresponding moderation of wage increases, were producing a profit squeeze. As summed up by Aglietta (1998b), ‘Fordism weighed capitalism down’ (p. 147). In addition, destabilisation in the 1970s was due to problems with the national-trans-national connection.

In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon countries that were reasonably faithful to the demand-side nation-centred essentials of the Keynesian model, the strong post WWII economic performance of countries such as Japan, Germany and Sweden was due not just to their greater attention to the supply side but also to their pursuit of export-led strategies. However, the problem of a systemic demand-side deficit only emerged clearly in the 1970s when the Newly Industrialising Countries pursuit of export competitiveness centrally included wage levels that were significantly lower than the advanced capitalist countries. In order to recover their profitability, firms in the industrial heartlands began re-locating parts of their operations to low wage countries (Lipietz 1987a). Rather than being a source of demand, wage levels were thus becoming a key cost to be reduced if firms were to remain profitable.

These shifts directly threatened the economic stability of both more committed Keynesian nation states and, integrally, the demand-side stability of the whole Fordist/Keynesian trans-national accumulation regime. Rather than the Keynesian autocentric formula, there was a growing imperative for nation states to pursue the logic of the ‘competition state’ (Cerny 2010; Hirsch 1997; Jessop 1994) defined here as export-led national accumulation strategies driven not just by higher productivity but also by lower wages (Neilson & Stubbs 2016). By the 1970s, limitations on both supply and demand sides were destabilising the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development.

Structurally determined circumstances define the limited possibilities of conscious intervention. Even within these circumstantial possibilities, a structural logic of objective contingency drives actual historical outcomes. Nonetheless, knowledge-based subjectivity is still causally integral to the process that makes history. That is, knowledgeable human agents – acting wilfully, deliberately and creatively – can overdetermine impersonal structural logic and change the world.

At the end of WWII, positive circumstantial possibilities included an openness to progressive change at both national and trans-national levels, and the establishment of enabling trans-national regulatory institutions. As well, the Fordist stage of the capitalist labour process and the one-off growth opportunity arising from the destruction caused by WWII structurally aided the achievement of full employment. Furthermore, nationally negotiated productivity-wage class compromises reinforced by the hegemonic exemplar of the US productivity compromise also complemented Keynes’ demand-side national template (Rupert 1995). However, other circumstances frustrated the full implementation of Keynes’ project. To begin with, Keynes’ national template proposal had much less influence over non-allied countries (Neilson & Stubbs 2016). In addition, the more powerful US delegation’s greater attachment to a more orthodox neoclassical perspective constrained implementation of the explicitly trans-national institutional aspect of Keynes’ unorthodox interventionist model.

Nonetheless, with limited trans-national powers of persuasion beyond the force of his own intellectual will, and falling short of his full plan, Keynes still managed to design and broker the world’s first model of development. He died in 1946 and Hayek lived on to promote and see his counter-revolution, but we are all living to this day in the legacy of Keynes’ pioneering praxis.

The neoliberal model of development

In the 1980s, International Monetary Fund and World Bank economists practically specified the neoliberal project as a model of development based in a pro-activating national regulatory template. As the World Bank understood it, ‘Globalisation begins at home’. They calculated that the globalising of market logic and capital’s power would occur once the countries of the world adopted the neoliberal national template. The externally interfacing component of the national template focuses on rolling back Keynesian trade protections, liberalising finance and privatising publicly owned enterprises. Corresponding and overlapping with the external component is the domestic component that comprises proactive forms of regulation that facilitate capital’s autonomy, security and profitability within nation state territorial borders. In practice, Keynesian social democratic institutions of counteractive regulation have given way to labour market flexibility and welfare state neoliberalisation including privatisation. Running parallel with the national template are multilateral trade deals. These seek a ‘level playing field’ for all participating countries defined by the locking-in of the same private property rights, and by local firms and local institutional priorities not being favoured over or constraining of global capital’s priorities (Gill 1995). Not only does the need to win ‘business confidence’ push countries to regulate in a neoliberal direction, trans-national regulatory agencies push national compliance by ideological transmission and by Structural Adjustment Programmes and their successor formats.

