Our work will be guided by a shared belief that
market principles, open trade and investment regimes, and effectively regulated
financial markets foster the dynamism, innovation, and entrepreneurship that
are essential for economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction. […] We
recognize that these reforms will only be successful if grounded in a
commitment to free market principles, including the rule of law, respect for
private property, open trade and investment, competitive markets, and
efficient, effectively regulated financial systems. These principles are
essential to economic growth and prosperity and have lifted millions out of
poverty, and have significantly raised the global standard of living.
Recognizing the necessity to improve financial sector regulation, we must avoid
over-regulation that would hamper economic growth and exacerbate the
contraction of capital flows, including to developing countries. We underscore
the critical importance of rejecting protectionism and not turning inward in
times of financial uncertainty.
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| Margaret Thatcher illustrates options |
Myth, writes Roland Barthes, may bear an ideological
mechanics that serves to legitimize its own truth through the imposition of a
distortion. Exemplified in Barthes’ reading of a magazine photograph in which a
soldier of African descent salutes the French flag, myth produces a sleight of
hand—here, forged from an image of colonial subservience to the French Empire—that
collapses the signified into a signifier by reducing its connotative meaning
into a self-evident, natural truth: “that France is a great Empire, that all
her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag,
and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this Negro [sic]
in serving his so-called oppressors” (116). Through reduction, by attributing
its constructed character to nature, myth may become an accomplice to the
legitimacy of the powerful through the forging of an alibi, here to the
“natural order” of cultural superiority and the right to rule demonstrated in the
subordinate’s allegiance to the empire. In this sense, as in Barthes’ reading,
myth may adopt or invert the arguments of its opposition and detractors,
despite the lack of veracity in its production of meanings or outright claims. “Myth
is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being
a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always
to have an ‘elsewhere’ at its disposal”—an elsewhere
located here in the empire’s benevolent intentions as its alibi to implicit
racism and oppression (123). Thereby myth becomes indisputable material, at
once passing itself off as a natural order that has always been and that bears
a malleable disposition to be appropriated in further myth-making, say, in
Barthes’ reading, at the service of imperial power and its legitimacy.
Let us return then to the assertion that neoliberal governmentality
delivers a greater good on a global scale. The
myth that neoliberalism produces poverty reduction and social wellbeing for all
has become an alibi for the dismantling of the welfare state in Spain and with
it, an accomplice to the funneling of public money into private interests to
the benefit of banks, financial institutions, and private business. Such a
polemic has been called into question by Spanish economist Vicenç Navarro, who
points out that Spain’s “soft” multi-billion euro bailouts from the European
Central Bank (ECB) do not alleviate the crisis of credit lending as these
monies are destined for Spanish banks to pay off interests on loans from
foreign institutions, particularly in Germany, while the Spanish state incurs
this burden of debt. Public funds, in other words, are poured into private
interests in neoliberal practice at the expense of social programs, schools,
hospitals, and so on. On the other hand, Navarro notes, the ECB and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) have placed conditions on Spain’s eligibility
to receive financial assistance by urging the government to adopt a battery of
measures in domestic policy that would increase the flexibility of labor,
reduce public expenditures on pensions, and privatize the welfare state—in sum,
neoliberal reforms.
Often if not exclusively benefitting the greatest fortunes, this upward siphoning
of wealth in neoliberal practice has inaugurated forms of what David Harvey
calls “accumulation by dispossession” of capital at public expense. That
is, where the private accumulation of capital reaches its limits of projected
growth, the sustainability of a given enterprise must be secured through
dispossession, through takeovers, expropriation, the rescued payment of private
debt with state funds, and so on. Favoring the wealthy in practice, if not
design, neoliberal reforms assiduously reorganize the burden of public debt, to
the benefit of private interests, to bear upon the working and middle classes
while conserving the greatest fortunes. Little wealth actually “trickles down” the
socioeconomic ladder—certainly, none of it redistributed naturally by market
forces or invisible hands—despite this mythic assertion in neoliberal rhetoric.
The foolproof benevolence of neoliberal
governmentality, however, resides in its myth: that the neoliberal way provides
the only legitimate technologies of government
“essential to economic growth and prosperity” today; second, inseparable from this
suture between neoliberalism and prosperity, as in Barthes’ notion of myth, its
self-justification asserts that neoliberalism has “lifted millions out of
poverty” and “significantly raised the global standard of living” in a
grammatical string of causalities in which self-legitimacy is spun, and indeed
naturalized, from the premise of a greater quality of life for all. Neoliberal
myth in which the G-20’s declaration shares its place, is borne from the
imposition of a distortion that legitimizes its own premise, delivering it to a
natural (economic and social) order of things that services the discourse, interests,
and practices of elite power and wealth. As it does so, myth produces its own
alibi in practice. For austerity, or the drastic reduction, if not elimination,
of state spending on areas in public healthcare, education, pensions, social
programs, among others—that is, the neoliberal purging of the welfare state—finds
its justification not in its service to private interests or dispossession, but
in the empty language of prosperity for all.
On the other side of the
same coin to austerity in Spain, one encounters a social, and particularly narrative
response that, largely disavowed from neoliberal orthodoxy, serves to unground
its myth. Germán Labrador Méndez has argued compellingly that stories of the
crisis on strife, suicide, and slow death bear narrative forms in a genre of
their own that confound clear distinctions between authorship and reception,
between the isolation of individual experience and the mobilizing capacity of
the collective. This form of micro narrative recounts the experiences of
austerity within a greater social crisis and, in my view, unground the myth of
neoliberal governmentality in the public eye through stories of its
biopolitical consequences. Personal life stories told by or about those most
affected by economic hardship have circulated widely in alternative,
mainstream, and social media, in Callejeros
tele-documentary programs, El País
editorials, and Facebook, among others. The author calls them subprime life histories, which by
granting public visibility to personal accounts of strife, “allow individuality
to be socialized” from the material, historical, and political circumstances of
the crisis (563). In growing circulation, personal narratives shift the focus
of public attention towards shared experience, in sharp contrast to the
abstractions of economic indicators ubiquitous in the media:
No longer are we speaking of self-sacrifice, but of people who die after
being denied urgent medical attention for lack of funds, cancers that worsen
because of prolonged waiting periods for surgery due to budget cutbacks,
elderly persons evicted from homes where they lived their whole lives, workers
sequestered by debts they will never be able to pay, young people with specific
training who work as tele-operators or accumulate temporary contracts without
obtaining a viable salary to live on—a set of narratives that could be framed
as “stories of the end of the welfare State.” (563-4)
And since Labrador Méndez’s time of writing, one should add to his
assessment the numbers of monthly suicides in Spain in the wake of more than
170,000 forced evictions between July 2008 and 2012 alone.
