Search the archive.

Unpacking this argument, it is perhaps useful to first recognize that, stable as the Holocene may have seemed from a human perspective, life was always vulnerable to a number of cosmic risks, such as bolide collisions, risks that only advanced technologies can mitigate. Similarly, the Black Death of the 14th century should serve as a powerful reminder of the extreme vulnerability of pre-industrial societies at a microbiological level. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think of the Holocene as providing a relatively stable baseline against which the ecological effects of technological interventions could hypothetically be evaluated. With most human activities being distinctively local, nature would for the most part “bounce back” (even if the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin during the Roman period is an example of that not always being the case) while larger geophysical processes, such as the carbon cycle, remained entirely beyond human intentional control. Even if there has been some debate about what influence human activities had on the preindustrial climate (Ruddiman 2007), anthropogenic forcing was in any case both marginal and gradual. All this changed with the onset of the Great Acceleration by which humans came to overwhelm the great forces of nature, causing untold damage to fragile ecosystems and habitats everywhere, forever altering the trajectory of life on the planet (Steffen et al. 2011b). In a grander perspective, humanity may one day become an interplanetary species and thus instrumental in safeguarding the long-term existence of biological life, but for the moment, its impact is ethically dubious at best as the glaciers melt, the oceans fill up with plastics, and vast number of species are driven to extinction. Faced with these grim realities, it is of course not surprising that the first impulse is to seek to restore some kind primordial harmony and restrain human activities. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, even if their aggregate impact may have been within the pattern of Holocene variability, pre-modern Western agricultural societies were hardly “sustainable” in any meaningful sense. Experiencing permanent scarcity, violent conflict was endemic (Gat 2013), and as much as some contemporary academics like to attribute all evils to “capitalism” (Malm 2016), pre-capitalist societies exhibited no shortage of religious intolerance and other forms of social domination. It is thus not surprising that some have argued the need to reverse the civilizational arc further yet and return to a preliterate hunter-gather existence (Zerzan 2008) even if this, obviously, has very little to do with existing political realities and social formations. Under Holocene conditions, the short-term human tragedy may have been the same, but it did not undermine the long-term ability of the planet to support life. In a world of eight billion people, already accumulated emissions in the atmosphere have committed the planet to significant warming under the coming centuries, with an increasing probability that committed warming already exceeds the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement even if all fossil-fuel emissions were to stop today (Mauritsen and Pincus 2017). This means that sustained negative emissions, presumably in combination with SRM, will most likely be needed just to stabilize global temperatures, not to mentioning countering the flow of future emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assuming that all the pledges submitted under the Paris Agreement are fulfilled, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees will still require negative emissions in the range of 100—1000 gigatons of CO2 (Hilaire et al. 2019, p. 190). The removal of carbon dioxide at gigaton scales from the atmosphere will presumably require the existence of an advanced industrial society since low-tech options, such as afforestation, will be of limited use (Gundersen et al. 2021; Seddon et al. 2020), especially in a future of competing land-uses. It is against this backdrop of worsening climate harms that the limits of “precaution”, at least as conventionally understood, become apparent. While degrowth advocates tend to insist that behavioral change, even explicitly betting on a “social miracle” (Kallis 2019, p. 195), is always preferable to any technological risk-taking (Heikkurinen 2018), that overlooks both the scope of the sustainability challenge and the lack of public consent to any sufficiently radical political project (Buch-Hansen 2018). While there may be growing willingness to pay for, say, an electric vehicle (Hulshof and Mulder 2020), giving up private automobile use altogether is obviously a different animal, to say nothing about a more fundamental rematerialization of the economy (Hausknost 2020). Again, the problem is one in which change either (a) remains marginal yet ecologically insufficient or (b) becomes sufficiently radical yet provokes a strong political counterreaction. A similar dynamic can be expected to play out at the international level where countries that remain committed to growth would quickly gain a military advantage. To make matters worse, there is also a temporal element to this dynamic since any regime of frugality and localism would have to be policed indefinitely in order to prevent new unsustainable patterns of development from re-emerging later on. All this begs the obvious question, if the political and economic enforcement of the planetary boundaries are fraught with such political and social difficulties, would it not be better to instead try to transcend them through technological innovation? Surprisingly, any high-energy future would most likely be subject to many of the same motivational and psychological constraints that hinder a low-energy future. While history shows that existing nuclear technologies could in theory displace all fossil fuels and meet the most stringent climate targets (Qvist and Brook 2015), it seems extremely unlikely, to put it mildly, that thousands of new reactors will be built over the course of the coming decades in response to climate change. Outside the world of abstract computer modelling, real world psychological and cultural inertia tends to ensure that political decision-making, at least for the most part, gravitates to what is considered “reasonable” and “common sense”—such as medium emissions electricity grids in which wind and solar are backed by biomass and gas—rather than what any utilitarian optimization scenario may suggest. Even if the global benefits of climate stabilization would be immense, the standards by which local nuclear risks are assessed, as clearly illustrated by the Fukushima accident which led to a worldwide retreat from nuclear energy despite only causing one confirmed death (which, though obviously regrettable, has to be put in relation to the hundred and thousands of people dying every year from the use of fossil fuels), underscores the uneven distribution of perceived local risks versus global benefits and the associated problem of socio-political learning across spatial scales. Almost two decades ago, Ingolfur Blühdorn identified “simulative eco-politics” as a key strategy by which liberal democracies reconcile an ever-heightened rhetoric of environmental crisis with their simultaneous defense of the core principles of consumer capitalism (Blühdorn 2007). Since then, declarations that we only have “ten years to save the planet” have proliferated, and so have seemingly bold investments in renewable energy, most recently in the form of US President Joseph Biden’s USD 2.25 trillion climate and infrastructure plan. Still, without a meaningful commitment to either radical innovation or effective degrowth, it is difficult to see how the deployment of yet more wind turbines or the building of new highways will in any way be qualitatively different from what Blühdorn pertinently described as sustaining “what is known to be unsustainable” (Blühdorn 2007, p. 253). However, all is not lost in lieu of more authentic forms of eco-politics. Independent of political interventions, accelerating technological change, in particular with regard to computing and intelligent machine labor, may one day make large-scale precision manipulation of the physical world possible in ways that may solve many problems that today seem intractable (Dorr 2016). Similarly, breakthroughs in synthetic biology may hold the key to environmentally benign biofuels and carbon utilization technologies. Yet, all such progress remains hypothetical and uncertain for now. Given what is at stake, there is an obvious danger in submitting to naïve technological optimism. What is less commonly recognized is that naïve optimism with regard to the prospects of behavioral change may be equally dangerous. While late-capitalist affluence has enabled many postmaterial identities and behaviors, such as bicycling, hobby farming, and other forms of emancipatory self-expression, a collapsing economy could quickly lead to a reversal back to survivalist values, traditional hierarchical forms of domination, and violence (Quilley 2011, p. 77). As such, it is far from obvious what actions would actually take the world as a whole closer to long-term sustainability. If sustainability could be achieved by a relatively modest reduction in consumption rates or behavioral changes, such as a ban on all leisure flights, then there would be a strong moral case for embracing degrowth. Yet, recognizing how farreaching measures in terms of population control and consumption restrictions that would be needed, the case quickly becomes more ambiguous. While traditional environmentalism may suggest that retreating from the global economy and adopting a low-tech lifestyle would increase resilience (Alexander and Yacoumis 2018), it may do very much the opposite by further fragmenting global efforts and slowing the pace of technological innovation. Without an orderly and functioning world trade system, local resources scarcities would be exacerbated, as seen most recently with the different disruptions to vaccine supply chains. In essence, given the lack of a stable Holocene baseline to revert to, it becomes more difficult to distinguish proactionary “risk-taking” from “precaution”, especially as many ecosystems have already been damaged beyond natural recovery. In this context, it is noteworthy that many of the technologies that can be expected to be most crucial for managing a period of prolonged overshoot (such as next-generation nuclear, engineering biology, large-scale carbon capture and SRM) are also ones that traditional environmentalism is most strongly opposed to. 3. Finding Indicators From the vantage point of the far-future, at least the kind depicted in the fictional universe of Star Trek, human evolution is a fairly straightforward affair along an Enlightenment trajectory by which ever greater instrumental capacity is matched by similar leaps in psychological maturity and expanding circles of moral concern. With the risk of sounding Panglossian, one may argue that the waning of interstate war in general and the fact that there has not been any major nuclear exchange in particular, does vindicate such an optimistic reading of history. While there will always be ups and downs, as long as the most disastrous outcomes are avoided, there will still be room for learning and gradual political accommodation. Taking such a longer view, it would nevertheless be strange if development was simply linear, that former oppressors would just accept moral responsibility or that calls for gender or racial justice would not lead to self-reinforcing cycles of conservative backlash and increasingly polarizing claims. Still, over the last couple of centuries, there is little doubt that human civilization has advanced significantly, both technologically and ethically (Pinker 2011), at least from a liberal and secular perspective. However, unless one subscribes to teleology, there is nothing inexorable with this development and, it may be that the ecological, social, and political obstacles are simply too great to ever allow for the creation of a Wellsian borderless world (Pedersen 2015) that would allow everyone to live a life free from material want and political domination. On the other hand, much environmental discourse tends to rush ahead in the opposite direction and treat the c limate crisis as ultimate evidence of humanity’s fallen nature when the counter-factual case, that it would be possible for a technological civilization to emerge without at some point endangering its biophysical foundations, would presumably be much less plausible. From an astrobiological perspective, it is easy to imagine how the atmospheric chemistry of a different planet would be more volatile and thus more vulnerable to the effects of industrial processes (Haqq-Misra and Baum 2009), leaving a shorter time window for mitigation. Nick Bostrom has explored this possibility of greater climate sensitivity further in his “vulnerable world hypothesis” (Bostrom 2019) and it begs to reason that mitigation efforts would be more focused in such a world. However, since climate response times are longer and sensitivity less pronounced, climate mitigation policies have become mired in culture and media politics (Newman et al. 2018) but also a statist logic (Karlsson 2018) by which it has become more important for states to focus on their own marginal emission reductions in the present rather than asking what technologies would be needed to stabilize the climate in a future where all people can live a modern life.

