capitalism is not a singular, coherent and logical system, but a contradictory and unevenly-developed regime, bound together by a reworked package of market ideologies, hyper-rationalist truth claims, competitive pressures and institutional practices, then its transcendence may not take the form of a Big Bang-style implosion. Zombie Neoliberalism What accounts for the relative durability of neoliberalism is not some comparative advantage in institutional creativity, or even that the peak institutions of globalising capitalism continue to favor market- oriented strategies, though these factors are certainly significant. Rather, the recasting of the rules of the game of regulatory transformation in neoliberal terms, enabled and energised by now well-established circuits of policy development, has meant that the sociopolitical and institutional environment increasingly induces and incen- tivises neoliberal strategies—even if it 2 cannot secure their ‘success’. Hayek him- self always insisted that neoliberalism must be a flexible creed.” In the long and winding path from its initial (re)articula- tion as an ideational-ideological project through to its close encounters with diverse forms of state and extra-state powers over the past three decades, neoliberalism has demonstrated remarkable shape-shifting capacities. Its destructively creative ‘logic’ may have initially been animated by the multifront war against the social state, social entitlements and social collectivities —which can be seen as the ‘rollback’ phase of neoliberalism—but the project has become increasingly consumed by the proliferating challenges of managing the costs and contradictions of earlier waves of neoliberalisation. Neoliberalism, in this sense, is not what it used to be. From dogmatic deregulation to market-friendly reregulation, from structural adjustment to good governance, Bfrom budget cuts to regulation-by-audi from welfare retrenchment to active social policy, from privatisation to public-private partnership, from greed-is-good to markets- with-morals... the variegated face of ‘rollout’ neoliberalism represents a deeply consolidated and a crisis-driven form of market rule. Maybe it is still being guided, in some way or another, by Hayek’s rusty old compass, trained on the unattainable (and stark) utopia of a free-market society, but the vanguard momentum of the ‘revo- lution from above’, such as the Thatcherite moment of unapologetic confrontation and ‘conviction politics’, has long since given way to opportunistic searches for a Third Way, ameliorative firefighting, trial-and-error governance, devolved ex- perimentation and the pragmatic embrace of ‘what works’. More often than not, the new neoliberalism learns (and evolves) by wrongdoing, having become mired in the unending challenge of managing its own contradictions, together with the social and economic fallout from previous deregulations and malinterventions. It fails, but it tends to fail forward. For all the ideological purity of free-market rhetoric, for all the mechanistic logic of neoclassical economics, this means that the practice of neoliberal statecraft is inescapably, and profoundly, marked by compromise, calculation and contradiction. There is no blueprint. There is not even a map. Crises themselves need not be fatal for this mutable, mongrel model of gov- ernance, for to some degree or another neoliberalism has always been a creature of crisis. But selectively exploiting the crises of Keynesian-welfarist, developmen- tal or state-socialist systems is one thing, responding to crises of neoliberalism’s own making is quite another. Increasingly, though, this is the unseemly task of me- tastasised forms of roll-out neoliberalism, be this in the aftermath of, say, the Asian financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina or the 45unravelling of New York/international credit markets. Each of these moments is typically accompanied by frenzied attempts to reboot (and sometimes to rebrand) the rickety regime of market rule, but they are each also—viscerally and strategically— political moments, the outcomes of which cannot be predicted. It is possible that a revamped neoliberalism 3.0 may neutralise, displace or reschedule some of the under- lying crisis tendencies, but these are never permanently resolved. Each new genera- tion of the free-market software, even if it comes in different packaging, will contain new bugs, was well as the old design flaws This means that what passes for ‘neoliberal governance’ at present invariably displays a rolling, if not roiling, dynamic. It is (re) animated as much by contradiction as it is by conviction. What is it, then, that sustains the project in the face of deep contradic- tions