Neoliberalism Is a Political

Project
David Harvey on what neoliberalism actually is and why the
concept matters.
by David Harvey

David Harvey (left) at a mobilization in Brazil in 2014. Direitos Urbanos

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leven years ago, David Harvey published A Brief History of Neoliberalism,

now one of the most cited books on the subject. The years since have seen new
economic and financial crises, but also of new waves of resistance, which themselves
often target neoliberalism in their critique of contemporary society.
Cornel West speaks of the Black Lives Matter movement as an indictment of
neoliberal power; the late Hugo Chvez called neoliberalism a path to hell; and
labor leaders are increasingly using the term to describe the larger environment in
which workplace struggles occur. The mainstream press has also picked up the term,
if only to argue that neoliberalism doesnt actually exist.
But what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism? Is it a
useful target for socialists? And how has it changed since its genesis in the late
twentieth century?
Bjarke Skrlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History
of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to discuss the political
nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed modes of resistance, and why the Left
still needs to be serious about ending capitalism.

Neoliberalism is a widely used term today. However, it is

often unclear what people refer to when they use it. In
its most systematic usage it might refer to a theory, a set
of ideas, a political strategy, or a historical period.
Could you begin by explaining how you understand
neoliberalism?
Ive always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate
capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically
towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a
political project that would curb the power of labor.
In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the
bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing
world Mozambique, Angola, China etc. but also a rising tide of communist
influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a
revival of that in Spain.
Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was
quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements,
forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate:
the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering
labor even more than it had been empowered before.
So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate
capitalist class and therefore the question was, What to do?. The ruling class wasnt
omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had
to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle
to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a
political project which I would call neoliberalism.

Can you talk a bit about the ideological and political

fronts and the attacks on labor?
The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell.
He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective
project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business
Roundtable.
Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that
universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong
and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the
Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks
brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side
economics.
The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did
for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded
institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then
be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would
surround and infiltrate the universities.
This process took a long time. I think now weve reached a point where you dont
need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much
been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.
With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with
global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example,
Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British
colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.
Instead they chose the other way to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces
were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance

capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital
and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.
At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created
unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and
a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and
robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.
It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what
neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the
corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.
I dont think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just
intuitively said, We gotta crush labor, how do we do it? And they found that there
was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.

Since the publication of A Brief History of

Neoliberalism in 2005 a lot of ink has been spilled on the
concept. There seem to be two main camps: scholars
who are most interested in the intellectual history of
neoliberalism and people whose concern lies with
actually existing neoliberalism. Where do you fit?
Theres a tendency in the social sciences, which I tend to resist, to seek a single-bullet
theory of something. So theres a wing of people who say that, well, neoliberalism is
an ideology and so they write an idealist history of it.
A version of this is Foucaults governmentality argument that sees neoliberalizing
tendencies already present in the eighteenth century. But if you just treat neoliberalism
as an idea or a set of limited practices of governmentality, you will find plenty of
precursors.

Whats missing here is the way in which the capitalist class orchestrated its efforts
during the 1970s and early 1980s. I think it would be fair to say that at that time in
the English-speaking world anyway the corporate capitalist class became pretty
unified.
They agreed on a lot of things, like the need for a political force to really represent
them. So you get the capture of the Republican Party, and an attempt to undermine, to
some degree, the Democratic Party.
From the 1970s the Supreme Court made a bunch of decisions that allowed the
corporate capitalist class to buy elections more easily than it could in the past.
For example, you see reforms of campaign finance that treated contributions to
campaigns as a form of free speech. Theres a long tradition in the United States of
corporate capitalists buying elections but now it was legalized rather than being under
the table as corruption.
Overall I think this period was defined by a broad movement across many fronts,
ideological and political. And the only way you can explain that broad movement is
by recognizing the relatively high degree of solidarity in the corporate capitalist class.
Capital reorganized its power in a desperate attempt to recover its economic wealth
and its influence, which had been seriously eroded from the end of the 1960s into the
1970s.

There have been numerous crises since 2007. How does

the history and concept of neoliberalism help us
understand them?
There were very few crises between 1945 and 1973; there were some serious
moments but no major crises. The turn to neoliberal politics occurred in the midst of

a crisis in the 1970s, and the whole system has been a series of crises ever since. And
of course crises produce the conditions of future crises.
In 198285 there was a debt crisis in Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and basically all the
developing countries including Poland. In 198788 there was a big crisis in US
savings and loan institutions. There was a wide crisis in Sweden in 1990, and all
the banks had to be nationalized.
Then of course we have Indonesia and Southeast Asia in 199798, then the crisis
moves to Russia, then to Brazil, and it hits Argentina in 20012.
And there were problems in the United States in 2001 which they got through by
taking money out of the stock market and pouring it into the housing market. In 2007
8 the US housing market imploded, so you got a crisis here.
You can look at a map of the world and watch the crisis tendencies move around.
Thinking about neoliberalism is helpful to understanding these tendencies.
One of big moves of neoliberalization was throwing out all the Keynesians from the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1982 a total clean-out of all
the economic advisers who held Keynesian views.
They were replaced by neoclassical supply-side theorists and the first thing they did
was decide that from then on the IMF should follow a policy of structural
adjustment whenever theres a crisis anywhere.
In 1982, sure enough, there was a debt crisis in Mexico. The IMF said, Well save
you. Actually, what they were doing was saving the New York investment banks and
implementing a politics of austerity.
The population of Mexico suffered something like a 25 percent loss of its standard of
living in the four years after 1982 as a result of the structural adjustment politics of the
IMF.

Since then Mexico has had about four structural adjustments. Many other countries
have had more than one. This became standard practice.
What are they doing to Greece now? Its almost a copy of what they did to Mexico
back in 1982, only more savvy. This is also what happened in the United States in
20078. They bailed out the banks and made the people pay through a politics of
austerity.