Following the author’s argument, these intimate
stories introduce an immeasurable “life scale” to the accountability of
austerity and the dismantling of social welfare in general. Whether about
modernization, development, economic strife, migrations, or ecological
disasters—in Spain or elsewhere—subprime life histories give meaning to macro processes
that at once shape and administrate the story being told, with real lived
effects (564). As they are told and retold in circulation, they draw attention
to the (political) experience of the subject and the collective as bound
together and dissolved in each other, which blurs the distinction between the
two in multiplicities of authorship and reception. Whose story is being told?
Not that of one person, but of many, in which storytelling and reception of
subprime life histories are no longer (auto-)biographical in nature but instead
may stand in for others’ stories or perhaps even one’s own. Indeed, to borrow
from the author’s terms, the visibility of micro narratives in circulation may
prove a powerful “technology of political imagination” for their mobilizing capacity
to forge “empathetic bridges” with others through association and critique of a
collective, and inherently political, history of the crisis (563). The
biopolitical dimension of subprime life histories, negated from the myth of
wellbeing for all, unravels the alibi of neoliberal governmentality in its own
production of the unprotected and excluded.
My interest here does not reside in an analysis of
macroeconomic policies, which is the competence of economists, but in the
veridiction of neoliberal thought in which free-market capitalism, competition,
and enterprise “naturally” produce social wellbeing for all. I am particularly
interested here in the logics of neoliberalism in the case of Spain that have
attempted to justify and naturalize, or on the whole serve to legitimize a set
of related claims to neoliberal thought as the
only technologies of government capable of delivering social wellbeing,
paradoxically, through the destruction of the welfare state, one that in
democratic Spain never reached the European average of public expenditures. On
the other side of the same coin, within legitimizing discursive formations on
neoliberalism, one can locate the production of social attitudes towards
poverty and exclusion, which participate themselves in producing exclusionary
effects often through the naturalization of inequalities and privilege immersed
in complex interstices among class, nationality, gender, ethnicity, within constructed categories of
otherness. After all, disavowed from the neoliberal myth of “prosperity for
all” are the exclusionary effects of policies that, in practice at my time of
writing, leave the poor, immigrants, women, the elderly, the disabled, to name
a few collectives, unprotected by and with increasingly restricted access to
social rights such as housing, medical treatment, education, legal assistance,
and so on. On the veridiction of neoliberal thought, I turn to a reading of Foucault’s
lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, which may prove of interest today as
a tool to analyze emergent social modalities, particularly in times of
austerity, in the language, practices, and belief systems on economic self-responsibility,
self-care, self-autonomy, and their exclusions in the neoliberal regime. This
reading does not aim to be exhaustive, but rather to generate some critical
concepts that may shed light on the sociopolitical production of neoliberalism
as a naturalized truth.
In his lectures Birth of Biopolitics delivered at the
Collège de France in 1979, Michel Foucault developed further his analysis of
the art of government, understood as the exercise of sovereign rule, through techniques
that surpass the limits of the state into the biopolitical administration of
all spheres of life. Passing
through a genealogy of eighteenth-century liberalism and the “new” liberal
technologies of government developed in the twentieth century by the Ordoliberals
in Germany and the Chicago School in the United States, Foucault effectively
provides some foundational antecedents from which to interrogate the
sociopolitical dimensions of neoliberalism as a practice of government in his
time, on the eve of its consolidation in state administration in the Thatcher
and Reagan era of the 1980s. For my particular focus here, Foucault underscores
the relevance of governmentality to the social production of thought and, in
extrapolation, modalities of the governed where neoliberal economics is
concerned today.
Whereas the advent of the state’s
calculation and management of birthrates in liberal democracies illustrates one
clear case of biopolitical governance and oversight of a given population (i.e.,
state planning on the projected growth, productivity, and wealth of its citizens),
the biopolitical dimension of neoliberalism encompasses more than the art of
government alone and indeed is defined by the state’s self-imposed limitations
in liberal democracy that must secure its citizens’ freedoms through the
protection of rights, private property, and the pursuit of enterprise. The biopolitics
of neoliberalism manifests itself broadly and dispersedly across the technologies
and knowledges of government (e.g., in the state, financial institutions,
think-tanks, and so on) and the social production of systems of thought, of
practices, of speech disseminated across the fabric of society (e.g., in the
media, cultural production, belief systems and attitudes, and so on)—in sum,
the dispositif or heterogeneous assemblage
of statements, knowledges, and practices that exercise and legitimize relations
of power. From this premise, Foucault’s analysis is a departing point from
which to read the multiplicities of social relations and attitudes arising from
a problematic distance between the neoliberal art of government and the
governed. On a cautionary note, however, this critical concept does not suggest
a rigid oppositional bloc between an imaginary state and its society, but rather
opens up plural fields in the social production of power relations and class
difference within neoliberal rationales. (Such a model, of a political
imaginary arising from the neoliberal art of government and the governed, will
be revisited later for the spaces that destabilize and refuse this binary
relationship, noted by Labrador Méndez and others, in the technologies of
mobilization and resistance.) In order to address its defining features, first
Foucault’s lectures should be updated, so to speak, in the neoliberal practices
transpiring since 1979; following this brief overview, I then turn to an
analysis of Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism.
