Marketization: How Capitalist Exchange Disciplines Workers and Subverts Democracy
Ian Greer and Charles Umney
Bloomsbury £12.99

POOR pay may be the immediate catalyst for the strikes gripping the NHS but it is clear that nurses and ambulance staff are in the vanguard of a broader struggle to save universal healthcare from creeping marketisation.

The introduction of market mechanisms over decades underpins the new militancy of organisations such as the Royal College of Nurses alongside other unions who are fighting not just to improve their conditions but also to ensure quality services and safety.

This slow, insidious cultivation of ever more private competition in areas that were once off limits because of their social importance and democratic requirements has been a cornerstone of political economy since the onset of neoliberalism.

To worship the market was the distinguishing reflex of Thatcher, who cast widespread privatisation as a crusade against statism, only for the same agenda to be subsequently embraced by Blair.

Moreover, marketisation has by no means been confined to the UK: it has been the engine of European integration, with the “single market” held up as the ultimate exemplar of institutional design in the public interest.

But while European governments have enhanced welfare and labour benefits through extensive regulatory regimes, expanding market freedoms have trumped social protections to ensure a labour force flexible enough to serve the changing needs of capital.

Ian Greer and Charles Umney’s book is a timely theoretical exploration of this reality at a moment when strikes in the UK demonstrate growing disillusionment with market hegemony.

However, the authors warn us — to paraphrase Twain — that reports of the death of marketisation are greatly exaggerated. It retains its fascination for European policymakers, and that is because it is rooted in the relationship between capitalism and the state.

Although orthodox economics suggests that competition threatens profits, the authors argue that competitive markets nonetheless remain beneficial to capitalists as a “disciplinary” tool to control labour through low-paid, insecure jobs that keep the labour force compliant, and to reduce political oversight by enabling capitalists to make decisions unilaterally.

In short, Greer and Umney state baldly: “Marketisation disciplines workers and subverts democracy.”

Based on hundreds of interviews with agencies and managers across Europe, this book is a grounded empirical study that should be required reading within the Labour Party, which is once again vying under Keir Starmer to be a “competent implementer” of market mechanisms.

The authors examine marketisation in theory, engaging with the thought of Karl Polanyi among others, and deploying their own Marxian analysis to reject what they see as the false dichotomy between market and state. States themselves are the key drivers of marketisation, they argue, even though this is a messy, difficult, unstable and often unrewarding process, because of the state’s role in ensuring permanent, uninterrupted accumulation of capital.

Greer and Umney write: “Class discipline is not a regrettable side effect of marketisation policies which are otherwise necessary to obtain low-cost high-quality goods and services. Class discipline is in many cases an end in itself… More and more, the creation of a compliant working population, with lower expectations about work quality and weaker trade unions, becomes a policy objective.”

As market mechanisms unravel or are challenged politicians are required to enforce class discipline in an explicit way, and we can clear signs of this in Britain, not least through Sunak’s planned anti-strike legislation aimed at public services.

Healthcare is the most emotive target of the right, and is one of three areas in which the authors explore marketisation in detail across Europe, alongside welfare-to-work policies and the music industry. In all three, the outcomes have been damaging to workers and services.

However, Greer and Umney also highlight the limits of marketisation and opposition to it.

The most effective resistance takes advantage of the political squeamishness of its technocratic champions, because marketisation requires depoliticisation that insulates decision-making from democratic accountability.

They point out that time and again politicisation has frustrated the quiet campaigns to marketise economies, adding: “Opponents of marketisation need to make quiet politics noisy.”