Rhizombie

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In ordinary parlance, neo-liberalism refers to the repudiation of Keynesian welfare state economics and the ascendance of the Chicago School of political economy – von Hayek, Friedman, et al. In popular usage, neo-liberalism is equated with a radically free market: maximized competition and free trade achieved through economic de-regulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favorable to business and indifferent toward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long term resource depletion and environmental destruction. Neo-liberalism is most often invoked in relation to the Third World, referring either to NAFTA-like schemes that increase the vulnerability of poor nations to the vicissitudes of globalization or to International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies which, through financing packages attached to “restructuring” requirements, yank the chains of every aspect of Third World existence, including political institutions and social formations. For progressives, neo-liberalism is thus a pejorative not only because it conjures economic policies which sustain or deepen local poverty and the subordination of peripheral to core nations, but also because it is compatible with, and sometimes even productive of, authoritarian, despotic, paramilitaristic, and/or corrupt state forms and agents within civil society.
   
While these referents capture an important effect of neo-liberalism, they also reduce neo-liberalism to a bundle of economic policies with inadvertent political and social consequences: they eschew the political rationality that both organizes these policies and reaches beyond the market. Moreover, these referents do not capture the neo in neo-liberalism, tending instead to treat the contemporary phenomenon as little more than a revival of classical liberal political economy. Finally, they obscure the specifically political register of neo-liberalism in the First World, that is, its powerful erosion of liberal democratic institutions and practices in places like the United States. My concern in this essay is with these neglected dimensions of neo-liberalism.

Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy

Oldie but a goody re recent conversations.

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gleemie:

Trump is not antineoliberal. He is attempting to be a charismatic fascist which fully included supporting capitalists and a managerial class

Agreed. But he has been heralded, by many on the Left, as a “sign of the times,” i.e., as a rejection of the neoliberal policies of globalism/unilateral free trade that led to the loss of American manufacturing jobs overseas. Trump ran on an anti-globalist, protectionist platform. He has bowed out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, plans to divest millions from the World Bank, and vowed to slap high tariffs on overseas imports/restructure NAFTA, etc. 

So on the one hand there is no doubt that his election presents a negative reaction to neoliberal economic policy. But my point is that it can’t just narrowly be defined as that. Not only because, as you point out, he fully represents the interests of Wall Street and abides by neoliberal conceptions of the state, etc. But also, because Trumpism/ “neofascism” as a phenomenon is not what happens “after” neoliberalism but might be internal to neoliberalism itself as mode of ensuring that “after” doesn’t come about. I guess the question is if an anti-globalist neoliberalism can exist, and whether it might not be its next iteration.

[gleemie]

Where do you see this thing about Trump divesting from the World Bank? My Googling failed. I’m wondering which sections of domestic capital win here. Extraction abroad is surely still okay in Trump’s order (exxon). Something that happened between the US and India: exporting jobs to India, growing a “middle class” market there, and trying to sell US products there (”emerging markets” and “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”) style is less okay since that was both a response to and intensification of the evacuation of the American middle class. I’m guessing microloans where citibank takes interest on the poor is probably still okay in this regime. Prison-industrial complex you’d think would be a real growth sector in this form of carceral neoliberal rearrangement. Deportations are less profitable than holding people indefinitely. 

Cui bono?

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Here’s from page 40 of the “America First” Blueprint Budget for 2018 published by whitehouse.gov: 

Reduces funding for multilateral development banks, including the World Bank, by approximately $650 million over three years compared to commitments made by the previous administration. 

Yep, I think you’re asking the right questions. Trump is anti-globalist only insofar as it doesn’t benefit certain sectors of domestic capital. Another way to say: he isn’t against free trade/globalism wholesale, only against multilateral free trade that unequally benefits other countries at the expense of the U.S. For example, he wants to rework NAFTA to better serve U.S. economic interests (and, like you said, we have to ask whose interests in particular: is it the shareholders/Wall Street or is it the stakeholders/workers? I think we know the answer despite Trump’s rhetoric) by moving to a bilateral/unilateral free trade policy. The question is, can we still consider this “neoliberal”? I think we’re both in agreement that yes, we can. If we limit our definition of neoliberalism to NAFTA/multilateral free trade, we miss all the much more insidious and comprehensive ways neoliberalism has fundamentally altered contemporary capitalism/society.

On a side note: the question about incarceration vs deportation is interesting. I think the answer is probably legal in nature (I’m not well enough versed in the law to know) but it brings up the larger question of how compatible deportations/an anti-immigrant stance like Trump’s is with neoliberalism if it is, as you point out,1)  so expensive and 2) not economically sound given that the U.S. economy depends on an undocumented work force. I think the answer has to do with one of those comprehensive ways neoliberalism has altered our understanding of value and the process of valorization. If neoliberalism is first and foremost about generating credit/stockholder value over profit, we begin to see how such a policy is not only compatible but rational under neoliberal metrics. And here I go back to Ascher’s point in my last post: it doesn’t matter if it’s true, what matters is perception.

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mitpress.mit.edu

Five Minutes with Ivan Ascher (Part 2)

In the conclusion of Ivan Ascher's interview about Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction, the author discusses the definition of neoliberalism, the book's cover art, Donald Trump, and more.