What is neoliberalism? The
rationale of neoliberalism is not attributable simply to an accelerated stage
of liberal democracy in direct continuity with the antecedents to advanced
capitalism. Foucault notes that emergent liberal technologies of government are
developed and experimented in subsequent crises of liberal democracy and its dispositif of governmentality from the
eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, which do not necessarily coincide in
time with the historical crises of capitalism per se. Rather,
the rationale of neoliberalism is scattered across an assemblage of practices,
knowledges, and discourse (i.e., hereafter, a dispositif) within government and among the governed from which the
peculiar transposition of an economic rationale upon the social body produces subjectivities—particularly,
conditioned modalities of the subject—which I will explore here. Following Foucault,
the neoliberal dispositif, or the
apparatus that secures its own veridiction, operates across a disseminated
social fabric that generates belief systems (i.e., morality) cemented in the
call for economic autonomy, self-responsibility, and self-care. In neoliberal
practices, the state assumes a managerial, economic approach to social policies
that pervade all spheres of life (i.e., their biopolitical dimension), aiming
particularly to roll back certain areas of state administration and, with them,
the social protections provided by welfare services. Privatization,
deregulation, and the minimization of barriers for trade and investment are
pursued as some of the defining policies of neoliberal doctrine that extend to social
responsibility in the private choices and interests of the population. As
Thomas Lemke observes on Foucault, “[n]eoliberalism is a political rationality
that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in
(welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for
‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-care’” that in the current conjecture, I
will add, often serve to justify the dismantling of social welfare itself
(203). The
forging of this link, in the production of a justifiable alibi for the
reduction of the state and social protections, is one nexus of neoliberal myth-making
at work today.
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| Milton Friedman examines new forms of monetary policy |
New liberal technologies of government develop from a specific
political climate around the time of WWII and during the Cold War era, marked
by the twentieth-century crises of liberal democracy and the breakdown in its dispositif of governmentality. As such,
even today, proponents of conservative neoliberal orthodoxy purport that its policies
are a cure to the evils of a strong state, whether socialism, communism, or
fascism. The material and social reconstruction of Europe after WWII,
specifically the German case, hinged upon rebuilding and modernizing projects
to secure economic recovery, the concerted planning of transnational reconstruction
efforts and sources of aid (i.e., the Marshall Plan), and the enforcement of social
objectives to hinder the return of fascisms, which together were implemented with
the deregulation of price controls in occupied Germany. This model would become
the new liberal (i.e., de-nationalized) formula for social and economic
policies that could bolster the legitimacy of state sovereignty in Germany after
the crisis of the war, especially as the call for unity and individualist freedoms
through the markets, it was believed, could impede the potential rise of
nationalisms.
It is a formula we will see again, beyond the German case. In the United States
context, new liberal discourse in the Chicago School as early as the 1930s (and
later, by the father of neoliberal economics Milton Friedman, author of Capitalism and Freedom) targeted its criticisms
on Roosevelt’s New Deal that had vigorously pursued Keynesian interventionist
policies and greater public expenditures largely on social welfare to covercome
the Great Depression. In the United States, Foucault views the social pacts of
economic security guaranteed to the postwar society at large (i.e., the promise
of state and labor security in exchange for military service and domestic war
efforts), as well as the expansion of federal administration in its management
of poverty, education, segregation programs, and so on, as the primary targets
of criticism from neoliberal proponents in the Chicago School. That
is, throughout the Cold War era, a new wave of economists and political
theorists alike viewed in liberal democracy and free market policy the security
of individual freedoms and the eventual reduction of the state, which was
conceived in economic terms as the remedy to the danger of totalitarianisms, whether
fascism (in the reconstruction of Germany for the Ordoliberals) or communism (in
the postwar hegemony of the United States for the Chicago School). Minimizing
the state’s role in providing social services, it was believed, could provide
at once a safeguard against the rise of a powerful state (i.e., communism,
socialism, National-Socialism), on the one hand, and likewise the necessary
leverage to reformulate Keynesian interventionist policies consolidated from
the 1930s to the 60s, on the other.
The bridge between these two points is not casually
connected, for orthodox neoliberal reforms in practice seek to roll back
remaining Keynesian interventionist policies and public spending on social
welfare programs (i.e., the call for market deregultation and austerity in
state spending) while, at the same time, neoliberal proponents often preach the
evils of big government in tandem with the benefits of opportunity and market
freedom—more often than not, conflating unfettered market activity with an
individual’s freedoms in liberal democracy. In this sense, neoliberalism has
been instrumentalized as a powerful political tool. During the Cold War, the
United States’ interest in securing developing countries’ participation in free
market capitalism, as well as its covert intelligence operations abroad, would
serve as an aggressive political instrument deployed against the feared spread
of communism. This would mean, nevertheless, that in United States foreign
policy rightwing dictatorships would become friend rather than foe, as is often
cited in the exemplary case of the so-called Chicago Boys and their role in securing
the solvency and political stability of the Pinochet Regime in Chile through
neoliberal reforms. In the 1980s and 90s, similarly, the neoliberal way would become
synonymous with the promise of democracy and newfound individual freedoms in
transitions from dictatorial regimes, as was the case in Latin America and
Spain, through a given country’s swift entrance into the world market via
deregulation, privatization, and the reduction of state administration as a
whole. As Susana Draper has argued, such a recipe for individual freedoms
guaranteed through free market activity in postdictatorship societies, would
invest in this model of liberal democracy the promise of deliverance from past
regimes and the possibility of future (economic and social) progress. Emblematically
secured in the fall of the Berlin Wall was a new world order of democracy and
free-market capitalism, the celebrated “end of history.” The development of the
neoliberal way throughout these years would mark a turn in the conjecture of
the Cold War in which the future of liberal democracy, international trade and
investment, and the financialization of the world economy would prove victorious.
That is, neoliberal orthodoxy today has become everywhere, in one form or
another, the order of the day.
But the neoliberal regime
witnesses in the diminishing of the state the rise of new political actors, or financial
players. The state, in other words, experiences a crisis of sovereignty in a
given government’s increasing lack of autonomy when deciding domestic policy,
in which elected politicians often kowtow to corporate and financial interests.
