Naked class war will continue post the pandemic, but it is not a break with neoliberalism

Lisbeth Latham 

The current crisis is sparking significant discussion about policy direction for our societies coming out of the pandemic. Zack Brestin’s article is an important contribution to that debate. While I agree that neoliberalism has been demonstrated to be a failed system and that we can expect to see an intensification of naked class warfare, however, I think it is a mistake to believe that we will see a break with neoliberalism is mistaken. What we are likely to see, unless working and oppressed people are able to resist it, is a deepening of the logic of neoliberalism rather than a break with it.

Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic economic and political outlook in the world for more than 40 years. However, defining neoliberalism is extremely difficult. This is for a range of reasons:

• Its proponents largely deny that it actually exists;
• It is so hegemonic that it articulates itself in numerous ways has it has permeated through a range of different political traditions on both the left and the right;
• One of the mechanisms for its hegemonic position is that it subverts and destabilises other outlooks rather than necessarily articulating a consistent position - a primary avenue for this is through what a number of authors have referred to as the neoliberal thought collective.

Having said this there are a number of features that can be associated with neoliberal positions, these include:

• Facilitating the free movement of capital by removing barriers to capital investment and shattering trade barriers;
• Increasing barriers to the movement of workers, which results in increasingly constrained rights and marginalisation for migrant workers;
• Prying open more aspects of social life for capital investment;
• Reduction in government social spending primarily premised on the justification of the need to rein in deficits;
• Increase in subsidisation of capital either directly or indirectly via the opening government services to capitalist competition;

Unfortunately, all indications are that these features will be deepened in the wake of the current crisis, just like they were in response to the Global Financial Crisis, and just as they have been after every crisis of the neoliberal era.

Why is this? I think we have to explore two aspects of neoliberalism, the first is that it is a response to the deep-seated and long-run economic crisis the global capitalist economy caused by the overaccumulation of capital which has resulted in capital finding it increasingly difficult to profitably invest outside of seeking to commodify all aspects of social life, redirect social spending into boosting profits and via the increasing financialisation and securitisation of the economy. However, these responses can only provide short-term relief to the problems that it is trying to address and has the tendency then to exacerbate the underlying crisis because it has both eliminated existing protections against crisis - such as the serious problem caused in the current pandemic by so many workers having little or no effective sick leave, resulting in workers with symptoms faced with the stark choice of attending work sick (and potentially infecting co-workers and by extension their families) - and that it has spread the direct impact of the economic crisis into more and more parts of the economy.

In response to both the failure of neoliberalism to avert crisis and the tendency to exacerbate crisis - while you would expect this to result in the death knell of the orientation, has repeatedly in crisis after crisis in the advocates of neoliberalism successfully enforcing prescriptions of the deepening of neoliberalism in the economy.

While this may seem both counterintuitive and running against the developments in the current crisis - with many advanced capitalist countries seeing government responses that have included the expansion of welfare payments, subsidisation of the payrolls of qualifying companies, and taken over privatised hospitals to meet the needs of responding to the pandemic. The reality is that many of these actions were taken late and begrudgingly, with many of the neoliberal governments which have introduced these frameworks already rolling back these programs despite the crisis being far from over. Neoliberal spokespeople both within and outside of government arguing that post-pandemic recovery will require a deepening of the deregulations of labour markets and privatisation, and the winding back of social spending to pay for the debt built up in responding to the crisis, that is, the shifting of the social cost the crisis onto working people in order to defend and prop up capitalist profits. This push is not inevitable, but resistance by working people in the current period is going to be difficult but as the struggles that are breaking out internationally in response to the crisis, it is possible.

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