Amy — One of our motivations for working as The Alternative School of Economics is the need to demystify big concepts that influence daily life, to try and reclaim them so that they make sense on our own terms and can be applied to everyday experience. The economy, or more specifically the mainstream description of the economy, is one such concept we have tried to unpick and re-understand in various ways, by looking more closely at some of the things within it, like austerity, the language of finance, and money itself. 

Ruth — Neoliberalism is an economic idea that has filtered into everything - where and how we live, how we communicate, how we perceive the world. It has created huge power for some governments and individuals - there have been coups, invasions and assassinations in the name of neoliberal democracy, from aggressive United States involvement in regime change in Latin America and the Pacific, to US and UK’s promise of ‘freedom’ and Western-style democracy in Iraq. It’s had huge ramifications in just about every aspect of our lives, including our imagination. But it’s not a word you hear in everyday language. People might talk about ideas connected to it – democracy, the economy, freedom, or even capitalism – but they don’t talk explicitly about neoliberalism.

Amy — We were both children in the 1980s when the neoliberal project began in earnest with the Thatcher government in the UK. Growing up in Derbyshire, I remember the reverberating effect of the miners’ strikes, when the Conservatives sought to break down the unions, and consequently the industries and communities connected to those unions. It was a violent political, physical and mental assault that has still not been addressed or resolved in the 40 years since.

When did the imagination emerge as an idea attached to neoliberalism?

Ruth — There is a liberal idea that political freedom is intertwined with economic freedom. An economist called Friedrich Hayek outlined this idea in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. It’s based on the idea of economics being an interplay between people as rational economic actors. He saw government intervention as being tantamount to totalitarianism, so rather than an ideological system driving politics, he saw politics in service to the economic system. Which you could say is what we have now. Neoliberalism then permeates everything - not just our work lives, but our health, housing, food, aspirations, happiness, leisure, perceptions of land, possessions, our own bodies, and our relationships from an interpersonal level to how we relate to each other around the globe. Thatcher - who cited Hayek as an influence - talked about using economics as a tool to change how people think: “What's irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it's always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn't that I set out on economic policies; it's that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” [3] Thatcher’s project is concerned with shifting society‘s heart and soul from being rooted in collective experience to being driven by personal need. 

Amy — There is also the idea of the imagination offering different viewpoints. Through a recent project called The End of the Present, [4] where we investigated the connections between financial and environmental crises, we met Bobby Banerjee, Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Research & Enterprise at Bayes Business School. [5] His research areas are corporate social irresponsibility, sustainability, climate change, and resistance movements. Speaking with him about indigenous ecologies and activism, we became interested in how indigenous worldviews are resistant to and incompatible with neoliberal ideology. In a research article co-authored by Banerjee, there is an analysis of three campaigns by indigenous communities against corporate mining practices where they live, and the ways they are resisted: “For many Indigenous communities, natural resources are not valued just in monetary terms that are reflected in commodity prices. The natural environment is often valued for reasons that are non-economic, for example as cultural resources where sacred sites are an integral part of Indigenous cultural identity. The problem of resource distribution therefore needs to be conceptualised not just in economic terms but also ecologically and culturally, given that nature and natural resources are valued in those terms as well. […] Political ecology reveals the incommensurability between economy and ecology, if the latter is to be recognised in non-economic terms. Identifying culturally diverse models of nature further deepens this incommensurability because different groups assign different cultural meanings to nature.” [6] The article suggests ways this ‘political ecology’ can be used ultimately to counter neoliberalism. For us, it’s a way in to thinking about what makes people see the world in a particular way, and what are the possibilities of imagining differently, or to use another phrase borrowed from feminist writer Lola Olufemi, ‘imagining otherwise’ [7]. 

Ruth — The difficultly is being able to imagine an otherwise from within neoliberalism – to escape from the lack of alternatives. Lola Olufemi’s book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise is a deliberately eclectic collection of possibilities, an emergent thought process of political imagining: “Unlike chaotic accelerationism, which seeks to harness and extend the capitalistic grip, feminism asks us to turn away, to refuse, to block the way, to slow down in order to destroy all of those patterns and formations that would have us die before we are ready. As political demands develop, we steal from the past and make better, or bastardise, but we do so with the aim of extending the political traditions based on cooperation, mutual aid for mutual benefit, ensuring that nobody is sacrificed to the election, the border, the surveillance apparatus. To understand the value of a life, one must create the conditions that enable us to defend it and then to flourish. Isn't this the most imaginative task of all? Isn't the real Ethico-Political Bind the tussle between what is and what could be?” It challenges us to question what utopia or progress might look like.

