Actually existing political economies

We would like to begin by thanking the commentators for their thoughtful analyses of our paper. The commentaries gather around two positions: on one side are those that see the object of enquiry as neoliberalism and comment on whether our account of the Australian experience adds anything to the understandings of its ‘variegated’ character. We include Edward Challis, Julie MacLeavy and Simon Springer in this grouping. Here, we think, a summation that our explanation is ‘evidence of precisely what [we] claim to be absent’ (Challies, 2014: 132) is an example of the way that a protean, hybrid, variegated conception of neoliberalism/neoliberalization rolls everything into its content: exactly the process that our paper challenges. Accepting such a definition, with neoliberalism’s global hegemony assumed, makes it difficult to see how comparative work could be capable of uncovering complex antecedents and local exceptions, let alone suggesting alternative explanations for them.

In the other gathering are those who, like us, see the object of enquiry as a local reality and ask how useful notions of neoliberalism are to its critical analysis and understanding. We are gratified to read the commentaries by our colleagues in other resource-rich and peripheral economies – Roger Hayter and Karl Benediktsson – who also struggle to fit their observations and experiences into the shape of neoliberalism, however variegated.

In between these views are the contributions of our colleagues Neil Argent and Vaughan Higgins, both of whom have deployed the ideas of neoliberalism and governmentality with great success in their analyses of Australian rural and resource economies. We do not deny the utility of neoliberalist framings in examining particular projects, especially those that involve marketization, privatization and the development of multiscalar forms of governance. Our point is that while neoliberalizations in agriculture and resource management are undeniable, other logics are also at work, including the fact that Australia’s political structure continues to favour non-urban constituencies. In this way, neoliberalization operates as one force (often among many) within a prevailing context, with no predetermined authority or priority. We acknowledge the powerful role of neoliberalizations in the resources and agricultural sectors in the contemporary period, as Argent and Higgins show. Yet an entrenchment of neoliberalization is not so clear in sub-sectors like manufacturing, infrastructure or community services where, as we show, so many other forces are in play.

Obviously, it is not possible here to take up all of the issues raised by the commentators, so we focus on three that we think are especially important: the malleability of definition; the importance of national scale relationships among state policies, economies, societies and the resulting national developmental trajectories; and, the questionable political utility of the idea of neoliberalism.

In the first part of our paper we express our wariness about the breadth and malleability of the definition of variegated and hybrid neoliberalism and its apparently unlimited capacity to incorporate all manner of forces, policies and events. The commentators agree about the need to be wary of the sloppy and imprecise use of the word neoliberalism and of neoliberalism as a lazy adjective used to carry an implicit meaning of badness. All agree that it is important that neoliberalism is not reified to survive as yet another stolid ‘ism’. Yet wouldn’t a similar degree of language awareness make us wary of introducing yet another descriptor like the word ‘rascal’ to add to the fluidity of neoliberalism’s content and invoke the implication that it not just untidy but also unprincipled or dishonest? Language building in critical social theory should be more than playfulness. We need more debate, we think, about the normative bent of contemporary social theory, especially when it tends towards moral certainty, even compulsion. To be clear, we are not arguing that the meaning of any word should be fixed. Clearly the capacity to rework definitions to describe new realities or incorporate new ontologies, even to create ambivalence or parody, is central to theoretical advancement. But for conversations to be productive, language and its words have to be tested against referents and circumstances, and they have to invite and carry meaning throughout a discussion. What we now have with the term neoliberalism is a category accepting of multiple definitions and understandings instead of an abstraction that leads to better explanations. Contrary to Simon Springer’s assertion that we are in denial, not able for some reason to recognise the sophistication of a ‘nuanced’ concept, we’d like to think we’ve have been around the block a few times, and we have rehearsed the place of categorizations, periodizations, language and tendencies to crisis in earlier debates about Fordism/post-Fordism and structuralism/post-structuralism. Moreover, we can remember and have documented for over three decades or more the events we describe in the paper and feel confident of making reasonable assertions about the dominance or not of neoliberal logics (by any name) in different circumstances. We haven’t found at any point that such an approach to scholarship has contradicted a progressive, activist political stance.

