Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Eugene de Salignac, 1914.
Have you heard about the lonesome loser?
He’s a loser but he still keeps on trying.
Sit down, take a look at yourself
Don’t you want to be somebody?
—The Little River Band
In my recent post entitled, “Economic Fatalism and the American White Working Class,” my starting point was a study of white working-class attitudes (published in April 2017) that showed that working class whites had voted for Trump in droves because of fear of so-called cultural displacement, rather than because of economic concerns. Nevertheless, I sought to argue that the pervasive belief that “the system is rigged against ordinary people” and that “things are not likely to get better” (also captured in the study) is at the root of the overall white working-class choice, rather than widespread commitment to an overtly racist political project.
I then set out to explore the meaning and significance of economic fatalism, as opposed to economic insecurity, by looking at a set of transformations in corporate capital management practices since the 1970s, leading to disinvestment in the productive economy and the effective deindustrialization of America. The overarching purpose in trying to tell this story about capital mobility was to find an insertion point where the white working-class sense of grievance (and fatalism) could be attached to something like “the rise and dominance of finance capital,” as opposed to things like “big government” or “handouts to minorities.”
In this post, however, my intention will be to move the focus away from job loss due to capital mobility, disinvestment, globalization, and deindustrialization in order to get at the full implication of what Michel Foucault has called Neoliberal Governmentality (more on this shortly). It’s not just that large numbers of people have been on “the receiving end” of market fluctuations, deregulated capital flows, outsourcing, and privatization; it’s that progressively, over the last few decades, their very identity as workers and citizens has somehow ceased to exist, leaving them feeling like perennial losers.
The Demise of Keynesian Man
Among historically-oriented philosophers, at any rate, it is not terribly controversial to say that the history of the last five hundred years, in the most general sense, is a record of the interplay between the experience of modernity (changes in human consciousness brought about by the rise of the free market) and the project of Enlightenment (as a political project commensurate to this version of homo economicus, the rights bearing individual of moral worth). These two aspects of the modern person and their relation, when explicitly valorized, define what came to be known as Liberalism. Liberalism is thus also bifurcated, into economic liberalism (the property rights of individuals under conditions of laissez-faire) and political liberalism (the legitimacy and purposes of the State, as understood by means of popular sovereignty and the social contract).
This existence of the modern individual as both “acquisitive bourgeois” on the one hand, and “citizen-holding-fast-to-utopian-ideals” on the other, also gives rise to a manner of governance that implicitly rests on this bifurcated foundation. In his paper on Neoliberalism and “The Aspirations of Human Capital” French philosopher Michel Feher points out that under condition of (economic) Liberalism, a formal equivalence is asserted between the salaried worker and the employer: both are understood as subjects who are free to dispose of their property, be it labor power or capital, and to exchange it at its proper value in the market place. Under this arrangement, so the story goes, we are sovereign subjects with inalienable rights—not to be taken ourselves as commodities, and with a right to bargain over what we own.
The guarantee of equality through the rule of law and participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of winners and losers.
As for the rest of it (all the other things human beings care about) Feher writes that Liberalism, as a humanism, acknowledges that this status as ‘free laborers’ leaves us with “needs and aspirations that cannot be reduced to interests that can be satisfied by the law of supply and demand.” Because Liberalism’s bifurcated notion of the individual leads to recognition of spheres of value other than the market place (even if it is only in order to reproduce subjects ready and capable to participate in the market) the mode of governance that arises in the age of Liberalism, because it recognizes such things as the domain of family and religious values, and individual life plans, etc., is that of the imperative to manage the mixed economy–where the State, respecting the individual right of free market exchange, nevertheless is also compelled to protect its rights-bearing citizens from the vagaries of the market by extending a social safety net.
The rise of neoliberalism then, is located first and foremost at the crisis point in the liberal manner of governance, where the basic assumptions of Keynesian economics that guided it, and the the assumptions about the subject, the market, and the State, begin to be withdrawn. In less conceptual terms, this is the story that I described in the first installment of this post, the backstory of working class economic fatalism since the 1970s due to increasing capital mobility (the rise of finance capital), disinvestment in the US productive economy, and the resulting deindustrialization of America.
