Neoliberals against Europe

Since the advent of the European debt crisis in 2009, it has become common to hear descriptions of the European Union as a neoliberal machine hardwired to enforce austerity and to block projects of redistribution or solidarity. Yet by adopting an explanatory framework associating neoliberalism with supranational organizations like the EU, NAFTA, and the WTO against the so-called populism of its right-wing opponents, many observers have painted themselves into a corner. The problems with a straightforward compound of “neoliberal Europe” became starkly evident with the success of the “leave” vote in the Brexit referendum in 2016. If the EU was neoliberal, were those who called to abandon it the opponents of neoliberalism? If the EU is indeed the “neoliberalism express,” then to disembark was by definition a gesture of refusal against neoliberalism. To make sense of the resurgent phenomenon of the far right in European politics, then, our chapter tracks such continuities over time and avoids misleading dichotomies that pit neoliberal globalism—and neoliberal Europeanism—against an atavistic national populism. The closed-borders libertarianism of nationalist neoliberals like the German AfD is not a rejection of globalism but is a variety of it.

Introduction

To many observers, the present resembles Antonio Gramsci’s depiction of crisis: a historical interregnum in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born.1 In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, some scholars invoked the image of “zombie neoliberalism” to explain how the reigning form of political-economic governance could persist, as if undead, through the wreckage of its own making. Despite the economic devastation, more of the same neoliberal measures were implemented: liberalization, privatization, marketization, securitization, and austerity....

Absolute Capitalism

In this essay, a tentative effort is made to adapt key categories of Marxism to the understanding of the world characterized by financialization and globalization. Looking for what David Harvey has called the “points of stress” in Marx’s theory of accumulation and crisis, the chapter explores two main issues: first, the withering away of the political (articulated around nations, classes, sovereignty, and antagonism) in a general economy of violence; and second, the articulation of “ecological debt” and “anti-planning” through the domination of liquidity over the organization of productive processes. Instead of focusing on the ideological category of “neo-liberalism,” the essay proposes to analyze the Great Transformation that leads from Historical Capitalism to a postcolonial and postsocialist Absolute Capitalism, the central “contradiction” of which reside in the structural and anthropological limits of commodification.

“Innovation” Discourse and the Neoliberal University: Top Ten Reasons to Abolish Disruptive Innovation

Innovation is a core neoliberal economic strategy, and the research university is a privileged site for its incubation and practice. Most senior university officials believe that the university’s stature, funding, and fate depend on maintaining its reputation as a primary innovation source and look to purge elements that do not appear to fit that purpose. This chapter argues that this neoliberal policy agenda is, in effect, fighting the latest and possibly the last economic war. The chapter begins with a brief intellectual history of innovation as a business concept, focusing on the development and influence of Clayton Christensen’s innovation theory. It then offers a critical analysis of the role of innovation in the contemporary global research university. In turn, it presents the argument of Giovanni Arrighi and others that the “Western development pathway” has reached a hard limit. Finally, the chapter posits that the sustainable, post-neoliberal economy-to-come will depart from the current pathway by replacing energy-intensive technology with skilled and educated labor.

Neoliberalism, Rationality, and the Savage Slot

This chapter upends usual discussions of neoliberal governmentality by focusing on the relation of neoliberalism to the irrational. The central task of neoliberalism in its early days was to resurrect a discredited liberalism. WW I and the problematic Versailles Peace of 1919 convinced many that irrationality lay at the core of the “civilized” European world. Those who became neo-liberal (before the hyphen was eliminated) embraced that which was irrational while resolutely attacking all kinds of collectivism. Early neoliberals such as Mises equated socialists with savages and put socialists in what Trouillot called “The Savage Slot,” thanks to their wilful overthrow of the free market price system, without which rationality itself could not exist. Hayek and the next generation of neoliberals shifted the source of irrationality into the physiology of individual humans. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union against which early neoliberal polemics were aimed, tacit knowledge moved out of the body to the corporation via Jean Lave’s concept of communities of practice. The chapter draws on classic works in anthropology; history of economic thought; US corporate history; and obscure annals of the public sector in Egypt to make these arguments.