Fifty years ago, researchers at MIT produced The Limits to Growth, a report on how existing economic trends foretold environmental ruin. Left unchecked, the authors predicted, expanding populations and economic growth would exhaust global resources and ultimately prompt civilizational collapse. The models upon which Limits was based suggested that global reserves of copper, silver, lead, tin, zinc, and petroleum would have all run out by now, and the world would be struggling to find enough arable land to feed a population of over 7 billion people. Without governmental efforts to change global trends, "[t]he most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity," the authors warned. As should be obvious, the predictions offered in The Limits to Growth (and other contemporary doomsayers) were wildly off the mark. Among other things, they failed to account for how markets respond to scarcity, producing incentives for efficiency and innovation, so that we may do more with less. In short, the authors failed to understand why markets encourage sustainability. Those predicting imminent depletion of global resources and exhaustion of the earth's carrying capacity also failed to predict what is arguably the most important -- and under-appreciated -- positive environmental trend of the 21st century: Dematerialization of modern economies. The same economic incentives which forestalled resource exhaustion have actually enabled people to do more with less throughout the developed world. This dramatic development is chronicled in Andrew McAfee's book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next, which I reviewed for Regulation. Here is an excerpt from my review: Dematerialization may be the most important, yet unsung, example of environmental progress in the 21st century. It is commonplace to observe that the relentless drive to do more with less has led to more efficient resource use, so that a soda can today is made with a fraction of the metal required 50 years ago. But dematerialization is not merely a story about increased efficiency or per‐​capita reductions. What is now being observed represents a fundamental decoupling of resource consumption from economic growth, such that as mature economies grow, they not only use fewer resources per unit of output, but they also consume fewer resources overall. In short, economic growth in the most developed nations increasingly coincides with a net reduction in resource consumption. Let that sink in. It is not merely that we are using resources more efficiently in countries like the United States. It's also that we are actually using fewer total resources year-over-year. The United States uses less gold, steel, aluminum, copper, stone, cement, and even paper than it did at the start of this century, despite the continued increase in gross domestic product. Annual consumption of all but six of the 72 resources tracked by the U.S. Geological Service are "post peak." We also use less fertilizer and water while growing more crops. Plastic consumption is up, as is energy use, but these two appear to have been decoupled from population and economic growth as well. How does this dematerialization occur? Some examples may be useful. The dematerialization of soda cans is relatively easy to grasp, particularly for those of us who can remember the heavier cans of the 20th century. Aluminum cans weighed 85 grams when introduced in the 1950s. By 2011, the average can was under 13 grams. Cans today are not only thinner and lighter, they are produced more efficiently, with fewer separate sheets of metal. Substitution can be an even more powerful source of dematerialization. Consider telecommunications. A single fiber optic cable made from less than 150 pounds of silica can carry the same volume of information as multiple 1‑ton copper cables. And were that not enough, satellite and wireless technologies enable us to bypass the use of physical cables altogether. We can communicate more and yet use vastly less material to do so. This not only saves copper, but other resources too. Think of all the paper saved by e‑mail, e‑banking, and e‑readers. Not only did neo-Malthusians not predict these developments, they failed to recognize that such trends would be driven by private markets, and not governmental regulation. We do more with less not because of government regulation or administrative direction, but because of capitalism and technology. These are the dominant forces driving dematerialization in the most developed countries and they could unleash similar gains in the rest of the world. We "want more all the time, but not more resources," McAfee notes. We want more of what resources can provide, and one way to get more is to do more with less. Market capitalism both facilitates and enhances the underlying incentives that drive efficiency gains and technological advance. This not only leads to dematerialization but also promotes "critical aspects of well‐​being," including health and prosperity. Unfortunately, these trends are not universal. While we consume fewer resources in developed nations, these trends have not (yet) taken hold in many developing countries, which often lack well-functioning market economies. We have also not observed equivalent trends in many forms of pollution, largely because emissions are not priced the way consumption is. An entrepreneur who figures out how to produce widgets while using less copper gains an economic advantage, as the copper must be paid for. An entrepreneur who figures out how to emit fewer particulates or nitrogen oxides does not, as emitting such pollutants is not meaningfully priced and contemporary regulations rarely create meaningful incentives for emission reductions on the margin. Understanding what has encouraged and allowed for dematerialization at the same time that populations have expanded and economies have grown is essential if these trends are to be replicated in developing countries and if we are to meet contemporary environmental challenges, including climate change. A suite of policies designed to replicate the same market dynamics that have led dematerialization could spur meaningful decarbonization. Ill-conceived policies, on the other hand, could actually do more harm than good. This is but one more reason policymakers should be more interested in fiscal instruments than regulatory mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Another article in the same issue of Regulation as my More from Less review notes that greenhouse gas emissions in the United States may have peaked in 2005, and that GHG emissions appear to initially increase, but then decline, with economic growth. Such trends are not observed, however, in less-developed and less-market-oriented economies, such as China. The authors, Bruce Yandle and Jody Lipford, think this indicates that domestic GHGs could continue to decline going forward, even without new government policies. This may be so, but the reductions are nowhere near what would be achieved if carbon emissions were priced and there were more powerful market incentives for market decarbonization. Greater market incentives for decarbonization could also lead to the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies that could facilitate emission reductions in other countries as well, and given that climate change is a global concern, such measures will be necessary if atmospheric stabilization is to be achieved. The bottom line is that competitive markets create powerful incentives for efficient and sustainable resource use. Market-driven innovation has made it possible to provide for more people using fewer resources. Such environmental successes are often ignored because there is no policymaker or program than can take credit for them. They are the result of market processes, not governmental direction or design.