Economic Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democracy
In her recent book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown writes that neoliberalism names a “historically specific economic and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism,” and goes on to recount the common definition of neoliberalism as “an ensemble of economic policies that are in accord with…[the] principle of affirming free markets…deregulation of industry and capital flow, radical reduction in welfare State provisions and protections, privatized and outsourced public goods, the end of redistributive economic and social policy…”. Brown also acknowledges the main foci of the critics of these policies: intensified inequality, crass commercialization of the natural and human spheres, inappropriate corporate influence over political decisions, and economic havoc due to Wall Street manipulations of Main Street.
But Brown’s interest in the book lies beyond a mere recounting of the arguments for and against these policies, something that she says is leading to democracy’s “conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment.” There is something about neoliberalism’s principles and precepts, she says, when deployed as a mature style of governance, as what, following Foucault we will call a form of governmentality, that has much wider significance than just the implications of a set of policy prescriptions.
Brown writes, “The guarantee of equality through the rule of law and participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of winners and losers.” “Liberty itself,” she continues, “is narrowed to market conduct, divested of association with mastering the conditions of life, existential freedom, or securing the rule of the demos.”
Michel Foucault and Neoliberal Governmentality
Remarkably, while most observers came to understand the full implication of neoliberal ideology slowing (across early experiments in the developing world in the 70s and 80s, and via the orthodoxy and wider application of the so called “Washington Consensus” in the 90s) Michel Foucault was thinking about neoliberalism (who knew!) as a kind of “reprogramming” or reinterpretation of liberalism in his 1979 lecture course in the College de France, before even Thatcher had come to power. His starting point is with the theory of the liberal state, as seen looking backward, with the neoliberal turn taken almost as a kind of manifest destiny.
As Wendy Brown relates, following Foucault, in monarchical Europe, state power is limited only by other competing sovereigns. Internally, the rule of law functions as a multiplier of state power, extending rather than limiting the power of the king. In the 17th century, law and right begin to move against “the raison d’état,” to constitute checks and limits. Finally, in the 18th century, “yet another principle of limitation arose, that of the market.” This led to a kind of reformulation of state sovereignty, constraining it, but also providing a new basis for legitimacy (sound fiscal and market management).
Under neoliberalism, economic growth is the State’s social policy.
During this time when Foucault is re-reading the likes of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Locke, and David Hume, he is doing so while also reading German (Freiburg/Ordoliberal) and American (University of Chicago) Neoliberal theorists, such as Wilhelm Ropke, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Through this parallel reading, Foucault concludes that across the history of liberalism to the neoliberal phase, a sort of a historical logic is working itself out toward final expression and judgement– that “liberalism was born with a market governmentality, rather than the rights of man at its heart.”
Whereas under conditions of liberalism, the market became “that which must be left alone by the State,” and which, having set the basic conditions for the market, protects the dignity of rights-bearing citizens and the public goods to which their popular sovereignty is entitled, neoliberalism is not just about the State leaving the economy alone. Reversing the formula in which a free market is defined as supervised by the State, for the neoliberals, the State should be defined and supervised by the market.
Following Wendy Brown, for Foucault, “neoliberalism activates the State on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to facilitate economic competition and growth, and to…regulate the social by the market.” Where the economy becomes the primary object of State concern and policy, and the State’s interest in the social domain concerns primarily it’s marketization, a whole host of departures, modifications and inversions of the principles of classical liberalism (both economic and political) become the order of the day.
Since the State must govern for the market rather than because of it, continuous support for competition replaces the priority focus on the various conditions of fair exchange. Since inequality is the premise and outcome of competition, where neoliberalism is realized, inequality becomes legitimate, even normative. Additionally, where competition is at the root, rather than exchange, labor ceases to be a central or even a meaningful category. There is only capital, financial capital and human capital. As Brown writes, “this transformation obscures the visibility of class to an even greater degree than classical liberalism, eliminating the basis for alienation and exploitation, and therefore the rationale for unions, consumer groups, or other forms of economic solidarity (other than cartels).” Finally, as was previously indicated, under neoliberalism social policy is not oriented as a compensation for economic policy; under neoliberalism, “economic growth itself should enable individuals to prosper and to protect themselves from risk—economic growth is the State’s social policy.
Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Human Capital
Thus far much has been said about the changing relationship between the State and the market. But more needs to be said about the emergence of this notion of the subject, in the age of finance capital, as first and foremost “human capital.” Recall that under conditions of classical liberalism up to and including Keynesian governmentality, we are also “homo economicus” but we get to be things other than homo economicus (recognition of other spheres of value, such as citizen, someone with familial bonds, believer, lover, etc.).
