On materialist utopias, policy failure, and the Sovietisation of higher education
Abby Innes helps us to understand the resemblance of neoliberal regimes and the Soviet Union. British universities exemplify the key flaws of both
In the spy drama The Americans, lead characters Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (KGB agents hiding in plain sight for decades in Washington DC) represent contrasting perspectives on ideological certainty. Elizabeth is rarely burdened by doubt: she despises the capitalist United States, and idealises the Soviet Union.
Philip instead comes to see both the good and the bad — the humanity — in both systems. He sympathises with many of the US government officials he deceives, and his torment over the devastating consequences of his actions is the show’s emotional core (and the platform for a remarkable performance by Matthew Rhys). But he seems oblivious to the racialised inequalities in the US that Elizabeth sees so clearly.
Elizabeth, however, is almost wilfully blind to all evidence that the Soviet system is itself a source of suffering. She exhibits many of the epistemological traits that Abby Innes warns about in her outstanding book Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail. For Elizabeth, Soviet communism is never at fault. ‘The centre’ embodies the will of the people, and its mistakes are due to sabotage by corruptible individuals rather than systemic flaws — so the appropriate political response is an authoritarianism that protects the people’s will, not the democratisation that might help to discover it.
Of course, the target of Late Soviet Britain is not the USSR or even the US, but rather the UK, and specifically the neoliberal ideas and assumptions that continue to underpin British political discourse and policy practice.
Elizabethan era
Despite the myth of great British decorum and moderation, contrasted with the revolutionary passions of mainland Europe, we are, it seems, an island of Elizabeths: at least when it comes to how political elites think of the economy.
Innes argues (albeit without the strained popular culture references!) that Europe became a little more Philip-like after the Second World War, managing capitalism through robust and adaptable institutions rather than via a blueprint for systemic perfectibility. This both questions the notion that Keynesian economics, as an alternative blueprint, was really applied with any rigour, and at the same time helps us to understand Keynesianism as a political project grounded in empirical observation not theoretical purity.
The UK took this road too, but has since diverted from it more sharply than our neighbours — perhaps precisely because Keynesianism was deployed here as a method of control rather than of constraint, meaning its apparent failure in the 1970s left a vacuum for ideological fantasies to exploit.
One of the great strengths of Late Soviet Britain is in linking the UK’s neoliberal revolution with a shift in the economics discipline — broadly, the emergence of neoclassical economics — centuries in the making. Neoclassical economics is founded on the possibility of a perfectly efficient market economy, with supply and demand perfectly balanced in price-setting via competitive dynamics. Most forms of state intervention in the economy are seen as a threat to equilibrium even if well-intentioned, and the application of neoclassical assumptions to relations within state institutions, or between state and market, tends to give rise to prescriptions to subject the public sector to market competition or at least a facsimile.
Failed state
To make the maths work, neoclassical economics required a highly simplified account of behaviour among its human subjects, akin to the subjects of the natural sciences. For its proponents, the objective in treating human beings as arch-materialists and hyper-rational utility-maximisers was theoretical parsimony rather than a realistic portrait of economic life. Yet over the decades this epistemological caution was lost in transition from analysis to prescription.
As such, for Innes, the essence of neoliberalism as ideology is the belief that while perfectly competitive markets cannot necessarily be observed, they can nevertheless be engineered. The neoliberal state seeks to facilitate the will of the market, uses its coercive power to programme real people to conform to the imaginary inputs of neoclassical theory. Innes’s core insight is that the British state came to resemble to Soviet Union’s overbearing state, even if it manifested differently. On the influence of the ‘new public management’ approach embraced in the 1980s, she writes:
In the name of market efficiency, neoliberal governments vastly increased the planning and budgetary units of the British state under new systems of imperative output planning, and all within intrinsically non-competitive conditions. The reforms resulted in systemic failures of function and accountability. Far from withering away, the neoliberal state became a giant of enterprise co-ordination and procurement and hence closer to its Soviet counterpart than its Weberian predecessor [i.e. the bureaucracy associated with Keynesian demand management] ever was…
What governments created was an explosion of control requirements across an increasingly disintegrated institutional framework. They built a new state-corporate production regime more complicated than Soviet central planning but no less driven by closed-system reasoning to operate within a logic of quantification. As in Leninism, the gains of the neoliberal revolution were predicated on a fantasy of completion in which all doctrinally motivated actions are assumed to offer a systematic improvement.
In Britain the result is less a totalitarian state than its chaotic fragmentation and the accelerating extraction of public authority and revenues by large business, law and accountancy firms, while governments act as their brokers.
