Beyond Regressive Nationalism and the Neoliberal Model of Development

1. Introduction

Left perspectives that strongly separate “capitalism” from “neoliberalism” narrow their respective meanings and invisibilize their interconnections. This separation speaks to a form of ThirdWay denial that is blind to the capitalist nature of its version of the neoliberal project. If recognized at all, capitalism is narrowly conceptualized without ideology as only its economic base, that is defined blandly in terms of markets and technological developments and without reference to the capital–labor exploitation relation. Correspondingly, if recognized at all, neoliberalism is treated as autonomous and unrelated to capitalism, but in the immaterial form of a free-floating worldview. Though countering the untenability of this conceptual separation, radical perspectives can fall toward the opposite pole that conflates capitalism and neoliberalism.

This paper takes the position between these poles. That is, capitalism’s actually existing historical forms integrally comprise causally interacting economic and political/ideological dimensions. Marx implicitly adopts this position in the Introduction to the Grundrisse when he states that like “every organic whole,” the social reproduction of any mode of production takes the form of “mutual interaction” between its “different moments” (Marx 1973: 100). This position, that finds explicit though flawed expression in Althusser’s concept of (political and ideological) “overdetermination” (of the economic), is adapted by his “rebel sons” in the French Regulation School (FRS; Lipietz 1987, 1993: 99; Neilson 2017).

The FRS, especially in its first-generation work, offers a “midrange” perspective of “overdetermination” that aspires to complement Marx’s long-range account of capitalism’s essential logic of economic development (Aglietta 1979; Neilson 2012: 160; Marx 1976). In volume 1 of Capital, Marx does present the (economic) beginnings of a midrange account by examining capitalism’s boombust cycle and by distinguishing economic stages of its development. However, in his effort to reveal capitalism’s deep forward structural logic, that is, the mode of “extended reproduction” of its essential social relations, Marx abstracts out the overdetermining forces of politics and ideology (Neilson 2018a, 2020a, 2020b). With the benefit of hindsight, the FRS developed an explicitly midrange political economy that periodizes recent eras of capitalism according to the prevailing regulatory framework’s form of overdetermination.

Though imbricated with capitalism’s long-term economic logic, the FRS seeks to specify capitalism’s midrange dimension that is driven by variations in capitalism’s forms of institutional coordination and that interconnect with its economic cycles and stages of development. In particular, via inquiry into an explanation for the unexpected “Long Boom,” the FRS (re)discovered the concept of “regulation.” In the FRS meaning, “regulation” refers historically to the complex institutional “mode,” more or less present amongst advanced capitalist countries in the post-WWII era, that counteracted, or offset, capitalism’s core unstable economic logic by generating instead a stable pattern or “regime of accumulation.” The FRS bundles this coupling of regulation and accumulation as the Fordist “model of development” (Neilson 2012).

This author’s critical revision of FRS orthodoxy addresses its failure to extend the “model of development” concept to the current “after-Fordist” era; its militant “methodological nationalism”; and, by following Althusser who threw out Marx’s early work, its blindness to “praxis” (see Neilson 2012, 2017, 2020a, 2020b). Here, the currently dominant “neoliberal model of development” refers to the practical outcome of a conscious transnational praxis led by its key agents in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. This praxis comprises the design, then facilitation across the countries of the world, of a national regulatory template intended to, and that with widespread adoption has actually resulted in, contemporary capitalism’s still prevailing national-transnational global regulatory architecture. In so doing, capital has been unleashed from the national impediments of the previous Keynesian era. In their place is the movement toward a global regime of accumulation enabled by the neoliberal mode of regulation that operates within and between countries across the entire planet.

The neoliberal model of development is theoretically grounded in and ideologically legitimated by its worldview that global market regulation will deliver a cosmopolitan civilization characterized by global prosperity, stability, and freedom for all humanity. Both as global capitalism’s contemporary midrange regulatory architecture and as its legitimating ideology, neoliberalism is also driving the rise of the alt-right. However, though a morbid symptom of neoliberalism’s terminal crisis, the alt-right’s racist regressive nationalist project breaks both with the ideology of neoliberal cosmopolitanism and partially with the neoliberal model of development’s regulatory architecture.