But where the dominant mode of governmentality becomes that of the State on the model of corporate governance under conditions of finance capital, we get a rising societal concern with capital growth through appreciation, with stock value rather than just profitable income. Where human being as neoliberal homo economicus gets interpreted as human capital, human beings are recognized exhaustively as market actors. Today’s homo economicus, Wendy Brown writes, “is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.”
Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity.
Those of you staring into the mirror, looking at the tired bags under your eyes, who can’t bear the thought of ever going to a party, even with long-time friends, who can’t bring yourselves to participate in frequent flyer programs, know what this is all about. It’s about people unselfconsciously pursuing their romantic life interests according to market principles; it’s about worrying about how many social media followers you have, how many likes, how many retweets, and being encouraged to rate and rank all activities in all domains. It’s the social and cultural correlate to the neoliberal political condition.
Naturally, a whole host of (formerly lurid) examples come to mind about what it means to have an overarching rationality and governmentality that no longer recognizes the distinction between market values and other forms of human value. However, my intention here, following Wendy Brown, is not to simply make a point about crass commercialization or what Jurgen Habermas referred to in the 80s as the “colonization of the lifeworld.” If the neoliberal version of homo economicus truly approaches everything only according to the rules of the market, then it also ceases to be homo politicus, Brown writes, because it cannot “think public purposes or common problems in a distinctly political way…Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity.”
If we recall for a moment what Michel Feher had to say about the purported formal equivalence of worker and employer under classical liberalism (both equally free to exchange either labor power or capital, despite Marx’s howls of protest) and we update it for neoliberalism, then the yield is the broad-based cultural assertion that as human capital, we are all equally entrepreneurs, except of course for our differing quanta of what makes the world go around. This, of course, brings us back to “winners and losers.” We are equally responsible for our human capital appreciation, and to protect ourselves from depreciation. Since the State is all about supporting the market and encouraging continuous competition, the only social policy is economic growth, and henceforth we have no guarantee of security, protection, or even survival. “A subject construed as human capital for itself, for a firm, or for the State,” Brown writes, “is at persistent risk of failure, redundancy, and abandonment, through no doing of its own, regardless of how savvy and responsible it is.” Needless to say, this is also true of the vast numbers of people who start with overwhelming deficits in the human capital department.
Your Neoliberalism Hard at Work
As was mentioned previously, when the State is supervised and supported by the market (rather than the other way around) classical liberalism suffers modifications, departures, and inversions. Among the most distinctive of these is the defocusing of rights in favor of supports for competition, such that rights themselves undergo “economization” by means of neoliberal jurisprudence.
As we are passing third base and heading for home in this article, it is useful to recapitulate much of what has been said by following Wendy Brown as she tells this story again through a concrete case, specifically the SCOTUS’s notorious Citizens United decision of 2010.
Citizens United, Brown says, is rightly taken as an emblem of the radical neoliberal turn of the Roberts court. In the majority decision written by Justice Kennedy, the court held that prior government bans on corporate contributions to super PACS are actually an abridgment of free speech, because corporations have the standing of persons.
But the biggest problem with the decision is not that it awards corporations the rights of individuals as has been widely remarked. Before neoliberalism reinterpreted the primary tenets of liberalism and turned the world upside down with the pervasive idea of the market, the political speech of rights-bearing individuals was something to be protected from the distortions of the market and the influence of corporate capital. However, once the world is upside down, Justice Kennedy makes a remarkable discovery—this whole time, these many decades where the legislative and judicial branches protected the sanctity of citizens deliberating together via political speech by limiting the flow of capital in electoral politics? Well, it turns out that these legislators and these jurists had been perpetuating an injustice against free speech.
That Justice Kennedy doesn’t worry about capital and political corruption is a testament to his residence in the upside-down world of neoliberalism.
In Citizens United, we get the effect that Wendy Brown is so worried about. Its more than the erasure of the difference between fictitious (corporate) and natural (human) persons in allocating free speech rights; needless to say, it’s also more than the subversion of popular efforts to limit corporate influence in politics. Under the new neoliberal order of reason and mode of governmentality, the exercise of democracy comes to be conceived as a marketplace, whose goods (ideas, opinions, and votes) are generated by speech, and speech itself acquires the status of capital. Once speech is separated from the rights of individuals and becomes a thing of the market, a premium must now be placed upon its unrestricted sources and unlimited flow. Since speech is the capital of the political marketplace, we are free when only when it circulates freely. In this way, the first amendment is transformed from a civil right, becoming a capital right.
