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Neoliberal Moral Economy
Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda
By Jörg Wiegratz Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Jörg Wiegratz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-855-1
CHAPTER 1
Market-society-making
Neoliberalism as a Cultural Programme
The historical context of the emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism since the 1980s has been widely discussed in the literature. Neoliberalism understood as a particular ideology, policy, discursive formation, class project, governmentality and social engineering project has also been studied widely. I do not revisit these debates here (Harrison 2010, Springer 2012, Springer et al. 2016), but highlight that neoliberalism – both as an ideology and as a programme of change – 'reaffirmed the inevitability and legitimacy of the basic institutions of the capitalist order' (Gamble 2006, 25). I adopt the interpretation that neoliberal reforms, policies, programmes and discourses (especially individual freedom, self-interest and free markets) seek the creation of fully fledged capitalist market societies across the globe: they encourage the marketisation of social relations, a general empowerment and hegemony of capital (especially of large private corporations), and the corresponding restructuring of people's subjectivities, relationships and everyday practices. A key aim is to universalise capitalist social relations, free markets and neoliberal social doctrine so as to make – totalitarian like – all realms of a society operate market like (Dean 2002, Harrison 2005a, 2010). Importantly, what we call neoliberalism – that is the emergence and/or consolidation of market society as a repercussion of neoliberal reform – becomes present and embodied especially in social practice and discourse (Harrison 2010, 29), thus requiring an analysis of 'neoliberalism-in-practice' (ibid, 19).
Neoliberalism has usually triggered changes not only in the economy, but also in polity, society and culture (Bush 2007, Harvey 2007, Mirowski 2013). Amongst others, the reforms were about (i) changing the role and the relationship of the state vis-à-vis the economy and society, i.e. away from the welfare state in the Global North and the economic-interventionist state in the Global South, (ii) (re)consolidating the conditions of capital accumulation and the power of the capitalist class vis-à-vis labour and the peasantry and (iii) in the post-Cold War context, expanding the global reach and dominance of the capitalist order, especially in the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and in non-Western societies in the Global South. The strand of neoliberalism that was predominantly imposed on these societies was not, to use Gamble's distinction, the social market type – where the state is concerned with issues of market taming and legitimacy – but the laissez-faire or market state (Robison 2006), characterised by the 'iconoclastic, ground-clearing, radical impulse to tear down the obstacles to capital accumulation' (Gamble 2006, 32–5).
The 'obstacles' that had to be removed and the order that had to be created concerned more than economic issues. Gill (1995) has suggested that the capital-driven restructuring of economies, societies, communities and individuals around the globe aims at the materialisation of a 'neoliberal market civilization', including free-market societies, hence, the reshaping of everyday life according to neoliberal notions of society, politics, economy, social purpose, good life and so on. These changes were brought about by the combination of 'market discipline and the direct application of political power' (ibid, 399), i.e. the workings of dominant political and economic forces. Gill pointed to the economic and non-economic dimensions of the transformative character of the neoliberal era and sketched out how and in which societal realms these changes might take place, i.e. not just at the ideological and political level but also at the social level, including in the sphere of culture. The insight that neoliberal dynamics also operated at the level of culture was thus articulated quite early in the debate, indirectly. Gill's analysis pointed to the need for a (cultural) PE that is able to grasp and investigate not just the macro- but also the interrelated meso- and micro-level processes of the changes. Yet, while Gill's diagnosis received substantial recognition in academic circles and some political scientists/IPE scholars analysed the market society theme since the 1990s (Young 1996, Williams 1999, Harrison 2005a, Bowden and Seabrooke 2006), relatively little explicit work was done by the discipline to study empirically the dynamics of engineering a market society into being, and develop fitting theoretical tools to aid this analysis. This limited follow-up is surprising since the theme touches issues that are of concern to critical scholars, including the operation of power in the imposition of market civilisation onto the societies of the South. There is no IPE of market society promotion/market civilisation as such.
A CULTURAL PROGRAMME: RESHAPING NORMS, VALUES, ORIENTATIONS AND PRACTICES
For neoliberal proponents, marching towards a market society is not about forcing and luring – in a conflictual and tensed process – people in the desired direction but about freeing them from political, social and cultural obstacles and constraints that hinder the expression of their (supposedly) natural, market-like essence. These subjectivities are seen to be innate, immanent and universal: neoliberal-capitalist. The social relations and the society that result out of or are based on these freed, natural subjectivities acting and interacting are assumed to be free-market like too and harmonious (Harrison 2005a, 1307–8). '[Neoliberal intervention is built on the belief] that the predicted effects of [reform-related] state action will be to release immanent free-market-like behaviour in societies' (ibid, 1307).