Racism and xenophobia are constant features of the different historical empires that differentiate “world capitalism’s” periods that span the centuries of “primitive accumulation” to the present world of global capitalism’s uneven development and that are central to all iterations of the far Right (Amin 1976; Marx 1976; Robinson 2011, 2016, 2016; Wallerstein 2004). However, further to Wallerstein’s world capitalism perspective that treats the period since the end of WWII to the present as the two stages (rise and falling) of the US empire, this paper argues that at least since the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, something novel has also been occurring. That is, this historical period also integrally includes the rise and falling of two models of development. The currently prevailing neoliberal model of development, now in its terminal crisis phase, is key for specifically explaining the contemporary alt-right’s regressive nationalist project, and the particular forms of racism and xenophobia that are integral to this project. In sum, by bringing in the hitherto missing midrange dimension of the neoliberal model of development, this paper is able to offer a fuller and more specific explanation for the ascendancy and form of the alt-right’s dangerously bankrupt project.

From the 1990s up until the neoliberal-led 2008 global capitalist crisis of over-accumulation, national political struggles have been truncated within Left and Right applications of this grand neoliberal project. This relatively stable midrange “center field” of “political space” (Bobbio 1996; Bourdieu 1991) is now breaking down as the neoliberal project descends into a permanent crisis. Contrary to the promise of the neoliberal worldview, the intrinsic logic of its model of development is generating increasingly unstable economic, political, and ideological outcomes. This paper contends that the destabilizing rise of alt-right regressive nationalism, in particular, is the predictable consequence of the neoliberal model of development’s global unleashing of capitalism’s contradictory logic on the terrain of a planet-wide market dynamic of deeply destructive competition between unevenly developing nationstates.

Especially since 2008, agents of the neoliberal project have struggled to contain breakout challenges from both Left and Right. Most dramatically, the pragmatic neoliberal consensus on the Right, which was based in a suturing of its conservative and liberal wings, is breaking down especially as the alt-right seeks to rearticulate social conservatives with its agenda. First, the alt-right seeks to disarticulate the conservative wing from the neoliberal worldview by equating neoliberal globalization with nationally destructive foreign invasion. Second, it seeks to rearticulate conservative social values especially around nation and family with “regressive nationalism.” That is, identification of conservative values with “amoral familism” neatly legitimated and rationalized the antiwelfare neoliberal domestic project (Layton 2010; Neilson 2015; Rodger 2003). This articulation is now being rearticulated with the alt-right worldview that is being fueled by a xenophobic, racist, anti-cosmopolitan, competitive, amoral form of regressive nationalism.

To the Left, there is also a growing movement against the neoliberal project. In particular, the current surging of a spirited Left activism is building from the ground up the seeds of an anti-neoliberal and anti-alt-right coalition. While continuing to support the progressive aspects of liberal cosmopolitanism central to the Third Way center-Left’s articulation with the neoliberal project of globalization, this anti-neoliberal Left seeks to re-inject into national politics the social democratic essence of the post-WWII labor movement that countered the socially regressive effects of domestic market regulation.

Achieving this articulation in practice faces several problems. The labor movement’s social democratic ideology has been backgrounded by “new social movement” ideology that has been articulated with the neoliberal worldview (Neilson 1996; Pitcher 2011; Tourraine 1981). In addition, social democratic regulation within nation states will remain constrained as long as the neoliberal model of development that makes economic competitiveness the national priority continues to define both global capitalism’s entrenched regulatory architecture and its forms and patterns of accumulation. A counter-hegemonic project, that can facilitate a socially progressive transnational stability based in a flexible national “cooperation state” template, is thus urgently required. While the post-neoliberal Left does not have a blueprint for such an alternative counter-hegemonic model of development that can counter the socially regressive logic of competitive uneven development between nationstates unleashed by the neoliberal model of development, the current “interregnum” will likely stumble onward toward the abyss.