and episodic waves of resistance and contestation? Should we still attribute ideo- logical, political and institutional potency 46 to the sullied, shop-worn and profoundly discredited shell of late neoliberalism, the last rites of which have recently been read by Naomi Klein, Eric Hobsbawm and others? Is it time to start thinking about neoliberal hegemony in the past tense? At this stage, it seems unlikely that the regulatory edifice of neoliberalism will collapse, in toto, house-of-cards style, if for no other reason than the fact that neoliberalism was never a monolithic structure in the first place. We have been spared, for a time, the hubris of free-market zealots, but the turmoil also induced by the global economic crisis seems, if any- thing, to have strengthened the (suppos- edly ‘safe’) hands of the pragmatists and technocrats—the true inheritors of rollout neoliberalism. George W. Bush’s feeble protestation, on the eve of the first G20 summit on the global financial crisis, that he remained ‘a market-oriented guy’, a statement that his successor has found 47it necessary to affirm, might be seen as a perfect metaphor for the bankruptcy of unre- constructed neoliberalism. It is extremely difficult to interpret the Obama administra- tion’s pragmatic centrism as a major break with business-as-almost-usual neoliberalism: unprecedented ‘emergency’ measures not only rebooted the financial system, but quickly restored Wall Street profitability; meanwhile, systemic un(der)employment has been re- styled as a ‘lagging indicator’. But if one takes the view that what neoliberalism has really ‘been about, ever since its birth as a transna- tional ideological project, in Paris, sixty years ago at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, has been the evolutionary development of proac- tive forms of liberal statecraft,” the market meltdown that began in 2008 might have been predicted to generate further rounds of flawed, pro-market reregulation, rather than to trigger some fall of the Berlin Wall-style systemic implosion. And technocrats, as we know, tend to work quietly. The accompanying political language has correspondingly been 48 that of grim determination and cautious pragmatism, in contrast to the rising crescen- do of market triumphalism over the past two decades. More and more, this sounds like an invitation to the Fourth Way. Neil Smith had it right when he diagnosed the state of neoliberalism, channelling Habermas's critique of modernity, as ‘dead but dominant’. The social interests that the neoliberal project was cobbled together to serve—corporate capital, financial elites, the shareholding classes, transnational investors—may have been flushed out into the open, but at the same time they have been reasserting their privileged interests with breathtaking au- dacity. The most urgent actions, with the advent of the financial crisis in the United States, were concerned with the salvation of failing banks and corporations, while pandering to the shattered ‘confidence’ of the markets. On the face of it, as Hobsbawm, Klein and many others argue, this is a 49damning, if not fatal, indictment of neo- liberal governance. Maybe the tide has finally turned, But we must also remember that, while this clumsy resort to state power (for all the rank hypocrisy and cog- nitive dissonance of the recent period of crisis [mis]management) may have created some awkward moments for dogmatic believers in the free-market script, the active (abuse of state power is quite consistent with the neoliberal playbook. The interests and institutions that were bailed out in 2008-09 never played by the rules of the free market anyway. And we might ask which way the tide is actually going, when financial risk is being socialised at an incredible rate and the rationalities of ‘Wall Street and Washington have become sutured together as never before? On the other hand, it is surely no mere oversight that endemic problems of socio- economic insecurity, not only among the very poor but also increasingly among the working and middle classes, remain brazenly unaddressed. Worse still, macr- economic exigencies, we are told, could mean that this ‘may not be the time’ for, say, redistributive tax reform, fair-housing legislation or systematic antipoverty efforts. Instead, the most urgent responses were focused on patching up the system of trickle-up economics in order to insulate the financial regime from future blow- backs (perhaps especially from ‘below’). Reregulation effort remains substantially preoccupied with the problem of financial tisk and the hysteria of ‘the markets’. Meanwhile, bearers of social risk are ex- pected to continue to get by on their own. At all cost, though, they must