Our paper emphasises the importance of examining the detail of relationships among state policies, economies, societies at the national scale and how these produce national developmental trajectories. We agree with Roger Hayter that a focus on governmentalities has displaced an analysis of political systems and that attention needs to be refocused on the detail of institutional arrangements – especially, as we are at pains to stress, on the relationships between local and non-local stakeholders – and of assessing whether observed phenomena are evidence of neo-liberalism or not; for example, whether market behaviour is neo-liberal, or capitalist, or even non-capitalist. We think that a predisposition to see local policy developments and change as explainable by the logics of neoliberalism – as in the proposition that ‘neoliberalism is different everywhere’ – needs unpicking. A better starting point, we think, is to see political economies – the manner of the articulations among social, political, economic and state activities – as different everywhere. Neoliberal ideas are part of the story, but they are contingent (in a classical philosophical sense in that they do not carry the conditions for their existence), and when discernible they are contested in many locally specific ways. We reject the possibility that neoliberalism is capable of existence in an abstract sense, as context of context, available for an empirical moment whenever or wherever the opportunity presents. There is no empirical map of ideal forms. This, of course, is not the same as arguing that neoliberal ideas do not exist, or cannot be enacted in powerful ways, or that they can be held off simply by the creation of alternate discourses. We recognise that neoliberal logics are present in the political mix; our argument is that they do not have a guaranteed actual empirically observable presence, let alone dominance.

Still, both Edward Challies and Neil Argent think that our focus on the national scale was not entirely successful. Challies views our object of analysis as the Australian state rather than the national developmental trajectory, and thought that ‘the way both terms are used implies a certain singularity and internal coherence where there is none’, suggesting ‘a rather bounded conceptualization of the nation-state’ (Challies, 2014: 132). Similarly, Neil Argent thinks separating the neoliberal and the developmental state is a false binary. We acknowledge the merits of these arguments and did not intend to give the impression that any state action or developmental trajectory is capable of internal coherence. Indeed, one consequence of our argument is that much more research attention needs to be given to the internal contestations and resolutions of states and their domains.

Finally, we would like to discuss briefly the issue of the political utility of the idea of neoliberalism. Neil Argent stresses the usefulness of the concept as a means of communicating a set of complex ideas to undergraduate audiences. For Karl Beneditktsson, neoliberalism ‘remains a dominant thread in contemporary political and economic thought and discourse…[and therefore]…deserves to be analysed critically in all its manifestations’. Simon Springer sees the word/concept of neoliberalism as a vehicle for uniting diverse interests into an oppositional movement, a sort of popular front of anti-neoliberalism. Similarly, in her address at the 2014 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa, Doreen Massey remarked that her ‘Kilburn Manifesto’, written with Stuart Hall, used the term neoliberalism expediently, despite deep misgivings, because it was the term familiar to the manifesto’s intended popular left audience (see Hall et al., 2013). For Massey, the task of forging a new vision demanded starting from the left’s use of neoliberalism as a word describing the social settlement that became hegemonic in the south of the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Yet we are not convinced of the political merits of deploying a loosely defined concept as the centrepiece of an explanation of complex ideas to non-academic audiences; but even if we concede that point, we still prefer an academic debate where analysis of the nature of contemporary social change uses more precise language and more enthusiastic recognition of empirical difference. And as Doreen Massey insists, a popular front has to be for something, for a vision of the future. If a political argument is only negative, uniting in opposition but not vision, it carries the risk of anarchy or totalitarianism.

Our abstractions are better when they carry hope as well as opposition; we wonder if the idea of neoliberalism does this sufficiently, or at all, which brings us back to our central concern: that both our scholarship and politics have become unnecessarily heavy, dull even, and that this comes from so much debating of the idea of neo-liberalism and its alleged manifestations rather than the analysis of the many political economies we live within, and imagining of possibilities for something better.