For Session 2 - Snehashish Mitra

Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction: David Harvey

In this article, Harvey elaborates the journey of neo-liberalism, primarily led by the US and Britain, into countries around the world; with some of them accepting neo-liberalism voluntarily, while other being forced to embrace it through military intervention (by the US of course). Neoliberalism, now established as a ‘hegemonic system within global capitalism’, argues for a minimal presence of government n the market and lobbies extensively for a market environment where business can thrive. The ideology hinges on ‘Social Darwinism’ wherein failure of any individual, community or any nation to prosper can be lazily attributed to cultural factors. Harvey points out that neoliberalism was an upper-class response to a relative fall in proportion and amount of wealth held by the top 1% in the US in the 70s when the growth collapsed. Privatisation, financialization, the management, and manipulation of crises, & state redistribution are four elements of neoliberalism, which have been applied across nations such as Chile, Iraq, Mexico, Argentina. The international bodies such as International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) have been instrumental in the spread of neoliberalism, these organizations are not answerable to any entity and go against the ethos of democracy in their own character, and simultaneously undermining the legitimacy and governing practices of democratically elected governments. Neoliberalism serves the purpose of the upper class who possess the social capital to reap benefits from the financialization and formalization of the economy, it, however, comes at the cost of dismantling the traditional institutional frameworks and ways of lives, which is collectively termed as ‘creative destruction’. In India, churning of financial gains through licit and illicit transactions over land and environmental resources are key examples of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which is primarily conducted for private enterprise with the endorsement of the state. For example, in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2007 there was a huge clash between the state police force and the farmers, as the latter were unwilling to hand over their fertile lands for industrial projects to be built by Salem Group of Indonesia. Here we can see the contradiction of neoliberal policy, as the Salem Group was unwilling to negotiate with the farmers about the terms of exchange, and were rather more keen to get possession of the land through state patronage wherein the farmers would have been likely forced to accept a compensation way below the market rate, as seen during land acquisition for the New Town Rajarhat township in the early 2000s. When dispossession is successful in a rural area, migration to urban areas for work subjects the migrants to objects accumulation through rent. Harvey insists on the need to avail an alternative and inclusive path of progress, which should focus on the anti-democratic nature of neoliberalism and confront the class equations which have been consolidated by neoliberalism.

Jurisprudence of Emergence: Neo-Liberalism and the Public as Market in India – Ritu Birla

Ritu Birla makes the distinction between public as a political and economic actor, and how neoliberalism has influenced such construction in India and elsewhere. Taking examples from the Indian jurisprudence, Birla highlights how India’s judiciary has responded to the affiliation to neoliberal ideology, wherein the verdicts of the courts discussed unsettles the notion of a homogenous neoliberalism across the globe and within India as well. The clear neoliberal distinction between the governing state and the market, where the state is not supposed to intervene, gets blurred through some of the legal cases, as Birla shows through the cases prosecuted in the high courts of Calcutta, Madras, Kerala, and Bombay. Apart from the case in the High Court of Madras, the other cases exemplify how the state takes the role of protecting its citizens through the judicial mechanisms, thereby suggesting the presence of strong state which claims to represent and protect its citizens. This is a significant shift from the colonial period when the state held a paternal benevolent attitude towards the public while treating them as actors, rather consumers (of goods manufactured in Britain) in the market.

In recent time, the judiciary has come into conflict with the Indian state a number of times on the questions of privacy, nationalism and Aadhar card. It is likely that such developments further entangles the analysis of a neo-liberal ideology adopted by the state and to in what manner does the state mechanisms facilitate or resist the adaptation. Birla shows how the definition (and perception) of public and private had animated the proceedings of the legal cases she showcased. Would a similar framework help us in understanding the recent debates?

The Uses of Neoliberalism – James Ferguson

James Ferguson employs a first-person narrative to keep his ideological positionality in retrospect and then critiques the ‘anti’ brigade of the academics which has been opposing the neoliberal right-wing governance without providing any alternative. He calls upon to practice some alternative governance approach within a leftist framework, such alternatives maybe similar to that of neoliberal tools but that shouldn’t be a factor of inhibition. The fact that social policy and nation-state are being decoupled, calls for a new way of reflecting about the relation between the people and service providing agency. It is also important to know what we mean by the term neoliberalism, as it encompasses a number of phenomena, it would be helpful if one could delineate these phenomena wherever possible while referring to neoliberalism. Ferguson categorically dismisses the ‘art of not being governed’, and emphasizes the requirement of a governing institute which would bridge the gap between demand and delivery. Like Birla problematizes neoliberal ideology in the earlier article, Ferguson also treads the same line b pointing that countries like India and Brazil have increased their social spending despite adopting neoliberal policies. Ferguson invites the readers to think through alternatives, by showcasing the nuances of ‘cash transfer’ policy in South Africa. Rather than holding the utopian desire to going back to the pre-neoliberalism setup, or finding the right formula in Marxist texts, Ferguson urges to recast the existing avenues of service/aid delivery in favour of a more just and equitable arrangement; this could be achieved only through policy testing and implementation.