Under this form of rationality and mode of governmentality, Wendy Brown writes, “it becomes clear that to subject the marketplace in which speech operates to manufactured equality and redistribution is simply to make a Keynesian moral and technical error” because equality pertains “to the right’s distribution, not the effects of the right’s exercise.” For those of you who still might think that the exercise of corporate speech rights that turns the practice of democracy into a capital market endangers the rights of citizens right to participate under conditions of equal protection, old Justice Stephens was with you, arguing that “the public has never clamored for more of corporate influence in politics.”
That Justice Kennedy doesn’t worry about capital and corruption is a testament to his residence in the upside-down world of neoliberalism. Because there is no longer such a thing as the public good (in neoliberal world there are only private interests, contracts and deals), corruption is limited to explicit cases of quid pro quo, and therefore access to elected officials or influence over them is not a per se sign of corruption. How could it be otherwise, if corruption no longer means the bending of the public interest toward private interests?
That was 2010. This is now. Vast sums of dark money entered political races across the country, affecting outcomes from house seats to the presidency. Asked about the impact of Citizens United and dark money on our democracy in his confirmation hearings, SCOTUS designate Neil Gorsuch was questioned about these things by Democratic senators still living in their shrinking alternative universe. Senator Durbin asked him about Hobby Lobby, RIFRA, and the Dictionary Act, and the troubling conclusion that corporations are persons and have equal speech protections. Gorsuch responded that recent law and precedent support the conclusion that was reached, and if it’s wrong, then Congress is free to pass laws that say so–despite the fact that the congress is populated by corporate puppets because there is so much freaking money in politics (ok, he didn’t say that last bit).
Senator Whitehouse asks about Citizens United; he practically begging Gorsuch to make a reference to the Constitution and the values embedded in it that reflect the intentions of the framers. Please, Judge Gorsuch, he appears to plaintively ask, you have been appointed to the Supreme Court. This is not some lower court appointment. Please enlighten us as to your view of the values enshrined in the Constitution, since you will be among a small number of people who have the last word on its interpretation. But no. Once again, he tells us that Citizens is now precedent, and he follows the law. Apparently, there is no per se role for the SCOTUS, following the Constitution, to protect people and institutions from the corrupting effects of corporate power and influence.
Foucault and Neoliberalism’s Winners and Losers
As mentioned, it is remarkable that Foucault was zeroing in on neoliberalism so early, especially given that contemporary economics and public policy seemed rather out of his line. It’s even more surprising for anyone with more than passing familiarity with his leading preoccupations and philosophical methods—Foucauldian genealogy aimed to write a sort of unexpected or fabulous history of the present, and thus did not lend itself easily to predictions and/or warnings about the future. But what Foucault was especially tuned into was changing conceptions about who we are, and how who we are is shaped by what he referred to as relations of power embedded in institutions and forms of language. So, he perceived the demise of Keynesian man, and the birth of something new. For the most part, Foucault avoided moralizing about these transformations, since he felt that morals came along with each stamping of human being, like a set of appropriate accessories. He would just say that what appeared to be coming next was “dangerous” rather than good or bad.
Where Wendy Brown, our commiserating contemporary wants to know what it is that Neoliberalism actually wants, what it’s utopia would look like, Foucault sees neoliberalism as a kind of interesting mutation. “It is a question of knowing how far the market economy’s powers of political and social information extend. This is the stake,” he writes. But having recognized that the reduction of human being to neoliberal homo economicus eviscerates democracy (by exposing people in all modes of existence to the vagaries of the market, thus rendering them necessarily everywhere winners and losers), Foucault is curious to know what tactics might work to gain the assent of perennial losers. Presumably, this is the case because people in such circumstances usually discern themselves to be rather royally screwed (economic fatalism). He writes, “How are neoliberal free market principles administered in such a way as to bind the population to them politically, and to the regime as a whole?”
Again, at the time Foucault was writing, neoliberalism as governmentality was not yet mature. Perhaps his interest in this question would be expressed as something other than disinterested curiosity if he were here with us today. For our part, I believe that contemporary political history has provided us with the answer to this question. It is found in and through the marriage of neoliberal governmentality and the white working-class politics of resentment that marks the present political moment.
