A capital critique: Progressive alternatives to neo-liberal economic order
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231179969 |
| Author | Van Jackson |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
A capital critique: Progressive
alternatives to neo-liberal
economic order
Van Jackson
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Abstract
Advocates of progressive political economy agree that the neo-liberal economic order
has worsened environmental degradation, worker precarity, and oligarchy, but what
are the alternatives? This article relates left-progressive discourses about concrete
approaches and policy ideas to implications for the global economic order. While pro-
gressives explicitly seek a more social democratic global order, the various policy ini-
tiatives in the progressive imaginary implicitly involve approaches to order-building
that are in scarcely acknowledged competition with one another. While neo-
Keynesianism, justice for the Global South, a Global Green New Deal, and degrowth
are all anti–neo-liberal approaches that pursue the same broad aims—reducing
inequality within the Global North, raising standards of living and buffering structural
violence in the Global South, and responding to the climate crisis—these goals poten-
tially exhibit the tensions of a trilemma.
Keywords
neo-liberalism, economic order, progressivism, leftism, Global South, Global Green
New Deal, social democracy, global order
The political economy plays an outsized role in left-progressive thinking. Not only is
economic inequality a concern of everyone on the left, but the anti-militarist character
Corresponding author:
Van Jackson, Faculty of Commerce and Administration, Victoria University of Wellington, 16 Kelburn
Parade, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Email: van.jackson@vuw.ac.nz
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2023, Vol. 78(1-2) 212–231
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231179969
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of progressive foreign policy finds the sources and remedies for global insecurity pri-
marily in the domain of political economy.
1
But what alternatives are there to the neo-
liberal economic order that has prevailed since the 1970s, and where do they converge
with and diverge from one another?
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, there has been an intellectual ferment fusing
long-running left-progressive resistance critiques against neo-liberalism, with positive
demands that range from modest reform policies to radical transformations of the inter-
national system toward a “post-capitalist”imaginary. This article explains how the
dozens of policy ideas found in those discourses explicitly seek a more progressive
(social-democratic) global order, but implicitly involve approaches to order-building
that are in scarcely acknowledged competition with one another.
Accordingly, I make two arguments. First, left-progressive policy proposals can be
organized based on how they align with competing “models”for global order:
neo-Keynesianism; justice for the Global South; a Global Green New Deal
(GGND); and degrowth. Each has distinct priorities driving its approach, prescribes
distinct ways of overcoming neo-liberalism, and is logically compatible with a finite
range of policies. Second, while all four approaches pursue the same broad goals—
reducing inequality within the Global North, raising standards of living and buffering
structural violence in the Global South, and responding to the climate crisis—these
goals potentially exhibit the tensions of a trilemma. While there are some policies
that would advance all three, most government action would not advance them
equally, implicitly privileging one above the others. Optimizing policy for responding
to the climate crisis and reducing inequality within the North limits how you reduce
economic precarity in the South. Optimizing policy for responding to the climate
crisis and improving life chances in the South constrains the ability to reduce inequality
within the North. And optimizing policy for reducing inequality within the North and
precarity in the South requires compromising how you respond to the climate crisis.
Knowing where and why the policy imaginary that reaches to the left of neo-liberalism
implicates competing models helps ensure awareness of what progressive goals are
being subordinated in order to realize others. The novelty of this research is thus in
both linking specific policy ideas to larger models of economic order and identifying
risks of each model. Put differently, I am relating policies to ordering constructs for the
global political economy. These would be legible to leftists and progressives, both
because they reflect social democratic ends and because the ideas themselves exist
as a somewhat unorganized patchwork of floating proposals and debates on the left.
The remainder of the article proceeds in three parts. The firstpartbriefly establishes a
multidimensional critique of neo-liberalism from the left, and the shared goals of a
1. Aaron Ettinger, “Is there an emerging left-wing foreign policy in the United States?”International
Journal 75, no. 1 (March 2020): 24–48; Van Jackson, “Left of liberal internationalism: Grand strategies
within progressive foreign policy thought,”Security Studies 31, no. 4 (2022): 553–592; Aziz Rana,
“Left internationalism in the heart of empire,”Dissent, 23 May 2022, https://www.dissentmagazine.
org/online_articles/left-internationalism-in-the-heart-of-empire (accessed 12 May 2023).
Jackson 213
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