The apparent uncrackability of neoliberalism

John Duncan is an associate fellow at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study (SAS). His research interests include Social Reproduction Theory, neoliberalism, human rights, and ecocide. He also runs the youtube channel, johntheduncan, where he uses his academic experience to produce engaging public facing content on topics ranging from degrowth, to effective altruism, to Chicken Run.

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Vlad Bunea: It certainly feels we are living in existential times with global warming, species going extinct, planetary health in shambles, new fascism on the rise, billionaires having grotesque wealth and power, while 52.3% of all humans live with under $10 a day. Are we at the end of understanding neoliberalism, or are there any unexplored angles that could finally crack the apparent uncrackability of neoliberalism, which is the cause for all these crises?

John Duncan: I think first it’s important to keep in mind that neoliberalism itself is not the underlying cause of all of the problems you list. Rather, I understand neoliberalism to be a particular moment of capitalist hegemony. Many of the issues of that you bring up (global warming, the grotesque wealth and power of the capitalist elite, the rise of fascism) have either appeared in prior moments of capitalism or have roots that extend far beyond the neoliberal moment. I think it is important to understand that ending neoliberalism will not necessarily fix these problems. Should we seek to actually mend the wreckage of the world, we need to be clear that another form of “humane” capitalist hegemony will not do, rather we need to be clear-eyed that what is required is a revolutionary break from capitalism and the collective construction of a socialist world.

Now, to speak to your actual question, are we at the end of understanding neoliberalism? I don’t think so. I think that, unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of myself (whether academically or through my public facing YouTube work) and others, neoliberalism is often quite poorly understood. I still find myself having to disabuse otherwise smart, informed people, of the notion that neoliberalism is simply a small state, laissez faire, policy program. This common refrain has dogged critical understandings of neoliberalism for decades and has led many on the left to create quite simplistic demands—whether that is some limited increase in spending on state projects or part-nationalisations of some industries. We’ve seen such limited policies appear throughout the neoliberal era and their appearance often comes with triumphalist proclamations that we have beaten neoliberalism or that it is dying. While celebrating victories is good, such proclamation are, I think, quite harmful, and allow potentially subversive pressure to be folded into the state through the support of such measures. What is also missed with “small state” approaches is just how large, powerful, and authoritarian the neoliberal state has become. This is not a fight over the size of the state, but over the fundamental (re)productive relations of society as a whole.

In contrast to the small state theories of neoliberalism, there has been a growing body of work—which has exploded over the past 10-15 years—that has highlighted the authoritarian aspects of neoliberalism and its rather large, active state. For my part, I find the most productive way to understand neoliberalism is as a moment of capitalist hegemony. Capitalism is a system that has had many different moments with different ideological and institutional expressions, which emerge out of the balance of class struggle at particular moments. Neoliberalism is but one expression of that moment. Ideologies appear from, and recursively reinforce, the relations of class struggle causing hegemony to constantly shift and adapt. One of the problems with neoliberalism is that it has proven to be extremely adept at shifting itself to survive.

Perhaps, however, the best challenge to neoliberalism in this moment is not a reaction against it, but its intensification into specific forms of neoliberal fascism. This is characterized by climate security politics, ultra-nationalist anti-migrant politics, hardline bio-essentialist gender politics, and an authoritarian state practice ready-made by neoliberalism for fascist domination. I think the left has been reticent to use the “F” word because of the fear that we’d be overusing it, but as you indicate with your question, we need to be as adaptable as neoliberalism itself has been in order to fully understand the profoundly dangerous moment we’re in.

VB: It appears capitalism is riddled with contradictions and many have said, starting with Marx, that these contradictions will necessarily lead to its collapse. Meanwhile, capitalism is quite adept at shapeshifting. Katharina Pistor’s explanation for the endurance of capitalism is the fact that it is fundamentally a legal regime. The code of capital is what makes the system so resilient. A gradual undoing of the code would mitigate its ill effects. Do you think this approach has some chance of success, given the urgency of the climate crisis? Or is capitalism perhaps overdetermined, and we’ll have to consider a wide canvas of causal forces, while acting fast on all of them?

JD: Firstly, however, I do think it’s important to point out that for Marx (especially though not exclusively in his later years) the contradictions inherent to capitalism will not necessarily lead to its collapse and replacement with socialism. The teleology ascribed to Marx (by both his critics and his supporters it has to be said) is not nearly as certain as is often said. Capitalism is an unstable, contradictory, crisis ridden system to be sure. But it is often through its periodic crises that it ends up reasserting itself. Take, for example, the transition from post-Fordism to neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 1970s labour unions and social movements in the global north were increasingly asserting their power and pushing demands for systemic change. Similarly, colonised states were throwing off the shackles of direct colonisation. With the global profitability crisis and oil shocks came the opportunity to suppress radical internal counterhegemonic movements through, for example, the smashing of unions; and reassert neo-colonial domination of the global south via the imposition of structural adjustment debt regimes. So, the contradictory crisis ridden nature of capitalism does not actually necessarily lead to its collapse but is often necessary for its maintenance. This is extremely relevant in the current moment of climate catastrophe. There’s almost a solace that some on the left cling to that climate catastrophe will lead to capitalism’s self-immolation and the opportunity to rebuild socialism from its ashes. But unfortunately, without organised fightback of the proletarian, and oppressed classes of the world I think what is more likely is that capitalism will intensify its authoritarian dimensions, and become ever more fascistic. There is no waiting for the revolution, there’s only making the revolution.

