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I think to understand neoliberalism, we need to think of it as a set of paradoxes
and I think there are three major paradoxes
to look at. The first one is really
how neoliberalism likes to position itself
as an amoral orientation that
is not about morality, is about market principles,
is about rational calculation,
and yet, if you look at how it's contextualized
on the ground, you see that it ushers in
a lot of conservative moral agendas about family,
about gender, about sexuality. So that's the first set of paradoxes.
The second set of paradoxes that I think we can identify
is the depoliticizing,
the depoliticization of social risks and
the hyper-politicization of national security.
So on one hand, you're supposed to be
responsible for your own risks, you're encouraged to take risks
and then take responsibility for those risks, and
it's not about the society, it's not about institutions,
it's not about unequal distribution of resources, it's about yourself.
On the other hand, there
is this regime of fear about how
the country's being invaded by immigrants,
by foreign culture of political influences
so we need to strengthen our borders, we need
more resources [and] international security. So
the third set of paradoxes, I think,
is on one hand, there is a continuous
ravaging of vulnerable populations.
On the other hand, there's the celebration of
humanitarian or human rights intervention.
So because neoliberalism really polarizes
distribution of wealth and resources and
yet, at the same time, there is this expansion of humanitarianism
globally. And so the two
seem to be, rather than a set of solutions for a set of problems,
they grow symbiotically together. So I think
that we need to pay attention to these three sets of
paradoxes in order to understand the complex
operation of neoliberalism and how it affects
What is the function of these wars that are being fought? And
you would think trying to cut government spending and lower
deficits, why
are these wars fought in
Afghanistan and Iraq and Lord knows where next?
There's no explanatory framework for that
within the genealogy of neoliberalism that's
really combined to what has happened in the Global North. In order to understand
that, to see how those -
what those wars are about,
and why it's okay -
why the same people who advocate cutting spending for
every kind of social service will advocate military spending
over the roof, not just for the companies that
make profit on producing goods
for the military, but on what is the point
of fighting these wars, right, in the first place
when they look on the surface to be utterly irrational
from the point of view of neoliberal policy alone,
that there's a broader context
of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism
and of post-colonialism - they're various
shifting frames you can think of
that expand that framework enough so that you can start talking about the
connections between, you know,
the ways that military spending fits with
slicing a social safety net and why -
how it is racialization works
within policies on neoliberalism.
Part of what it has meant to me in activism is a few things:
a way of talking about what Lisa Duggan has called
a set of conditions that have produced an upward distribution of wealth,
that's a really key baseline for thinking about it, like what is this
range of things that have happened.
And when we're looking at that domestically, we see things like
growing wealth divides, stagnating wages, attacks on labor,
attacks on welfare, and the dismantling of
the minimal poverty alleviation programs the US has. So sort of like
worsening conditions,
rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, and this drastic development
of what I call apparatuses of racialized violence:
major expansion of criminalization, major expansion of
immigration enforcement, militarized borders, more people locked in cages
than ever anywhere on Earth right here in the United States right now.
So those two things happening are really big, and then a third piece of it
is - it may be particularly interesting to me as a legal scholar and
and legal activist - is the ways that
those things that happened during a period when supposedly,
we've all become declared equal under the law, right? During this period
of the last 40, 50 years, supposedly,
racism, sexism, ableism became
illegal United States and we have anti-discrimination laws and hate crimes laws
and there's been this sort of purported
legal resolution of these long-term tensions, problems,
violences. Yet on the material level,
those things have worsened and deepened with this growing poverty and
growing criminalization and immigration enforcement.
Some theorists have talked about the ways in which
freedom is understood as consumer freedom for the middle classes,
right? And then
for less privileged people freedom,
ironically, can become, in some instances, literally
equated with incarceration, so
which brings up an interesting question: what could be meant by freedom in this
context? Let me just tell you a little bit about my own work because I
work with sex workers who've been
declared or understood to be trafficking victims
by secular and evangelical Christian activists
who don't see this as paradoxical or oxymoronic,
so in their view, through the prison,
sex workers can be rehabilitated so that they can have freedom in a meaningful sense.