Hence, a core logic that feeds into reforms is that market and other societal structures that are liberalised, hence freed from regulating constraints, will enable the innate, actual personalities to arise and be acted upon which, in turn, will result in both harmonious inter-actor relations and accelerated economic performance. Neoliberal ideology suggests that the reform process is a relatively unproblematic endeavour, a virtuous cycle, because one can build on a natural and win-win dynamic: people who will be liberated already inherently possess the (to-date suppressed) qualities that neoliberal capitalism is built upon; people are thus eagerly waiting to be freed to start the era of neoliberal life – in every aspect, political, social, economic and cultural. Significant resistance is not to be expected from 'the people', but those officials and their cronies who have benefited from the state-controlled pre-neoliberal economy; the creation of the market state addresses this only remaining challenge. Reforms are thus based on a belief in universal motivations and behaviours of individuals, and universal forms of running a society, including state, economy, community and family. These claims are portrayed as natural traits of human beings and their social organisations around the world. Thus, the reform – often termed in the language of liberalisation, facilitation or empowerment – formally aims at dismantling any constraints or distortions that might block these supposedly natural traits of the market actor (and the consumer-citizen) from their full emergence and expression.
Conceptualising and interpreting neoliberalism in this way allows us to understand that the reform is not just about reducing state involvement in certain affairs and to free the market, but, more broadly and significantly, about the engineering into existence of a certain polity, economy, society, culture and people (Young 1996, Williams 1999, Harrison 2005a, Ferguson 2006). A country can be characterised as neoliberal in that sense as long as the dominant ideology and actors (and their interests) are committed to the market society project.
Neoliberal ideology and rhetoric represents the reforms as unproblematic in the sense that the policies and programmes are only freeing, releasing and facilitating what already exists – because it is universal: market-like societies, social relations and individuals. In reality, this is not the case, not in Uganda or elsewhere in Africa and beyond. Neoliberal ideology and proponents thus 'misread' African and other societies (Harrison 2005a), i.e. ignore or fail to recognise and engage with the profoundly non-neoliberal characteristics of structures and actors, be it in markets, state offices or communities (ibid). Arguably then, the bringing about of a market society is about something else than freeing innate properties.
If the 'it-is-innate' assumption does not hold, we can interpret the reform in a different light: not as a straightforward liberalisation but a complicated transformation of people and societies who are not innately neoliberal at their core and to a considerable degree are embedded in, value and act-upon non-neoliberal structures. The reforms are then substantially antagonistic vis-à-vis significant parts of these existing structures and subjectivities and actually have to undermine, delegitimise, overwrite and displace hindering pre-existing non-neoliberal NVOPs in the society that is targeted for reform. At the same time they have to promote, legitimise and elevate certain pre-existing and new NVOPs which are in line with the neoliberal ideology and its market society end point. Neoliberal reform, then, can be understood as deliberate acts of social engineering to create a capitalist market society via imposing (i) a market-conforming thinking, rationalising, feeling, behaving and interrelating of people and (ii) the notion of self-interest – and the closely related instrumental rationality and material gain maximisation – as sole market coordination device and hegemonic moral norm (Harrison 2005a, Watson 2005a, 2005b, Beckert 2009a). '[T]he task of constructing a market society appears to be one of disembedding the economy [from pre-existing, pro-social other-than-gain-making values and norms] because the pursuit of individual gain is suddenly elevated to be the fundamental organizing principle of economic life' (Block 2003, 21). Embedding neoliberalism (Harrison 2005a), then, can be interpreted to be about the undermining, overwriting and displacing of a range of specific, non-neoliberal, culturally embedded motivations, modes of reasoning, practices and inter-personal relationships across societal realms, including the economy.
Transforming NVOPs also means changing things that are closely related to or underpin the pre-existing NVOPs: social institutions, systems and relationships of authority and power, systems of thoughts and actions, attitudes, identities, beliefs, sensitivities, ideas, imaginations, language and discourse (Greenhouse 2010). Williams and Young write that neoliberal reform aims at 'the destruction of those affective or community ties which [in the reformers' view] hinder development' and foresee a reform-induced replacement of the 'narrative of community' (i.e. kinship and affection) with the 'narrative of capital' (i.e. efficiency and homogenisation of individuals). 'The mentalities to be brought about by long-term change will be devoid of affective or communal ties and will be free to associate within modern [i.e. Western-capitalist] social organizations.' Communal ties of the individual are replaced by always freely chosen contractual ties (1994, 96–8).