In response to these challenges from both Right and Left, agents of the Third ay who ideologically identify with globalization seek to stay the course. That is, they try to hold the center that they ideologically present as the socially progressive advance of a cosmopolitan global modernity, and which they contrast with nationalism that, whether to the Left or Right, they equate with social regression. In the New York Times (Blair 2017), ex-UK Third Way Prime Minister Tony Blair clearly expresses this position in his argument for the establishment of a “progressive center” that “reaches across party lines” to counter the “profoundly” mistaken “revolt against globalization” that aligns “Rightist populism” with “Leftist populism.”

Gramsci’s famous aphorism that “morbid symptoms” appear in the interregnum when the “old is dying but the new is yet to be born” resonates closely with this present conjuncture. It is an interregnum because while the Left fails to give birth to a coherent and socially progressive global alternative, the morbid symptoms of the alt-right have the opportunity to grow. This regressive nationalist project that conflicts with, but arises from, the catastrophically failing neoliberal project implies escalating global instability. Neither can offer a way forward but, instead, are leading the world toward ecological catastrophe, economic collapse, and political chaos.

The paper is organized into two major sections. The first discusses related themes concerning the paper’s key thesis: that the present political crisis on the Right is the consequence of contradictory national and transnational economic logics unleashed by the neoliberal model of development. Second, the paper introduces elements of an alternative Left counter-hegemonic project, focusing specifically on components, including “direct regulation,” of a blueprint for an alternative model of development.

2. Regressive Nationalism and the Neoliberal Model of Development

A brief outline is initially offered of the author’s conception of model of development that, whilst grounded in (Parisian) French regulation theory, critically revises it for deployment in the neoliberal era (Aglietta 1979; Neilson 2012, 2020a, 2020b). Aligning this revision with a neo-Gramscian approach underpins this paper’s analysis of the changing midrange relation between the nationstate and the transnational environment, which in turn is connected with changing forms of nationalism. Special attention is paid in the second subsection to distinguishing “regressive” and “progressive” nationalisms in relation to polar opposite ideal type models of development. Discussion then returns to reconsider the proposition that the current destructive war of position on the Right has its roots in the contradictory logics of the neoliberal model of development.

3. Regressive Nationalism: Inscribed in the Unfolding Logic of the Neoliberal Model of Development

At Bretton Woods in 1944, Keynes offered a national transnational blueprint for all participating countries designed to deliver stable autocentric accumulation compatible with full employment and the welfare state. Central to the brilliance of Keynes’s pioneering praxis is his understanding that stable national accumulation regimes, based in demand-led regulatory frameworks that positively correlate increasing wages and employment, are made viable by a complementary transnational environment (Neilson 2020a, 2020b). In practice, the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development, though falling short of Keynes’s vision, was able to achieve enough national transnational compatibility to ensure stable growth with social progress within and across advanced capitalist countries for about a generation. Ideologically and practically articulated with the labor movement’s class compromise with capital, this project expressed principles of wealth redistribution, universal material security, equality, and inclusion.

In practice, the Fordist model of development delivered on its social democratic world outlook by reducing competition both within and between countries, and achieving high levels of secure well-paid employment that formed the cornerstone of the Keynesian welfare state. Nonetheless, there were gaps such as between the ideology of equality and solidarity and the reality of gender and ethnic stratification. Furthermore, this model of development applied, not globally, but only to the advanced capitalist countries. In sum, albeit with blind spots and limitations, the Keynesian-led Fordist model of development practically demonstrates that integrally connected endogenous and exogenous conditions can be constructed to facilitate progressive nationalism.