So sex workers as well
as the people who are understood to exploit them. And what's interesting about
this and makes you think, what could this possibly mean, is that
in their view freedom is not just doing anything at all,
but freedom can only take place under conditions of constraint,
so the,
the space of prison actually becomes a space of possibility where people
can learn the necessary constraints so that they can exercise meaningful freedoms.
The same thing, the same dynamics are also operative
in the incarceration of people who are arrested for drug crimes, as other
scholars have noted,
a similar kind process here.
In many ways I think she is the perfect neoliberal subject, right?
You are self-managing, your are self-responsible,
and you are seeking for self-advancement, but
because she is a sex worker, so she
immediately is targeted and regulated and policed
as trafficking victim, well,
or, a ***, depending on what agenda do you have
in encountering with her.
So that is the one thing - that's why I think that
victims of sex trafficking are very often
the marks of the limits of neoliberalism,
or the *** limits of neoliberalism. So
in this seemingly amoral
system, there is a strong moral
agenda, especially a *** agenda,
and it is about a middle-class,
domestic, *** relationship,
and supposedly egalitarian partnership,
and selling sex just violates that,
and we need to domesticate sex.
Individuals,
through changes in
the structure of retirement and social security
processes, have been called upon to
do their own
work, take care of themselves
financially and into the future, to think about the future. You don't count on a pension,
you actually have to figure out how you're going to have enough money to live when
you're old.
And then of course there's an enormous commodification of financial services and
financial tools,
you know, all those calculators and systems for keeping your accounts
online and
technologies for
for managing, even if you have very little money
you know, you're still supposed to manage it and budget it
and figure it out and it's very,
I mean, it is highly class differentiated so
payday loans on the one hand,
and then all sort of elaborate individual retirement accounts and
financial services for people who are
wealthier, but we're all supposed to be engaged in these processes.
It's actually highly gendered:
women have been told, for the last couple decades at least,
that they're bad at it, that they're particularly bad at it.
We have had recently this whole narrative of women being irresponsible,
specifically irresponsible about money, either
shopaholics, either not able to manage money in that way,
or passive and paralyzed, just afraid
of dealing with the whole problem of investments. And in between that,
the sort of appropriately
healthy, probably male,
rational money manager. So there's the sort of mobilizing of
traditional, of gender stereotypes to promote
the called-for personal financial
self-management. That's flipped a little bit since the financial crisis.
All of a sudden now, women's risk aversion,
what used look like anxious passivity, is all of a sudden
a smart risk aversion and where men are now -
it's now the fault of testosterone that we had the
financial crisis, right, so
men are being made crazy by their hormones and women are the rational ones
whereas it was presumably women's hormones that were the problem before.
So we've had a little reversal in the evaluation, but the gender stereotypes
are actually
the same. So in terms of personal finance, we've really seen
gender stereotypes mobilized in support of
particular norms of personal financial self-management.
It's very difficult starting with your sort of average
audience in the United States to explain what the problem with free trade
is, right? What could be wrong with free trade?
And in order to explain what's wrong with free trade,
you do need a longer history
of colonialism in order to explain how it is that stronger economies
extract resources from weaker economies and how
freedom of trade can actually exacerbate inequality.
You really need to understand the history of empire
in order to understand how that works, like the way that
labor, land, and raw materials have circulated,
have been grabbed by, or circulated to
richer economies and been sucked out of poorer ones.
You have to understand that in order to get how
a policy like free trade could be
extracting resources, rather than existing in
a fair balance trading field, which is the imaginary free trade, right?
Free trade: oh, that means everybody just gets to buy and sell what they want to
and nobody is going to try to put a stop to it.