Introduction Read any issue of Critical Public Health and you’re more likely than not to see the concept of ‘neoliberalism’ invoked at some point. Inputting it as a keyword in the journal brings up 93 papers, and it features prominently in the title of three articles on our ‘most cited’ list: ‘Understanding health promotion in a neoliberal climate and the making of health conscious citizens’ (Ayo, 2012), ‘Neoliberalism, public health, and the moral perils of fatness’ (LeBesco, 2011) and ‘Aboriginal mothering, FAS prevention and the contestations of neoliberal citizenship’ (Salmon, 2011). The growing frequency with which the concept is invoked amongst authors publishing in CPH has led us to joke, on more than one occasion, that perhaps we should modify our name to Critical Public Health: the Negative Impacts of Neoliberalism. In light of the growing prominence accorded to the concept of neoliberalism in (and of course beyond) the journal, it therefore seems like a good time to take stock of our conceptual equipment to ensure that it does what we think it does and want it do. Reminded of Latour’s (2004) injunction to think critically about critique, in this editorial we simply want to do ‘what every good military officer, at regular periods, would do: retest the linkages between the new threats he or she has to face and the equipment and training he or she should have in order to meet them’ (p. 231). Indeed, we can’t help but notice that much like the concept of ‘society’ before it, when the term neoliberalism is invoked it is often used to jump straight ahead to connect vast arrays of life and history, to mobilize gigantic forces, to detect dramatic patterns emerging out of confusing interactions, to see everywhere in the cases at hand yet more examples of well-known types, to reveal behind the scenes some dark powers pulling the strings. (Latour, 2005, p. 22) What is ‘neoliberalism’? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism refers to the capitalist restructuring that has occurred around the globe since the 1970s in the name of a ‘post-Cold War, post-welfare state model of social order that celebrates unhindered markets as the most effective means of achieving economic growth and public welfare’ (Maskovsky & Kingfisher, 2001, p. 105). Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the USA are often highlighted as prototypical manifestations of neoliberalism; however, policies informed by a similar market-centric logic were introduced in a more moderate form in a variety of social democracies (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden) (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Maskovsky & Kingfisher, 2001; Ward & England, 2007). They were also exported to the Global South through the structural adjustment and fiscal austerity pro- grammes enforced by institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). In its strictest sense, neoliberalism refers to a macro-economic doctrine, but there is huge variation in the ways the term is employed in contemporary scholarship (Ferguson, 2010). Although its conceptual intelligibility is often taken for granted (Garland & Harper, 2012), neoliberalism is variously used as: a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself, or as a kind of shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities … a kind of abstract causal force that comes in from outside to decimate local livelihoods … [or] a broad, global cultural formation characteristic of a new era of ‘millennial capitalism’ – a kind of global meta-culture, characteristic of our newly deregulated, insecure, and speculative times. And finally, ‘neoliberalism’ can be indexed to a sort of ‘rationality’ in the Foucauldian sense, linked less to economic dogmas or class projects than to specific mechanisms of government, and recognizable modes of creating subjects. (Ferguson, 2010, p. 171) Indeed, Ward and England (2007) have identified four distinct understandings of neoliberalism in the social sciences: (1) neoliberalism as an ideological hegemonic project; (2) neoliberalism as policy and programme (e.g. policies enacted under the banner of privatization, deregulation, liberalization, etc.); (3) neoliberalism as state form – i.e. the ‘rolling back’ and ‘rolling out’ of state formations in the name of reform; and (4) neoliberalism as governmentality – the ways in which the relations among and between peoples and things are reimagined, reinterpreted and reassembled to effect governing at a distance. In light of this eclectic usage, scholars are now examining the relationships between neoliberalism and everything from ‘cities to citizenship, sexuality to subjectivity, and development to discourse to name but a few’ (Springer, 2012, p. 135). Although these versions of neoliberalism often intersect with each other, they can also lead to very different readings of the same phenomena. For example, taking a political economy perspective, Otero, Pechlaner, Liberman, and Gürcan (2015, p. 48) use the term ‘neoliberal diet’ to characterize the high levels of consumption of energy-dense, low-nutrition ‘pseudo foods’ amongst the working class; however, Foucauldian governmentality perspectives are more likely to characterize a neoliberal diet as precisely the opposite of this – as one that encourages the individual to take responsibility for his or her health by consuming more fruits and vegetables (e.g. Ayo, 2012). When a concept can be used to describe such an extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of phenomena, questions can clearly be asked about how useful it actually is. Perhaps a larger issue is the reductive ways neoliberalism often tends to be used. As Phelan (2007) observes, in a number of accounts its effects are so totalizing and monolithic that it starts to assume causal properties in its own right; ‘that is, it becomes the “it” which does the explaining, rather than the political phenomenon that needs to be explained’ (Phelan, 2007, p. 328). Consider, for example, neoliberalism as governmentality – one of the more common ways the term is employed by CPH authors. As Kipnis (2008) observes, the key defining features of this variant of neoliberalism: governing from a distance; the emphasis on calculability; and the promotion of self-activating, disciplined, individuated subjects, can be found in a variety of contexts that are historically and culturally distant from Western neoliberal or liberal governing philosophies. In his words, ‘These three categories correspond to broad human potentialities that have been imagined in a wide variety of ways in a broad range of settings and that have become more prevalent in all state-governed and industrial societies’ (p. 284, 240 Editorial emphasis added). Thus, characterizing such features exclusively in terms of neoliberalism runs the risk of exaggerating its scope by reifying it into a globally dominant force or stage of history (Kipnis, 2008). It also runs the risk of eliding other processes that deserve analytic attention in their own right. For such reasons, there have been growing calls to explore neoliberalism in terms of ‘concrete projects that account for specific people, institutions and places’ (Kingfisher & Maskovsky, 2008, p. 118) – what Brenner and Theodore (2002) refer to as ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Some suggestions for the way forward Theoretical concepts such as neoliberalism clearly have their uses: they signal to readers the kind of argument a writer is making, and act as a shorthand to summarize complex configurations of economic, political and cultural change that do, arguably, have some commonalities across different contexts. It is the role of theory to provide abstracted explanations that hold across time and place, and the concept of neoliberalism has been a fruitful one for thinking about some general implications of contemporary social change. However, over-extension has its risks, and there are now diminishing returns in simply documenting how technologies, policies or products ‘illustrate’ neoliberalism. To advance our understanding of how, specifically, public health is imbricated in the various manifestations of neoliberalism requires a more critical, nuanced and reflexive approach. First, we need far more clarity on how the term is being used, rather than taking its meaning for granted. With the over-extension of ‘neoliberal’ to describe everything from welfare cuts to wearable health monitors, scholars need to unpack more carefully the particular processes to which they are referring. Rather than assume a deterministic role for those processes, the nature of the links between, say, welfare change and the impact on subjectivities needs to be explicated. As Meershoek and Hortsman (2016) note in this issue, merely reporting how health promotion reflects or contributes to neoliberalism does little to untangle the ‘material, technical and practical dimensions’ of how what kinds of health, and whose, are prioritized. Taking the commodification of workplace health promotion technologies as their case, they unpack how policies emphasizing employee health become legitimated within networks that include knowledge institutes and private companies, but not the workers themselves. Importantly, this focus on the process itself enables their analysis to point to not only the potential negative effects for public health of such commodification, but also ways forward, in political mobilization through workers’ organizations to incorporate different frameworks of well-being. Second, we need more nuance and specificity in accounts. The question is not so much ‘what forms do public health outputs or technologies take in neoliberal times?’ but ‘how, where and in what forms do the various processes of neoliberalism impact public health?’ Two papers in this issue illustrate the value of more specificity. Hervik and Thurston (2016), in their account of how Norwegian men discuss their responsibilities for health, note that the specificities of the welfare state in Norway configure assumptions embedded in talk about ‘responsibility’. Rather than simply reading off the espousal of ‘personal responsibility for health’ as another reflection of neoliberal hegemony, Hervik and Thurston note that in this context, responsibility for health is rooted in a participatory model of the welfare state, in which principles of egalitarianism and social democracy may have very different implications for public health than in welfare states where the focus is on individual choice and self-sufficiency. Similarly, Nourpanah Editorial 241 and Martin (2016) delineate both parallels and divergences between the discursive framings of health promotion described in Western states and those they document in Iran, where there is an absence of focus on consumption, despite similar orientations towards individual choice. In general, rather than reifying neoliberalism as a monolithic entity, it may be more productive to speak of ‘neoliberalization’ as an always partial and incomplete process (Ward & England, 2007). This raises potentially fruitful questions around when, where, and in what ways the economic, political and cultural intersect with health. We need also to be reflexive about claims to neoliberalism, in that of course our critique is inevitably embroiled in the very processes it seeks to analyze. Indeed, it may be productive to think of neoliberalism as a discourse as much as a reality (Springer, 2012). In sum, we are not calling for the abandonment of the concept – paraphrasing Clifford (1988) on yet another troubled notion (‘culture’), neoliberalism seems to be a deeply compromised idea we cannot yet do without. Thus, being more careful and mindful of how we use it seems a good place to start.