The aggregate tendency of the national template’s more or less widespread adoption is towards a seamless global market surface on which capital can move freely within and across countries. Thus, the neoliberal mode of development has unleashed capitalism’s unstable logic of accumulation globally. This construction of a global market surface has enhanced capital’s power over labour and nation states, but it also disciplines capital because firm viability depends on meeting global wage, employment and productivity norms. In turn, nation states are also directly exposed to these disciplinary global market norms that define both their terms of subordination to the needs of capital, and the terms of their locational competition with each other for a share of capital.

Institutionally, this neoliberal form of capitalism’s political and ideological superstructure is embedding as a geo-political patchwork of national regulatory frameworks networked with and overseen by global regulatory agencies. Robinson (2001) names this configuration as an embryonic Trans National State. Combined with technological developments, this neoliberal-led trans-national state has also facilitated direct globalisation of capitalist production and consumption. Trans-national corporations orchestrate production in the form of ‘global networks’, which articulate functionally and geo-politically segmented sectors and stages of the production process (see Phillips et al. 2014; Robinson 2004; Taylor 2008; Wilkinson 2009).

Nation states are components of this emergent Trans National State, as well as competition state players on the resulting global market terrain. In their competitive struggle with each other to attract and retain a viable share of mobile capital, they must meet globally competitive norms that vary across different stages of global production networks and that change as the effect of on-going competition between firms and between countries. Contrary to Boyer’s analysis of the post-Fordist world, countries are deeply constrained, though in differing extents and ways, by the requirements that flow from their ‘insertion’ into the neoliberal trans-national framework of global competition.

Uneven development and the neoliberal model of development

Though from different perspectives and with important differences, a diverse range of writers all agree that the current era is characterised by a diverging variety of national forms of regulation. However, all of this literature obscures or underplays the national effects of the overarching trans-national dimension of the neoliberal project. Bringing in the ‘neoliberal model of development’ helps address the one-sidedness of existing discourses by identifying the trans-national drivers of existing patterns of national variety, as well as national convergence. This section briefly outlines this article’s contribution to the existing discourse of variegated neoliberalisation, before exploring national variety in terms of contemporary capitalism’s uneven development.

The influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach contrasts the neoliberal national model (‘Liberal Market Economy’) with the non-neoliberal model (‘Coordinated Market Economy’). Its founders claim nation states are tending towards one or other of these poles because they argue hybrids are inefficient, and globalisation is an external force that has little impact on this underlying tendency towards polarising national divergence (Hall & Soskice 2001). Other perspectives, all critical of the VoC approach, more closely align with what is summarised in the term ‘diverging convergence’ defined as different national mixes of neoliberal and non-neoliberal forms of regulation (Neilson & Stubbs 2016). Peck and colleagues’ descriptively map the international pattern as a ‘variegated neoliberalisation’ (Brenner et al. 2011). Cerny and colleagues, similarly, emphasise diverging national models of the competition state, but within patterns of broader convergence with the neoliberal project (Cerny 2010; Soederberg et al. 2005). Nonetheless, Cerny and colleagues are limited by the conceptual absence of ‘model of development’. As a result, they do not systematically examine the causal interconnection between nation state imperatives or nation state variegation (diverging convergence) and the particular global market form of capitalism unleashed by the ‘neoliberal model of development’.

Consistent with the FRS conceptual binary between regulation and its absence, both Boyer and Jessop also make considerable concessions to the prevailing accent on variety across different national experiences (Boyer 2005; Jessop 2011, 2014). In addition, like the VoC writers, they treat nation states and groups of nation states as different models of capitalism, and they have long been sceptical of hybrids. However, Jessop’s (2014) study of ‘variegated capitalism’ innovatively introduces a different dimension of national variation that takes a significant step beyond the less critical perspectives of Boyer and the VoC approach. That is, Jessop invites us to think about the contradictory logic of contemporary capitalism in terms of the unstable international interaction of unevenly variegated national models.