In contrast, the neoliberal model of development has universally subordinated national accumulation regimes to the logic and imperatives of global capitalism which, consistent with the conditions promoting regressive nationalism, have generated intensifying competition, division and inequality both within and between nation states. In a direct reversal of Keynes’s project, agents of the neoliberal model of development have pushed the world’s countries to adopt the neoliberal national template which as an aggregate effect has radically reduced national impediments to capital’s global free flow. On the resulting institutional terrain of global market capitalism, firms compete with each other to meet global norms of competitiveness in order to remain profitable. In turn, as the key condition of viability in an environment of direct contestation with each other, nation states must offer economic conditions compatible with capital’s global competitiveness. In short, nation states have been transformed into “competition states” (Cerny 2010; Hirsch 1997; Hirsch and Kannankulam 2011; Jessop 1994; Neilson 2012, 2020a, 2020b; Neilson and Stubbs 2016; Ryner 1997).

This locational competition is intensified further in the current era because the globalization of capitalist logic across unevenly developing countries has simultaneously unleashed “relative surplus population” tendencies associated both with peasant dispossession that occurs at the early stages of capitalist industrialization, and industrial worker redundancy associated with technologically advanced forms of capitalist production (Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Therefore, locational competition is intensified further to become a zero-sum game because, due to labor’s global oversupply, capital is scarce (Neilson 2018a, 2018b, 2020a, 2020b).

Competition between transnational corporations, which presently takes the form of a rapidly changing high-stakes winner-takes-all global contest, pushes locational competition in a similar direction. That is, national decline or even breakdown is implied for those countries that cannot meet the global competition-driven locational conditions of capitalist profitability. Such intense locational competition for scarce capital promotes in each nationstate an aggressive “us against the rest of the world” mentality that is the basic source of contemporary forms of regressive nationalism.

This regressive nationalist tendency contradicts the other function of the neoliberal national template’s widespread adoption, which is to institutionally construct the global market. The neoliberal priority is to achieve, via its national transnational regulatory framework, a global market terrain on which capital can move freely and on consistent terms across and within countries. In contrast, nationstates prioritize their own competitive advantage, and may therefore depart from the neoliberal template in order to achieve, maintain, or improve economic viability.

The neoliberal intentions of the uniform adoption of its national template are to facilitate a global environment of nationally unbiased market regulation where the principles of private ownership and market regulation are consistently and equally extended to all forms of capital regardless of national location, thus maximizing the scale and scope of national subordination to global capital. Special favors, deals, protections, incentives, and collaborations that advantage local firms undermine nation-states’ subordination to global capital, as well as unbalancing the global “level playing field” of competition between capitalist firms. Similarly, the global power of finance capital and the logic of financial globalization are seen to be undermined by national “manipulation” of exchange rates to gain national economic advantage. While neoliberals have deliberately facilitated locational competition, this game is nonetheless to be played fairly according to the nationally unbiased rules of the global market! Further, neoliberals oppose discriminating forms of national regulation, as central to “social democratic multilateralism,” because they tend to undermine global capital’s power and tilt the game in favor of nationstates. In sum, both the power of capital and the coherence of the global market are undermined when countries seek to vary the neoliberal national template which defines the nation-state’s terms of engagement with capital and with each other.

Nonetheless, to be clear, there is a fundamental difference between alt-right and social democratic challenges to the level playing field of the global market. On the one hand, the amoral nationalist sense of nation states, each varying their mode of national regulation to leverage an unlevel institutional advantage over other countries, undermines the consistency of the global market and feeds an escalation of mistrust and economic war between countries. This alt-right project is therefore more dangerously destructive than the original neoliberal project. Nonetheless, in a way that resonates with Baudrillard’s concept of “simulation,” agents of the neoliberal project can contrast the imagined stability of “perfect competition” with instability associated with an environment of imperfect competition driven by unlevel and unfair national advantage. In contrast, “social democratic multilateralism” seeks consensus and agreement across participating nationstates, which, in direct contrast to the alt-right view and the neoliberal practice, is solidaristic.

