Abstract
We are happy to begin the editorial by informing our readers that Marketing Theory continues to perform strongly on most indicators. In 2023, we received 200 new submissions, about the same as our average over the last five years. The desk reject rate of 65% was also close to the figures in the previous few years, and the rejection rate was above 80%. In 2024, we are continuing to see a similar performance. We have also witnessed a 77% increase in the total downloads of Marketing Theory articles since 2020, with a rise of 63,000 (28% increase) from 2022 to 2023 alone. The restored impact factor of Marketing Theory is a healthy one at 3.4. We have always believed that suspending the journal’s impact factor was unjustified. As we mentioned in the previous editorial, editors of this journal, both past and present, have never encouraged self-citation to inflate the impact factor. Our self-citation rates reflect the nature of the field, the size of the critical marketing scholarly community, and the uniqueness of Marketing Theory as an outlet. Despite Clarivate’s decision on the impact factor last year, the journal’s performance is heartening and shows that the research community strongly supports the outlet. There are numerous people to thank for their help. Particular thanks must go to the Sage staff, and Sophie Donnely, Zarah Ahmed, and Manisha Bisht, who have supported us much beyond the call of duty. We are also grateful to the Associate Editors, Editorial Board, Authors, and Reviewers, without whose support we would not have succeeded.
Although Marketing Theory continues to flourish, we must come to a different conclusion about markets. Neoliberalism is a concerted attack on both public and competitive market infrastructures across the world. While the attacks on the welfare state and public infrastructures have been duly acknowledged and critiqued (Harvey, 2007), the myth and rhetoric of marketization continue to be associated with neoliberalism even in critical scholarship (Cahill, 2014). Neoliberalism’s central contradiction is not with the state because big capital needs a powerful state to further accumulation (Blakeley, 2024). Along with public infrastructures, working-class interests, and welfare policies, neoliberalism’s key contradiction is with markets that allow competition to dampen the monopolistic impulses of big capital. Given the centrality of markets to this journal, engaging with the issue in this editorial is important.
Markets and competition are used as a façade in neoliberalism to push the interests of monopoly capital. A series of recent studies show how neoliberalism has led to an increase in the concentration of corporate power, financialization, and has tightened the grip of monopoly capital on the global economy (Blakeley, 2024; Durand and Gueuder, 2018; Durand and Milberg, 2020; Eeckhout, 2021; Grullon et al., 2019; Hudson, 2015; Meagher, 2020; Rikap, 2021). The scholarship on monopoly capital has shown how neoliberalism is characterized by the dismantling of markets and the dominance of monopoly and oligopoly power exercised by mega-corporations (Sawyer, 2022). For instance, Durand and Milberg (2020), examining ‘intellectual monopoly capitalism’, find that the intensification of the use of intangible assets within global value chains and government protections have created new sources of monopoly power. Similarly, Eeckhout (2021) provides several examples of rising concentration over the past four decades and illustrates how economies of scale, technological changes, and mergers and acquisitions under neoliberalism favour monopoly capital. The data show that corporate concentration has been on an upward trend in the last four decades, and supported by favourable government policies, the ‘Big Tech’ has been heavily involved in the rise of monopoly capital (Sawyer, 2022). Corporations have been given much greater scope for their actions under the guise of being responsible (Bakan, 2020), and their monopoly powers have expanded with the help of the new regime of intellectual property rights under the aegis of the World Trade Organization (Rikap, 2021). Neoliberalism has also facilitated risk-shifting from corporations to society, rolled back restrictions on corporate size, and provided an ideological framework that allows the global expansion of corporations, the establishment of a corporate-dominated digital economy, and the extreme exploitation of workers (Hathway, 2020). In terms of government policies, neoliberalism has advanced structural adjustment programmes, particularly in the Global South, that have led to deregulation, financialization, corporatization, and lower taxes with devastating consequences for the lower classes (Patnaik, 2019). It was a transformation that was anticipated by Marx (1991, 567), when he noted, ‘[Capitalist mode of production] reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new kind of parasite in the guise of company promoters, speculators and merely nominal directors; an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the promotion of companies, issue of shares and share dealings. It is private production unchecked by private ownership’. We possibly live in an era of neo-feudalism in which the ‘Big Tech’ and finance capital have fundamentally transformed capitalism (Fraser, 2019; Hudson, 2015; Varoufakis, 2023).