This article makes the case that by requiring nation states to prioritise global capitalist profitability, the neoliberal model of development has undermined the autocentric social progress that the Fordist model of development enabled. However, within this broad convergence of nation states towards the imperatives of neoliberal globalisation, nation state responses still vary. Neilson and Stubbs (2016) build empirically on the national variation literature by offering a six-pronged typology of competition states, derived from a global empirical overview of nation states that distinguished between developing and developed competition states, and between countries with different national mixes of proactive and counteractive regulation. Though going in different directions, the empirical evidence demonstrates that the neoliberal era, like the Fordist era, is characterised by national convergence towards a particular regulatory form, but divergence occurs within this convergence. In particular, this research observed different mixes of neoliberal regulation, and different mixes of neoliberal plus non-neoliberal regulation, across nation states at different stages of industrialisation. In sum, divergence is occurring within the converging effects of the neoliberal model of development’s transformation of nation states into, more or less successful, competition states. Unfortunately, this study excluded non-competitive nation states, central to exploring more deeply the particular form of uneven development in the current neoliberal era.

In the famous preface to Capital Vol. 1, Marx explains to readers that the following exposition focuses on uncovering capital’s essential ‘abstract’ laws of motion, and not on how this contradictory logic unfolds across nation states that are at different stages of development. In the Fordist era, neo-Marxist theorists of uneven development addressed this deficit by studying the dynamics of ‘unequal exchange’ between core and peripheral nation states (Amin 1976). Jessop (2014) innovatively adapts this general kind of approach to thinking about how the relationship between core and peripheral forms of nationally variegated capitalisms expresses the crisis logic of contemporary capitalism. I explore further the specific form of uneven development in the current era, but within this article’s more globalist perspective on national variation and in terms of a specific account of the ‘relative surplus population’ (Marx 1976; Neilson 2018; Neilson & Stubbs 2011).

The neoliberal model of development has intensified capitalism’s expansive yet unstable accumulation process. Recurring economic crises, underpinned by a global demand-side deficit, are the only one aspect of this instability. More alarmingly, aggressive zero-sum locational competition unleashed by capitalism’s neoliberal-led globalisation is driving deepening ecological destruction and intensifying uneven national economic viability between winner and loser countries (see Heynen & Robbins 2005; Hickel 2017). The neoliberal-led globalisation of production makes this international competitive struggle particularly brutal because it has created universal national dependence on global market capitalism by systematically undermining local economic self-sufficiency. For the most successfully advanced competition states, the ‘core’, dependence on the global market works to their advantage. However, for the ‘peripheral’ countries, especially those failing to achieve even a minimal competitiveness in the global market, this dependence spells horrific disaster.

This dramatic pattern of uneven development that is generated by the neoliberal capitalism’s aggressive locational competition between the countries of the world intensifies and is intensified by the global oversupply of labour or what Marx (1976) names as the ‘relative surplus population’. Marx predicted that the long-run effect of the competition between capitalist firms that centres on ‘necessary labour’, that is, prevailing productivity and wage norms, is that the ‘relative surplus population’ will grow to become the majority of the ‘labouring population’ (Marx 1976: 781–799).

The neoliberal model of development has unleashed capitalism’s long-range ‘relative surplus population’ tendency on a global scale. First, it has re-activated the basic demand-side problem of capitalism that the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development had counteractively offset. Now, competition states each seeking ‘business confidence’ risk capital flight and thus decreasing national economic viability and employment levels if they increase wages above global norms (Kalecki 1943). This competition-driven logic of national wage restraint drives capitalism’s inherent crisis tendency to deficient demand at a global level that, in turn, reduces employment levels. Second, the global unleashing of capitalism’s productivity logic leads to living labour’s redundancy. Demand deficiency that intensifies the competition between capitalist firms to increase productivity and restrain wages, which both imply labour’s redundancy, is mutually reinforcing. Third, this vicious cycle accelerates because labour’s oversupply that corresponds with capital’s scarcity implies a zero-sum struggle between competing countries to win its favour.