But what that has meant historically is that stronger economies
move in and put local economies out of business and take resources
and profits out of those countries and end up dominating
economies in poorer countries in a way that makes it
difficult for those economies to
develop in ways that actually support the local populations because so many
resources are being
sent out by the,
via policies of
so-called - free trade means unregulated, so that the
the poorer economy, then, is not allowed
to protect its own industries so they can grow
or to prevent foreign interests from coming in and taking
profits right out of the country.
With SB 1070, the anti-immigration law,
what is important for people to understand about that piece of legislation
is that although the architects of that law
argue that the law is merely mirroring
federal immigration law, it actually is doing something
other than what federal immigration law does. Namely
it's criminalizing immigrants
who are undocumented in new ways, in ways that they
weren't criminalized by federal law.
So in the very act of criminalizing,
neoliberalism becomes an important tool there
for the law, SB 1070, right? So we have
a new law, SB 1070, which
uses the implicit
key terms of neoliberalism to
help itself congeal into this law. So the key terms being
things like personal responsibility, law abiding citizen,
strong family values - all of those things
are mobilized by the law
in order to criminalize a certain segment of the population:
immigrants who are undocumented.
For people who are caught up in these, in these disciplinary
projects like, say,
people in mandatory drug treatment, people in the
in the prison system, they're being told that
the way to
become good Americans is to, you know, adopt a good work ethic, become
good mothers and fathers,
and often good Christians as well.
I think it's very important for those who are working on social justice
issues to recognize,
recognize how strong these normative projects are
and recognize how
how powerfully successful they are
in terms of
resetting the moral compass for a lot of people.
And that, in some ways, poverty
has become reinterpreted as moral failings.
There's a queue to get into
a charitable bingo hall in Canada, for example,
there are lots of organizations who are seeking slots
to get access to
raise money, and I find it
interesting to look at what they're using that money for.
Often they're using that money to fund
what one analyst
Colin Campbell has called "nice to have services" for middle-class youth,
so: better equipment your hockey team,
for example, or new uniforms
for some other sports team. And this money is coming
from older working class women,
who are the majority of players in bingo halls.
So I think that's a really
interesting example of how charity
is being mobilized in different understandings of political economy,
that gambling can be depoliticized or it
becomes acceptable because we're raising money for good causes through the gambling,
but what's happening there is a transfer of
political and economic resources - economic resources most obviously -
a transfer of economic resources from older working-class women
to nice-to-have services for middle-class kids. And
that definition of charity is one that I think is
helpful to critically interrogate and that
tells me a lot about the increasingly central role
of charities to neoliberal management of poverty
and the way that sometimes that strategy of managing
poverty transfers resources to already-privileged people away from
older working-class women, for example,
as in this example, so that's one way. Another way is the resurgence in voluntarism
that's associated with neoliberalism. So as neoliberalism
as a strategy of accumulating capital
reaches its inevitable limits - that it's not
socially sustainable, that it will generate crisis and it will generate
indigence and dreadful levels of poverty. As it reaches its limits of
social sustainability,
one of the suggested solutions is a resurgence in voluntarism,
that people should give back to the community, that they
should become more involved in voluntary work, that
they can help solve this structural problem
by volunteering their labor to good causes.
Withholding access to subjugated knowledge,
more specifically to ethnic studies, I would say that that is
a form of neoliberalism because one of the things that neoliberalism
does is it encourages people,
all sorts of people, to think of themselves as
individual units, to think of, first and foremost,
of the self and the care of the self and personal responsibility
as the way that we live our lives.
And so when ethnic studies
is suggesting that
that's not enough, when ethnic studies is suggesting that we need to think about
histories of peoples
and systemic relations, or rather systemic
forms of exploitation, then that is
very directly challenging the me-me-me-ness
of neoliberal discourse.
This kind of framework around choice and around freedom and around
individuality, that's basically just a cover for
reorganizing, slightly, things to keep them as much the same as possible
and also enhancing those sorts of violence.