“Hard Times Make for Hard Arteries and Hard Livers”: Deindustrialization, Biopolitics, and the Making of a New Working Class

This article argues for a view of “actually existing neoliberalism,” identifying points of continuity from midcentury social democracy and showing how American neoliberalism developed unevenly across a preexisting landscape. It does so with a case study of labor market transformation in Pittsburgh, showing a causal relationship between the New Deal state’s institutional structures and the rise of low-wage employment in health care in the 1970s and 1980s. The low-wage service economy did not only come after the high-wage industrial economy: it grew out of it, sped by the decline of steel manufacturing and shaped within the distinctive matrix of the postwar public-private welfare. In establishing this historical process, the article also suggests that social history can play a useful conceptual role linking Foucauldian and Marxist accounts of neoliberalism, by showing concretely the role of the production of subjectivity and the governance of population in the establishment of the neoliberal economic regime. Pointing to a homology between the structural role of incarceration in neoliberalism and that of health care, the article suggests the term “biopolitical Keynesianism” for understanding this conceptual synthesis, which uncovers new contradictions within neoliberalism.