keep shopping. Exploiting crisis conditions, we must re- member, has been a hallmark of neoliberal governance, even if the recent pattern of events seems less and less like a ‘normal crisis. But again, the jaded and discreditedproject threatens to lurch haphazardly onward (if not forward) —that is, unless concerted political opposition blocks its path and an alternative sociopolitical programme begins to fill the attendant vacuum. The global economic crisis may have been abnormal in its scope and in- tensity, but the social conditions of crisis that it engendered have since apparently been normalised. ‘Dead but dominant’, neoliberalism may indeed have entered its zombie phase. The brain has apparently long since ceased functioning, but the limbs are still moving, and many of the defensive reflexes seem to be working, too. The living dead of the free-market revolution continue to walk the earth, though with each resurrection their decid- edly uncoordinated gait becomes even more erratic. Alternatives? Is this really the dawning of a postneolib- eral era, in which the tyranny of market rule is vanquished by the rediscovery of multilateral cooperation and supranational regulation? It is tempting to conclude that neoliberalism’s end arrived, quite appro- priately, in the form of its very own short, sharp shock—of overdetermined financial ctisis—and that what now beckons is a more humane, postneoliberal political order, governed by fundamentally different tenets and interests. Neoliberalism, one might reflect, was powerful enough to unleash financialised capitalism but not powerful enough to save this destructively creative system from itself, In this light, it is at the very least ques- tionable that the hastily conceived plans —in treasury ministries around the world and at the G20 summits—to ‘bring the state back in’ represent an emergent form of ‘financial socialism’? entailing ‘a step beyond the neoliberal mind map’ Again, to paraphrase David Harvey, it really does depend on what you mean by neoliberalism.The kind of neoliberal Realpolitik that has for decades fashioned a coexistence with selective corporate welfare, with the public absorption of private risk, with periodic bailouts of financial and credit markets and with a succession of state author(is)ed projects of ‘deregulation’, can surely learn to live with the occasional violation of textbook principle—in the interest of getting the markets moving again, of course. The recent experience of rolling bank bailouts and publicly funded reflations of credit markets does not mark such a major break with neoliberal practice, as some have been claiming, while the return of debt financing—along with loan conditionalities —threatens to recreate the circumstances in which multilateral banks ‘shoved the Washington Consensus down the throats of low- and middle-income countries’** However, the very public exposure of what were previously obfuscated or clandestine acts of hypocrisy and incompetence may yield (political) consequences of its own. The seeds of an indeterminate legitimation crisis may indeed have been set Al of this begs the question of what it will take to truly escape the ‘neoliberal mind map’. On their own, crisis conditions will never be enough, not least because the tools of neoliberal governance were forged in, and for, precisely such condi- tions, and because the project of market rule has been periodically rejuvenated and restructured through crises. This said, the challenges posed by a genuinely global crisis are of a qualitatively different order than that of the succession of local (or local- ised) crises that neoliberalism has con- fronted since the 1980s. The global eco- nomic crisis placed enormous pressure on the neoliberal operating system. At the same time, the world that this system. has wrought—of globally integrated, heavily privatised, trade exposed, deeply financialised and socially segregated capitalism—is clearly far more profoundlyentrenched than any particular facet of neoliberal governance. Realistic near-term threats, such as a protracted overaccumu- lation crisis, some kind of global lock-in of public-sector austerity, renewed pressure for microneoliberal strategies, endemic failure in multilateral coordination, a wide- spread debt crisis and a relegitimation of neoliberal centrism under the Obama. administration, prompted Patrick Bond, among others, to issue a stern caution against ‘illusory postneoliberal hubris’ Crisis-plus-governance-failure may also be insufficient, then, to secure a transition to a progressive variant of postneoliberalism. Should such a hegemonic transition occur, it may well take the form, as some have been arguing from a Latin American per- spective, of an