Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
not simply marketed, whatever the neoliberals insist otherwise. As with history, men make ideas, but not as straightforwardly as they please. Ideas have a nasty habit of transubstantiating as they wend their way throughout the space of discourse; sometimes proponents do greater harm to their integrity than do their opponents. Other times, people seem congenitally incapable of grasping what has been proffered them; and creative misunderstanding drives thought in well-worn grooves. In a riot of Dubious Signifiers, the Big Lie is king; but that does not preclude the fact that the juddering call and response strewn around it can be regularly bent to political ends. Furthermore, whenever basic notions are treated as colorless and transparent, the more they can serve as political ramparts to channel history in only one direction. When doctrines persist against all odds, say, in a worldwide economic crisis; when knowledge and power converge in stasis, then surely there is something that demands explication.
Do Zombies Dream of Eternal Rest?
In the throes of the red-misted nightmare, it looks as if the crisis, otherwise so virulent and corrosive, didn’t manage to kill even one spurious economic notion. This is not exactly news. John Quiggin has entertainingly dubbed the phenomenon Zombie Economics, and deserves kudos for stressing this point. Incongruously, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom has returned to best-seller lists after a long hiatus. Even Ayn Rand has apparently enjoyed a new lease on (undead) life. One can readily agree with Colin Crouch: “What remains of Neoliberalism after the financial crisis? The answer must be ‘virtually everything.’”19 Similarly, a glut of crisis books has been pouring from every possible digital delivery system of publishers. They fall from the presses, not stillborn, but clone-dead. The cynic might say: Leave it to academics to turn a pervasive human disaster into another unsustainable growth industry. What could be the purpose of yet another jokey variation on the metaphor of the “Invisible Hand” on the cover of some text that purports to convince us that a very few select events or principles (usually a prime number) constitute the Rosetta Stone for decoding recent events? The distance from self-help books (Six Things Momma Taught Me to Succeed When Good People Do Bad Things) to crisis prescription books (Dunk That Invisible Hand in Talcum Powder and Snap on the Handcuffs) and get-rich-quick books (Who’s Afraid of the Big Black Swan?) narrows precipitously in the modern marketplace of ideas.
Rest assured this will not be another of those books “about the crisis,” in the sense of purveying yet one more play-by-play account of who did what to whom. Indeed, some of the best-detailed accounts of the economic history of the contraction of 2007–9 are freely available online; the problem seems to be, rather, that no one cares enough anymore to expend the effort to read them.20 There is even a superb film that lays out the basic sequence of breakdown in an admirably clear way for a general audience: I refer to the movie Inside Job (2011). It even comes with an equally insightful follow-up book (Charles Ferguson’s Predator Nation). In an ideal world, as a service to tyros, there would be a YouTube link to it right here in the text. Of course, the film is weak on intercalated structural causes, elides nonfinancial considerations, and tends to fall down on international developments; and it has that bad American habit of needing to finger the stick-figure “bad guys.” Of course, such son et lumière pageants are no replacement for detailed indispensable sources of financial defalcations, quantifornication, legal sabotage, and twisted crisis particulars. But there is something else: while the film stands as an unprecedented indictment of the economics profession, it rather incongruously gives ideas a wide berth. It is skeptical of economists, but discordantly, takes no position on economics. This book therefore seeks to supplement it along a crucial dimension: it explores the economic crisis as a social disaster, but simultaneously a tumult of intellectual disarray. If the references hadn’t been so egregiously obscure, I toyed with the prospect of calling the book The Goad to Neoliberal Serfdom. Avoiding that gaffe, it may nevertheless transpire that we can recognize our predicament as a conceptual debacle, and perhaps then, in retrospect, the crisis will not go down in history as such a pathetic waste.
Beyond that, I will endeavor to make use of the crisis as a pretext and a probe into the ways in which neoliberal ideas have come to thwart and paralyze their opponents on the left. The ongoing crisis is a political watershed; keeping that conviction front and center turns out to be much more difficult than one might initially think. And by “the left,” I do not mean those benighted few, those Revenants of the Economic Rapture, who were certain that only complete and utter breakdown of capitalism would pave the way for a transition to the political ascendancy of the proletariat. History has already been unkind to them. I aspire to a different, more general audience. The Great Contraction has completely wrong-footed people who used to be called “socialists” or “progressives,” confounding every expectation that they had finally achieved some small measure of vindication for their understanding of the economy. It ushered in a mongrel regime leaving them baffled and bewildered, such that one frequently heard them wonder out loud whether there was any left left.21 It is those people who have taken it as a fundamental premise that current market structures can and should be subordinate to political projects for collective human improvement whom I seek to address here. Such like-minded compatriots are legion, but I fear their understanding of markets and societies has fallen into dire intellectual desuetude.
Let me draw one example from the film I have just praised, Inside Job. There and elsewhere in the aftermath of the crisis, one heard that the neoliberals were primarily responsible for the disaster because they imprudently deregulated markets, or else because they undermined existing regulation. I witnessed this proposition rolled out repeatedly at INET, for instance, and from people in Washington. Without a doubt, there had been important alterations in regulatory structures since 1980, and I will point to some of them in this book; but in no sense were they a simple removal of strictures that could or should be reinstated in any sense. To accept the language of “deregulation” is to become ensnared in a web of concepts that serves to paralyze political action. The neoliberals have openly expressed contempt for their opponents’ easy appeals to “reregulation”; and I think the time has come to take them far more seriously.22
The nostrum of “regulation” drags with it a raft of unexamined impediments concerning the nature of markets, a dichotomy between markets and governmentality, and a muddle over intentionality, voluntarism, and spontaneity that promulgates the neoliberal creed at a subconscious level. This, I believe, has been one major symptom of the endemic failure of economic imagination on the left. Phalanxes of political theoreticians before me have repeatedly insisted that the neoliberal project primarily reregulates and institutes an alternative set of infrastructural arrangements; it never ever wipes the slate clean so that it gets closer to the tabula rasa of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism has never been especially enamored of the Eden of right-wing folklore, a paradise that never existed anywhere, anytime. I cannot exaggerate the myriad times this point has been made over the last century,23 and yet there perdures a dizzy distracted air about the culture of late modernity that keeps ignoring it, repeatedly embracing the Dumb Dichotomy every time the politics heats up. This paramnesia is far too convenient for one side of the political spectrum to chalk up to ambient Alzheimer’s or inept journalists. Appeals to “free markets” treat both freedom and markets as undefined primitives, largely by collapsing them one into another. It takes substantial theoretical sophistication to keep this fact front and center in the political disputes of the modern era; both neoclassical and Marxian economics have not proven salutary in this regard. This book aims to remind us that economics turns out to be good to forget with; one prophylactic will be recourse to a different approach to economics, one that is antithetical to core neoliberal tenets at its ontological base.
There is another way Team Regulation inadvertently capitulates to Team Greed. Team Regulation often has quipped a quick one-liner justification for its prescription: there were no financial crises (often left unstated: in the United States) from the 1940s to the mid-1980s; therefore, all we need do is reset all the dials back to that Golden Era. In subscribing to this notion, the left unconsciously accepts the key notion of the populist right and the neoclassical orthodoxy, that “nothing is substantially different between then and now.” Markets are timeless entities with timeless laws, they insist. Indeed, this is the identical premise of some of the most popular crisis books of the last few years, from Kenneth Rogoff and