How Labour Made Neoliberalism

Abstract

Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this paper focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983-1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour's active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be 'written in' to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.

Class in the 21st century: Asset inflation and the new logic of inequality

“…When the ALP came to power in 1983, it was with the promise that it would put an end to the problem of combined unemployment and wage-push inflation that its conservative predecessors had repeatedly tried and failed to resolve. Paradoxically, then, the wage moderation which in other countries appeared to take the explicit and often violent form of an attack on union power, in Australia was ushered in with the full consent of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) (Humphrys, 2019;Humphrys and Cahill, 2017). The first iteration of the Prices and Incomes Accord (henceforth, 'the Accord') was negotiated between the ALP and the ACTU in 1985 and went through multiple revisions up until 1996, when the ALP lost power.…”

Rethinking the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ thesis

“…The Accord became the vehicle for a radical neoliberalisation of the Australian state and economy (Humphrys, 2018a;Humphrys & Cahill, 2017). Crucial to this neoliberal transformation was an ongoing process of labour disorganisation.…”

“…This should prompt a reconsideration of the role of centre-left parties and the labour movement within processes of neoliberalisation more generally. Indeed, the historical record suggests that such institutions were active in constructing neoliberalism contemporaneously with, or even prior to, the Thatcher and Reagan governments which are most often seen as being in the vanguard of this process (Humphrys & Cahill, 2017). In this sense, the progressive origins of neoliberalism in Australia might not be an outlier, but indicative of a more general, although uneven, embrace of neoliberal forms of regulations by centre-right and centre-left parties across the capitalist world during the 1970s and 1980s.…”

Experimenting with Price: Crafting the New Social Contract in Finland

“…First, analyses which have stressed that the process of neoliberalization does not involve a subordination of the state to the market and/or the capture of the state (and society) by market principles but the activation of the state to generalize the market. While this process was paradigmatically set out by Foucault (2008), of particular relevance to our concerns in this article are analyses which have stressed how this has involved the making and embedding of a set of powerful institutional linkages in which the state plays a powerful role (Humphrys and Cahill, 2017;Konings, 2010;Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). Second, we draw on analyses which have stressed that rather than necessarily homogenized and centralized these institutional linkages are often dispersed and heterogeneous, indeed that such linkages are often infrastructural in character (Peck and Theodore, 2015).…”