I’m currently reading this book and it’s been extremely helpful for me, but I wanted to highlight this quote from a recent interview because it’s relevant to my last couple posts:

Q: How is Trump a fitting emblem for our age of modern finance? You wrote a blog post that says he traffics in unpredictability—do you think the markets will carry on regardless of his politics?

IA: There are all kinds of ways in which the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency is a disaster of planetary proportions. One of them is that the various aspects of Trump’s temperament—be it his pathological commitment to privatization, inequality, environmental devastation, or his equally pathological disregard for the truth—are perfectly in accord with the world of speculative finance. As I put it in the blog post, today’s financial markets are not unlike the news on Breitbart: they are fueled by rumor as much as by fact. It doesn’t matter to the hedge fund manager whether the price of company’s stock at any given time “accurately” reflects anything about the company, any more than it seems to matter to the President whether his latest tweet is based in fact or entirely fanciful, or whether it contradicts whatever he tweeted yesterday. All that seems to matter is the volatility induced by these unpredictable quotes. And though we may be told that markets “don’t like” instability, it is also the case that those who are able to trade in financial derivatives may well stand benefit from the increase in volatility.

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gleemie:

Trump is not antineoliberal. He is attempting to be a charismatic fascist which fully included supporting capitalists and a managerial class

Agreed. But he has been heralded, by many on the Left, as a “sign of the times,” i.e., as a rejection of the neoliberal policies of globalism/unilateral free trade that led to the loss of American manufacturing jobs overseas. Trump ran on an anti-globalist, protectionist platform. He has bowed out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, plans to divest millions from the World Bank, and vowed to slap high tariffs on overseas imports/restructure NAFTA, etc. 

So on the one hand there is no doubt that his election presents a negative reaction to neoliberal economic policy. But my point is that it can’t just narrowly be defined as that. Not only because, as you point out, he fully represents the interests of Wall Street and abides by neoliberal conceptions of the state, etc. But also, because Trumpism/ “neofascism” as a phenomenon is not what happens “after” neoliberalism but might be internal to neoliberalism itself as mode of ensuring that “after” doesn’t come about. I guess the question is if an anti-globalist neoliberalism can exist, and whether it might not be its next iteration.

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I woke up to the following scribbled on a piece of tissue paper near my bed side: “trumpism is immunological response to neoliberalism. does not pose threat to neoliberal order but inoculation against threat. Scaling back [sic]”

I mean it’s a bit laughable in the cold clear light of day, but there is something to be said for the dangers of positing Trump as somehow external to/unequivocally opposed to neoliberalism (Zizek is the most stupid example, but pretty much everyone on the Left has gone along with this even if they haven’t followed it to its logical conclusions). At the risk of conflating historical fascism with (”neo”)fascist ideology, Esposito’s diagnoses of Nazism (politics of death was internal condition for politics of life) might be helpful here. Also Marx vis a vis the Melinda Cooper I’ve been reading: capital transcends all barriers, but it must occasionally impose an internal limit, a return/preservation of the conservative social order, in order to sustain itself. 

But at the more basic level, I have yet to see, aside from a proposed protectionist policy that has yet to be enacted, anything coming out of the Trump administration that can be considered anti-neoliberal (though I’m not denying the economic precarity engendered by neoliberalism had a hand in getting him elected). And at the purely-surface-but-no-less-symbolically-important level, if the neo in neoliberalism refers to the remaking of previous non-market spheres (family, state, civil society) according to market principles and goals/in the image of a corporation, what better signal that that processes is well underway than the election of a businessman rather than a politician as head of state? 

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Could we say that the waffle exists independently of the waffle-iron?

Michel Callon, “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics” (1998: 41)

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Anonymous asked:

I hate to bother you, but if you have a minute I'd love to hear your opinion on something. Do you think I could ever get into a good history graduate program with a mixed academic record: terrible grades for my first three semesters, four years leave of absence, and then strong writing and excellent grades from an Ivy undergrad in my final five semesters?

Honestly you probably *could* get in, depending on the particular program you’re applying to, but the real question is *why* you would want to. I always recommend my students who want to go to grad school take a year or two off and try to do something else. At the risk of sounding like a a bitter old grump, graduate school will drain you of all self esteem and any joy you find in academic pursuits. That’s not even getting into the exploitation of grad student labor and the fact that if you manage to finish you’re more than likely to adjunct–making less than minimum wage with no job security.

The general exception is if you’re a nice white upper middle class cisman. They seem to do alright for some weird reason. 

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can’t believe it’s 2017 and I’m still talking about Marx on tumblr.

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As an instrument of redistribution, the standard Fordist wage actively policed the boundaries between women and men’s work and white and black men’s labor, and in its social-insurance dimensions, it was inseparable from the imperative of sexual normativity. The Fordist politics of class was itself a form of identity politics inasmuch as it established white, married masculinity as a point of access to full social protection. Today, the politics of distribution is no longer channeled through the instrument of the Fordist family wage and (as Thomas Piketty has shown) is much more heavily influenced by the wealth-transmitting mechanism of private inheritance. But here again, the distinction between recognition and redistribution proves unhelpful as a way of understanding the actual imbrication of sexual and economic politics. How after all are we to separate the wealth-destributive work of inheritance from the legal and cultural legitimation of family? In what sense can the regulation of sexuality be abstracted from a legal instrument of real appropriation that takes the form of family genealogy?