¶ The Black/white right-wing's attempted usurpation of the civilized qualities "self-reliance," "self-discipline" and "personal responsibility" amounts to slander against Black ancestry. To be successful, all mass movements had to rely on themselves, be more disciplined than the oppressor, and imbue participants with a deep sense of both personal and collective responsibility for their actions. The entirety of the Freedom Movement was a glorious saga of collective Self Help, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Growth, that transformed African Americans, the nation, and the world.¶ ¶ Having nothing to offer a people in dire need of a mass movement against increasingly hostile Power - except bromides, navel-gazing, and "prosperity churches" - the status-quo crowd robs the English vocabulary, expropriating for themselves the terms for all that is virtuous, while risking...nothing. At the desired end of the process, the poor are to be left without even the words to defend themselves. Worse, when you steal people's words, you steal pieces of their minds.¶ ¶ Induced Shame¶ ¶ The self-styled self-helpers thrive on banalities and generalities, through skillful use of which they get applause and "amens" from folks who should know better - who would actually like to confront en masse the real sources of Black economic and social hyper-vulnerability. Chanting the mantras of "self-help," "self-reliance," "self-discipline" and "personal responsibility," they induce group shame - an extremely debilitating, rather than liberating, emotion. (Preachers have long understood that folks will pay good money to be released from shame.) Substantial sections of the audience transfer their shame to the most powerless among them, who become the repositories of all that ails Black America.¶ ¶ John McWhorter, the vile Black servant for the reactionary Manhattan Institute, even blames the poor for the Katrina catastrophe. Under direct questioning from a radio talk show host, just months after the deluge, McWhorter explained the horrors of New Orleans' Coliseum/concentration camp, this way: "What we see in Katrina is single women who also have a great many children."¶ ¶ Such is the logic of the Right, in blackface. It is pointless to spend precious time arguing with these walking pollutants. Instead, let us explore the limits of their narrow definition of Self-Help - a definition that rejects mass action.¶ ¶ True Self-Help¶ ¶ Earlier this year, Black Agenda Report and CBC Monitor circulated a petition with a list of seven demands for presentation to the Congressional Black Caucus. All were rooted in issues that lay at the core of the Historical Black Political Consensus; positions around which many generations of African Americans had coalesced. Most were related to existing legislation before Congress.¶ ¶ 1. Dismantle racially selective mass incarceration.¶ ¶ 2. Aid and empower those dispersed and dispossessed by Katrina.¶ ¶ 3. End the war in Iraq now.¶ ¶ 4. Get the U.S. military out of Africa.¶ ¶ 5. Transform the cities and create millions of jobs.¶ ¶ 6. Establish truly universal, single payer health care.¶ ¶ 7. Ensure voting rights.¶ ¶ Not one of these righteous demands can be accomplished by some diluted, narrow Self-Help as preached by the Cosbys of Black America, and most are actively opposed by Black corporate "conservatives." Churches can and do operate "prison ministries" - a worthy project - but that cannot dismantle an "intake" mechanism that operates at every level of the criminal justice system, from omni-surveillance of poor Black communities to the inevitable result: one million African Americans behind bars.¶ ¶ The crime of Katrina cannot be addressed absent empowerment of residents to direct the spending of many tens of billions of dollars in "reconstruction and return." This requires a national mobilization of millions of Black people to confront Power, directly. Volunteers have already poured in by the tens of thousands, but can only provide some amelioration, as all admit. True Self-Help - decisive help for New Orleans - must come from mass political action.¶ ¶ Local Self-Help groups can counsel limited numbers of returning veterans of the Iraq war, or advise young people not to join the military. But only a mass movement (or inevitable U.S. defeat) can cause the United States to withdraw from Iraq, quit its military buildup in Africa, and cease threatening the survival of the planet.¶ ¶ No amount of community-based resources can revamp urban structures to the benefit of masses of city-dwellers; this is a nation-building task. Black entrepreneurship is an admirable enterprise, but it does not significantly alter relationships of power in a world ruled by multinational corporations. Only People Power can do that, and in the process create the jobs that will sustain the African American presence in the cities.¶ ¶ Community-funded neighborhood clinics save thousands of lives, but none of them pretend to be the solution to Third World-like Black mortality rates. Universal health care can only be won in a twilight struggle with for-profit medical, insurance and drug corporations and their servants in government.¶ ¶ The right to vote must ultimately be ensured by a mass movement that poses a threat to Power that makes fairness at the ballot an attractive trade-off for the current vote-suppressors. Such was the case in the Sixties, and so it remains.¶ ¶ Take Back the Term: Self-Help¶ ¶ The right-wing theft of the term Self-Help is a sacrilege against our heroic dead and Black history, itself. Wasn't Harriet Tubman engaged in Self-Help when she escorted hundreds of slaves out of bondage? Didn't the Pullman Porters exemplify Self-Help in their decades of struggle for recognition as a union - and as men? Were not the young lunch counter integrators involved in Self-Help, as they put their bodies in danger and their academic careers at the mercy of handkerchief-head Black college administrators? Was the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 something other than Self-Help? Who would have done it but ourselves, and the allies we enlisted? Are the youthful Black Panther Party members who aggressively monitored police in Oakland, California, to be expelled from the Self-Help definition? Did scores of Party members die helping other people than their own? Is the fight for a living wage beyond the pale of Cosby and Co.'s Self-Help parameters? Does the mass demonstration at Jena, Louisiana, qualify as Self-Help?