Despite being somewhat muted about the role of monopoly capital in his reading of the history of neoliberalism, Harvey (2007, 80) acknowledges, ‘while the virtues of competition are placed upfront, the reality is the increasing consolidation of oligopolistic, monopoly and transnational power’. In doing so, Harvey hints at an important divide between the rhetoric of neoliberalism and its actual functioning. The philosophical foundations of neoliberalism in the formation of Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 by Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek were steeped in antidemocratic politics, anti-egalitarianism, and in attempts to overcome the possibilities of working-class resistance to capitalist accumulation (Brown, 2019; Whyte, 2019). Neoliberalism originated from a political agenda that predicated on restricting the liberty of the working class (Ganti 2014). Yet, there is a strand of critical scholarship that draws upon the work of Michel Foucault (2008) to read neoliberalism as the creation of entrepreneurial, prudential, and marketized subjects. In doing so, such an interpretation gets persuaded by the neoliberal rhetoric of freedom and liberty. This is not the place to open a debate on Foucault’s vast oeuvre, but we would like to draw the attention of readers to the writings that identify several limitations in his reading of neoliberalism and class conflict (Behrent, 2016; Zamora, 2016).
Instead of getting swayed by the neoliberal rhetoric, there is a need to see how it is contributing to monopoly capital and to the dismantling of public and competitive market infrastructures across the world (Blakeley, 2024). To borrow from Bruff (2017), ‘let’s put this bluntly: neoliberalism has nothing to do with markets as commonly conceived, and everything to do with the orchestration of social relations in the name of markets. As a result, neoliberalism in principle and in practice is fundamentally about the coercive, non-democratic, and unequal reorganization of societies along particular lines’. However, such a reading requires overcoming the popular presentation of neoliberalism and paying attention to its actual practices (Hathway, 2020). It is particularly important for marketing scholarship to do so because these ideas have successfully been advanced around the world, and neoliberal concepts represent ‘the ruling ideas of the time’ (Harvey, 2007: 36). It is essential to clarify that we do not see markets as a panacea for human problems and nor do we see the rise of monopoly capital as unique to neoliberalism (Baran and Sweezy, 1966). However, given the dominance of the idea and the destruction it has caused, it is necessary to understand the reality of neoliberalism without getting persuaded by the rhetoric of markets.
There is an urgent need for critical scholarship in marketing to pay attention to the destruction caused by neoliberalism because of two significant consequences for the vast swathes of the global population. First, consider the following observations by Oxfam, (2024, 9-10) in its latest report: For most people around the world, the start of this decade has been incredibly hard. At the time of writing, 4.8 billion people are poorer than they were in 2019. For the poorest people, who are more likely to be women, racialized peoples, and marginalized groups in every society, daily life has become more brutal still….Billionaires are now US$3.3 trillion or 34% richer than they were at the beginning of this decade of crisis, with their wealth growing three times as fast as the rate of inflation….The other big winners in this period of crisis are global corporations. For huge corporations, just as for super-rich individuals, the last two decades have been extraordinarily lucrative and the last few years have been better still: the biggest firms experienced an 89% leap in profits in 2021 and 2022.
The report further notes that the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their wealth since 2020, and five billion people have been made poorer. Such a massive transfer of wealth from the lower to upper classes has happened seamlessly and as part of the routine functioning of neoliberal capitalism. As McNally (2011, 2) sharply articulates, ‘What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity, in other words, is its elusive everydayness, its apparently seamless integration into the banal and mundane rhythms of quotidian existence’. Such a destructive function of neoliberalism for the lower classes has implications for research on consumption, markets, and corporations. It means that class has to be accorded renewed significance in the field because it is the very foundation of a capitalist society (Chibber, 2022). Specifically, there is a need to attend to not only misrecognition and identity but also to the critical aspects of maldistribution and class conflicts (Fraser, 2000).