In the 1970s, foreign credit lending from financial institutions in the United
States would wield powerful leverage to reshape strategically the economic
policies of indebted countries, which David Harvey notes, saw in Mexico the
test case for inducing neoliberal reforms towards greater labor flexibility
(i.e., the deregulation of labor by the state), free market laws, and
privatization, after Mexico had been pushed into default on its debt to New
York financial institutions in 1982-84. Since the test case of Mexico, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) has demanded neoliberal reforms of
governments, or “structural adjustments”—termed “shocks” in the IMF’s
literature—met
with reduced public spending and deficit controls, in order for these countries
to be eligible for sovereign credit lending or assistance in other forms,
despite that these demands have proved “damaging [to] the welfare of the common
people in those countries, causing enormous suffering. […T]hese policies had
consequences for the welfare and quality of life of ordinary people, creating death,
disease, and social unrest” (Navarro). In
states where neoliberal reforms were met with resistance, regulatory policies were
induced via the IMF and World Bank, joined by backing from influential
financial institutions and hegemonic powers such as the United States and the
United Kingdom.
Within the decade after
Foucault’s lectures, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of the 1980s would
consolidate neoliberal practices in state government through the continued
dismantling of social protections from the Keynesian era, hand-in-hand with
privatization and deregulation writ large, as the emergent practice of the
world’s wealthiest powers. It is during this time that Jamie Peck and Adam
Tickell note a shift in the 1980s roll-back
neoliberalism “preoccupied with the active destruction
and discreditation of Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist
institutions (broadly defined),” to a roll-out
neoliberalism “focused on the purposeful construction
and consolidation of neoliberalized state reforms, modes of governance, and
regulatory relations” (384). In
this manner, neoliberal proponents seek out new forms of social governance along
with a redefining of the government’s role, rather than the outright
minimization of the state per se; it is an art of government that delimits the
state’s terrain of activity to an economic one in the pursued destruction of
former social contracts with the population. This roll-out project in the UK
and US would be shared by the EC, in the case of the Economic and Monetary
Union of the European Union (EMU), in the consolidation of free-market trade and
monetary policy in the Euro zone, which together with the ECB and the IMF have adopted
similar interventionist measures in Europe’s peripheral economies (e.g., Italy,
Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and at my time of writing Cyprus).
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| 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona |
On the other hand,
neoliberal “structural readjustments” are not simply imposed coercively in all
cases, as they have been very much welcomed from both the political left and
right. In the post-Cold War era, European socialist projects would adopt
policies in a form of neoliberal economics adherent to a social program, in the
emergent “Third Way,” but not without compromising labor issues by introducing
flexibility (e.g., part-time contracts, temporary employment, legal
restrictions on labor strikes, etc.) and pursuing greater market competition
through privatization. Withered socialism to neoliberal practices of
government, which European socialist projects increasingly had to mitigate against
their abandonment of the social and labor issues to which they were supposedly
committed.
In Spain, for example, the first wave of labor reforms and privatizations from
1984 to 1996 was undertaken during Socialist rule, which cleaved a fissure
between the PSOE and labor unions CCOO and UGT, the motivation for the three
general strikes on labor issues during President González’s tenure.
In the socialist project, furthermore, full integration into Europe and the
international free market was invested with the terms of modernity and
progress, celebrated internationally as a successful, albeit deeply flawed,
Transition to democracy, on the heels of Spain’s dictatorial isolation. Spain’s
adoption of neoliberal reform, arguably motivated in part by a strong
psychological component to embrace modernization after dictatorship, was likewise
driven by the need to meet European criteria on public spending and the
national deficit before its monetary integration in the European Union. Later, a
second wave of privatizations continued under President Aznar’s tenure (PP), consisted
of the deregulatory, universalizing program passed into law through the
Programa de Modernización del Sector Público Empresarial, which was the
hallmark of Spain’s full adoption of deregulatory neoliberal policies to
establish a global framework for privatization and competition.
Although the applications of neoliberalism vary in circumstance, region, and
administration, and indeed in a test of resilience allow corporate and
political decision-making to seek out and adapt to new “opportunities” for its
survival, one cannot ignore that neoliberalism, despite its heterogeneity of
practices and contradictions, bears a general schematic outlined here. Neoliberalism
is mutative over time and, today, malleable in its local, regional, and transnational
implementation, which gives rise to internal contradictions in governance (Peck
and Tickell 388). Such contradictions can be observed, say, in the deregulatory
neoliberal reforms pursued under Zapatero’s administration (PSOE), which were
mixed with Keynesian initiatives in increased public spending (i.e., the “Plan
E” Economic Stimulus Package in 2009), or Rajoy’s current administration (PP),
which has aggressively sought out, at once, roll-back and roll-out
neoliberalism, or system “shocks” in acute austerity and labor reforms, but has
also raised taxes and nationalized banks.
Despite the regional and
ideological differences of its practices, then, neoliberal governmentality is,
it is worth repeating here, the predominant, if not the only pervasive,
technology of government among states and international financial institutions today.
Indeed, beyond government, as David Harvey has noted, the advocates of
neoliberalism “occupy positions of considerable influence in education (the
universities and many ‘think tanks’), in the media, in corporate boardrooms and
financial institutions, in key state institutions (treasury departments, the
central banks), and also in those international institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO)
that regulate global finance and trade” (3). This
brief overview, at the risk of reductionism, brings us to the current
conjecture. In order to understand this map since and in Foucault’s time, we
must return to his lectures on the twentieth-century swerve towards the
neoliberal regime from its crises in liberal thought. Market competition and the
individual rationalized as an autonomous subject are the two technologies of government
in liberal democracy that I will focus on here, as both concepts necessitated a
reassessment of governmentality in the neoliberal regime.
The Biopolitics of Neoliberalism
For Foucault, the advent of liberal
practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entailed both techniques
of economic governance of the markets and the population (e.g., economic
policy-making, management of birthrates, etc.), on the one hand, and what is
inseparable from them, the social production of the governed who are
rationalized as economic units, on the other. As the development of liberalism
was practiced through laissez-faire market policy and non-interventionism by
the state, the twentieth-century German and United States schools of “new”
liberalism elaborated different approaches to the state’s “permanent vigilance,
activity, and intervention” in the markets through specific corrective
instruments that aim to sustain competition as any healthy economy’s
self-regulating motor (132). In this manner, neoliberal economic policies
require the state or transnational financial institutions to decide the time
and measure for market intervention through specific instruments that aim to
produce secondary, corrective effects on market systems in order to foster greater
competitive activity within them.