The view that the reforms attack communal and affective ties, subjectivities and economies, i.e. specific forms of indigenous culture, is widely shared by scholars. Implicitly or explicitly, it is suggested that neoliberalism will attack any of the following non-economic, non-neoliberal action rationalities and motivations to act in markets: fellow feeling, empathy, other-regard, propriety, mutual recognition and respect, group morality, common good, fairness, altruistic cooperation, reciprocity, honesty, dignity, acting justly, avoidance of harming the other, logics of appropriateness, social obligations, duties, loyalties or responsibilities. These motivations are seen to largely run contrary to self-interest, instrumental rationality and individual gain maximisation. There is again the suggestion that neoliberalism is not 'freeing' natural traits but actually imposing its version of life upon existing, somehow different life forms; hence, the reform aim of making the latter diminish (Williams 1999, 99). In such a scenario of change resistance is to be expected. 'Resistance to the reconstruction process should not be seen as simple ignorance of the necessary conditions for peoples' material well-being; rather, resistance should be seen as arising out of preexisting attitudes, norms, and patterns of conduct [challenged by the reforms]' (ibid, 97–8).
To date though, yet again, very few political scientists have empirically followed up their theoretical claims about this socio-cultural transformation process; the few studies focused rather on the state or 'civil society' than the economy. Hence, we know little about how the cultural reconstruction processes actually unfold on the ground, and why, and whether, and in which form resistance exists, how it fares and how it is handled by neoliberal proponents and beneficiaries. That said, one has to be careful not to set up the case of neoliberal restructuring in dualist terms, 'of a liberal imperialism and a non-liberal subject of intervention ... [which implies] that nonliberal selves are being forged into liberal ones' (Harrison 2004, 47–8). Rather, first, Western actors have attempted to restructure every aspect of life of African society – economy, state, community, religion, etc. – for more than a century and thus left their specific cultural marks already (ibid, 48). Also, foreign-induced changes in the context, content, form and level of moral authority of the ruling local actors, and the moral connation of the organisation and exercise of political power in Africa is a longer process which has a particular colonial twist (Chabal 2009). In short, pro-Western and pro-capitalist moral order intervention is not exclusive to the neoliberal era. Yet, arguably, the neoliberal phase of 'freeing', i.e. 'adjusting', African societies is more all-encompassing and, in Uganda's case, backed by far more power, finance, technology, staff and organisations (including NGOs, consultants, firms and religious organisations) than past phases of Western social engineering. Second, certain cultural features that we categorise for analytical purposes as 'neoliberal' – say, self-interest, individualism, instrumentalism (or opportunism) – existed and were effectual in a given society prior to neoliberal reform (and prior to Western colonialism). What makes the neoliberal phase distinct is that these norms and values, or 'normative rationales' (Sayer 2005b, 948), are now given major official, i.e. ideological, institutional and political backing; put differently, neoliberal ideology, economy and state have 'elective affinities' with these norms and values. The key point remains that the reform, and the social formation emerging out of it, is likely to make neoliberal NVOPs over time more powerful vis-à-vis non-neoliberal NVOPs. My analytical interest then is to study the process of shifting, i.e. making (more) dominant what was not or less dominant before, especially in terms of morals, and how political-economic factors shape this process.
Notably, first, even in a neoliberal society, non-neoliberal NVOPs are unlikely to be wiped out entirely, but are instead likely to coexist with the newly dominant neoliberal NVOPs. Arguably, what matters in ME terms is not the absence or presence of one element alone – e.g. the self-interest norm – but in which way this element is embedded in a web of norms, which position and relative power it is given vis-à-vis other norms, how the normative elements interact and what the character and purpose of the entire normative order is. For instance, self-interest means different things, operates differently and serves different ends in a capitalist (in combination with values and realities of wealth, individualism, inequality, etc.) versus non-capitalist social formation. Second, one may also expect that at times, and for a limited period, neoliberal proponents advance non-neoliberal NVOPs, i.e. 'borrow from older social forms' (Greenhouse 2010, 4), for instance, to boost state legitimacy or social cohesion. Further, while some past and present foreign interventions were closer to ('traditional') Ugandan culture than others, in principle terms Ugandan and Western culture can be considered to be for most parts at opposite cultural poles (Munene and Schwartz 2000, Munene et al. 2000). Finally, while I proceed with the analysis as if these NVOPs are clear-cut neoliberal or not, in reality these things are never clear-cut; rather, these analytical distinctions serve to study and interpret neoliberal transformation in its empirical complexity (Harrison 2010). This book is concerned with studying 'neoliberal moral restructuring', i.e. the recalibration of the moral underpinning of especially the economy. To do this is to take seriously the point that neoliberalism is in important ways a cultural restructuring programme that changes predominant NVOPs and the underpinning power structures and institutions in a country. This idea is implicit and sometimes explicit in many of the critical writings on neoliberalism; yet, how this process works, what is political about it and how it can be studied are rarely followed through empirically.
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Excerpted from Neoliberal Moral Economy by Jörg Wiegratz. Copyright © 2016 Jörg Wiegratz. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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