The design of a financing mechanism determines equity in access to and payment for health care. To inform the preparation of a financing plan, the HCHR campaign looked to the human rights standards in its system assessment tool and to the equity principle in Act 48. The goal was to produce actionable guidance for realizing the principle of equity in financing in a way that generated sufficient revenue for meeting all residents’ health needs. This focus on equity coincided with the Occupy movement’s protests against rising inequality, which catalyzed an ongoing debate in US politics about the largest concentration of wealth since the 1930s and the greatest income inequality since the late 1970s.19 Regressive health care financing is a significant contributor to economic inequality, producing an inverse correlation between household income and household health care spending.20 Conversely, a redistributive universal health care system in the United States would deliver significant financial relief to lower- and middle-income families.21 Providing health care as a public good could also pave the way for a broader paradigm shift toward universal public programs, replacing the threadbare safety net of means-tested benefits. Health care could function as a strategic lever for building a more equitable society through the universal provision of the goods and services needed to exercise economic and social rights. In turn, increased equity would further improve health outcomes.22 It follows that health reform goals should reflect the direct correlation between health and equity by measuring not only health but also equity indicators. This broader equity vision characterizes the HCHR campaign’s approach to financing, which aims to disrupt the vicious circle of inequity and poor health fueled by unequal access to care based on income, wealth, and employment. International health systems research confirms that commercialized health systems with significant private sector involvement both impede access to care and deepen inequities.23 The market-based insurance system in the United States demonstrates that private pre-payment schemes are neither intended nor equipped to guarantee equity in access to and payment for care. Any redistributive potential of pre-payment is lost when the insurance business model incentivizes access restrictions by means of cost-sharing, narrow provider networks, and prior authorization processes, and when even a slightly more progressive premium structure for low-income policyholders, as mandated by the ACA, requires the channeling of sizable public subsidies to private insurance companies.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 71-72, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