What was your problem or challenge with neoliberalism to start with?

Amy — Although neoliberalism is presented as an economic system for everyone, only a few people benefit - people with money and assets, people invested in the global corporate world. It prioritises the financial markets as the centre around which the global economy circles and around which the world operates. And it is this belief in the market - which puts money, and making money from money, before people or the planet - which has moral implications. It has accelerated extractive capitalism enormously: ruining the planet and consequently people’s homes, and lives.

Ruth —  Neoliberalism really gained traction in the UK in opposition to what was seen as the failure of the big government. Thatcher famously said "Who is Society? There is no such thing! There is only the individual men and women" [8]. She painted the welfare state as bloated, and national industry as holding the country back. Whereas Hayek’s ideas and free-market think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs offer neoliberalism as a prerequisite to growth – growth being the zenith of any capitalist economy. Growth is an idea that predates neoliberalism, but neatly dovetails corporate business practices with neo-colonialism, and dominates global thinking about national economies and development. But it can create boom and bust economies. David Graeber, who died in 2020, said in his book Bullshit Jobs (2018) [9] that neoliberalism “was really the opposite of what it claimed to be; it was really a political project dressed up as an economic one […] While neoliberal rhetoric was always all about unleashing the magic of the marketplace and placing economic over all other values, the overall effect of free market policies has been that rates of economic growth have slowed pretty much everywhere except India and China; scientific and technological advancement has stagnated; and in most wealthy countries, the younger generations, can for the first time in centuries, expect to lead less prosperous lives than their parents did.” Neoliberal capitalism appears to materially make our lives better, but arguably it does not.

Amy — There are huge mental health crises in neoliberal capitalist societies like the UK, as communities, care and cooperation are completely devalued and shattered, something Mark Fisher described as a “mental health plague." [10] More recently, The Care Collective, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, published the Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. [11] They argue “the archetypal neoliberal subject is the entrepreneurial individual whose only relationship to other people is competitive self-enhancement. And the dominant model of social organisation that has emerged is one of competition rather than cooperation. Neoliberalism, in other words, has neither an effective practice of, nor a vocabulary for, care. This has wrought devastating consequences."

You've spent the last few months reading the written words and speeches of the dead. What drew you to these particular figures of the past?

Ruth — We wanted to research the architects of neoliberalism – the economists and theorists who devised it, and the politicians who made it a reality. Those who have had such a huge influence on behaviour and society. Thatcher was an obvious starting point. We read her speeches and interviews to seek out the language she used to describe the economic and political project of neoliberalism. Her catchphrases echo across the decades. Even in 2022, the media reported Liz Truss as “not for turning” [12] over economic policy, a direct use of Thatcher’s famous phrase which she first used at the 1980 Conservative Party Conference speech.

Amy — Thatcher led us to Hayek, as she talks about him in her autobiography. Writing The Road to Serfdom during the second world war, whilst working at London School of Economics, you can see how Hayek was reacting to fascism: the dangers of government control of economic decisions through central planning, the abandonment of individualism leading to a loss of freedom, an oppressive society, dictators and ‘serfdom’ (subjugation) of the individual. It is interesting to trace neoliberalism back to this context, but also to consider how his ideas were unfashionable for a long time. In post-war UK, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was in power - arguably the most socialist government Britain has ever had - establishing a centrally planned NHS, unemployment benefits and public pension scheme. Three decades later though, Thatcher embraced Hayek’s ideas. Reading his words, it’s clear how she turned Hayek’s propositions into Conservative policy - things like the right to buy council housing scheme, or the neoliberal belief that money creates freedom of choice. This is Hayek: “money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man [...] If all rewards, instead of being offered in money, were offered in the form of public distinctions or privileges, positions of power over other men, or better housing or better food, opportunities for travel or education, this would merely mean that the recipient would no longer be allowed to choose, and that, whoever fixed the reward, determined not only its size but also the particular form in which it should be enjoyed.” [13]

Other than Thatcher and Hayek, is there anyone else you came across that greatly shaped or propped up this neoliberal thinking in the UK? Were there any other slogans that carried such influence?

Ruth — The tech industry is an area that has been shaped by different ideology – so initially hippy culture, with proponents like Apple-founder Steve Jobs talking about technology as a form of creative expression, and how computers are “a bicycle for our minds." [14] Then figures like Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, who despised counter-culture and saw entrepreneurialism as a way to control your own destiny. Obviously those are not UK figures, but their technology has changed the way we live.