In practice, unevenly developing and unevenly performing nation states have differing capacities to select-in and select-out different types of capital. In particular, successfully competitive developed nationstates, in contrast to less competitive and less developed countries, are in a position to maintain more socially responsible forms of counteractive regulation that effectively select-out forms and stages of capitalist production associated with low skills, low wages, low safety levels, and poor environmental protections; and select-in knowledge intensive industries consistent with healthy, safe, skilled, well-paid, educated, and environmentally friendly jobs. Developed countries, especially the most successful which have a greater proportion of such “good” jobs, contrast most clearly with struggling nondeveloped countries that are caught up in a downwardly destructive competition over wages, safety, and the environment.

Nonetheless, even in the most successful industrially advanced competition states, but especially for those struggling to retain competitiveness, a tradeoff between counteractive regulation and jobs is implied. Advanced competition states, therefore, may consider more aggressive neoliberal regulation as a means to address declining job opportunities, even if this draws them toward competition’s downwardly destructive tendency. The alt-right’s project, especially in Trump’s version, embraces this neoliberalization from a national capitalist standpoint that dismisses counteractive regulation. At the same time, the alt-right pursues non-neoliberal strategies for improving national economic competitiveness and winning local jobs by seeking advantage in bilateral trade deals or by protecting, favoring, and growing national capital. This latter strategy resonates especially with the East Asian “developmental state” countries (see Neilson and Stubbs 2016).

The alt-right more openly embraces a fundamentally aggressive, and indeed amoral, version of national economic advantage and corresponding nationalist ideology. “Amoral nationalism” resonates with “amoral familism” which refers to the process where, when confronted by the destabilizing effects of broader societal insecurity and competition, families withdraw into their own space. Each fights to protect their own family members in a struggle for their own survival, and expects other families to do the same. If a family is dysfunctional, it is not only the family’s own fault but is seen to bring everyone down (see Layton 2010; Neilson 2015; Rodger 2003).

Amoral nationalism scales up the amoral familism concept in that it refers to countries that defensively withdraw support for other countries while seeking to more strongly defend and prioritize their own national interests. Further, beyond amoral familism, amoral nationalist ideology casts the national self in direct struggle with other families/nations. In short, the world is imagined to comprise a natural zero-sum struggle between competing nations. The “amoral nation” aggressively asserts its rights and interests in direct opposition to other nations. This worldview rationalizes a “hook or by crook” approach to economic advantage. In addition, the alt-right’s socially conservative, anti-cosmopolitan, neofascist tendency extends this mentality to the cultural domain. Thus, the alt-right’s explicitly neofascist tendency blames job scarcity on foreign invasion and advocates for more stringent limits on immigration and for expelling locally residing denizen populations. Further, the other is cast as an alien-nation that seeks to destroy the local way of life. Once the national project is embraced as a zero-sum economic and cultural struggle with other nations, then departing from the rules, regardless of moral or legal implications, can be rationalized.

The neoliberal world outlook of a global market civilization, which imagines an emancipated and enlightened global citizenry of multicultural cosmopolitans, is contradicted in practice by the neoliberal-led form of capitalism’s globalization which coerces nationstates into a zero-sum locational competition to retain economic viability. The competitiveness imperative, intensified by the neoliberal model of development’s decline into permanent crisis, drives deepening uneven development both between and within countries and increasingly widespread insecurity that feeds people’s fear and anxiety. When this fear is combined with social conservatism, political parties that espouse socially regressive versions of economic and cultural nationalism are likely to have political appeal. In sum, regressive nationalism, degenerating toward amoral nationalism, is inscribed in the contradictory effects of the practically unfolding logic of the neoliberal model of development.

4. Toward a Left Alternative beyond Two Bankrupt Projects

The counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal project needs a blueprint of an alternative socially progressive model of development for which the ideal model outlined above serves as a compass. Such a project needs to demonstrate how it can practically deliver on the neoliberal promise of a cosmopolitan civilization while critiquing the actual effects the neoliberal model of development has had on the world’s nation states. Contra the neoliberal project that undermines nation states and progressive nationalism, the counter-hegemonic project should assert the spirit of, and propose a regulatory architecture that can practically underpin, a progressive nationalism. Contra the alt-right’s amoral nationalism that naturalizes the struggle between nation states, a blueprint is required that can practically deliver the material conditions of a politically responsible and socially solidaristic form of nationalism. Specifically, the key to the post-neoliberal Left’s counter-hegemonic model of development is that it be structured to incentivize enlightened cooperation between nation states. Imagining a progressive model of development that can structurally facilitate cooperative positive-sum logic between the world’s nationstates is the key for practically reversing the competitive zero-sum logic of locational competition that has been universalized and intensified by the neoliberal model of development.