In their book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel diagnose the conceptual errors embedded in the view they call ‘everyday libertarianism’. 22 This is, in effect, the view that there is a domain of economic activity, free of government intervention, that has conceptual (if not temporal) priority over really existing economic activity that takes place in the presence of government tax-and-spending. This ‘everyday libertarian’ fallacy explains what goes wrong when an individual thinks of their pre-tax income as in some sense robustly all ‘theirs’, with government intervention through the tax system then conceptualised as the expropriation of something that would otherwise belong to them. As Murphy and Nagel point out, what counts as somebody’s property is itself defined by the full system of property rights, of which the tax system is a part. The tax system is not some alien extrusion into the property system, but a constitutive part of it. Moreover, given that an individual’s market earnings will typically depend on a background of legal, social and physical infrastructure – from contract-enforcement to public roads – which itself depends on the tax system, it is not as if there exists some kind of normatively privileged possible world in which we somehow can have the benefits of the tax system without being taxed, and against which we should set the normative benchmark of our property entitlements.

In Logics, Badiou develops the notion of resurrection by which the truth of an event resurges in a new context, a new world, through the incitement of a new event.133 In my own history, the names of these events would include Wittgenstein, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Lawrence, Derrida, Lacan, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Badiou (more or less in that order), though this would be to limit the events of my intellectual history through which the subject of a truth has been resurrected and kept alive. Furthermore, this generic truth that unbinds me from the categories of everyday social existence creates the condition for a universal address that recognizes the one thing that all human beings have in common, the foundation of their existence on the void of infinite possibilities, however different the import and significance of the events that force human beings into the subjective formation of a truth. For example, the Holocaust survivor, the victim of torture in Iraq, the political prisoner, the innocent and probably the guilty at Guantanamo, the terrorists and those who survive their terror, the cancer patient whose insurance won’t cover a treatment, the bulimic who has to lie in order to get health care, the raped woman and possibly the rapist, not only the victims of child abuse but the perpetrators who were themselves abused, the displaced and exiled, and all the usual suspects that would include the poor, the exploited, the homeless, and so forth—such people are not merely victims or perpetrators but potential subjects of truth, even though the truth they bear is usually prescribed to inexistence by the hegemonic state of the situation that names them. Even they themselves usually evade the truth by accepting the categorical judgments of the State. It is always easier and more negotiable to be a victim or a perpetrator than to insist on the methodical exposition of the truth that has derived from the event, however negative, that transformed a person into a subject. I don’t mean to say that all these experiences are the same or of equal value in the world as it currently exists. Still, there is no reason to wait for an apocalyptic event that would guarantee the universal disclosure of the truth. The events that make truth possible by forcing the inexistent into existence are everywhere, and the only true universal is the subtractive power of the void that has the creative-destructive power to force a change of base, a change of the transcendental ordinary.134

In the earlier chapters of this book, I exposed myself to the accusation of resentment and tried to challenge or interrogate its truth. My argument was not that I am a man without resentment, since if we have learned anything since Nietzsche, who in his last works proved himself to be everything he criticized, we have learned that there is no resistance or critical ground for challenge to any situation without resentment. However, the larger point and purpose of this essay is to suggest that the truth of an event will not persist at the level of mere resentment. The truth of an event is precisely what constitutes the subject as the power to overcome resentment in the struggle to transform the world itself, which is always one of an infinite number of possible worlds. Ironically, because the truth is infinite, there can never be of the inconsistent multiple that is being in itself and the variation of its worldly unfolding in appearance.135 Marx’s class struggle, Nietzsche’s self-overcoming, Wilde’s perversity and paradox, Lawrence’s sexual folklore, Gramsci’s counterhegemony, Wittgenstein’s curve, Lacan’s ellipsis, Derrida’s deconstruction, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, and Badiou’s metapolitics—these are all the names of truth procedures that aim at the transformation of the transcendental ordinary. No doubt, in the lives of all these thinkers, there were events that incited them to the procedures that laid out the consequences of a truth. Sometimes these may have been great historical events, and at other times events that would have gone unnoticed had not a truth impressed itself on a particular person. It seems naïve to claim that any truth procedure necessarily invalidates the possibility of another. In my own case, if my mother had not gone mad, I might have found a truth in some other way. But it was my mother’s madness that forced me into the process of interrogating the values of my society and world. It gave me the means to understand my father and the working class with which he would always be associated in my mind. It taught me that all human beings are more than their material conditions, and that whatever their condition in a particular world they are all capable of the thought that allows them to transform themselves as well as their world. It taught me that the only property common to all human beings is the singularity of the truth that says, We are nothing, so let us be everything.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 70-71, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

Firstly, the temporal objection. If read in its literal sense, the talk of before and after with regard to the tax system simply does not stand up. It is not that economic activity somehow takes place within a discrete time period, with the government standing outside the economic domain while these processes take place, only stepping in at the end of each period, so to speak, in order to collect taxes and pay out benefits, so that a new discrete period of economic activity can then take place. Rather, economic activity is an endlessly ongoing process, with the government’s activities as both collector of taxes and payer of benefits a similarly continuous, if periodically modulating, constitutive part of that process. The temporal objection then, is that talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ with regard to government’s role in economic life, while it has a certain kind of brisk initial plausibility, is on further investigation merely mystifying.21

This focus on equity coincided with the Occupy movement’s protests against rising inequality, which catalyzed an ongoing debate in US politics about the largest concentration of wealth since the 1930s and the greatest income inequality since the late 1970s.19 Regressive health care financing is a significant contributor to economic inequality, producing an inverse correlation between household income and household health care spending.20 Conversely, a redistributive universal health care system in the United States would deliver significant financial relief to lower- and middle-income families.21 Providing health care as a public good could also pave the way for a broader paradigm shift toward universal public programs, replacing the threadbare safety net of means-tested benefits. Health care could function as a strategic lever for building a more equitable society through the universal provision of the goods and services needed to exercise economic and social rights. In turn, increased equity would further improve health outcomes.22 It follows that health reform goals should reflect the direct correlation between health and equity by measuring not only health but also equity indicators.