Amy — Peter Thiel was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, a writer best known for her novels Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943), who was also a philosopher and developed a system called Objectivism. Rand believed in a kind of heroic, utopian individualism, in which life is about the pursuit of your own happiness at all costs, and selfishness is a virtue. These characteristics all work best in a system that promotes and protects individual rights, rather than collective - embodied in laissez-faire capitalism. Her fiction was a way to get her philosophy out into the hands of ordinary readers.

Adam Curtis’ 2011 documentary series All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace [15] connects Ayn Rand to the tech geeks in the 1990s, and how her ideas fed into their vision for computer technology: “a new kind global capitalism, free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.” Importantly, people using this technology would be able to come their own ‘heroic individuals’: “it was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary because computer networks could create order in society without central control.”

Rand’s influence on Silicon Valley [16] was all about appealing to the visionary male hero, changing the norms of society, whose ideas cannot be compromised. She was a kind of philosophical Gordon Gekko, with his ‘greed is good’ slogan from the 1987 movie Wall Street. Unsurprisingly, Trump is a fan, as was Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan (Reagan’s chairman of the Federal Reserve).

During your convening with this group of neoliberal architects, who else came along to counter their ideas?

Ruth — I guess Hall’s subtitle is referencing the ‘long march’ as a leftist idea: a strategy for establishing the conditions for revolution, whether communism, socialism, or freedom, through persistence and solidarity. It’s kind of depressing to see that strategy turned on its head by neoliberalism.

Amy — Yes, but Left cultural theorists like Hall and Doreen Massey do provide pathways for optimism, ways out, and re-writings of the ‘success’ of neoliberalism: “that shift, from social democracy to neoliberalism, did not just ‘happen’. In the retrospective accounts that we read now, social democracy is said to have ‘broken down’ or ‘run into the buffers’, and the neoliberalism that succeeded it is painted as the obvious corrective. (Mrs T. solved the problems generated by social democracy.) It is a story of seamless inevitability. It is astonishing how many people write that history in that way now. For in fact, it was nothing like that. The transition between settlements was a story of political struggle.” [20]

Amy — In terms of our conceptual starting point for this research, we were thinking about what ghosts (or the idea of ghosts) means in terms of the relationship that is occurring imaginatively. How is the idea of a ghost useful for reflecting on something that is so part of everyday life? What can that relationship open up for us?

Ruth — There’s also the idea of something half-dead - David McNally has written about monster-metaphors in his book Monsters of the Market [21]. He traces these metaphors from Marx’s descriptions of capitalism through to modern day economics, in particular the vampire and the zombie: “Like Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, the vampire and the zombie are doubles, linked poles of the split society. If vampires are the dreaded beings who might possess us and turn us into their docile servants, zombies represent our haunted self-image, warning us that we might already be lifeless, disempowered agents of alien powers.”

Amy —  Yes, Mark Fisher talks about how capital is a “zombie-maker”, but also that the “insatiable vampire” would die without our co-operation. In the constant re-hashing of a neoliberal agenda, there is a sense of being stuck in a feedback loop of a never changing system.

Ruth — Thatcher’s words haunt us in that way, and more subtly, those of economists Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School, and politicans like Ronald Reagan. We watched some of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose documentaries (originally broadcast on US public television in 1980 [22]) which are basically propaganda for the free market. It’s presented as a very rational, more ‘modern’ way of life. An episode of the 1990 reissue was voiced by Arnold Swarzenegger: “Being free to choose for me means being free to make your own decisions; free to live your own life; pursue your own goals; chase your own rainbow; without the government breathing down on your neck or standing on your shoes.” The idea of economic and personal freedom is 100% part of the American Dream but has been eroded or misshapen to the point that it has lost its meaning.

Amy — Maggie Nelson’s recent book On Freedom [23] is a really inspiring text that digs deep into the “depleted, imprecise, weaponized” word ‘freedom’, especially from a US context, and how freedom is remolded around different ideologies. She talks about her impulse to write the book stemming from the capture of the word ‘freedom’ by the right wing: “in just a few brutal, neoliberal decades, the rallying cry of freedom as epitomised by Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools, Women's Liberation (etc) was overtaken by the likes of the American Freedom Party, Capitalism and Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Ruth — We‘re haunted by political ideas on both the Left and Right. Mark Fisher talked about how “we are haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance.” This is what he called ‘the failure of the future’. “After 1989, capitalism's victory has not consisted in it confidently claiming the future, but in denying that the future is possible. All we can expect, we have been led to believe, is more of the same - but on higher resolution screens with faster connections. Hauntology, I think, expresses dissatisfaction with this foreclosure of the future.” [24] 

So, Fisher brings us back to the role of inevitability in the neoliberalism project. If a situation is inevitable, it shuts down the potential of there being any alternative – it forecloses the future and so forecloses the imagination, would you agree?