Second, neoliberalism contributes to the rise of authoritarian tendencies and far-right across the world (Slobodian, 2023). Although there is a strong relationship between fascism and capitalism (Pauwels, 2017; Poltantzas, 2018; Zetkin, 2017), the recent rise of fascist forces is closely related to neoliberalism and the ascendance of monopoly capital (Gambetti, 2020; Giroux, 2021; Maher, 2023). As Patnaik (2016) sharply notes. In the context of crisis-induced mass unemployment, the corporate-financial oligarchies that rule many countries actively promote divisive, fascist, and semi-fascist movements, so that while the shell of democracy is preserved, their own rule is not threatened by any concerted class action. And the governments formed by such elements, even when they do not move immediately towards the imposition of a fascist state as in the case of classical fascism, move nonetheless towards a ‘fascification’ of the society and the polity that constitutes a negation of democracy.
The relationship between neoliberalism and fascism is evident across the North-South divide with the rise of fascist forces in countries as diverse as France, India, and the United States. The ascendance of fascism should alert marketing scholars to the role of political economy and how increasing inequality, reduction in welfare measures, and corporate power are creating fertile ground for fascification of societies.
Robbing of the lower-classes and fascification under neoliberalism should draw attention to a very fundamental issue of justice that is central to critical scholarship. As Rawls (1971, 3) famously notes, ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought’. Accordingly, justice is a fundamental virtue, the one that secures the basis for developing all of the rest. It is only by overcoming institutionalized injustice that we can create the ground on which other virtues, both societal and individual, can flourish (Fraser, 2012). Neoliberalism, however, exacerbates conditions of extreme exploitation and dismantles restrictions that can be placed on big capital. It is a system that thrives on injustice (Brown, 2019; Whyte, 2019). However, its injustice is concealed because neoliberalism places the burden of responsibility on the victims by depriving them of their ability to see the unjust working of corporate power behind the veil of markets. Instead of producing indignation, victims of neoliberalism are interpellated to blame themselves. The rhetoric of individualization, freedom, and marketization limits interpretative schemas that permit lower-classes to categorize their situation not simply as unfortunate but as unjust. In such situations, the harm of injustice is compounded because the exploited have been robbed of the means to interpret their situation as unjust (Fraser, 2012).
Any conversation on justice today would be incomplete without mentioning the ongoing genocide and mass destruction by the state of Israel and its Western allies in Gaza. Although the October 7, 2023 actions of Hamas were highly reprehensible and condemnable, the genocide by the state of Israel and the complicity of Western powers are unpardonable crimes against humanity that are being inflicted on some of the most persecuted people on the planet. As Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, has noted, ‘Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity’ (Amnesty International, 2023). It is tragic that the death of nearly 40,000 Palestinians and the violent displacement of millions are not stopping Wall Street from profiteering from the genocide (Clifton 2023). Therefore, as editors, we not only strongly condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza but also urge marketing scholars to study and write about violence, vulnerable consumers, the military-industrial complex, and the socio-economic consequences of international conflicts.
In such times, it is so important for us to reflect on how Marketing Theory can remain a critical voice in the discipline and be an outlet that centrally locates the question of justice. How do we move ahead in these difficult times and continue to focus on issues that concern people and communities across the globe and not cater to narrow and destructive corporate interests? The issue of justice raises questions on the role of scholarship in general and critical marketing scholarship in particular, on the consequences of academic conversations, and what academic work can and cannot accomplish. There are no easy answers to these questions, but we believe that having a critical voice that is committed to justice, one that is not beholden to corporate interests, requires a collective effort that should continue on the pages of Marketing Theory and beyond those. As editors, we are committed to furthering this agenda. This has been and will always be a collective effort.
It is perhaps appropriate to close the editorial with the inspiring poetry of Bertolt Brecht: Justice is the bread of the people. Sometimes it is plentiful, sometimes it is scarce. Sometimes it tastes good, sometimes it tastes bad. When the bread is scarce, there is hunger. When the bread is bad, there is discontent. Throw away bad justice Baked without love, kneaded without knowledge! Justice without flavour, with a grey crust The stale justice that comes too late! As the daily bread is necessary So is daily justice. It is even necessary several times a day. : : Since the daily bread of justice, then is so important Who, friends, shall bake it? Who bakes the other bread? Like the other bread The bread of justice must be baked By the people. Plentiful, wholesome, daily.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