To turn to your actual question, I think capitalism’s legal regime is essential to its existence but I wouldn’t characterise capitalism as fundamentally a legal regime. I’m going to rely on a base/superstructure metaphor here but I don’t want to imply that capitalism is purely mechanistic or particularly stable, my use of this metaphor here is purely for simplicity in this moment. Capitalism is more fundamentally a totally structures around the social relations of (re)production. From those relations emerge its institutional regimes like the law. Take, for example, the abstract relation of a seller of labour power (worker) meeting a buyer of labour power (boss) on the free labour market. In this most abstract relation we have to assume that a regime of law exists to protect the property rights of the buyer of labour so that he can accumulate the wealth necessary to employ the seller. We also have to assume a legal property regime which has dispossessed the worker has also dispossessed him of his means of (re)production. This abstraction has various other implications worth considering at a different time like the regime of social reproduction necessary to bring the worker to the labour market in the first place, but what I would draw attention to here is that it is not the legal regime which produces the relations of production, rather the relations of production are the emergent condition from which the legal regime arises. This is not a temporal or strictly causitive argument. It is not that capitalist relations emerged first and then the legal second or vice versa, rather they are co-constitutive. They inform and uphold each other. The legal regime did not exist prior to capitalism, but emerges as a constitutive element of it.

To return to the metaphor, the relations of (re)production are the base and the legal superstructure emerges from it to maintain these relations. This is not to say the superstructure is unimportant or even less important, it is in fact essential! However, it does mean that we cannot simply undo the legal code of capitalism and hope that the fundamental, anchoring relations of production will be abolished. The law can be a target of social action for sure. For example, we can look to Marx’s constant discussion of workers’ organising to limit the length of the working day. But what is essential in Marx’s discussion is that workers organised, built collective power, recognised themselves as social agents, and demanded a change in the legal structure of society. The struggle was not one confined to technical change of the legal regime. To undo the legal code of capitalism would require a massive rupturing movement of counter-hegemonic power, in short, a revolution. This is what we mean when we say that the institutional regime of capitalism in a specific moment of hegemony is defined by the outcomes of class struggle. The neoliberal moment re-balanced class power in favour of capital through intense authoritarian (supra)state action and thus the legal regime became less favourable to workers. To change that legal regime requires the difficult work of organising proletarian power.

Of course, the addendum to all of this, and the added complexity, is that we cannot assume all segments of the working and oppressed classes have the same interests, nor that those interests are stable. It may be in the interests of the global north workforce to keep an imperial boot on the neck of the global south in which case organising in the global north needs to expand beyond immediate workplace demands but this is I think a question for another time.

VB: Landing into the present, in our late 2025 reality, the UK Green Party is surging, Sheinbaum’s party Morena in Mexico is hugely popular, [democratic] socialist Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York, Communist Jeannette Jara may win the presidency in Chile, the African periphery is vibrant in their anti-imperial struggles as I have learned from Roland Ngam. These may be seen as signs of tremendous hope. Do you see them as such? Is the silent majority finally waking up, slowly but surely?

JD: I don’t want to denigrate political victories because they each present opportunities for radical action. But I think the role of the left in relation to those political victories is to always remain critical. There’s a concept from Neil Stammers, a human rights scholar, called the paradox of institutionalisation. It is essentially co-option but in some ways easier to communicate. Stammers argues that social movements tend towards institutionalising themselves either through legal victories, political victoreis, or NGO-ification. Becoming institutionalised doesn’t mean that a movement becomes useless but it does mean it becomes embroild within the logic of the institution. I think that you can see that with Mamdani already. His police abolitionist stances must be blunted to operate as NY mayor. That’s not even a criticism its just how operating in bourgoise politics works. For the left, however, that means that our engagement with institutionalised progressives has to remain critical or else we become institutionalised to and we end up just repeating a left bourgoise political line. Fundamentally, just like we can’t litigate our way out of capitalism, we also can’t legislate it away.

Again, with that being said, I do think that the electoral victories of these figures is itself a sign of hope. It’s easy to fall into despair and become misanthropic but I think people are far more maleable and less set in their ways than we think (for better or for worse). We can sort of see this with individuals thinking of voting green or reform in the next UK general election. That’s a bizarre contrast but it goes to show how incoherent political values are. The job of the radical end of the movement is of course, not to coddle the reactionary elements of people’s weird collection of views but to always challenge and make radical what is already present. For example, a movement which does give me hope is that massive international Palestine solidarity movement. That almost spontaneous eruption of solidarity across the world which did put those participating at some level of risk is a tremendous opportunity for the left to engage in radicalisation. People across political spectrums have begun to question why western states support genocide and that presents an immense educational opportunity to spread analysis of imperialism and global capitalism. The risk of not doing so is apparent in the spread of anti-semitic conspiracies which get us nowhere and must always be opposed.

So to answer your question in short, yes I get some hope from political victories, but I find more hope and more opportunity in moments of mass mobilisation like Palestine solidarity, global BLM movements, international climate mobilisations, or the Indian Farmers Strike (the largest strike in history). These mobilisations provide immense opportunities and remind us that power is always ready to be taken.

VB: Thank you John.

Thumbanil photo credit: Yuval Levy.