Furthermore, the rapid globalisation of market competition across countries at very different stages of development activates the productivity logic driving labour’s oversupply at both early and mature stages of capitalist industrialisation. That is, the early stages of capitalist industrialisation that dispossess the peasantry and the automation logic driving its mature stages have been activated simultaneously by the global reach of the neoliberal capitalist project. On the one hand, both technology-driven innovation and the transfer of industrial production drive Fordist working class redundancy to low-waged workforces in newly industrialising countries. On the other hand, the neoliberal project is foisting capitalism’s productivity-driven redundancy logic on to the large rural populations of non-developed countries as corporate agriculture directly competes with, and in so doing undermines, traditional small-scale forms of agriculture (Habib & Juliawan 2018; McMichael 2008).

Capitalism’s global tendency towards a growing oversupply of labour, which unfolds unevenly across a world of unevenly developing nation states in competition with each other, underscores capital’s global power and drives social regression. Those outside of global capitalism’s core productive workforce, especially in the global South, struggle within a socially unprotected environment of competitive insecurity to find employment. Under these conditions, people accept low-paid insecure employment as well as unsafe, demeaning and illegal work. In this desperate environment where the commodity value of human life is cheap, there is increasing child labour, prostitution, people and body-part trafficking, criminality, incarceration, and slave labour (Breman 2006; Davis 2006; Lankford 2010). Furthermore, as people in the relative surplus population struggle to find any kind of low-paid employment, working time increases such that in some situations all family members work long hours to amass enough income just to meet their basic needs. Overall, labour’s oversupply is universally, but unevenly within and across nation states, generating social regression characterised by extending working time combined with deepening insecurity, poverty, competition and inequality.

Locational competition has become a zero-sum game between winner and loser nation states that intensifies the neoliberal crisis trajectory, while, in turn, the neoliberal crisis intensifies this logic of uneven development that frames different national social policy options (Hickel 2017; Neilson & Stubbs 2016). Only countries that can successfully attract capital and thereby generate economic growth and jobs have room to maintain pre-existing institutions of social progress or engage in socially progressive reforms. Beneath them, less successful advanced and more recently advancing competition states calculate the risks of socially progressive investment, while non-competitive countries trend towards zero resources and opportunities for such investment. Furthermore, in advanced competition states, growing insecurity, competition, and segmentation, especially among their relative surplus populations, which include both recent migrants and redundant sections of the Fordist working class, defines a golden opportunity for the alt-Right. The threat of the ‘other’, both within and beyond national borders, feeds exclusionary forms of national identity that energise the alt-Right’s neo-fascist and ‘amoral nationalist’ tendencies.

The intensifying zero-sum locational competition for scarce jobs mutually intensifies uneven development and the deepening instability of the neoliberal model of development. For non-competitive countries, this zero-sum locational competition drives a growing relative surplus population expelled from the countryside combined with steep decline in ‘food sovereignty’ and climate change–induced agricultural failure. For these countries, but especially those located adversely in relation to the heat and water rising effects of global climate change, there are catastrophic implications. Simultaneously, the decline towards ‘amoral nationalism’ among competitive countries that are struggling to retain their own viability in an increasingly insecure world of competition leads them to reduce or cut their support for non-competitive nation states. These factors contingently combine to intensify the desperate plight of the peripheral South. In ways more correct than in the previous Fordist era, the current logic of the neoliberal model of development thus graphically and disturbingly demonstrates Weeks’ (2001: 16) argument that, in direct contrast to neoclassical ideology, ‘Competition, not the lack of it, is the source of instability, crises, and uneven development’.