Not just any form of market
intervention is permissible in neoliberal practice. For, neoliberal economic
policies are shaped by specific forms and instruments aimed at regulating
market prices and purchasing power, such as monetary policy (i.e., printing
less money to reduce inflation) and adjustments to taxation (i.e., lowering
taxes to increase purchasing power), never intervening directly in the markets
through price-fixing or, say, mandates to regulate unemployment. As such, one
of the tenets and main pursuits of neoliberal practice today is to achieve
greater “flexibility” in the labor market through legal deregultations that
minimize corporate empoyers’ fiscal responsibility for its employees while
introducing temporary employment, new hiring practices for pluri-employment,
and greater ease to hire and fire at will. Whether in the labor or other
markets, this rationale aims to free market activity from stops or controls
that would otherwise hinder its operations, but not without favoring corporate
enterprise, in the case of labor, at the expense of precarity for workers. In
this sense, proponents of neoliberal policy defend the use of “instruments” and
deregultation as operational tools in lieu of direct state intervention, which
aim to induce secondhand effects in the markets conceived as a complex operative system whose calculation can never be totally comprehended (139). On
this operational approach to tempered market interventionism in neoliberal
orthodoxy, one returns to the G-20 Washington Summit declaration drafted thirty
years after Foucault’s lectures, which upholds the validity of neoliberal
instruments for regulation in “a
commitment to free market principles, including the rule of law, respect for
private property, open trade and investment, competitive markets, and
efficient, effectively regulated financial systems,” without isolation or “overregulation
that would hamper economic growth.” As such, according to neoliberal
doctrine, any operative intervention in the markets must be legitimated in its
aim to foster greater competition and exchange, or what amounts to the same,
for example, to reactivate stagnant markets through controls on inflation.
In Foucault’s words, market
regulation by competition becomes the economic paradigm through which the
social is governed in neoliberal practice:
Government must not form a counterpoint or a screen, as it were, between
society and economic processes. It has to intervene on society as such, in its
fabric and depth. Basically, it has to intervene on society so that competitive
mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in
society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible, that
is to say, a general regulation of society by the market. (145)
Seated in an economic rationale, competition operates as a regulatory
measure for the social body. In practice, observes Maurizio Lazzarato, “the
specific role of government is then, on the one hand, to detect the
‘differences’ of status, incomes, education, social insurances, etc., and to
set these inequalities to act effectively one against the other,” which in
neoliberal rhetoric sustains competition as the stimulus for greater efficiency
and productivity; “[o]n the other hand, it is a question of amplifying the
politics of individualization—of salaries, of careers, of the monitoring of the
unemployed—inside each segment, each situation, as a way of inciting
competition” (“Neoliberalism in Action” 119). The rationalizing imaginary that conceives
of competition as a healthy motor for free market activity is inextricable from
the envisioned ideal subjects who participate in economic transactions. The
individual conceived as the subject who enjoys certain freedoms and naturally
reaps greater earnings from incentive-based competition, and whose experience
of sociality passes first through self-interest rather than solidarity, is
constructed as an idealized, albeit distopic, subject. Neoliberal technologies
of government and the self-regulatory practices of the subject are inscribed
within an imaginary of economic autonomy and self-responsibility grounded in individual
gain. In neoliberalism, summarizes Jason Read, “the discourse of the economy
becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action—crime,
marriage, higher education, and so on—can be charted according to a calculus of
maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an in-vestment,” contemplated
from market logic and the private activity of the population (31).
In order to maximize on competition and thereby
productivity for this imaginary subject and market forces at large, privatization
is pursued within corporate activity as the guarantor of market competition. In
this light, privatization serves a dual purpose as it reduces the state’s role
in providing public services in healthcare and education, pensions and social
security, or infrastructure and energy, and so on, while neoliberal practice
“frees” these services to market competition. Market forces shall determine the
survival of the fittest enterprise when left to their own devices. The
production, distribution, and promotion of culture, largely dependent on public
funds, for example, are consigned to a market logic of consumerism in which
revenues must sustain these activities. Such is the case made by Spanish economists
Rocío Albert and Rogelio Biazzi who advocate the elimination of subsidiaries for
Spanish cinema as a measure to urge the industry “to stop making auteur film to
make films for viewers,” profitable by ticket sales and commercial endeavors
alone. Aside
from the culture industry proper, however, one consequence of deregulation and
privatization today has been the common occurrence that administration in public
and private hospitals, schools and universities, social services and pensions
programs, among others, are increasingly required to justify their
decision-making based on profitability and competitivity. The firm becomes the management
model for all areas of human activity.
Indeed, amid the push to privatize, the
corporatization of the media, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on, not only
becomes more commonplace, but certainly presents unethical conflicts of
interest among politics, private endeavors, and the corporate and political ownership
of the media. Take, for example, the cases in Spain, among many, in which
privatization initiatives have served the business interests of the political
class. Such is the case with the push to privatize public healthcare in Madrid
by politician and former Counselor for the Madrid Health Department Juan José
Güemes (PP), who sought the privatization of Madrid’s clinical and lab analyses
while he served on the advisory board to Unilabs, a company that would reap private
benefits. During the bonanza years of the construction boom in Spain, the
examples of confluent spheres of interest among building contractors,
politicians, and credit-lending institutions are countless. Or, take, for
example, former Vice President under Aznar’s administration, Rodrigo Rato, who
also served as Managing Director of the IMF; after Rato’s failed reappointment
to head Bankia (i.e., formerly, CajaMadrid), a disastrously managed fusion of
semi-public savings banks that required nationalization, he was reappointed to
Telefónica’s Advisory Board. In other words, local, regional, and national political
figures have enjoyed a revolving door to serve on advisory boards in private
interests, if not reaping the benefits of privatization and private investment
directly.
