Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, political scientist George Kolankiewicz (1994) published an article pondering the problems of legitimacy faced by Central Europe’s first post-Communist governments. Having gained moral authority by virtue of their opposition to state socialism, most post-Communist elites had quickly shelved earlier ideas of ‘local and economic self-government’ in favour of the neoliberal doctrine of ‘shock therapy’ (ibid. 1994: 148). Policymakers in his native Poland immediately set about reforming the country’s centralized command economy, withdrawing price controls and subsidies for state-owned industries, liberalizing trade and investment and organizing the privatization of publicly owned assets. And yet, while free-market capitalism and representative democracy had ‘at first appeared to possess their own built-in selflegitimating impetus’, the realities of this post-socialist reform quickly revealed that liberalization had come at the price of growing social inequality and class conflict (ibid. 1994: 144). Consequently, Polish politicians found themselves saddled with a legitimacy problem. As Kolankiewicz wryly noted, it is ‘difficult enough to mobilize society on the promise of greater inequality let alone admit that [reform] will be inherently unjust and will consign one-third of its citizens to social redundancy’ (1994: 147). Indeed, the re-election of the national-conservative Law and Justice Party to parliamentary majority in October 2015 illustrates that the neoliberal politics of economic intervention has never quite managed to shed its legitimacy problem. Neoliberalism is often presented as a morally bankrupt ideology that ‘promotes a society in which materialism overwhelms moral commitment’ (Stiglitz 2010). Commentators from the political left have condemned it for championing capital at the expense of labour, and self-reliance in place of collective responsibility, characterizing neoliberalism as a form of ‘amoral market fundamentalism’ that has replaced ‘the moral economies of twentieth-century welfarism’ (Muehlebach 2012: 5, see Bauman 2000, Harvey 2007). Locating social and moral economies ‘outside’ the market, others have claimed that (neo)liberal economic culture has led to ‘moral breakdown’ (Zigon 2010) and the impoverishment of social ties (Swader 2013). Going one step further, still others identify neoliberalism as the source of financial, fiscal, and political malfeasance. According to Janine Wedel, the rise of neoliberal government, finance, and policy has been accompanied by a development of ʼneed corruption’ into ‘greed corruption’ (2015: 7). ‘Greed corruption’, she writes, flourishes at the interstices of the private and public sector. It is perpetrated by elite members of the academic, business, and political worlds that make use of positions of public consultancy to advance their own agendas at the expense of the companies, institutions, and voters they are meant to represent. These individuals promote policies of fiscal and financial (de)regulation that depreciate the public purse, negotiate unfair advantages for select business and industrial sectors, and even take nations to war (Wedel 2009). Yet, because they are engaged in practices that are technically legal, they escape conventional methods of audit and control. Despite violating public trust, Wedel argues, these ‘shadow elites’ remain literally ‘unaccountable’. In this chapter, I investigate the emergence of such ʼnew’ forms of fraudulent.
