Abstract
The dominant narrative of political crisis since Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the far-right in European Union (EU) member states is often framed as a cautionary tale by the neoliberal political elite in Western countries, who pledges to defend the liberal democratic regime against its enemies. Less has been said about the ways in which this crisis reveals the underlying restructuring of the neoliberal accumulation regime at the global scale. Rather than jeopardizing the interests of dominant classes in advanced as well as emerging economies, the multiple crises of the capitalist order in the last decade have comforted these interests through authoritarian state practices.
States of Discipline: Authoritarian neoliberalism and the contested reproduction of capitalist order is a collection of essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars that defends this thesis, and aims to build a research program thought as a blueprint for emancipation from this situation. This volume of the Transforming Capitalism series engages with the recent conceptualization of authoritarian neoliberalism coined by Ian Bruff (2014). By building on diverse methodologies and exploring a large set of case studies, the essays convincingly illustrate the multiple facets of the fit between authoritarian politics and neoliberal accumulation regime. Several Marxist concepts are operationalized, such as authoritarian statism from Poulantzas (1978), dispositif from Foucault (1997), or hegemony from Gramsci (1971) to grasp spatiotemporal class dynamics that materialized into the “States of discipline” that authoritarian neoliberalism produces.
The introductory chapter presents the theoretical understanding of authoritarian neoliberalism. Based on Nicos Poulantzas (1978) and Ian Bruff (2014), Cemal Burak Tansel proposes a research agenda to understand the new set of state practices that increasingly rely on the coercive, judicial, and administrative state apparatuses to prevent or circumscribe any political mobilization against neoliberal policies. To overcome the weakness of the overstretched concept of neoliberalism, Tansel defines “authoritarian neoliberalism” as an array of concrete practices of neoliberal governance beyond the case of Western countries. Such a systemic and variegated approach of neoliberalism implies focusing on local components of the dynamic of accumulation, namely, “socioeconomic development, state power and class politics” (8). The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the processes, spaces, and actors shaped by authoritarian neoliberalism; the second part documents the authoritarian turn of the EU and case studies on the neoliberalization of authoritarian emerging economies.
The first part of the book is composed of thematic chapters that focus on the repressive practices of state apparatuses used to politically and socially divide labor, and more generally overcome resistance against neoliberalism. Mònica Clua-Losada and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz explore the repressive character of labor market reforms in Spain and related counterstrategies from the workers. The contribution of Kendra Briken and Volker Eick draws attention to the impact of the commodification of the police in Western countries on the division of the working class. Forms of individual resistance against neoliberal and/or authoritarian forces are studied by Wendy Harcourt, who relates the trajectories of five women workers from Turkey, Bangladesh, Iran, and Indonesia. Sébastien Rioux examines how the shift from welfare to workfare in the United States since the 1980s preserved the interests of the dominant capitalist class by reforming the labor market and disciplining labor through hunger. Annalena Di Giovanni sheds light on the neoliberalization of the urban landscape in Istanbul, analyzing how the AKP-led Turkish government has used the state apparatuses to both repress lower classes and secure the reproduction of capital. Luca Manunza focuses on the authoritarian turn in the management practices of the Italian state dealing with incoming migrants; their purpose shifted from humanitarian concerns to issues of borders security, which is in fine a dispositif of the EU to select those that can be exploited by the neoliberal accumulation regime, and exclude the others.
