34 10.
Formal democratic institutions where citizens vote for government representatives should be maintained, but key policy-making and
implementing power should be held by an appointed and publicly unaccountable market-oriented technocratic elite e.g., Central Bankers, that
can bypass or overturn decisions made by formal democratic institutions when necessary, i.e., when they go against market principles.
Together the ideas discussed in this section form the philosophical, intellectual, and policy foundation of neoliberalism. When taken to its logical
conclusion, neoliberalism is more totalizing in scope than any other previous theoretical conception of capitalism, as it calls for the extension of market logic
and practices into all forms of government, civic, public, and even private life. As Lemke 2001 puts it, in a neoliberal world there is no longer a separation between
the market and society; everything is economic. Nonetheless, according to the MPS, and the now global network of market-oriented think-tanks,
14
if governments follow the basic propositions listed above, and if individuals can
embrace their self-interested nature, then a prosperous, dynamic, and self- regulating global society will emerge. Yet despite its narrow and cynical
ontological presuppositions, neoliberalism, as I will explain in the following sections, has to a significant extent shaped, and embedded itself into, the political-
economic and socio-cultural structural and discursive fabric of Western society, and continues to influence the perspectives and policies of UK and US governing
elites.
1.2 Neoliberal Globalization: the End of History
The second half of 20
th
century world order was characterized by a series of global crises and transformations that, among other important factors, brought
about the end of Keynesianism and its system of global capital controls Chomsky, 1999; McNally, 2009. By the 1980s, members of the MPS had gained momentum
in their war of position, i.e., the move from ideological struggle to political power Gramsci, 1971, and helped to form the political platforms and administrations of
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan Mirowski Plehwe, 2009. Once in
14
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the intellectual representatives of these institutions have been working overtime to assure both government officials and the public on the soundness and
superiority of a free-market system Mirowski, 2011.
35 office, and at the urging of their MPS connected economic advisors, Thatcher and
Reagan implemented a host of tax cuts and deregulatory economic policies which cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, shrank the power and size of regulatory
state agencies, and loosened or lifted financial, safety, labour, anti-trust, and environmental regulations. These and other economic policies, in conjunction with
the global trade policies and multi-lateral agreements spearheaded by the UK and US controlled World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization, helped to initiate, facilitate, and accelerate the processes of neoliberal globalization, which are characterized by the free-flow of capital within
and across nation-states, the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of national economies, and the rise and dominance of transnational corporations and
financial institutions Gill, 2003; Harvey, 2005. Successive UK and US administrations, regardless of their traditional political positions, whether left,
right, or centre, continued with similarly business friendly economic policies, and spread similar policies across the globe through their control of the World Bank,
the IMF, and the World Trade Organization incidentally all organizations with close ties to the MPS.
15
After the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, and throughout the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal ‘globalization’ was legally cemented by
multilateral international free-trade agreements like the 1994 World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights.
16
These types of agreements, in addition to ongoing World Trade Organization, European Union, and G7 negotiations, formed what Gill 1998, p.
16 refers to as the ‘new constitutionalism’; i.e., sets of: Policies and legal measures that are intended to reinforce the rights and
political representation of investors, and in so doing to strengthen the power of capital on a world scale. This process involves dominant
state apparatuses in the Group of Seven, the international financial institutions, and transnational corporations, and it seeks to reproduce,
15
The imposition of neoliberal policies on developing countries via, for example, the IMF’s and
World Bank’s structural adjustments programmes is also widely referred to as the ‘Washington
Consensus’ Chomsky, 1999.
16
When the interconnectedness of national economies on a global scale actually occurred is a matter of ongoing debate with some authors suggesting that it started when Columbus landed in the
Americas Ellwood, 2002. For the purposes of this thesis, I am using the term neoliberal globalization to refer to the spread of neoliberal economic reforms and policies via supra-national
organizations like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF Gill, 2003; Harvey, 2005.
36 politically and legally, disciplinary neo-liberalism and the main
discourse and strategy for creating what Karl Polanyi called the stark Utopia of a market society on a world scale.