Far from delivering a materialist utopia with a minimally invasive state — the end-point of both neoliberalism and communism — neoliberalism has instead produced a dystopian form of governance, characterised by bureaucratic rigidity and rising costs, and an economy characterised by stagflation, rentierism and corruption.
Innes offers a remarkable degree of breadth and depth in exploring various policy failures associated with the flawed application of neoclassical assumptions. Tax competition, for example, has not encouraged firms to invest more, or encouraged high-value production to remain in or relocate to the UK. The model has failed, but the policy remains, as large corporations — as in the Brezhnev era — have to be effectively bribed to keep production going at any rate. Innes dissects also the neoclassical assumptions underpinning efforts to address climate change, chiefly the utopian notion that, through regulatory nudges, markets will learn how to properly price climate risks.
Chapter 6’s roasting of secondary education provision in Britain is depressingly magnificent. It finds successive governments intent on introducing quasi-markets into the school system, despite a lack of clear diagnosis of the problems in the existing system. The result has been falling attainment levels, and rising costs. Academies game performance metrics more systematically that local authority schools. They exclude more children and let down disadvantaged children. And the original notion of allowing schools autonomy to innovate, in collaboration with parents, has given way to a concentrated market of multi-academy trusts. Michael Gove’s free schools programme was an attempt, of sorts, to return to the original policy intent of academies, but free schools mainly constitute profit-hungry enterprises able to escape democratic or indeed market accountability. Innes writes:
This organised forgetting of the state, first in neoclassical theory and then in policy justification, created an academy and free school regime that is neither fish nor fowl: neither an efficient market nor a well-organised public system but a capitalist parody of Soviet planning — a system of barely accountable private enterprises managed by central, no longer local, government, via an elaborate exoskeleton of intrusive and rigid bureaucratic oversight, which is the exact opposite of what was promised.
The university of utopia
Late Soviet Britain does not explore higher education, but it seems to me that UK universities offer an exemplary case of its key arguments. The marketisation of higher education is a product of a belief in a materialist utopia, which has led to a distinctly British dystopia. These words by Hannah Rose Woods in The New Statesman would not be out of place in Innes’s book:
For decades, the prevailing tenor of political and media debate has been to hector universities: “Behave like a market! No, not like that!”… Time and again, governments have been astonished by the unintended – though widely predicted – consequences of their legislation. Almost no one with a substantial public platform seems to have an adequate grasp of the structure of higher education or the way it is financed.
The post-war expansion of higher education was a good thing, reflecting mostly progressive economic and cultural changes. New Labour’s aim to reignite expansion in the 2000s was certainly laudable, but it was fuelled by a novel faith in marketisation. This has created myriad problems, ultimately leading to the shrinking of the sector now upon us.
The relationship between students and educators has been fundamentally distorted. Perhaps some rebalancing in authority from the latter to the former was overdue — and of course consistent with pedagogical best practice — but the notion this could be achieved by redefining this relationship as primarily a commercial one was a serious error. Forcing teenagers to think like utility-maximisers has undermined their ability to, well, maximise the utility gains of a university education.
The introduction of and sharp rise in tuition fees is the centre of this commercial relationship. There is no real market here, of course, so the state has had to artificially dictate one. But if students were asked to pay anything like what it costs to actually provide their course — let alone allowing some courses linked to occupations with high barriers to entry to charge a premium for the value they add to future earnings — the economic viability of higher education would instantly collapse.
Tuition fees were introduced, naively, as a co-pay mechanism while universities remained largely publicly funded. But the public good provided by universities diminished as a result of commercialisation, making the public increasingly reluctant to maintain subsidies amid austerity. Significant undergraduate fee rises were inevitable (and loan repayment terms have also deteriorated). But it was also inevitable that a price ceiling would be found, with the £9,250 per year level being frozen since 2017. The economy is no longer producing the secure livelihoods for young people that would make ever-larger and uncertain investments in their own education attractive for most.
As stagnation has turned to stagflation, universities must charge more to survive. But they cannot possibly charge more if they want to survive. The public sector has even fewer incentives to invest in an industry that public policy pathologies have rendered uninvestable. The result is an inferior ‘product’, in terms of student experience, as class sizes and lecturer workloads increase. The academic workforce in the UK is now highly precarious, and under-paid by international standards. The current wave of redundancies — just the tip of the iceberg — are probably unavoidable, but will only make all of this worse.