This broader equity vision characterizes the HCHR campaign’s approach to financing, which aims to disrupt the vicious circle of inequity and poor health fueled by unequal access to care based on income, wealth, and employment. International health systems research confirms that commercialized health systems with significant private sector involvement both impede access to care and deepen inequities.23 The market-based insurance system in the United States demonstrates that private pre-payment schemes are neither intended nor equipped to guarantee equity in access to and payment for care. Any redistributive potential of pre-payment is lost when the insurance business model incentivizes access restrictions by means of cost-sharing, narrow provider networks, and prior authorization processes, and when even a slightly more progressive premium structure for low-income policyholders, as mandated by the ACA, requires the channeling of sizable public subsidies to private insurance companies.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 88-89, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

It is a familiar objection directed at advocates of a political focus on predistribution, that even effective policies of predistribution would not eradicate the need for forms of redistribution, both in the form of direct cash transfers, and in the form of indirect transfers through the provision of public services funded through taxation. Obviously, the advocate of predistribution should have no argument with this objection, not least because, as we have seen in sections 4–6 above, such redistributive policies frequently have a distinctively predistributive justification. Moving away from the Hacker-type view that sees predistribution as a kind of policy as opposed to a kind of aim or goal, or valuable effect, helps to forestall this kind of unilluminating disagreement between advocates of predistribution and their opponents. Moreover, it should be no part of advocating predistributive public policies to think that there might not also be a justification for transfers or public service provision that was based on purely redistributive considerations – i.e. because one person or group is in need, or suffering some absolute level of privation, and the transfer from a relatively advantaged person or group would rectify this. After all, our concerns as egalitarians are complex, combining consideration of both how well each individual fares, and of the nature of the social relations between individuals.43 There may also be cases where purely redistributive aims could be most efficiently enacted by means of the kinds of policy mechanisms associated with predistribution. In many cases, the same policies might be favoured by progressives and egalitarians for both their redistributive and predistributive effects, operating at once but by means of distinct mechanisms. None of these cases would constitute an objection to either our characterisation of the idea of predistribution, or to the claim that progressive or egalitarian politics should treat predistribution as a central priority.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 76-78, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

Imagine a society in which healthcare benefits are provided in a haphazard way by an inefficient system of private insurance, with many people’s access to even a minimally decent level of healthcare provision being tied to their employment status. Imagine that in such a society, against all previous expectations, a democratic socialist candidate is elected to the presidency, and that one of his or her first policy priorities is to create a national health system that ensures that all workers have access to an excellent level of universally available healthcare, provided free at the point of use through direct public provision, funded by general taxation. What would be the implications enacting this kind of policy? Well, obviously something would have to happen to the tax system in order to fund this new system, and the new system would bring benefits to many individuals who were comparatively disadvantaged by the previous system No doubt there would be some general efficiency gains in moving from a splintered private market to a coherent public system of healthcare provision, and so there would be a certain amount of ‘levelling up’, and the removal of the deadweight loss associated with the rent-seeking private bureaucracies associated with the previous system. What there would also be, in terms of direct effects, would be a de facto economic transfer from those who were especially advantaged by the old system (e.g. by the unreasonable suppression of top rates of taxation) towards those relatively disadvantaged individuals who would be most advantaged by the new system.

How should we in academic public health engage with the issue of racism, at both interpersonal and structural levels? How might we best mitigate its effects? I suggest four possible approaches. First, we must tackle racism at the community level. In this capacity, some of us may choose to express solidarity with affected groups, participating in public shows of support. Such actions ensure that the issue of racism moves to the forefront of the public debate and stays there. Indeed, peaceful public statements of concern about a pressing social issue always have a place in an open society, and our responsibility to make these statements is not in any way inconsistent with our role as members of an academic community. Given that we are members of this community, my second suggestion relates to how our scholarship may pave the way for progress on this issue. The work of knowledge generation can help inform acute social needs, developing constructive strategies to help solve the urgent problems of our time—problems such as racism. This nudges us toward a scholarship of consequence, where we aim to shed light on the root causes of racial divides and the link between racism and the health of the public. To do this, we must prioritize our research questions accordingly. By focusing on what matters most, and orienting our scholarship toward areas of inquiry that tackle the foundational drivers of population health, we stand to make a real difference in creating a fairer, less racially fraught society. Third, we are charged at our various institutions with fostering an education environment that both teaches the foundations of our field and prepares students to engage with evolving issues of contemporary public health importance. That calls for an education that is dynamic and reflexive, but also one that is encouraging and respectful of the sharing of ideas. Such an academic climate does much to advance the goals of engendering mutual understanding and identifying solutions grounded in diversity of experience, opinion, and perspective. It is not enough to merely acknowledge disparities; we need to engage in difficult, sometimes uncomfortable discussions about these issues in order to understand one another and improve the often unacceptable conditions our scholarship makes all too apparent to us. Finally, insofar as public health centers around shaping the conditions that make people health, and insofar as those conditions depend on the introduction of health in all sectors, we need to work toward a health conversation that extends well beyond the walls of academia. This agitates for an engagement with the public conversation around the issue of racism wherever the conversation may arise. Public health’s unique perspective, informed by its scholarship, is well positioned to influence how we understand racism and its consequences for the well-being of populations. By clarifying the links between racism and health by making them unignorable in the public debate, we can then begin to advance solutions. Needless to say, racism and hate of any kind are intolerable, even when we do not take into account their health consequences. But health, as a universal aspiration, can serve as a clarifying lens for action, elevating the importance of creating a society free of racism, where health will no longer be determined by the color of a person’s skin. The actions of a committed, activist public health will go far toward bringing this about.