Practically realizing this imaginary is inspired both by progressive projects of the past as well as by initiatives in the present. Keynes’s original project, in particular, is highly relevant because, though reality fell short, he imagined a national template negotiated then deployed in practice as a consensual transnational agreement of participating nation states. Keynes’s original model of development project is also relevant now because it was designed to curtail the transnational power of capital over the fates of nation states, while simultaneously practically addressing uneven development and offering a framework for nationstates that would give each the room to be both locally viable and socially progressive.

“Social democratic multilateralism” (SDM) resonates with Keynes’s model. Both seek to unite nation states in the project to curtail capital’s power to operate without impediment within and across nation states. SDM also builds on Keynesianism in practice insofar as national state actors directly seek to negotiate socially progressive multilateral international agreements. In particular, SDM seeks to build progressive principles, such as ecological sustainability, social protections, decent employment, income standards, and fair trade into trade agreements that entail their consistent adoption across participating nation states. Such agreements can subvert the power of capital over nationstates by effectively removing progressive areas of regulation from locational competition. In these ways, SDM is working toward practically replacing the logic of “competition states” with that of “cooperation states.”

However, a counter-hegemonic model of development needs to go further than SDM if it is going to facilitate global cooperation. That is, SDM seeks to selectively modify rather than transform the underlying neoliberal terms and effects of global competition between unevenly developing nation states fighting to win viable shares of scarce global capital. Social democratic multilateralism fits best for successfully competitive developed nation states who, because they are successful, can afford to be socially and ecologically responsible. It ignores problems linked with the destructive dependence that nondeveloped and poorly performing capitalist countries have on regressive proactive regulation. For examples, lax ecological regulation, unfettered managerial prerogative, and low wages enable nondeveloped and less successful nationstates to attract scarce capital.

SDM will curtail certain aspects and effects of the neoliberal-led logic of competition amongst successful advanced capitalist countries but without addressing the core problem of zero-sum competition-driven uneven development. SDM thus falls short of fully operationalizing the core principle underlying the cooperation state: that is, of countries acting together to promote for each the conditions of local economic viability and social progress. Ultimately, a progressive future for all countries depends on putting in place a global counter-hegemonic model of development that prioritizes counteracting the destructive logic of neoliberal-led uneven development. Therefore, the first priority is to transform the precarious situations of people located in the most desperate nations of the nondeveloped capitalist world.

This obvious humanitarian priority also has political and practical rationales. Marx’s political formula that the wealth of a nation should be measured according to how its least fortunate members are treated is given here a transnational reading. Rather than with the wealthiest and most powerful nations that hitherto have controlled the global agenda and prioritized their interests, the key problem of uneven development implies prioritizing the needs of the least fortunate nations of the Global South. Adoption of the neoliberal template has opened up many such countries to a global market field that they have been unequipped to be competitive within and thus has resulted in their economic destruction.

In particular, the presently networked system of global production that has been institutionally enabled by the neoliberal model of development subordinates local populations to the regressive logics of destructive global market competition. While ideologically legitimated as the most efficient way to meet people’s material needs, scale and price logics of capital’s global production networks are actually driven by capitalist goals of power and profitability. In practice, global production has systematically undermined locally sustainable self-sufficiency in agriculture and manufacturing for all countries, while destroying economic viability for some. The least viable nations within this framework of global competitiveness are likely to be most open to the construction of practical national frameworks of regulation and accumulation that can reverse the neoliberal template and instead facilitate local economic viability.

