“Like a pancake on wet pavement”: everyday resonance, asymmetric mobilisation, and the failure of alternatives to neoliberalism in Western Europe, 1973-83

This paper investigates the origins of neoliberalism in Western Europe from a new perspective, by highlighting and explaining the rejection of a family of alternatives to neoliberalism in the 1970s and early 1980s. These policies for the ‘socialisation of investment’ made diagnoses that were similar to neoliberal diagnoses, particularly emphasising the tension between policies that challenged the interests of capital and reliance on that capital for investment. However, whereas neoliberal policies answered this problem by facilitating the interests of capital, these alternatives sought to extend state and workers’ control over investment. Focusing on cases in the United Kingdom and Sweden, the paper explains why Socialist parties in these countries discussed but ultimately rejected socialisation of investment as a basis for their economic strategies. Comparing the processes of rejection in these cases, and comparing them to policies that these parties did implement, it argues that these proposals were rejected because of asymmetries in resonance and mobilisation on the question. Owners and managers of capital mobilised strongly against socialisation. By contrast, most Socialist politicians, voters, and union members saw control over investment as abstract and distant from their everyday priorities, and did not provide the support needed to counteract resistance.