How Neoliberalism Got Where It Is: Elite Planning, Corporate Lobbying and the Release of the Free Market

DAVID MILLER

The argument of this chapter is that corporate lobbying organizations are at the forefront of organizing and pursuing capitalist class interests through the promotion of neoliberal agendas and the planning of neoliberal projects (see Birch and Mykhnenko, this volume). These organizations exist to plan and implement policy, sometimes for a wide range of ruling class fractions and sometimes for a much narrower ideological base, as a number of chapters in this book (for example, Birch and Tickell; Jessop) will later show. Either way, corporate lobbying has been at the centre of efforts to expand and globalize corporate power, to introduce and develop the 'doctrine' of neoliberalism according to which, as David Harvey (2005) has put it, 'market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action'. In this sense, neoliberalism is the ideology of the emergent transnational capitalist class which has planned and constructed an architecture of global governance in response to threats from national capital (Euroscepticism in the UK, for example), from neoconservatives (internationalist American exceptionalists, for example – see Diamond 1995) and from the Left.

However, the planning and implementation of the global architecture of neoliberalism depended on the organization of interests. It was only possible to introduce neoliberal ideas in practice when enough members of the ruling class were either won over or had become indifferent or constrained enough to make opposition futile; it was only possible, in other words, by preparing the ground. This has been a long-term process, as will be outlined in this chapter, and has depended on a battle of ideas, certainly, but also on a battle to put certain ideas into practice, to win certain conflicts and to build concretely on these victories. It is certainly not the case that this was done in an abstract way, in total divorce from national and global economic conditions. But nor was it the case that the economic conditions of the mid-1970s inevitably produced neoliberalism. It depended on the existence of a relatively coherent if inchoate and evolving set of ideas, an emergent class ideology to which increasing fractions of the ruling class could be won over. If the neoliberals had to invent on the spot all the ideas and the concrete political victories they had won by the 1970s, and then practically build on them, they would have tried – but they would have been acting in (different) circumstances not of their choosing.

As might be apparent from this brief discussion it is my argument that the question of ideas is important in historical development as discussed elsewhere in this book (by Birch and Tickell, for example). The concept of hegemony is useful here, though it is important to specify that the 'ruling ideas' referred to do not necessarily become those of subordinated classes. Rather I refer to hegemony as the process by which ruling class fractions are able to exert leadership over closely related fractions and to forge ruling class unity on particular questions, even if only fleetingly. Of course this unity need not be total and may fracture quickly, as arguably has been the case with the ruling class 'realist' opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the peeling off of other elements of the ruling class when Iraq turned out not to be a cake walk. The other obvious way in which ruling class consensus is fractured is when 'experience 1' (as Edward Thompson called it) walks in 'without knocking' (Thompson 1978: 201). I refer of course to the financial crisis, which has forced the entire apparatus of bankers, financiers, economists, politicians, regulators, journalists and other 'experts' on such matters to hurriedly rearrange their analysis of global finance (see Shaoul, this volume). A series of splits quickly emerged to be followed by regrouping and ideological projects aimed at defending the castle of capitalism slightly further up the hill.

All of this does not emerge spontaneously from the economic circumstances in which the capitalist class find themselves. They need to discuss and debate, to wheel and deal to come to a view on their response. All of this is accomplished in a myriad of social circles and institutional locations, from the golf course to the gentleman's club, but is most obviously institutionalized in the elite policy planning organizations, the think tanks and the class-wide corporate lobby groups that both have distinct national characteristics – as I will show in relation to the UK – and cut across national borders in the extension of global corporate power. Sidney Blumenthal (2004: xix) notes in the introduction to The Rise of the Counter Establishment that his aim is to advance the argument that 'ideas themselves have become a salient aspect of contemporary politics'. He also writes that at the heart of what he calls the 'counter-establishment' 'is an intellectual elite ... attached to the foundations and journals, think tanks and institutes' (ibid.: xx).

Putting the Architecture in Place

As we will see, the architecture for elite global policy planning was constructed by means of lobby groups, think tanks, research institutes, corporate-sponsored foundations and so on. International groupings emerged gradually over the course of the twentieth century, starting in 1920. In general, they developed in line with the three waves of business activism which can be identified in both the US and the UK in the twentieth century (Miller and Dinan 2008).

Elite policy planning groups...