extended war of position, rather than a Big Bang” It is here that the uneven development of neoliberalism, again, makes a difference, because while this may reduce the likelihood of a unified, 56 ruptural collapse, it does open up the possibility of a multifront war of position, waged across a differentiated terrain and through a range of contextually specific, conjunctural struggles. Following this logic, and recognizing the constructed nature of neoliberal capitalism, Sekler concludes, ‘Just as neoliberalism cannot be regarded as a monolithic block, but as (re)constituted in different contexts, post- neoliberalism or the respective counter- hegemony has to be considered “under construction”... [through] many postneo- liberalisms’28 This raises the prospect of a form of neoliberal transcendence grounded not only in strategic opposition to axiomatic neoliberal positions (regarding, for instance, financialisation, deregulation, labour flexibililisation, privatisation and trade liberalisation) but also in a compre- hensive and principled rejection of the neoliberal development imaginary, based on market universalism, one-size-fits-all policymaking and global integration viacommodification. The (re)mobilisation, recognition and valuation of multiple, local forms of development, rooted in local cultures, values and movements would indeed represent a radical break with neoliberal universalism. And just as Latin America was the ‘laboratory for neoliberal experiments par excellence.” it is perhaps fitting that this region should also have become one of the principal proving grounds for alternative forms of socioeconomic politics.” While Latin American experiences can and should spur the postneoliberal imagination, the region's lessons are also sobering ones. Here, audacious forms of neoliberalised accumulation by dispossession inadvertently prepared the ground for widespread social mobilisation and radical resistance politics. And in the decade or so that followed, electoral realignments in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere consolidated progressive gains, as a period 58 of hegemonic dispute gave way to region- wide hegemonic instability. Moving pur posefully in the direction of postneoliberal forms of governance has, however, been a challenge, even for the region’s largest economies. Global financial flows, trading regimes and investment policies continue to be guided by logics of short-term price competition—in the context of global overaccumulation—while progressive forms of multilateral coordination can only be negotiated in the long shadows of imperial and neoimperial power." Whereas neoliberalism may have exposed the limits of financialised capitalism, it has also undermined the strategic and organisational resources required for its transcendence. The prospects for such forms of alternative politics will surely be struc- tured and constrained by the neoliberalized terrains on which they must be prosecuted, This is not simply a matter of contending with (residual) neoliberal power centres, 59in economics ministries, in international financial institutions, in think tanks, in the media and in much of the corporate sector. Perhaps more intractably, it must also entail overcoming the profound reconstitu- tion of cross-national, interlocal, and cross-scalar relations with various forms of market rule, which facilitate the repro- duction of neoliberalised logics of action, institutional routines and political projects —through both the dull compulsion of competitive pressures and the harsh imper- atives of regulatory downloading. The long-run consequences of the global economic crisis may indeed include an intensification of these hostile conditions such that some modalities of neoliberal rule may be reconstituted almost by default Ii the untidy arc of the neoliberal ascend- ancy was characterised by a challenge to faltering Keynesianism, followed by conservative vanguardism and stridency, and then by centrist accommodation and 60. technocratic normalisation, it may indeed be about to enter a post-programmatic, or ‘living dead’, phase, in which residual neoliberal impulses are sustained not by intellectual and moral leadership, or even by hegemonic force, but by underlying macroeconomic and macroinstitutional conditions—including excess capacity and overaccumulation at the world scale, enforced public austerity and global in- debtedness, and growth-chasing, beggar- thy-neighbor modes of governance. In such a climate, the transformative potential of progressive, postneoliberal alternatives —for all their social, ecological and indeed economic urgency—may be preemptively constrained, if not neutralised. It will continue to be imperative, therefore, to push for radical transformations of interlocal and international regulatory relations, the liminal zones in which residual neoliber- alisms lurk, through every available channel, including the nation state. New spaces must be carved out not only for a global alethics of responsibility but also for sustain- able forms of sociospatial redistribution —anathema to neoliberalism—which can ultimately only be secured berween places, through a reconstitution of sociospatial relations, This is not simply to say that progressive localisms can only be secured, in the long term, through complementary ‘top-down’ interventions, but to suggest that the effective propagation of such alternatives, while a prerequisite for post- neoliberalism proper, will ultimately require a transformative shift in inherited macroinstitutional rules of the game— neoliberalism’s last hiding place as a ‘living dead? ideology. Absent this, the po- tential of progressive postneoliberal projects will continue to be frustrated by the dead hand of market rule. 2 Bibliography J—Steven Erlanger, ‘Sarkozy stresses global financial overhaul’, New York Times, 26 September 2008 2—Gusenbauer (2008: I). 3—(2008: 2), Ibid. 4—Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Is the intellectual opinion of capitalism changing” radio broadcast, Today, BBC Radio 4, 20 October 2008, www.news.bbe.co.uk/ today/hi/today/newsi 5—Ioseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The End of Neo- Liberalism?” Project Syndicate Commentary, 08 July 2008, www-project-syndicate.org/ commentary/stiglitz101/English 6—Perry Anderson (2000: 7). 7—Ammanvel Wallerstein (2008: 2). &—Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review 1, January-February 2008: 1-9. 9—Ulrich Brand and Nicola Sekler, “Postneoliberalism: catch-all word or valuable analytical and political concept?” Development Dialogue 51 (2009): 5-13. 810—Neil Brenner, Jaime Peck and Nick Theodore ‘Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways’, Global Networks, vol. 10, no. 2: 182-22. 11—Colin Leys, ‘Still a question of hegemony’, New Left Review, 1/181, May-June 1990: 119-128. 12—Jaime Peck and Adam Tickell, ‘Conceptualizing Neoliberalism, Thinking Thatcherism’, in Contesting Neoliberalism Urban Frontiers, eds. Helga Leitner, Jaime Peck and Eric S. Sheppard (New York: Guilford, 2006), 26-50. 13—David Harvey, ‘The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power: Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism? Counterpunch, March 13-15, 2009, www:counterpunch.org/ harvey03132009.htm1 14—Jaime Peck, ‘Zombie Neoliberalism and the Ambidextrous State’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 14, 1 (2010): 104-110. ‘15—Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time [1944] (Boston: Beacon, 2001) 64 16—Stephanie Lee Mudge, ‘What Is Neo-liberalism?’ Socio-Economic Review, vol. 6, issue 4: 703-731. 17—¥. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom [1949] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and ‘Friedman, 1951’ not included 18—Elmar Altvater ‘Postneoliberalism or postcapitalism? The failure of neoliberalism in the financial market crisis’, Development Dialogue 51 (2009): 73-86. 19—Ibid.: 75. 20—Hayek, The Road to Serfilom. 21—See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008): Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Jaime Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6522—Neil Smith, ‘Neo-liberalism: dead but dominant’, Focaal 51 (2008): 155-157. 23—(Sennett, 2008). 24—Elmar Alvatar. ‘Postneoliberalism of postcapitalism?”: 79. 25—Degol Hailu, ‘Is the Washington Consensus Dead?” One Pager 82 (2009), International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, Brasilia. 26—Patrick Bond, ‘Realistic postneo- liberalism—a view from South Africa’, Development Dialogue 51 (2009): 193-21 27-—Brand and Sekler, ‘Postneoliberalism: catch-all word or valuable analytical and political concept?”, Emir Sader, ‘Postneo- liberalism in Latin America’, Development Dialogue 51 (2009): 171-179; and Sekler, 2009). 28—Sekler (2009: 62-63. Nicloa Sekler, ‘Postneoliberalism from a counter-hegem- onic perspective’, Development Dialogue 5 (2009): 62-63. 29—Sader, ‘Postneoliberalism in Latin America’. 66 30—(Kennedy and Tilly, 2008; Brand and Sekler, 2009b). Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly, ‘Making sense of Latin America’s “third left”, New Politics 11 (2008): 11-16; and Brand and Sekler, “Stuggling between autonomy and institu- tional transformations’. 31—Paul W. Drake, “The Hegemony of US. Economic Doctrines in Latin America’, in Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen (ed.) Latin America After Neoliberalism (New York: The New Press, 2006), 26-48. o