Consequently, this has led to the commodification of seemingly everything e.g., rain water, plant seeds, public utilities, organs Braedley Luxton, 2010;
Patel, 2007, and to the global consolidation of markets whereby a handful of oligopolies control the majority of the world’s manufacturing, financial,
transportation, communications,
commodity, cultural
production, and
increasingly education markets Coghlan MacKenzie, 2011; Patel, 2007; Roy, 2012; Vitali et al., 2012. These economic policies have had a number of domestic
effects on UK and the US, chief among them being the deindustrialization of their economies, as they allowed and effectively encouraged Western corporations to
bypass domestic labour markets and outsource their operations to other nation- states with abundant cheap labour and even fewer regulations Ellwood, 2002. As
a result, since the 1980s the UK and US economies have transformed from an industrial to a post-industrial service sector economy. As of 2011, the service
sector comprised 77.7 and 76.7 of the UK and US GDP respectively. Neoliberal globalization is far too complex a phenomenon to be discussed at any
further length in this thesis. Nonetheless, it merits mention since it sets the context and justification for the socio-economic restructuring of the UK and the US of the
last thirty years, in that major social policies since the 1980s have been premised on the discourse that the liberalization of global market forces is inevitable and
beyond the control of any one nation-state Friedman, 2004; Giddens, 1998; Gill, 2003. Therefore, in order to survive in the new global economy, i.e., maintain
market credibility and attract foreign direct investment, UK and US governing, intellectual, and media elites have argued that the major components of their
respective state, economy, and civil society need to facilitate market operations and help prepare citizens to better compete in the global markets. In the following
section, I briefly examine a set of UK and US welfare and education policies from the last thirty years that are premised on the above argument, and I pay particular
attention to the discourses used to justify these policies in order to help set up what
37 I refer to as discursive barometer that will help with the empirical component of
this thesis, and that I will elaborate on in Chapter 4.
17
1.3 Neoliberal Governance We Will Force You To Be Free Central to the neoliberal domestic project was and is the transformation of
the welfare state. Upon taking office, Thatcher and Reagan began the dismantling of welfare institutions, arguing that they produced generations of lazy welfare-
dependent citizens that were a drain on the economy Harvey, 2005. Extolling the virtues of markets and competition, Thatcher and Reagan urged citizens to wean
off their dependence on welfare services and invest in the property owning democracy Hall, 2011. As Larner 2000 argues, the 1980s UK and US
neoliberal discourses of the minimal state and individual responsibility marked the beginning of ‘market governance’, where both individuals and institutions are
encouraged, if not coerced, to conform to the norms and values of the market. The subsequent Blair and Clinton administrations took a more moderate ‘third way’
approach, and implemented some important social reforms. These included increased funding to public education and the implementation of the minimum
wage in the UK, and the raising of the federal minimum wage in the US. However, their ‘third-way’ approach stressed the importance of economic growth
and entrepreneurship in solving social problems Giddens, 1998,
18
and hence both governments continued the transformation of welfare by reducing its scope, and
by transforming welfare institutions into market apparatuses that force welfare- dependents into the labour market Cloward et al., 2001. In 1996, promisi
ng “to end welfare as we know it”, Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work
Act, which among other provisions included: ending welfare as an entitlement
17
While I am aware of, and sympathetic to, the critique that neoliberalism is filtered through, re- constituted, and contested across different localities, making the top-down ideal-typical description
that I am describing in this chapter contestable Wilson, 2004, I maintain that this critique overlooks the reality of the fact that no matter how unpopular and contested certain neoliberal
policies may be, UK and US governing elites at both the national and localcity level have nonetheless implemented them, e.g.,
the UK’s higher education tuition fees that took effect in 2012, and
the US’s 2008 unprecedented Wall St. bailout. For UK and US city level examples see Hayes Home 2011 and Pedroni 2011. Overlooking this fact by overly focusing on minor instances
of resistance that have not, to be blunt, really changed anything, seriously underestimates and even mystifies the role of elites and powerful vested interests in crafting and carrying out important and
consequential policies.