Alan Thomas, “Rawls’s Critique of Welfare-State Capitalism,” in Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy, Oxford University Press 2017, pp. 181-182.

Rawls thinks that there are such factors:  welfare-state capitalist societies permit concentrations of wealth in private hands because they have a limited focus on ex post facto redistributions of income by tax and transfer policies. If my argument in chapter 2 is correct, then that leaves in place a structure of incentives that can lead to domination. Rawls unequivocally states that welfare-state capitalism involves the “neglect of a principle of reciprocity.”2 Rawls believes that this fact has further damaging political consequences: given that such societies have no intrinsic concern with reciprocity, they also violate the value of solidarity. In the inherently competitive space of pressure for political influence, the better off and the best off will work toward a political consensus that may well undermine the basic liberties if left unchecked by any failure to secure their fair value. (This is Rawls’s first concern about welfare-state capitalism in the passage quoted.)

Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, “The Promise of Predistribution,” Policy Network, 28 September 2012, pp. 1-7, https://philpapers.org/archive/ONETPO-5.pdf.

The core meaning of “predistribution” is simple to grasp. As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, the term’s progenitor, puts it in his Policy Network paper on “The Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy”2, the aim of predistribution is “to focus on market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits”. Instead of equalizing unfair market outcomes through tax-and-spend or tax-and-transfer, we instead engineer markets to create fairer outcomes from the beginning. To put things in a slightly different way, the need for ex post redistribution is reduced as the ex ante distribution of economic power is made more fair and equitable.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 85-87, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

Does this mean that we have simply been on a wild goose chase in thinking through the idea of predistribution, seen as an alternative to traditional forms of redistribution? Thankfully this is not the case. What we have shown is that, insofar as there is an important distinction here, it has to be with regard to the aims and effects of policy, rather than in terms of the nature of the policy tools or mechanisms that are used. The content of these policy aims and effects has already been touched upon above, in imagining the new USanian healthcare or Medicare service, and its potential twin roles in both reducing objectionable inequalities of power within market relationships, and giving individuals a secure standing outside of the market transactions in which they may otherwise be potentially vulnerable to a troubling degree. To get a clearer sense of these predistributive policy aims, I want very briefly to revisit a thinker whom one can see as a highly significant theorist of predistribution avant la lettre: the Nobel Prize winning economist James Meade. In seeing what was at stake Meade’s critique of redistribution, we can hope to get a clear fix on what is at stake between advocates of predistribution and redistribution, now reconceived as aims or objectives of policy, rather than as distinct kinds of policy.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 63-67, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

When political philosophers think about egalitarian public policy, and about what states need to do in order to deliver social and economic justice, their attention has most often naturally been drawn to questions of redistribution. They typically consider how states can create more equal outcomes through standard fiscal mechanisms, as when more advantaged members of society are taxed by the state, which then uses those fiscal flows to fund transfer payments and to provide public services. It is illustrative here that, when G. A. Cohen launched his powerful and influential critique of Rawls’s account of social justice, the totemic practical issue on which he focussed was the level of the top marginal rate of income taxation.1

Joseph Stiglitz, “Introduction,” in People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Penguin Books Limited 2019, non-paginated pdf.

The failure of our elites

Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “Taking Control: Arguing for Community Wealth Building,” The Case for Community Wealth Building, Polity Press 2020, non-paginated pdf.

Oscar Wilde, the author of The Soul of Man Under Socialism, understood well the relationship between economic institutions and the inner lives of those living under and within those institutions.35 He put his finger on one potential problem of more democratic forms of collective organisation when he famously quipped (although the attribution may be apocryphal) that ‘the problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings’. In our terms, the worry would be that a more democratic economy might make unrealisable demands on the citizens who will be its participants. There are two responses to this Wildean line of critique; responses that are individually strong, and jointly decisive. The first is that one should not overestimate what would be required – not endless participation in economic decisionmaking by all of the people all of the time, but only participation by some of the people some of the time. Even extremely successful democratic enterprises such as Mondragón in Spain do not expect or require endless engagement by all worker-owners in every forum, only that there will be a spectrum of engagement sufficient for a critical level of participation.36

Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “Taking Control: Arguing for Community Wealth Building,” in The Case for Community Wealth Building, Polity Press 2020, non-paginated pdf.

Alongside the ‘municipal protectionism’ critique that we have been concerned to rebut above, there’s a parallel strand to the economists’ critique of Community Wealth Building that is less concerned with the allegedly self-defeating logic of each city or municipality being especially concerned with the advancement of its own local economy, and instead is motivated by a broader scepticism about the very possibility of having a more democratic economic system. The argument here is that, as soon as one departs from decision-making made purely on the basis of narrowly defined economic criteria, and instead finds space for genuine democratic agency within local authorities’ decisionmaking in the economic domain, then one somehow opens the door to a free-for-all in which cronyism and rent extraction will proliferate. Here’s The Economist again:

John Whitlow, “If You Can Unmake It Here: Crisis, Contingency, and Law in the Making and Unmaking of Neoliberal New York,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, April 2022, pp. 344-345, https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/121/2/339/297868/If-You-Can-Unmake-It-HereCrisis-Contingency-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

Despite the world-making and subjectivizing valence of neoliberalism, one of the core arguments of this article is that the neoliberal project is now on shaky ground and that we find ourselves caught up in a new conjuncture, the resolution of which is contingent. This conjuncture was inaugurated by the Great Recession of 2008, when the neoliberal economic system collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions,3 “congeal[ing] decades of class bifurcation, downward mobility, and environmental, political, and social brittleness that [had] increased progressively since the Reagan era” (Berlant 2011: 11). In the United States, this economic collapse was not met by an organized alternative to neoliberalism—as New York’s elite met the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, or as Thatcherism responded to the crisis of embedded liberalism in the United Kingdom—but, rather, by the restorationist Obama presidency, which sought technocratic fixes to deep-seated political economic problems. These fixes largely maintained existing power arrangements and relied on neoliberal assumptions about the proper role of the state vis-à-vis society and the market economy. Put another way, the financial meltdown of 2008 destabilized the material basis of economic growth within the parameters of the neoliberal economic order, but it did not provoke the immediate delegitimation of the neoliberal social order (Gago 2017).