The second part of the book develops further the class-centered approach of authoritarian neoliberalism in Europe and beyond. It opens with two chapters on the EU that describe the coercive mechanisms designed to secure the hegemony of the neoliberal class. Ian Bruff investigates the competing discursive strategies between the European Social Model and the competitiveness objectives. Bruff makes the argument that the primacy of soft laws in the union construction was increasingly hardened in the 1990s to coerce states into deepening neoliberal governance. Panagiotis Sotiris points out the hegemonic project that underlies the European integration process and aims at securing a neoliberal accumulation regime. Based on the Greek experience, he concludes with fervor that a separation from the EU is the unique way for the subaltern classes to claim a popular sovereignty back. Turkey is again the focus of discussion in the contribution of Baris Alp Özden, Ísmet Akça, and Ahmet Bekmen, which accounts for changing forms of the AKP class strategy from an expansive to a limited hegemony. Brecht De Smet and Koenraad Bogaert suggest a comparative analysis of authoritarian policies in Egypt and Morocco and establish a link between the initial class structures in the two countries and locally situated forms of resistance. Opening the discussion to Asia, Simon Spinger focuses on Cambodia’s patronage system to show the concrete practices through which the authoritarian elite has used neoliberal reforms since the 1990s to its benefit. Kean Fan Lim argues that the unfolding of neoliberal logics in China at the subnational scale is motivated by the need to control socioeconomic tensions and ensure the reproduction of the political regime. The book ends with a postscript by Cynthia Enloe, who stresses the analytical and political contributions made by the book and gives insights from a gender studies perspective to further strengthen the research agenda.
States of Discipline adds value to the current literature by establishing a strong theoretical and empirical dialogue between contributions. The Foucauldian concept of dispositif is used to describe the management of migrants in Italy as well as the control of the population in the case of China. Class strategies and hegemonic projects of the European integration echo those of the rise of the AKP in Turkey. The volume also delivers on the variegated aspect of authoritarian neoliberalism across time and space, which constitutes several entry points to the volume for scholars with different interests. A number of dimensions of states of discipline are explored, in relation to labor (chapters 2, 3, and 5), to citizens (chapters 4, 7, and 11), and with regard to their spatial implications (chapters 6 and 13). Another partition of the volume is, of course, geographical: Europe (chapters 2, 3, 7, 8, and 9), Northern Africa and Middle East (chapters 6, 10, and 11), and Asia (chapters 4, 12, and 13). There is also a clear separation between the contributions that focus on the state apparatuses (chapters 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 13) and those that center their analysis on the class dynamics (chapters 6, and 9 through 12).
This book contributes in several aspects to the literature on the role of the state, and on practices of neoliberal governance and their congruency with authoritarian politics. First and foremost, it demonstrates the analytical strength of the class-centered approach to understanding the evolution of contemporary capitalism. The contributions convincingly show how neoliberal policies underpinned class projects in the EU, Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Cambodia, and China. The book persuasively combines structural features with concrete practices of actors, without falling into a deterministic approach. Hence, this volume contributes to the renewal and revival of Marxist theorists such as Poulantzas and Gramsci, at the theoretical and empirical level. Moreover, this book documents the crises of capitalism—economical, social, political, ecological—and how they are mitigated by new modalities of neoliberal governance. For example, welfare reforms toward a workfare system change who bears the cost of resorbing the crisis of neoliberal accumulation. Neoliberal dispositifs are also used to rein in protests against authoritarian political regimes or secure new sources of profits for capitalist elites. The volume, therefore, provides powerful evidence on the mechanisms of and solutions to the crises of accumulation that satisfy a class strategy to restore profitability, ensure the containment of protests, and sustain the political hegemony of the capitalist class.
The book would gain additional strength from the articulation between authoritarian politics and neoliberal governance being explored more systematically. There is a tension between the research agenda laid out in the first chapter, focusing on the continuity between neoliberal governance in the post-2008 global financial crisis and authoritarian tendencies, and the empirical evidence offered on emerging countries. The chapters on the “Global South” are compelling in using a class-centered framework to investigate how neoliberal logics have developed in authoritarian political regimes. However, they relate to the well-known story of the spread of neoliberal policies in emerging economies in the late 1980s, from the Washington consensus and structural adjustment programs onward, without drawing implications in the recent period. Therefore, it could have been made clearer how these chapters contribute to the research agenda of the volume. This tension could have been eased by adding introductory remarks before the mentioned contributions or by making the volume more cohesive.
Despite this weakness, States of Discipline makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of neoliberal governance across time and space. By enriching a necessary dialogue between the study of different geographical areas and between disciplines, this book will be useful for advanced scholarship in economics, sociology, geography, and politics, among others. Furthermore, this book will also be of interest for readers seeking theoretical and empirical materials for political emancipation.