18
Anthony Giddens’s “third way” can be considered a type of second-wave neoliberalism that unlike the first-wave neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan, emphasizes social justice discourses,
but maintains that social justice can only be accomplished through competitive market mechanisms and concordant neoliberal policies see Steger Roy, 2010.
38 programme by requiring recipients to begin working after two years of receiving
benefits, and placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by Federal funds. The following Bush administration passed into law the 2005 Deficit
Reduction Act, which further increased the numbers of hours that welfare recipients are required to work in order to qualify for benefits Parrott et al., 2007.
While in the UK, in 1998, the Blair government passed the New Deal policy. This primarily focused on helping or ‘empowering’ welfare recipients to gain
employment and enhance their human capital by providing state subsidized job training programmes, employment, and employment-derived tax incentives
Cochrane et al., 2001. The Brown government that followed continued with the Blair’s tax-credit incentive schemes, believing that welfare recipients can be
financially incentivized to work and save to lift themselves out of poverty Field, 2002. Overall, British welfare, Cooper 2008 argues, along with the nation state
itself, has been transformed in accordance with the principles of neoliberalism. As he puts it
, “contemporary welfare policy is that the work of welfare is now to produce, maintain, and if possible repair a workforce that can help this market-
state be a contender in the new economic order of the 21st century” 2008, p. 36. This turn in welfare policy is known as workfare in the US, where the traditional
Keynesian system which allotted rights-based benefits has been replaced with a Schumpeterian workfare-state that according to Jessop 1995 better suits the post-
industrial neoliberal economy. While the old Keynesian system was designed to accompany an industrializing economy and was ambiguous about the causes of
poverty, the current Schumpeterian system is meant to accompany a post- industrialized service economy where poverty is held to be the fault of the
individual – one that can and must be remedied by individual effort Cloward et al.,
2001. In a neoliberal society, there are no social problems, only individual hurdles and challenges. Hence, while the Keynesian inspired governments of the
post-war period could be thought of as having a paternalistic relationship with their citizens, neoliberal governments, according to Rose 1992, govern by
enabling individuals to govern themselves and making them responsible and accountable for their own life choices and actions. As Gibson 2008, p. 12 puts it:
In summary, the Keynesian welfare state was to be dismantled and replaced by a Schumpeterian workfare, one where the state’s role is to
39 create the structures for the successful operation of the market in which
individuals will increasingly need to compete and plan for themselves as individuals, or as individual family units.
Furthermore, along with welfare reform policies, education systems, argue Boyles 2008 and Gibson 2008, have become one of the primary carriers of the
neoliberal political-economic project, such that, the UK and US governments of the last thirty years have maintained the neoliberal position that state institutions
should both resemble corporate structures and facilitate market operations. Since Thatcher and Reagan, public education has been presented as failing to adequately
prepare students to compete in the global market. To remedy this crisis, UK and US education policies, including
the UK’s 1988 Education Reform Act and 2008 Education and Skills Act, and the US’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, and 2009
Race To The Top Initiative, have been implemented and had the effect of significantly marketizing and commodifying education. In both subtle and overt
forms, these policies orient students, parents, teachers, and school administrators towards market subjectivities and neoliberal discursive practices of competition,
consumption, and performativity. For example, the UK’s 1988 Education Reform Act, and the US’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, began the ranking and public
listing of schools’ performance measured primarily on completion rates in the
US and by how well students perform on standardized tests in the UK and the US. The supposedly objective measures produced by standardized testing are
meant to provide parents with the necessary information to make a sound and rational choice of which schools best serve their child
ren’s needs. The rationale is that public funding for schools should be allocated based on market principles of
cost effectiveness, accountability, and satisfying customer demand i.e., parental demand for a quality education for their children. For example, Lawy Tedder
2011, p. 2 argue in the UK context that, since 1997: Further Education Colleges no longer received block grants but were
funded on the basis of numbers and completion rates. Managers were now no longer solely concerned with the curriculum and pedagogy, but
were charged with achieving effectiveness and efficiency at lower costs in a competitive and heavily marketised environment.