Together with
the development of neoliberalism’s instruments of market correction and
competition, which mark its difference to the non-interventionist free-market
practices of liberalism, Foucault identifies another significant, and social,
attribute to the paradigm shift from liberal to “new” liberal governmentality. He
observes a remarkable transformation in the liberal art of government that
requires policy-makers to reconceive their rationalization of economic activity,
which in any complex system cannot be fully calculated, towards the calculable
domain of the individual. Whereas in liberalism this individual, the homo oeconomicus, was conceived as the
irreducible rational “unit” of labor and social production quantifiable in any
census or statistic (i.e., thereby also usually reproducing the family as the
basic unit of production), the new abstracted form of neoliberal homo oeconomicus
is endowed with a novel characteristic as an enterprising, self-sustained
“unit” capable of maximizing his own productivity, social autonomy, and
independent responsibility for self-care. With this imagined unit of autonomous
independence are initiated practices of spending and rationalized judgment
regarding one’s private pocketbook, investment, and practices—not only the
choice to save and invest in private insurance, private property, private
pensions in imagining a future when one can no longer work. This envisaged
individual autonomy, which presumes a surplus in one’s income for investment, likewise
extends to choices on one’s risk, future dependency, prudent spending, and so
on. Thereby economic growth becomes a social policy that aims to allow an individual
to acquire an income that maximizes his capital to realize fully his enterprising
character and possibility for production. It follows that private insurance,
access to private property, and individual or familial capitalization are
achieved through privatization itself that aims to minimize the state’s
responsibility in providing social programs and public services (144). After
all, the homo oeconomicus can only realize his fullest productive potential as an
autonomous, enterprising unit if he benefits from the minimum possible tax
withholdings on his income and acquires the maximum possible capital to finance
his own endeavors, independently of the state. As David Harvey explains this
link between the state and the individual:
Privatization and deregulation combined with competition, it is claimed,
eliminate bureaucratic red tape, increase efficiency and productivity, improve
quality, and reduce costs, both directly to the consumer through cheaper
commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden.
The neoliberal state should persistently seek out internal reorganizations and
new institutional arrangements that improve its competitive position as an
entity vis-à-vis other states in the global market. (Brief Introduction 65)
 |
| Competition and social atomization, figuratively |
The homo oeconomicus in the neoliberal
regime becomes the model for the ideal subject, based not on rationales of contract
exchange as in liberalism, but on market competition for private interests as
the maxim of neoliberalism, in which the individual is presumed to be an
entrepreneur, a self-sufficient enterprise of one for life. Experience, if not
life itself, is valued by economic productivity, autonomy, and solvency as an
assumed, permanent condition, in which fending for oneself in competitive terms
encourages enterprise for the common good of the markets. The incentive-based
claim to productivity and financial gain, in other words, is imagined as the
ideal model of human activity. What lies beyond the imaginary model for the homo oeconomicus, however, are its many
exclusions, defined loosely as “non-productive individuals”: the unemployed,
the dependent, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. As such, an unemployed
person is presumed in neoliberal theory to be in a transient position on her
way to future employment, regardless of the circumstances of the labor market
that might impede the realization of this naturalized assumption. If this person
cannot secure a job, however, then she suffers from “chronic unemployment.”
If classical liberalism may be understood as the
political convention of the bourgeoisie, in the neoliberal regime, similarly,
political doctrine presumes that a specific segment of the population (i.e.,
the “productive” with a surplus of earnings for private investment, insurance,
property, etc.) stands in for society as a whole. Cultural narratives of upward
mobility and equal opportunity, which are often blind to class difference and
social disadvantage, are evidence of the rationalizing suture required to
justify the myth that hard work and perserverance equate to a better quality of
life, attainable for all. The pursuit of individualism, particularly the
outward appearance and fashioning of individual identification, is conflated
with the freedoms to choose, whether one’s identity or a range of consumer
products.
However, it should not go unstated that those excluded
from the ideal subject envisaged as the self-sufficient homo oeconomicus are increasingly held to bear the economic and
labor burdens that limit an individual’s possibilities, paradoxically, to
become self-sufficient. The circumstances are many in Spain today: as companies
are required legally to pay less into social security for employees; as higher taxes
are imposed to pay off state debt from bailout packages funneled to private
interests (i.e., in lieu of higher taxes on the wealthiest fortunes and the
pursuit of fiscal fraud); as labor laws favoring flexibility make full-time employment
or permanent contracts increasingly rare; as wages continue to be low enough for
millions not to meet basic expenses for vital needs (e.g., housing, utilities,
groceries, etc.); as the increasing costs of advanced degree programs and
medical treatments prove too expensive for many, the model of self-sufficiency
upheld in the ideal subject is one that proves only attainable for those who
enjoy a surplus for personal savings and perhaps private investment. As such,
risk of economic insolvency is a more tangible threat to the precariously employed
and the “non-productive” who find themselves increasingly unprotected, than to certain
areas of corporate activity and private ownership freed of risk by protectionist
benefits. As Lazzarato notes on the financialization of the economy since the
time of Foucault’s lectures, the onus of risk has come to bear unevenly upon
the vulnerable rather than the well-to-do.
Contemporary capitalism has
overturned this relation of relative risks, for, as we have seen from the new
strategies introduced to insecuritize or make precarious the condition of
wage-earners, contract no longer provides the guarantees and securities once
prevailing; the opposite movement has seen the introduction of stock options,
golden handshakes and so on to protect management as well as shareholders from
risk. This is a qualitative shift—it prompts us to temper the comments of
Foucault on liberalism and competition by taking account of the asymmetrical
effects of financialization for, on one side, ‘non-owners’ and, on the other
side, shareholders and holders of savings. The former must rely on their
earnings alone, often blocked or eroded because of the systematic reduction in
social expenditures, whilst the latter can shift risks onto the stock market or
insurances. (Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action” 124)
Faced with its own set of risks, however, the economic
rationalization of the social body also confronts the state with its own
limitations. “Homo oeconomicus strips
the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental, and
major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the
totality of the economic field. The sovereign cannot fail to be blind vis-à-vis
the economic domain or field as a whole” (Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics 292). If liberal theorists took up the
rationalization of life, parceled out into calculable elements in an economic
science, then in neoliberalism calculability has become the economic onus of
rationality, judgment, and possibility for action in an individual’s choices—the
limitations of his freedoms and conditions thereof. For, in liberalism,
Foucault argues, the state is conceived and practiced in government as
self-limiting in its powers and extension. After all, liberalism in theory
preserves individual rights (i.e., freedoms), and particularly the right to
secure and protect private property, in which the state cannot intervene. The biopolitical
dimension of governmentality extends beyond the state’s limitations to act upon
subjects directly. Where the state ends—beyond its reach to intervene in life—modalities
of social and self-administration (i.e., control, limitation, regulation, risk
management) are produced and reinforced within social relations, serving in
part to reproduce self-government where liberal democracy otherwise limits the
state’s very possibility for direct administration of its population. Liberal
practice has done so historically, Foucault argues, by inventing the slippery
notion of “civil society” as a marriage between the state’s limits in which it
cannot intervene directly (i.e., the social and economic administration of the population)
and the state’s very terrain in which it can act (i.e., the law). It is a
concept of civil society in the current trajectory of Spain’s crisis, that is
increasingly charged with the responsibility of assuming costs (e.g., medical,
insurance, education, legal, housing and food, etc.) for segments of the
population no longer protected by social and welfare services or rights to housing.