Is there anything about the recent crises and the ways in

which they have been managed by the ruling classes
that have made you rethink your theory of
neoliberalism?
Well, I dont think capitalist class solidarity today is what it was. Geopolitically, the
United States is not in a position to call the shots globally as it was in the 1970s.
I think were seeing a regionalization of global power structures within the state
system regional hegemons like Germany in Europe, Brazil in Latin America, China
in East Asia.
Obviously, the United States still has a global position, but times have changed.
Obama can go to the G20 and say, We should do this, and Angela Merkel can say,
Were not doing that. That would not have happened in the 1970s.
So the geopolitical situation has become more regionalized, theres more autonomy. I
think thats partly a result of the end of the Cold War. Countries like Germany no
longer rely on the United States for protection.
Furthermore, what has been called the new capitalist class of Bill Gates, Amazon,
and Silicon Valley has a different politics than traditional oil and energy.

As a result they tend to go their own particular ways, so theres a lot of sectional
rivalry between, say, energy and finance, and energy and the Silicon Valley crowd,
and so on. There are serious divisions that are evident on something like climate
change, for example.
The other thing I think is crucial is that the neoliberal push of the 1970s didnt pass
without strong resistance. There was massive resistance from labor, from communist
parties in Europe, and so on.
But I would say that by the end of the 1980s the battle was lost. So to the degree that
resistance has disappeared, labor doesnt have the power it once had, solidarity among
the ruling class is no longer necessary for it to work.
It doesnt have to get together and do something about struggle from below because
there is no threat anymore. The ruling class is doing extremely well so it doesnt really
have to change anything.
Yet while the capitalist class is doing very well, capitalism is doing rather badly. Profit
rates have recovered but reinvestment rates are appallingly low, so a lot of money is
not circulating back into production and is flowing into land-grabs and assetprocurement instead.

Lets talk more about resistance. In your work, you

point to the apparent paradox that the neoliberal
onslaught was paralleled by a decline in class struggle
at least in the Global North in favor of new social
movements for individual freedom.
Could you unpack how you think neoliberalism gives
rise to certain forms of resistance?

Heres a proposition to think over. What if every dominant mode of production, with
its particular political configuration, creates a mode of opposition as a mirror image to
itself?
During the era of Fordist organization of the production process, the mirror image was
a large centralized trade union movement and democratically centralist political
parties.
The reorganization of the production process and turn to flexible accumulation during
neoliberal times has produced a Left that is also, in many ways, its mirror:
networking, decentralized, non-hierarchical. I think this is very interesting.
And to some degree the mirror image confirms that which its trying to destroy. In the
end I think that the trade union movement actually undergirded Fordism.
I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually
reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left dont like to
hear that.
But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror
image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into
the hands of neoliberalism?
Resistance to neoliberalism can occur in a number of different ways. In my work I
stress that the point at which value is realized is also a point of tension.
Value is produced in the labor process, and this is a very important aspect of class
struggle. But value is realized in the market through sale, and theres a lot of politics
to that.
A lot of resistance to capital accumulation occurs not only on the point of production
but also through consumption and the realization of value.

Take an auto plant: big plants used to employ around twenty-five thousand people;
now they employ five thousand because technology has reduced the need for workers.
So more and more labor is being displaced from the production sphere and is more
and more being pushed into urban life.
The main center of discontent within the capitalist dynamic is increasingly shifting to
struggles over the realization of value over the politics of daily life in the city.
Workers obviously matter and there are many issues among workers that are crucial.
If were in Shenzhen in China struggles over the labor process are dominant. And in
the United States, we should have supported the Verizon strike, for example.
But in many parts of the world, struggles over the quality of daily life are dominant.
Look at the big struggles over the past ten to fifteen years: something like Gezi Park
in Istanbul wasnt a workers struggle, it was discontent with the politics of daily life
and the lack of democracy and decision-making processes; in the uprisings in
Brazilian cities in 2013, again it was discontent with the politics of daily life:
transport, possibilities, and with spending all that money onbig stadiums when youre
not spending any money on building schools, hospitals, and affordable housing. The
uprisings we see in London, Paris, and Stockholm are not about the labor process:
they are about the politics of daily life.
This politics is rather different from the politics that exists at the point of production.
At the point of production, its capital versus labor. Struggles over the quality of urban
life are less clear in terms of their class configuration.
Clear class politics, which is usually derived out of an understanding of production,
gets theoretically fuzzy as it becomes more realistic. Its a class issue but its not a
class issue in a classical sense.

Do you think we talk too much about neoliberalism and

too little about capitalism? When is it appropriate to use
one or the other term, and what are the risks involved in
conflating them?
Many liberals say that neoliberalism has gone too far in terms of income inequality,
that all this privatization has gone too far, that there are a lot of common goods that
we have to take care of, such as the environment.
There are also a variety of ways of talking about capitalism, such as thesharing
economy, which turns out to be highly capitalized and highly exploitative.
Theres the notion of ethical capitalism, which turns out to simply be about being
reasonably honest instead of stealing. So there is the possibility in some peoples
minds of some sort of reform of the neoliberal order into some other form of
capitalism.
I think its possible that you can make a better capitalism than that which currently
exists. But not by much.
The fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we
are going to go anywhere without a very strong anticapitalist movement. So I would
want to put things in anticapitalist terms rather than putting them in anti-neoliberal
terms.
And I think the danger is, when I listen to people talking about anti-neoliberalism, that
there is no sense that capitalism is itself, in whatever form, a problem.
Most anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless compound
growth ecological, political, and economic problems. So I would rather be talking
about anticapitalism than anti-neoliberalism.