The choices that lie beyond neoliberalism

Many Renewal readers yearn, I am sure, for a world ‘beyond neoliberalism’. A recent high-profile and intellectually fertile conference, which aimed to manifest precisely that, will no doubt be of interest.

Over three days at the end of May, hundreds of academics, policy makers, journalists, and former government advisors gathered at the Møller Institute in Churchill College, Cambridge to ‘envision a new political economic order’. Organised by the distinguished historians of North American capitalism and politics Gary Gerstle and Noam Maggor, along with Hannah Jackson, the conference was impressive. The dedicated website is well worth bookmarking for post-conference video content.

The Financial Times journalist Rana Foroohar characterised the symposium as ‘Bidenomics in exile’. The organisers, to their credit, worked hard to keep the conversations global; the line-up included many interventions focused on East Asia, South America, and Africa. But it was no coincidence that multiple ex-Biden administration advisors, such as Heather Boushey and Jennifer Harris, were among the speakers. As Harris’s remarks on behalf of the conference funders, the Hewlett Foundation, made plain, a core goal was to sketch out an intellectual roadmap for ‘progressives’ in the United States.

If not quite the Bourbons in London glaring across the Channel at Napoleonic France, there was a certain atmosphere of émigré politics. Trump came up in the Q&As even more than usual, and post-Biden disagreements within the American left circulated freely. Wildly varying views could be heard, for instance, on the ‘abundance’ agenda advocated by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein.

This in itself made the conference a valuable exercise. Even accounting for its catastrophic moral failure on Gaza and its inability to avert a second Trump presidency, the Biden administration remains a significant lodestone. In its own conception at least, it was self-consciously a major attempt to reset the ideological, social, and institutional coordinates of mainstream economic policymaking, on fiscal, industrial, and labour policy in particular. Insofar as one accepts ‘neoliberalism’ as the most appropriate descriptive term for those coordinates, it was without question an attempt to move beyond them. Its ambiguities, from derisking to inflation, are thus critical to think through.

However, as the conference progressed, a more fundamental set of tensions arose, centred around the relationship between recent policy innovation in the economic sphere, and new forms of authoritarianism in the political sphere. As Maggor noted in his perceptive closing remarks, an implicit disagreement emerged between those who were primarily excited by the possibilities of ‘post-neoliberalism’, and those who were wary of, even frightened by, the prospect of ‘post-liberalism’.

The synchronicity of ‘post-neoliberalism’ and ‘post-liberalism’ is undeniable. After all, few would describe Trump II’s trade policy as neoliberal. An honest assessment would concede, moreover, that the protectionist and nationalist elements of Biden’s agenda flowed logically from many of the ideas pursued by Trump in his first term. Moreover, the West’s newfound enthusiasm for industrial policy is in many respects a direct reaction to the perceived successes of an oppressive and dictatorial party-state which has few compunctions about anti-neoliberal heresies like capital controls and state direction. As Helen Thompson stressed, the West was fundamentally trying (in her view, unrealistically in the case of EVs) to ‘catch up’ with China.

For a social democrat, especially a liberal social democrat, this is an uncomfortable train of thought. To be sure, there is significant scope for the centre-left to embrace the ‘repoliticisation’ of economic policy, in the sense of the reassertion of democratic power over markets and private power. As Renewal co-editor David Klemperer recently wrote, social democracy is characterised by post-Marxism and post-liberalism in the proper sense: influenced by but departing from both.

Yet there are also political risks. If a break from ‘neoliberalism’ would be welcome, a break from liberalism tout court is a much more dangerous prospect. It was striking that several (though certainly not all) of the examples of successful post-neoliberal policies given during the conference were pursued by illiberal or anti-democratic states. China was the most obvious example, but there were others too. Ha-Joon Chang discussed South Korea’s dramatic industrialisation in the 1970s, but noted in passing that this country was then ruled by a dictatorship – one, we should add, pockmarked by coups, uprisings, and declarations of martial law. Such parallels might seem gothic. But even taking into account its longstanding social sickness of gun violence, democratic failings, and gaping class and racial inequalities, the contemporary United States shows how quickly an authoritarian turn can lead to people being snatched off the streets by masked state forces.

It was striking too that a (brilliant) discussion on ‘governing finance’ harboured an implicit tension between contributors who advocated that the ‘sovereign’ takes a more directive role in money creation in order to disempower systemic private interests, and those who emphasised the radical inequality of the global monetary order that confronts the Global South (and, to differing extents, all of us who are not American or, at a push, Chinese). For countries without a global reserve currency, ‘which sovereign?’ is perhaps the more important question, and in 2025 there are only unappealing answers.

Speaking personally, my anxiety about the 2020s covariance of post-neoliberalism and post-liberalism was not helped by the event’s Fabian tenor (and I say this as not only as an archetypal metropolitan elite but one unfashionably committed to the emancipatory potential of a good filing system). Obligatory references to ‘social forces’ abounded, but few examples were in evidence. Indeed, many papers pointed in more pessimistic directions. Intellectual historian Anton Jäger stressed the collapse of associational life, leading to a volatile and ungrounded ‘hyper politics’ accelerated by social media. Sociologist (and Renewal contributing editor) Sacha Hilhorst presented findings from her ethnographic research in Mansfield, England. Even though she stressed the interest her interlocutors had in leftish ideas about economic policy, the main takeaway was the utter contempt in which many British voters hold  politicians and all mainstream political parties, and the centrality of the meme of ‘corruption’ to how politics is understood. If I was a radical right strategist, I would see a lot of promise in such raw materials.

In such a context, social democrats should reflect carefully on what we prioritise, where our red lines are, and with whom we are willing to form alliances. UCL academic (and former Ed Miliband advisor) Marc Stears put the problem crisply in his plenary remarks. Relating the conference’s big-picture themes to the travails of the Keir Starmer’s government, Stears identified two factional camps within Number 10: the post-liberals and their opponents. The former embrace a performatively cruel politics of harsh migration control, a scepticism of multilateral legacies like the ECHR, and an almost mystical faith in a homogenous and insurgent, Reform-curious working class. He linked this camp, which naturally included Morgan McSweeney, to the ‘Blue Labour’ contingent.

According to Stears, however, the Labour post-liberals also have opponents in the government. These opponents continue to believe that a social democratic agenda demands a humanistic approach to migration control, and the protection as well as reform of the liberal global order. They also look towards future electoral coalitions that encompass middle-class progressive and multicultural working-class voters in the cities, as well as those in Reform-curious constituencies. Stears suggested that it is unclear where Keir Starmer himself falls on such questions. Does he agree with McSweeney, his chief of staff, or Richard Hermer, his appointee as Attorney General? Do we really know? Does he?

Regardless of where Starmer lands, my conference takeaway was that social democrats in the UK need to be sure that they can answer such questions themselves. In short, where will we draw the line? I do not want to be misunderstood. Given severity of the problem facing us, social democrats should be open to quite radical economic policies, including those at a national as well as at a multilateral level. There is significant scope, and a growing need, for the state at different levels to discipline private interests for the sake of the greater public good. And certainly, as we continue to confront a dangerous world, we should be clear-eyed about the realism of geopolitical strategies. But there are bridges too far, there are ‘allies’ that are anything but, and there are concessions social democrats should not make. It never has been a binary choice of market versus state. Who governs the state, on what basis, and to what end, matters too.

Colm Murphy is a Lecturer in British Politics at Queen Mary University of London, and a contributing editor of Renewal.