Sub Commandant Marcos’s vision of “a world within which many worlds can fit” imagines the constructively cooperative essence of the national transnational connection of a global counter-hegemonic project that accords with prioritizing the needs of the most desperately struggling local “worlds”. Further, the related La Via Campesina project of “food sovereignty” pinpoints a universal condition of security for all, but is the most pressing priority for the world’s precarious (Marcos 1996) nations and social groups. A socially progressive post-neoliberal model of development needs to build practically on this vision by seeking to construct a global regulatory framework that can actively generate positive sum economic relations between nation states and universal local material viability. Struggling nationstates are likely to be open to projects aimed at constructing dynamic modes of local production, especially for food and shelter, and also for manufacturing (Neilson 2013). This project directly challenges the present neoliberal-led dependency of local national economies on competitiveness within the networks of global production, and simultaneously speaks to key elements of an alternative progressive model of development.

Ideologically, this alternative project is about articulating an imaginary of global solidarity with a blueprint for delivering self-sustaining local material security universally. Achieving this articulation in practice depends on designing and deploying a post-neoliberal counter-hegemonic model of development that is focused on a global project to cooperatively address uneven development across and within nationstates. This counter-hegemonic project is practically dependent on constructing a new national transnational connection that is simultaneously cooperatively cosmopolitan in its grand global vision yet supremely practical in its active promotion of the conditions which will generate local material viability universally.

Such a model of development is politically premised on institutionally re-engineering United Nations institutions in order to deliver a genuinely democratic organizational form and a post-neoliberal theoretical paradigm. This political agenda implies, first, breaking with the logic of empire by replacing the stranglehold that the world’s most powerful nation states presently have on the United Nations with a new reformed structure of democratic organization within which the nationstates of the Global South are fully represented. Second, political and ideological reformation requires transforming the neoliberal vision and practice of the UN’s regulatory institutions, especially the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Such transformation implies dismantling the worldview and institutional architecture of the current neoliberal model of development and replacing them with a cooperative and interventionist outlook inspired by, and inspiring of, the project to design and deploy a socially progressive model of development.

In the spirit of the development bank Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods, a re-engineered World Bank would be focused on providing economic resources for failing and struggling countries. Beyond Keynes, this function would include the collection and diffusion of knowledge, which has implications for all countries but is of central significance for nondeveloped countries. This project would seek to disconnect knowledge from privatized intellectual property rights and reconnect it to a socialized and cosmopolitan global information network (see Neilson 2020a, 2020b). This “world knowledge bank” would become a key piece of the cooperative transnational architecture that is dedicated to the universal development of efficient and ecologically sustainable, yet diverse, forms of local accumulation.

Such a post-neoliberal model of development thus moves beyond how regulation is usually understood. That is, in Keynesian and FRS thinking, regulation focuses on the demand side, broadly speaking, while supply/production or the “technology paradigm” is implicitly viewed as the exclusive domain of capital. In Lipietz’s version of the standard FRS conceptual toolbox, technology paradigm is ambiguously included alongside mode of regulation and regime of accumulation that are bundled together as a model of development (Lipietz 1992: 2–3). Of course, regulation on the demand side does regulate the production process, and various other forms of regulation linked with trade unionism, health and safety, industrial relations legislation, and so forth also constrain capital’s autonomy to define the production process. These are examples of what I label here as “indirect” counteractive regulation, which refers to forms of regulation that while in effect constrain how work can be organized, do not fundamentally challenge capital’s autonomy to define the essential form of the production process.

Beyond the progressive form of the Keynesian/Fordist model of development, a progressively nationalist post-neoliberal alternative to the current global form of capitalist development based in viable local accumulation regimes requires directly challenging the global form of capitalist production central to the regressive logic of global capitalism institutionally unleashed by the neoliberal model of development. A post-neoliberal counter-hegemonic model of development must do more than counteract the unstable and destructive effects of capitalism beyond the moment of production itself. In short, the basic form of the alternative post-neoliberal model of development implies “direct regulation” of the production paradigm.