Melinda Cooper, Family Values

Re: that last post.

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pulangpluma:

Marx was talking about the superstructure of society. And that’s not what identity politics mean. ._.

The vulgar reading of base/superstructure here is precisely the target, because it relegates cultural phenomenon (eg the social value of gender and sexuality) as merely the epiphenonmenon/ideological abstractions reducible to their economic/material conditions. Cooper’s point (and mine) is that any phenonmenon cannot be easily divided between economic/material on the one side and cultural/social on the other. This is a very common critique of Marx (at least the Marx of the German Ideology and Early Manuscripts), so not sure what the issue is.

I meant identity politics broadly understood (and largely derided by many Marxists) as post-war identity-based forms of political contestation. The dismissal of identity politics by Marxists is derived from the above distinction between “real”/serious politics that aim to change material economic exploitation and what is sometimes referred to as the “artistic left”/cultural politics which seek to address liberation from a particular set of social relations (gender norms, racial inequality, etc.)–this division has a long history, beginning with that base/superstructure distinction, through Frankfurt school language of recognition versus redistribution, and the general division between class and identity politics today). Cooper (and many other theorists) respond by saying this is a false distinction or at least one that we can’t easily make, and in addition we should question the implicit causality therein (material–>cultural). 

This particular text is looking at how the 2nd wave feminist critique of the Fordist family wage is considered by many Leftists (she takes Streeck, Boltanski, Chiapello, and even Nancy Fraser to task) to be the reason for the increasing “flexibility”/feminization of labor broadly. So “identity politics” in the form of 2nd wave feminist demands are blamed for the loss of the welfare security of the Fordist family wage (never mind that this wage solidified normative gender roles/sexual division of labor and was therefore a form of “identity politics” itself–again that distinction between economics/culture is difficult to claim here). Even more disturbing is the fact that these Leftist theorist seek to reestablish some form of the family wage, and therefore re-solidify the family (albeit in a more “progressive” form) as having a priori social value/take the form of cultural norm. So the presumably “Leftist” politics is revealed to be deeply socially conservative. That’s not even getting into how it displaces social insurance to the normative domain of the family/household (and why it bears some similarities to neoliberal calls to reinstate the family wage or even universal basic income).

Anyway I hope that clears the quote up a bit as it is completely out of context. I’ll post another one in a minute that might help clarify the argument as well.

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In its efforts to overcome all quantitative barriers to the generation of wealth, Marx observed,capital transgresses all established forms of reproduction–that is, all customary or religious strictures on the organization of gender, all status-like constraints on social mobility, and all national restrictions on the circulation of money. But is it not also compelled to reassert the reproductive institutions of race, family, and nation as a way of ensuring the unequal distribution of wealth and income across time? Isn’t it compelled, in the last instance, to reinstate the family as the elementary legal form of private wealth accumulation?
On this point, Marx’s thinking must be radicalized. The assertion of foundation is never merely ‘economic’ in character since it must ultimately incorporate the ‘social and cultural’ conditions under which value is to be reproduced and reappropriated in private form–kinship, lineage, inheritance. If the history of modern capital appears on the one hand to regularly undermine and challenge existing orders of gender and sexuality, it also entails the periodic reinvention of the family as an instrument for distributing wealth and income.

Melinda Cooper, Family Values

Yo, Marxists who shit on “identity politics”

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What makes Polanyi’s theory of the double movement so appealing to a certain kind of left is its tendency to conflate capitalism itself with the logic of the free market and thus to reduce its ideological expression to economic liberalism, understood as a force of social disintegration. Once one has accepted these premises, however, resistance can only be imagined as conservative. If capitalism as an ideological formation is reducible to the tenets of economic liberalism, and if market freedom tends inexorably to disintegrate, disembed, and homogenize social existence, then any viable countermovement must seek to reanchor value as a way of arresting these trends. This imperative applies not only to the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money–which the social protectionist movement seeks to ‘decommodify’ and restore to a position of fundamental value–but also to social life more widely, which ultimately demands to be stabilized and reembedded within the institution of the family. If capitalism is theorized as uniquely and exclusively destructive of prior social solidarities, then the countermovement can be imagined only as an effort to restore, or at least reinvent, that which was alledgedly destroyed by the advent of industrial capitalism.

Melinda Cooper, “Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism”

Another way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the deterritorializing drive of capital (what Marx described as its immanent drive to self-valorize): not absolute deterritorialization but a “conjunction of deterritorialized flows” relative to the axiomatic of capital (infinite exchange/circulation). Reterritorialization, as Cooper rightly points out, is always conservative. Her answer is a better understanding of how capital itself necessitates/calls for this reterritorialization in order to sustain the social order. Deleuze would also warn us of the danger that lines of flight might turn to lines of death.