It is a civil society, as Wendy Brown has duly noted, that in neoliberalism is
increasingly reduced to economic functions vis-à-vis market activity alone.
As such, the invention of civil society provides the
state with a “legitimate” terrain for maneuver through which practices of
government enter into the social and economic life of citizens, both directly
through law and punishment in disciplinary societies, and indirectly through
the social production of modalities according to this rationale, say, in the
possibilities and limitations of one’s capacity for action, as well as in the values
that mold upstanding citizens according to the envisaged ideal subject of the homo oeconomicus. For, in the civil
society of the neoliberal regime, practices and knowledges of
self-responsibility and self-care develop with force, as an individual’s
economic decisions and self-autonomy are invested with moral terms that materialize
class distinction, if not judgement on the “irresponsibility” of the socially
excluded, the dependent, and welfare recipients. This is one form of the
intervention with which the neoliberal dispositif
acts upon and within society in its fabric and depth.
In this manner, the biopolitics of neoliberalism are
not solely limited to the consequences of a top-down imposition of governance
upon a given society or a subject; they also arise relationally in social practices
and modes of thought, in the ability for (neoliberal) practices in government
policies and decision-making to reproduce themselves in self-regulating modalities,
in exchanges among people, in the structural model of firm management, and in
an individual’s freedoms of choice. Stated otherwise, neoliberalism is more
than an art of government or a legitimated set of fiscal, monetary, or market
policies and instruments. In the social body, it is perpetuated within
practices, ways of life, and systems of thought (i.e., the neoliberal dispositif) in a relationship between
technologies of government and the governed, and between the social and the
economic possibilities of production. It is this treatment of the social as an
economic paradigm that might further approximate not only the social and
cultural manifestations of neoliberalism in the context of the crisis in Spain,
as elsewhere, but also the real biopolitical effects produced both from and
against dominant political discourses, knowledges, and practices that aim to
legitimize the neoliberal art of government to the detriment of many and for
the privilege of the few. Following Foucault, in other words, we might extract
that in the neoliberal regime, the art of government that addresses the social body
through a purely market rationale, which reveres competition, market logic, and
opportunity, is itself evident among the governed: in rationalized practices of
self-restraint and self-care, in the calculated decision-making of individuals
based on risk management, cost-benefit, and social exchanges that wager favors
or indebtedness as leverage for competition. Or, in the decision-making process
that leads an individual to choose one option over another based on its
competitive payoff, its inherent risk in the probability of compromising
oneself, or in the short- to long-term return, economic or otherwise, one
expects to receive in a given social exchange or contract. Together with the
economic determinants of decision-making processes such as these, one might
begin to approximate some traces of the neoliberal dispositif distributed across the social field for their production
of modalities, or ways of being (i.e., thinking, speaking, acting) in the world.
So too does the neoliberal
rationale bear upon the social constitution of alterity. The biopolitics of
neoliberalism are inherently bound within the complex interstices that shape
and are shaped by the social production of class difference and exclusion in
constructed categories of “others” (e.g., the poor, the unemployed, pensioners,
immigrants, etc.) who do not meet the self-sufficiently productive model of the
ideal subject. For example, such a model is observed in the social attitudes and
rhetoric of those who attempt to recast low-income mothers as irresponsible
decision-makers, which in turn serves as leverage to justify the elimination of
social welfare programs. Or, similarly, in the view that the unemployed are
unmotivated—or lazy, if you like—incapable of keeping a job through hard work,
which serves in turn to justify the minimization of unemployment benefits as a
motivating incentive. David Harvey writes, “Individual success or failure are
interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings (such as
not investing significantly enough in one’s own human capital through
education),” which form judgements and attributions blind to class difference and
preexisting social disadvantages (Brief
Introduction 65). This is another nexus at work in neoliberal myth-making
today, in which social judgements on autonomy and self-responsibility are
recast as an accomplice to the ends and aims of neoliberal policies.
Behind the language of
austerity, explored in greater depth in the following chapter, the most
vulnerable and unprotected are often targeted in related claims. Women’s
centers and shelters, social protection and integration programs for
immigrants, and state services and pensions for the disabled, to name only a
few, are in practice some of the first ledgers liquidated of public funds. So
too are immigrants without papers cited in conservative political rhetoric,
contrary to fact, as the primary abusers of medical services in Spain, which
serves in turn to justify their exclusion from state healthcare coverage. As
such, the neoliberal art of government often restricts equal access to services
and opportunity for all, as vulnerable segements of the population find
themselves unable to meet the idealized economic standards of self-sufficiency
required of them, much less full autonomy for life through the contracting of
private services and benefits. In
the case of Spain, specifically, the political rhetoric that assigns blame to
Spanish residents for having outlived their means tout court, echoed in the
discourse of the liberal media and of certain segments of the conservative
right, not only ignores the political market deregulations and financial
interests that ushered unbridled construction from boom to bust; this argument
also serves in turn to justify austerity measures in the language on government
cutbacks, and as it does so, targets residents as responsible parties for
paying the public debt on funds fueled to private interests. Fiscal policy, in
other words, or specifically the management of state spending and public debt,
is recast in social and, particularly, moral terms on prudent spending and the private
investments of the population. The message to be read is one of shame, judgement,
and irresponsibility.
Morality is a key component in
the veridiction of neoliberal thought within the social body. Rationalizing sutures
such as those mentioned above form part of the neoliberal myth I referred to
from the outset, in which an alibi (i.e., civilian responsibility) and an
accomplice (e.g., elimination of welfare, austerity, etc.) are spun at once in
the veridiction of neoliberal thought, despite the lack of truth in its claims.