Direct regulation refers to the design, promotion, organization, and coordination of the production process by local, national, and cosmopolitan political agencies beyond capital. However, like indirect regulation which assumes the organic terrain of capitalism, direct counteractive regulation need not mean, though it pushes in the direction of, the full socialization of production both as “knowledge socialism” and as democratically controlled local “accumulation regimes.” In this stage of the long war of position that Gramsci refers to, direct regulation of production still implies active collaboration with capital to rework, refit, and replace prevailing forms of capitalist production. However, capital is subordinated to socially progressive forms of regulation and production. In sum, direct counteractive regulation refers to the explicit design, promotion, and coordination of viable systems of local accumulation that point beyond capitalist control in both production and exchange. The general counteractive movement for production is from capital’s fetishizing of scale toward optimizing local efficiencies of scope and propinquity, and promoting local forms of economic democracy. This alternative project implies moving from capital’s price, power, and profit priorities to the everyday local priorities of people for socially progressive and ecologically sustainable local-sufficiency.

In this proposal for a counter-hegemonic, post-neoliberal model of development, globally socialized cosmopolitan knowledge (as well as on-the-ground expertise and resources) tailored to local situations directly informs and directly supports the practical construction of flexible national projects to develop and implement local production paradigms and related forms of exchange and distribution. Thus, more exactly, this is globalization plus localization otherwise known as “glocalization.”

At the local level, there would be direct hands-on involvement by a range of national and transnational agencies in the practical adaption of existing forms of production, and in the construction, varying according to local situation, of alternative modes of local production. This project is inspired in particular by Sub Commandant Marcos and La Via Campesina. The idea of a (flexible) national template/mode of national regulation would still remain central. Internally, such variations on the national template would involve laws, policies, agreements, and forums that frame local economic and social experience. Externally, the national template would comprise a range of measures that resonate with Keynesianism, social democratic multilateralism, and more. Specifically, the external aspect of the national template needs to be designed so as to curtail capital’s present freedom to do whatever it likes within and across nations, while at the same time encouraging positive-sum international cooperation.

Such a post-neoliberal, counter-hegemonic model of development directly contests global production networks and zero-sum competition between countries. This alternative model requires constructing and implementing a regulatory national template that counters the power unleashed by the neoliberal model of development of global companies over the fate of nationstates. It also requires deliberately constructing a framework for a stable, progressive, ecologically sustainable localized alternative model of accumulation energized by international cooperation and globally socialized cosmopolitan knowledge. In sum, the alternative project introduced here is based on a model of development and complementary worldview in which sustainable efficient local accumulation for each country is directly promoted and virtuously interacts with its achievement for all countries.

5. Conclusion

This paper has advanced the case that changing forms of nationalism are driven by the structural effects on nationstates of the prevailing model of development. From this basis, deeper causes of the current war of ideological position between and within Left and Right positions in political space have been identified. The current conjuncture is an interregnum that on the Right is characterized by a contest between two bankrupt projects, one catastrophically failing and a false alternative that is actually a morbid symptom of the former’s crisis. Specifically, this paper has demonstrated that while agents of the neoliberal project ideologically identify with multicultural cosmopolitanism its model of development has actually facilitated conditions conducive to the growth of regressive nationalism.

On the Left, a political struggle is playing out between the neoliberal Left and growing post-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. However, though the neoliberal Left is in decline, this paper has presented the argument that breakout forces are unlikely to transform the Left while there is no clear blueprint of a global counter-hegemonic model of development. Nonetheless, social democratic multilateralism and the reassertion of social democratic principles for national regulation represent important albeit limited steps toward the construction of such an alternative model of development.

This paper’s theory of the relationship between different models of development and forms of nationalism has underpinned its attempt to build on social democratic multilateralism toward cosmopolitan democratic socialism by bringing in elements of a socially progressive post-neoliberal model of development. Much more needs to be done if a viable counter-hegemonic model of development capable of drawing the nations and laboring populations of the world into a global social bloc united in a democratic socialist project to deliver a progressively sustainable future for human civilization is to win out.