Conclusion: towards a counter-hegemonic model of development

The above discussion of neoliberal and Keynesian–Fordist eras is consistent with the FRS discovery that material security–based social progress requires capitalism’s counteractive regulation. This discovery is the enduring base on which the concept of model of development has been revised here by extending the scope of regulation and by adding in trans-national and praxis components. Specifically, this article has recast ‘model of development’ as a consciously designed and implemented national-trans-national mode of regulation that delivers a corresponding accumulation configuration. As such, both Keynesian–Fordist and neoliberal eras have models of development, but they are fundamentally different.

The aspiration of the Keynesian–Fordist model of development was stable and socially progressive capital accumulation via a trans-national project, the priority of which was to facilitate viable nation-centred accumulation for participating countries. In contrast, the neoliberal model of development is leading the world in the opposite direction by enlisting countries in the global unleashing of the capitalist mode of production that subordinates them to capitalist imperatives. Rather than material stability and social progress, the neoliberal model of development has delivered recurring global accumulation crises, deepening ecological instability, destructive zero-sum competition between unevenly developing nation states, and escalating social insecurity and inequality. This article adds a trans-national explanatory dimension to the existing discourse of national variegation. In particular, it draws attention to the specific mid-range logic of capitalism’s uneven development across countries unleashed by the neoliberal model of development.

At the same time, this article’s revised conceptualisation of model of development brings into the foreground the creative knowledge or praxis aspect that is central to making a better world. The socially progressive ideal model of development imagines a framework of collaborative positive-sum nationalism between cooperation states in a virtuous relation with universally stable and socially progressive modes of local production. The autocentric and pro-labour counter-regulatory emphasis of the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development resonates with the ideal model, but for a post-neoliberal model to be progressive, more than indirect constraint of capital’s power over the production process is required. In the present, capital’s production prerogative, expressed as a mutually reinforcing global competition-driven dynamic of profit and power, is systematically decimating locally sustainable self-sufficiency in agriculture and manufacturing, and is the power to which are being sacrificed social solidarity and people’s material needs. A post-neoliberal counter-hegemonic model of development needs to directly contest global production networks and zero-sum competition between countries by offering a stable and progressive localised alternative energised by international cooperation. Such a project requires the ideological inspiration of an alternative globalisation ethos of international mutual support and solidarity. This ethos needs to be politically reinforced by democratised institutions of global governance that are focused on the design of a model of development in which sustainable efficient local accumulation for each country can virtuously interact with its achievement for all countries.

Many discourses and practical projects push towards sustainable local accumulation.⁴ However, they confront both the hostile priorities and legitimating neoliberal discourses of the currently prevailing neoliberal model of development. The key challenges are to reverse the neoliberal regulatory framework and formulate a blueprint, with location sensitive variations, of a dynamically efficient, locally sustainable, and inclusively cooperative national model of production.⁵ Politically, the premise of this project is the reform and democratisation of the institutions of global governance. The key trans-national regulatory agency within this cosmopolitan democracy, inspired by Keynes’ concept of a world development bank, would be dedicated to collecting and diffusing the best practice knowledge, economic resources, and expertise needed to practically deliver viable socially progressive local accumulation regimes. Immediate priority would be given to bringing into actual practice locally sustainable accumulation for the countries that are presently least economically viable.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Encouraging comments on early versions of this article presented at New Zealand Sociology conferences have helped the author keep working on his project. The author is also grateful to Brett Heino for his support and helpful critique of a more recent version of the article. New Political Economy referees also provided useful critique of recent unsuccessful versions of this article. Remaining flaws and blind spots are all of the author.

Notes

Author biography

David Neilson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He publishes mainly in the fields of class theory and political economy. His most recent papers include ‘In-itself for-itself: Towards second generation neo-Marxist class theory’, published in Capital & Class, and ‘Re-situating Capital Vol. 1 beyond Althusser’s epistemological break: Towards second generation neo-Marxism’ published in Continental Thought and Theory.

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