Sexing Homo Œconomicus: Finding Masculinity at Work

Homo oeconomicus is the agent at the heart of neoliberalism, whose capacity to make autonomous, rational choices animates the system as a whole. This chapter calls the bluff on his claim to stand in for an unmarked humanity, identifying the ways he operates as a masculine figure. The chapter tracks him through three sites: Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism; an ethnographic account of a trading desk set at a hub of the global money supply; and the scientific investigation and public discussion of the disruptive role of testosterone in financial markets during the 2008 crisis. In each arena, a distinctive iteration of masculinity emerges as crucial to its functioning. Viewed together these three snapshots illuminate neoliberalism’s fundamentally gendered nature and suggest masculinity’s role in keeping its social structuring out of view.

The Market’s People: Milton Friedman and the Making of Neoliberal Populism

Neoliberalism has often been presented as a secretive project directed against democratic control and collective imaginaries. Following the path of Milton Friedman to notoriety in mass media and political campaigning and analysing his television series Free to Choose, this chapter argues that another thread of neoliberalism has often been hidden in plain sight: its engagements with mass publics. Following this thread leads us to a fuller picture of neoliberalism and helps explain its popular appeal and claims to democratic legitimacy. Free to Choose developed the populist imaginary of an elite enemy, “big government,” as contrasted with a collective—a people whose interests converge in an idealized market place. Taking this side of the neoliberal project seriously opens paths for understanding the current populist moment.

Neoliberalism’s Scorpion Tail

Recent hard right political mobilizations in the West are commonly framed as rebellions against neoliberalism. This chapter questions that framing as it identifies neoliberal reason with the aim to replace robust democracy and social justice with authoritarian liberalism, traditional morality, and, of course, unregulated markets. Politically pacified citizens disciplined by patriarchal families and free markets, themselves secured by lean, strong states—this was the neoliberal dream. The dream twisted, of course, and the chapter concludes with reflections on the current conjuncture.

Feminist Theory Redux: Neoliberalism’s Public-Private Divide

Conventional wisdom about neoliberalism is that it has led to the privatization of what were once public resources and that many state functions, particularly those related to social welfare, have been outsourced or privatized. While we do not dispute that many recent changes have led to what analysts call “privatization,” we argue that this story of neoliberalism is insufficient to understand its contemporary manifestations in India and China and, perhaps, more generally. Feminist theorists have long argued that “public” and “private” are ideologically defined and vary historically; that the division is empirically unfounded; and that it obscures the work these ideological distinctions do to maintain gender hierarchies. The chapter borrows from such insights to analyze recent mutations in the relationships between state and capital, or state-capital. It argues that much of what has been described as neoliberal privatization are actually blurred, hybrid mixtures of public-private endeavors that comprise “actually existing” neoliberalism.

Anti-Austerity on the Far Right

After almost a decade of punishing austerity and social-democratic paralysis, the electoral success of the far right appears as a real and credible threat across Europe. This chapter focuses on the resurgence of a specifically anti-neoliberal or national-social far right in Europe today and investigates its complex relationship with a hitherto hegemonic neoliberal far right. This resurgent anti-capitalist far right has obvious affinities with the German conservative revolution of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialism of the Third Reich. But it also has more proximate origins in the French Nouvelle Droite of the late 1960s, which very rapidly distinguished itself through its opposition to neoliberal economics and its mimetic relationship to the new left. This chapter looks at the disquieting parallels between the German debt deflation of the 1930s and the long aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis today. It then turns to the complex relations between the pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal factions in the European far right, focusing in particular on the key influence of the French intellectual Alain de Benoist in articulating an anti-capitalist neofascism for the twenty-first century. The chapter argues that the left needs to take the anti-capitalist far right more seriously than it often does.