Glen O’Hara cites Innes in making the link between a mental health crisis among the academic workforce, and the system’s endemic governance failures:
What we’re really doing overall is running down our social capital, toiling away in a failing system that calls to mind nothing more than the late Soviet economy (far more similar to ours than we’d like to admit). When the money coming in continuously declines, organisations sweat their assets, and as they do so increasingly wear away their own foundations. What that involves is constantly whacking our own creativity, and capacity for ideas, against the brick wall of funders’ and employers’ indifference. That’s a losing game. Small wonder a lot of lecturers come to feel – or be made to feel – like losers.
It is tempting to see universities as a whole primarily as victims, but many senior managers and academics are part of the problem too. As the economic foundations crack, university managers have become obsessed with control. Academic work has become excessively bureaucratic, primarily as teaching and research staff are expected to report in infinitely creative ways on their own performance, answering to functionaries not qualified to exercise judgement. And the bureaucracy too often rewards those best at conforming to process rather than performing in their job.
While pay and job security declines at the front line, executive pay balloons and executive support functions proliferate (yet many universities still spend a fortune on external consultants). University executives are paid vast amounts to undertake work that only needs doing because marketisation has disrupted the university’s ability to self-organise; they have no incentive to challenge this form of governance, since it risks making themselves obsolete. Perversely, executing redundancies will result in a boom in bonus pay.
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) — the process by which the quality of research outputs are judged — typifies what higher education has now become in the UK. There is a slightly-less-naïve argument that REF was needed to modernise arcane practices in some elite universities. But the elite of the elite can prosper and perpetuate without playing the REF game anyway. In general, REF attempts to instil competition between universities in order to access remaining subsidies, while actually excellent research relies on academics collaborating with each other across institutions. Its main impact is to inhibit collaboration within universities, as individual academic careers are determined by the survival of the best fit to the metrics. The extraordinary reporting requirements faced by university managers in relation to REF are pushed down to the front line, with the richness of academic life distilled into meaningless corporate narratives about the inimitable greatness of individual institutions. REF embeds the neoliberalisation and Sovietisation of higher education, and at the same time exposes their inherent flaws. But the process generates virtually no resistance at any level of authority: it persists by dehumanising its participants.
The wider ecosystem of academia warrants a mention too. The journals that feed directly into the REF process are owned by large corporations making large profits, facilitated by editors and reviewers essentially being willing to exchange their labour for free in order to occupy informal positions of authority in their disciplines. The funding bodies whose money indirectly enables the research captured by REF have gotten very good at funding research that has already been done; this is okay when they are de facto reimbursing universities for research done within normal workload allocations, but is less okay now that the space for ‘unfunded’ research is closing up. The only viable future for academic research at the moment is to focus on applied research, answering questions defined by policy-makers. This is important, obviously. But in losing the space for open-ended research and critical thinking, we lose a large chunk of what makes academic research uniquely valuable.
After neoliberalism
Something other than neoliberalism is on the horizon. Some have argued that Rachel Reeves’s recent Mais lecture offers a tentative shift back to the mixed economy of social democracy by recognising that markets do no always know best, while others suggest that the speech heralds a more statist form of capitalist management not necessarily prioritising equitable outcomes.
The former is possible, the latter more likely. But this will not be the end of the story. One of the most interesting aspects of the speech was the sense that Reeves recognises that, while she is focused on pulling the British economy back from the brink of irrelevance, economic policy thinking is likely to develop further in the years ahead. Of course, it is highly likely that any new settlement will require significant investment in public services, major tax reform, and a recognition that the private sector will not decarbonise itself; Labour in opposition has been non-committal, at best, on these issues.
Labour has also been largely silent on higher education. This cannot last. Universities will be essential to any version of Britain’s economic future.
We all need to be a little more Elizabeth sometimes. I have much sympathy with the argument that moral clarity — revulsion at aspects of the current capitalist order, and faith in an alternative future — is a pre-requisite of transformative change.
But the business of actually governing needs a bit more Philip too. We need an understanding of the dangers of applying ideological blueprints to complex socio-economic domains. There are unintended consequences. There is intended corruption. Political power will arc towards authoritarianism in the futile hope that the utopia of perfect efficiency is just ahead of us, if we can insulate the system against the consequences of its failed application.
I am aware this sounds like a plea for moderation in political ambition. But pragmatism and radicalism are not opposites, and there are more ideological diehards in the so-called centre of British politics than there are on the left. The argument that neoliberalism has simply failed is no less potent than the argument that it is inherently bad.