Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen — The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?

If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades.

In our new book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism we condense four decades of research and activism into an argument about how ordinary people can understand the nature of the world we live in and find ways to push beyond the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last few decades.
We start by asking how we can get beyond the theologies of university economists – impervious to the failures of their ideas and their costs in human lives – and the opinion politics of angry right-wingers on the Internet. We look at how people in struggle learn about the world through attempting to change things (and in the process overthrow apartheid, dictatorships or empires) and develop movement-based theories such as Marxism, feminism or ecological thinking. Often these forms of thought become taken up into the university, and popular movements have to “reclaim, reuse and recycle” them for their own purposes, in attempting to break out of the limits which the powerful and wealthy want to set on them. 

We Make Our Own History rethinks humanist Marxism as a theory of collective action, including the ways in which social movements from below can develop from localised struggles over individual issues to far-reaching projects for social change (a welfare state, an end to patriarchy, an ecologically sustainable society). It also looks at the history of movements from above – those which can draw on the resources of capital, the state or cultural power to impose themselves. Rather than see these as unstoppable, we show how complex the process of constructing power has been, how at every stage of the way popular resistance has shifted the terrain, and how short-lived all historical forms of capitalism have been. If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades – and is just as vulnerable to the collapse of the alliances which sustain it.…

Yet any attempt to shortcircuit the slow development of popular agency, whether through opinion politics or intellectual critique which discuss structures in isolation from the kinds of agency which sustain them – and the kinds of agency needed to overcome them – is doomed to failure. The most effective orientation for change is one which starts from dialogue with practically situated struggles – those that people have to engage in to sustain their lives – and supports their extension in alliances across space but also across the social world, into far-reaching projects for change which are grounded in a wide range of differentsituations. These processes of external struggle, internal learning and alliance-building are what matter most, and there is no short-cut (in universities, parties or shouting at the computer screen) that can usefully avoid them. 

Human beings make our own history, but not just as we please: neoliberalism, like all other forms of capitalism before it (and in the bigger picture like every form of class society), had a beginning and will have an end. The key question in this crisis is whether movements from below are able to develop together in a way that enables them to set the direction for what comes next.

Open Democracy

The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen