Abstract
Taking an empirical process and subjecting it to a comprehensive critical-theoretical analysis, Ian Greer and Charles Umney’s Marketization shows the power of applying the tools of critical theory and the critique of political economy to real-world issues, exposing the lessons for practice, policy and politics. The first chapters of the book introduce some conceptual foundations drawing on Marxian theoretical insights developed in earlier work such as Umney’s (2018) Class Matters. Particularly impressive is Chapter 2, which provides a theoretical discussion of a crucial conundrum: ‘On one hand, markets under capitalism tend to be anarchic, impersonal, and therefore unruly and difficult to bring under control. On the other, they are also governed by rules that have been set by someone’ (p. 32).
The main chunk of the chapters in the second part of the book report on case studies from the authors’ deep empirical exploration of the industrial relations implications of public service reform in the UK and Europe. The conclusion gives some political coordinates for a wider challenge to marketisation and the incubation of non-market relationships, wisely withdrawing from the proposal of a coherent alternative or remedy for intractable contradictions. Overall, the book shoulders the radical task of taking on a big political-economic process and breaking it down through stories that communicate to a wide audience – reminding this reader of the blue-spined Pelican paperbacks that performed such a public service in times past.
The basic thesis is that processes of marketisation have the consequence of ‘shifting power relations’ (whether intentionally or unintentionally is a possible point of contention), introducing competition which then ‘ratchets up’ pressure on workers (p. 25). It is insufficient, Greer and Umney argue, simply to see marketisation policies as springing from wrongheaded ideas associated with ‘neoliberalism’ propagated by influential networks. Whilst avoiding a ‘master narrative’ (p. 55), it is necessary instead to focus on how these processes take root in ‘everyday life’ (p. 17), specifically in the forms of ‘class discipline’ which are their ‘intended consequence’. Particularly interesting in this last respect is the focus on how competition based on price drives everyday practices of measurement, valuation and commensuration. Illustrated with several excellent case studies in sectors like health, this resonates with recent discussions in this journal, including a current call for papers (Pianezzi et al., 2022; Pitts, 2022).
There are, however, a few aspects of the book that reward some critical scrutiny, mainly relating to how the relationship between the market, society and the state is articulated. At one point the authors pose the question: Is the market, as many on the left argue, a totalising force that subordinates state, society and capital? Or, as many on the centre-left think, can it be tamed or controlled by policymakers, its failures corrected, and society protected? Or maybe, as some libertarians, conservatives and mainstream economists argue, the free market a real utopia, a path towards spontaneous action of autonomous individuals coordinated to the benefit for overall human welfare in the long run (p. 30).
What this line of questioning does not adequately permit is that the market might be all of these and more, with all the complexities and contradictions this implies. The problem, here, begins with the subtitle of the book: How Capitalist Exchange Disciplines Workers and Subverts Democracy. This previews the external relationship the book posits between exchange and, on the one hand, work, and, on the other, democracy. This relationship is depicted as if market exchange imposes itself upon society and state from outside. The subtitle’s implied understanding of social, economic and political phenomena as externally related and imposed upon each other flows through into the book’s reconstruction of capitalist political economy. The market is seen as something enforced upon society and human productive activity; class discipline is seen as something imposed upon one class by another; policy is seen as something enacted on an unsuspecting public. There are several issues with each of these assumptions, namely that they fail to root the social forms that define capitalist society in human practice itself.
Firstly, capitalism, markets and state policy are not things that simply happen to human beings. The struggles that humans have fought for piecemeal and imperfect emancipation have produced capitalist social and economic relations, whether as an intended or unintended consequence. Many of the rights, freedoms and forms of justice that we understand as synonymous with liberal democracy are associated with the extension of markets and the identification of actors with activities or subjectivities forged from market relations. This is especially pertinent when considering the bearers of the commodity labour power, who attain employment rights and bargaining capacity, and associate through trade unions and labour parties, principally as occupants of a particular market position.
Secondly, the system of externally related impositions conceptualised by the book produces a particular understanding of class dynamics. This suggests that the social and economic compulsions attached to market society can be channelled and controlled only by one of two ‘competing interests between class groups’ (p. 22). They are thus felt as a force by only one set of those interests, rather than all classes being dependent on the market and hence processes of marketisation for their reproduction, whatever the contradictions that arise. For the authors, analyses that cast doubt on personalised critiques of capitalism as a ‘rigged’ system (see e.g. Bolton and Pitts, 2020) neglect the study of ‘capitalists as individuals or organisations with agency to shape the world, rather than as mere pawns of abstract value’. They reject any argument that ‘the whole system of market exchange and value extraction . . . actually dominates more or less everyone in it, including capitalists’ (pp. 40–41).
But, I would argue, rather than this going too far, it is possible to go further still. The system of market exchange and value extraction does not just ‘dominate’ worker and capitalist alike, but actually springs from the increasingly complex social and economic activity of everyone involved too. The ‘alien force’ Greer and Umney describe (p. 39) is the unintended consequence of our own human practice, solidified into a structure with powers of its own. Not only that, but we subsist through the reproduction of that creation, as the making and remaking of human life becomes synonymous with the labour power that workers exchange as a commodity on the market, and the capital that accrues to its bearer.
If, as I am suggesting, our relationship with marketisation is one of implication rather than imposition, then another problem arises with the system of externally-related actors and processes presented by Greer and Umney. There is a recurring theme in the book that marketisation goes hand-in-hand with institutions and processes that are insulated from political contestation by ‘workers or the wider public’ (p. 27), whether in the ‘quiet’ politics of the electoral or parliamentary process or the ‘noisy’ politics of protest and extraparliamentary mobilisation. But this once again presumes that these policies are imposed, from outside, by politicians and policymakers upon an unsuspecting public. In an authoritarian society with no effective democratic rights and freedoms, such a dynamic is beyond doubt. But in a liberal democracy that rests upon some kind of consent, even if imperfectly articulated between party manifestos and the mandates received by governments in elections, it cannot simply be said that marketisation just happens to people without them having had any voice along the way.
The uncomfortable truth is that in marketisation initiatives – including measures like active labour market policies in the wake of the financial crisis, robustly challenged in the book – policymakers must try to do the best they can with cues from the voting public. There is a rich empirical basis for the arguments presented in the book, collected over many thousands of hours of interviews and other data. But there is nonetheless a feeling that the complicated and compromised character of the governance dilemmas that ‘pragmatic policymakers’ (p. 21) face is insufficiently accounted for. There is a fundamental difficulty confronting the worlds of politics and policy that emerges from within the contradictions of society and social relations themselves rather than being imposed upon them from outside. Indeed, the book touches upon this state of affairs where it discusses how the state ‘mediates’ the complex push and pull of conflict and collaboration between competing class interests (pp. 53–54).
Politicians and policymakers, no matter how left-wing or right-on, cannot single-mindedly represent the wishes of people as workers or producers alone. Rather, they are answerable to constituencies who, in concrete policy areas, might experience issues from the perspective of a range of social and economic positions including as consumers or users of services. There is therefore pressure to promise these voters, as consumers and users, a better deal. There being few political or economic conditions for radical social transformation, the introduction of competition or marketisation in a sector might seem to function as a means to follow through on these promises. Banal it may be, but contra Greer and Umney, these contingencies mean that class discipline is as likely an unintended as intended consequence of marketisation drives, as policymakers perform the art of the possible and the landscape of existing power relations determines the rest.
In this, the ultimate characterisation of the state used in the book probably does ring true, eventually surpassing a narrow ‘class bias’ view of government: ‘The state does not simply ensure ‘capitalist domination’; given how chaotic societies are, this is not really possible. Instead, it is a set of institutions which embody and crystallise class conflict, but in such a way that the possibility of more radical social transformation is largely defused’ (p. 68). How content this leaves readers will ultimately depend on their stomach for ‘radical social transformation’ at a time where even those fragile achievements of human practice ossified in the status quo need defending. Indeed, in our fractious world the ‘repoliticisation’ of markets that the authors propose could well have ugly conditions and unintended consequences all of its own.