40 Additionally, in the US, contemporary education policies have also allowed
for the growth of business-school partnerships where businesses and corporations provide funding to underfunded schools in exchange for publicity and
advertisement space Boyles 2005. Hewitt 2005 argues that this, can go a long way to fostering within students an unquestionable faith in, and inherit
benevolence of, the corporate world. In anything from curriculum creation to fund-raising, corporations have and continue to step in where the state has
neglected or been unable to fund services, and, in the US in particular have turned many schools into shopping malls where parents can purchase anything from
chocolates to wrapping paper Breault, 2005. As Molnar notes 1996, p. 25, “the
problem with this is that students and teachers become subsumed in market logic that, in part because of its pervasiveness, appears therefore becomes impervious
to critique ”. Recent education acts like the UK’s 2010 Academies Act and the
US’s 2009 Race to the Top initiative take the corporate infiltration of public schooling even further, and strongly in line with the neoliberal voucher conception
of education, have facilitated the privatization of education where schools are entirely run by private institutions. These privatized academies or free-schools in
the UK, and charter schools in the US, have the ancillary benefit of being able to hire non-unionized teaching staff, which if their expansion continues, may have
the spiraling effect of depressing wages for all teachers and school staff. In brief, these acts, which have been largely influenced and in some cases
directly crafted by unelected business leaders, neoliberal think-tanks, and venture capitalists Lipman, 2011, serve as pointed examples of neoliberal policy and
governance, and have to varying degrees in respect to the UK and US education systems:
Narrowly defined
education values
giving primacy
to economicinstrumentalist purposes, and viewing education as job training
for the global market Robinson, 2000. Marketized schools, by making school rankings public, and expecting
parents and students to become rational and responsible consumers of education Gutstein, 2010.
Corporatized schools, by introducing neo-managerial organizational strategies and accountability metrics where schools are to be run like
41 corporate entities, in part by having to compete with other schools for
funding, and have their success and accountability measured by how well their students perform on standardized tests Gewirtz Ball, 2000; Valli et
al., 2008. Begun the privatization of public schools, where entire schools are
reconstructed on profit models, or where selective school functions are outsourced to the private sector, e.g., school-business partnerships Boyles,
2005. Other state institutions, like the UK and US criminal justice systems and
military apparatuses, have undergone similar neoliberal reforms and transformations Graham, 2010. I have chosen to specifically highlight the
neoliberalization of UK and US welfare and education, in part because as stated earlier, the reformulation of these public institutions is central to the neoliberal
domestic project Braedly Luxton, 2011; Gutstein, 2010, and because these institutions arguably most directly impact the lives of my youth participants. For
instance, even if some of my participants do not in any way directly benefit from welfare provisions, they, unlike previous generations, have been surrounded by an
unprecedented mass-media-led anti-welfarestate discourse that essentially stigmatizes the poor and unfortunate, and promotes a very unsympathetic and anti-
empathetic disposition that is a key feature of neoliberal ideology as described in the previous sections. Education, which should also be seen as a sub-branch of the
welfare-state, has undergone an extensive restructuring that has primarily impacted the lives of the post-1980s generations. That said, while there are
numerous similarities between the UK ’s and US’s neoliberal public-sector reforms,
there are several key distinctions. For example, even with the recent election of Conservative David Cameron, the UK still has, compared to the US, a fairly
generous welfare state that includes a universal healthcare system and relatively affordable higher education although this may soon change given the current
political climate. Conversely, the US, even under the recent half-hearted attempts by the Obama administration, failed to institute a single-payer universal healthcare
system, and the costs for higher education continue to rise making it realistically unattainable for working-class families, and increasingly unattainable for middle-
42 class families as well.
19
However, it should also be noted that both administrations, in light of the current global recession, continue to resort to neoliberal policies.
These include, among others, the implementation of quantitative easing to stabilize major banks and financial markets Mason, 2010, the lowering of taxes
on the wealthy, and the implementation of fiscal austerity measures that are cutting state funding for their welfare and education institutions McNihol et al.,
2010; O’Grady, 2010. In the final two sections of this chapter I describe some of the ways that neoliberalism has impacted the urban landscapes and cultural
spheres that are inhabited by contemporary UK and US young people.
1.4 Neoliberal Urbanization and Non-Profits