Amy — As part of the Roaming Symposium for Decentralising Political Economies, we collaborated with artist Marcus Coates on a workshop called ‘Neoliberalism and the Imagination’. Marcus’ previous projects include School of the Imagination [25], where participants were encouraged to develop the scope and use of their imagination as a problem-solving tool. As a group, they advised the health team at the London Assembly, City Hall to reflect upon and develop London wide policy. 

Ruth — Marcus introduced us to Gary Lachmann’s book Lost Knowledge of Imagination [26] which outlines the way the imagination has been marginalised over the last three centuries, through the rise of rational thought and the move away from mythology - the same trajectory that has forefronted economics as a science.

Amy — Before the workshop, we talked with Marcus about how the imagination is the unconscious becoming conscious, but those thoughts happened without our control - they don’t define who we are. We discussed how cultural norms, developed from the dominance of enlightenment ideals, have feared the irrational. We became interested in the idea of the imagination being limited by this and wanted to see if an unconscious experience might tell us something about the relationship neoliberalism has to the imagination.

Ruth — With a group of people in the workshop, Marcus led us through three guided meditations. They were journeys developed from characteristics we identified as particular to neoliberalism: individualism, anthropocentrism, wealth accumulation, and concepts of ownership and territory. We were invited to use our imaginations to visualise our surroundings and make decisions within the meditation. We then collectively reflected on what we saw and did in the meditation, noticing the relationships that formed within that imaginative space.

Amy — The question emerged as to whether the imagination is a place where the social norms of neoliberal life are mirrored or played out, or if it might offer a place where we can be liberated from those norms, and rethink things or find new perspectives. For example, one of the guided mediations was about building some kind of dwelling and how to do that in a place where other living things had already made their home. One participant recounted how she built something and then invited everyone in, which then led to a discussion afterwards about sharing instead of ownership of self, and the rights around possession. We could see potential in ways to use the imagination to reflect on how we both comply and resist the economic and political doctrine in which we live.

Could you tell me about your interest in the role of the imagination as a tool of resistance in neoliberal societies?

Ruth — I’ve been reading a lot of books by female science fiction writers in the last few years, and there are two more voices from the dead we thought about in relation to this research: Ursula K Le Guin talked about the power of imagination: “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” [27] Octavia Butler deliberately centered black female protagonists in her visions of the future. When talking about her frustration with whiteness in Science Fiction, she also talked about its potential: “Science Fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions.” Her Parable novel series, which presents the dystopian extreme of neoliberal America, gained a lot of attention during Trump’s presidency: it’s devastatingly prescient, but candidly hopeful. Both writers have a power that is subversive, that circumnavigates reality whilst reflecting on it.

Amy — Art, fiction and creativity all have the potential to be radical positions from which to create alternative worlds. I want to think about how these worlds become real. How can we begin to believe in these alternatives in a way that can be transformative? Through our research on the imagination we have started to look at the relationship between imagination and belief: how they are connected, how the imagination manifests as belief. For example, neoliberal ideologues talk about belief in the markets as the key to a successful system, whereas there are indigenous communities that believe the mountain in their territory has personhood. These two different belief systems show how the imagination creates culture, how culture develops from belief, with different consequences for people's lives, the world and its survival. The power of the imagination is perhaps why it has been feared in the past, or deliberately devalued – the same way magic, psychics or what might be described as spiritual practices have been.

Ruth — There are several threads are exploring further - one is about using imagination as a tool, through fiction, sonic meditations and discussion. We are doing this collectively with union members in Manchester. We want to get more understanding of how imagination and belief systems enable neoliberalism to operate. Further down the line, we’re interested in spiritualism, and talking to the dead, so communing with some of the writers, economists and public figures we have talked about, as a more imaginative, less ‘rational’ kind of research. Another is to get more understanding of how imagination and belief systems enable neoliberalism to operate.

Amy — Yes, like the way spirituality has become a lucrative business, loosely attached to a kind of competitive wellness and ‘living your best life’, and the way religious belief has been used to expand and support the neoliberal colonial project. Both speak to this hierarchy of transactional objectivity over subjective imaginary. We hope that by unpicking the neoliberal imagination, we can understand the workings of the neoliberal machine, and begin to imagine other possibilities.