In them, myth is forged from justifications and moralizing presumptions that
legitimate limiting the role and extension of the state while fostering
self-responsibility, autonomy, and enterprise. In other words, in neoliberal rationales
one can identify the constitution of “upstanding civil society” as a system of
practices, beliefs, and judgements in social relations—particularly, of
morality as one basis for this judgment—which reenact the neoliberal art of
government in an individual’s decisions, actions, and identifications in
similarity or difference to others. We may bear witness, in other words, to the
production of neoliberal myth in social attitudes, knowledges, ways of life,
and statements, which often participate in reifying social exclusions on moral
grounds seated in an economic rationale. As Nikolas Rose argues, in neoliberal
practice today, “We have seen the birth of political mentalities and
governmental practices which have served to sharpen and neutralize the
divisions between the autonomous and the dependent, the contented and the
discontented, the haves and the have-nots” in decisive divisions that dangerously
cast out society’s “unproductive” others as second-class citizens (Powers 254). The calculable rationale
extends, in other words, to an affective realm of justifications and judgments
of oneself and others in the exercise of freedom—of guilt, shame, blame, etc.
On its other side, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and a range of affects
associated with the pursuit of individual happiness and enterprise are the premise
of self-responsibility in the neoliberal rationale, assumed to be equally
accessible to all.
For Wendy Brown, this key element in neoliberalism’s
moralization of an individual’s choices and conduct is precisely the mechanism
through which neoliberal subjects are controlled through their freedoms.
Revisiting Foucault, she argues: “the withdrawal of the state from certain
domains, followed by the privatization of certain state functions, does not
amount to the dismantling of government but rather constitutes a technique of
governing; indeed, it is this signature technique of neoliberal governance, in
which rational economic action suffused throughout society replaces express
state rule or provision” (44). As
the state is reduced in its extension, the exigencies of self-management,
enterprise, and care become the operative basis for the subject’s possibilities
of (economic and social) choice. The moralizing effect of neoliberalism extends
to this judgment of others in their actions, of responsible or irresponsible
spending, investment, and personal choice that relates life to calculable,
economic factors. Such is the case, for example, in the disparaging complaint
that welare recipients are a tax burden on one’s own private profits, as “productive”
society pays for the “free ride” of the non-productive. It is a form of moral
judgement that true to neoliberal doctrine, not only imagines a readily
accessible world freed of limits and controls for the entire population, which are
largely available only to the privileged, but that likewise recasts economic
criteria onto social decisions of (ir-)responsibility in others’ actions. Hence,
one of the great fallacies of neoliberal myth resides in the presumption of
equal opportunity in which external controls, stops, or social modalities that
might impede access for all, are ignored or are simply believed not to exist at
all.
For Foucault, the universal model of market
competition and enterprise in neoliberal doctrine, itself a potential social
antagonism and root of conflict, is met with the perceived necessity among
neoliberal policy-makers to foster a “set of what could be called ‘warm’ moral
and cultural values which are presented precisely as antithetical to the ‘cold’
mechanism of competition” (Birth of
Biopolitics 242). Amid perceptible social atomization, neoliberal policies
must be supplemented with alterior forms of social activity that can satisfy this
human deficit. In this sense, the neoliberal think-tank of the conservative
Popular Party, the Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES),
has produced a substantial body of literature on domestic policy often traced
with assessments on the moral decadence and relativism plauguing Spanish
society today. In the FAES papers, one often finds a nostalgic desire to return
to upstanding moral convictions, summarized in former President Aznar’s words on
the universal “moral superiority of a
series of values that have prevailed over centuries” in liberalism and Christianity
(12).
Religion, in the United States context, but certainly elsewhere, plays a
primary role in satisfying the moral and cultural values accompanying this
deficit in the neoliberal rationale. As Juli Highfill has argued in her
research on Christian mega-churches and religion in the United States,
spirituality of a neoconservative bent provides its church members with a sense
of social integration on both a small group and mass scale, as well as the
privileges of belonging to a society (e.g., classes, daycare services,
networking events, etc.) that provides moral direction on questions ranging
from private property and investment to family management.
It is worth noting that religious followers and believers in vast segments of
the United States population no longer value the separation between church and
state as one foundation of liberal democracy. To the contrary, politicians are
often championed by constituents for their spiritual beliefs or religious
denomination as a sort of moral compass for social policies, even if these religious
convictions justify negating equal rights to others.
On the other side of upstanding civil society in the
neoliberal regime, however, alternative community formations develop with
force, which, David Harvey notes, provide a sense of belonging, affiliation,
and stability.
Stripped of the protective
cover of lively democratic institutions and threatened with all manner of
social dislocations, a disposable workforce inevitably turns to other
institutional forms through which to construct social solidarities and express
a collective will. Everything from gangs and criminal cartels,
narco-trafficking networks, mini-mafias and favela bosses, through community,
grassroots and non-governmental organizations, to secular cults and religious
sects proliferate. These are the alternative social forms that fill the void
left behind as state powers, political parties, or other institutional forms
are actively dismantled or simply wither away as centers of collective endeavor
and of social bonding. (Brief History
171)
These alternative modes of socialization, if not economic
subsistence, constitute an antagonism to upstaning civil society, which it perceives
as a dangerous threat. Their collectives comprise a lumpen category of
second-rate citizens excluded from certain privileges, protections, and even
basic rights. As some social attitudes would have it, writes Nikolas Rose, they
are civil society’s abject others: “outside the communities of inclusion exists
an array of micro-sectors, micro-cultures of non-citizens, failed citizens,
anti-citizens, consisting of those who are unable or unwilling to enterprise
their lives or manage their own risk, incapable of exercising responsible
self-government, attached wither to no moral community or to a community of
anti-morality” (Powers 259). Their abjection
is a powerful case of how society’s marginalized are reinforced through the
reification of class difference through moralizing criteria based on (economic)
subsistence and social modes of being in the world.
This brings me to the question of how subjects in the
neoliberal regime are controlled through (economic and social) freedoms, which
I have been calling here social modalities.