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One of the important tasks that, you know,
the term neoliberalism has been performing
is as a way to gather together and explain the social policies
over the past 30, 40 years that have resulted in
a tattered social safety net
and redistribution of all kinds of power and resources upward.
The term neoliberalism emerged pretty much from
the scholarship - critical left scholarship -
done on and about Latin America
as a way of naming, in a much more more
critical incisive way, some of the economic policies being imposed
through the IMF and the World Bank, what was called the Washington Consensus.
So rather than talking as, you know, Bill Clinton did about globalization as
this sort of fabulous
connecting up of everything and flows of capital around the world in a totally
positive way,
neoliberalism was a name for -
a more negative name, a more critical name - for policies that
forced countries that were having to borrow a lot of money from the IMF or
the World Bank,
forced them into structural adjustment reductions
of social welfare programs and so on. And then we saw what I was seeing in my
research at that time
was how those same kind of structural adjustment policies were being
deployed in the US as well, so it wasn't just about
a kind of imposition
on developing countries, but what was also then turned around as social policy in the US
the reduction of the welfare state.
Sexuality and gender
are such embodied
spheres that on one hand, you -
it is very private, it is very individual -
and on the other hand, it has tremendous
social importance.
So from Foucaultian biopolitical perspective,
you know, you need to target sexuality to - in order to,
in order to make sure that everybody falls in place. So I think if you
apply that
to the neoliberal logic, then
you need people to fall in line according to certain
gender and *** norms, in order to
to ensure the smooth operation of neoliberalism,
especially when it is about the retrenchment of the state,
when it's withdrawing all this other social support,
you need a certain stable order
of heterosexual reproductive family
in order to progress.
So I think gender, sexuality is a necessary
part of the larger - I wanted to say warfare, but -
strategy of neoliberalism.
So neoliberalism refers to several things. It's been used as a periodizing schema
to describe a related constellation of changes that have happened over roughly
the last four decades.
And it's also theoretical shorthand for summarizing the ways in which various
schools of thought
see the most significant amongst these changes.
There are probably three main schools
of analysis that seek to capture these
different and interrelated changes. The first
school is the neo-Marxist school and is indebted to theorists like David Harvey
who talk about neoliberalism as a project of upward
redistribution of economic resources
through policies like structural adjustment and IMF policy,
literally a shift in economic resources from
the poor and working classes to
elites. Second major school thought is the neo-Foucaultian school associated with
theorists like Nikolas Rose, Wendy Brown,
which sees neoliberalism as more of a cultural project
and talks about the ways in which new market rationalities get
embodied and subjectively incorporated
into self-responsiblized neoliberal subjects.
The third school of thought is associated with
social scientists who work on theorizing state transformations
and is associated with people like the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant,
who talk about neoliberalism as a new mode of statecraft and are particularly
interested in the shift from the welfare state to the carceral state,
the rise of a new securitized state apparatus, and, in particular,
the growth of mass incarceration or "hyperincarceration,"
as he calls it, as the paradigmatic state project.
All of this goes together, right, in this sort of neoliberal frame
of concentrating wealth, extracting more and more and more from
poor people - extracting it from people
not only by making conditions of work worse, making wages lower, making sure
nobody has
pensions or health benefits, all those sort of literal ways, adding free
trade agreements that make
it easier to capture wealth and exploit laborers and the environment all
over the world -
but also through actually making money off
imprisoning people and off of
every aspect of domestic and international warfare.
So there's sort of this new level of profit-making
that's also a form of intense social control that
certainly makes it difficult to - it's hard for resistance in many ways.
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.
The term neoliberalism sometimes can allow us to
look at a bunch of things that would be, that might be analyzed as disparate,
siloed incidences, and instead look at them together
and think together about - for example, instead of looking at the criminal and
immigration system separately,
which the law might tell you to, the law says one is a civil system, the other
is a criminal system,
they're different. Instead, we can understand, together, a broader trend
of expansion of racialized imprisonment and then we might see something different
about how - Wow! The same companies own
the criminal prisons as the immigration prisons. Interesting.
The US never gave up on the spectacular power
of the predisciplinary
sovereigns and we still have the whole circus of
death penalty here, for example, and
shaming of people on workfare.
We still
have a very moralistic and violent society and
indeed, a sort of fetishization
of power and structure.
So we have to understand that
these forms of power are asynchronous and occur
at the same time, and that for poor people
we still have much more of
these older forms of power. Disciplinary power and sovereign power
are far more important than self-managing power.
And that's really the forms of
neoliberal governance which make more sense for understanding
poverty management in the US.
So I think that in order to understand neoliberalism,
we've got to bring these two literatures together,
bring together the Marxist tradition and the Foucaultian tradition
in a way which speak more clearly to each other.
What we have in Mexico is a very - it's very puzzling
because just as neoliberal
policies regarding the welfare state are underway,
at the same time, we get a universal right
in the capital city, and I mean abortion rights in public clinics.
So, of course, neoliberalism is by no means
something that is advancing in a very
monolithic way, but it gets played out
very differently, even according to
the people who are in power -
their interests, their takes on
the welfare state, their takes on modern notions of citizenship.
The political culture has moved, so it's not
neoliberalism as a set of policies, but it's a set of policies that
circulate and get implemented in
law and in institutions
because these feelings and ideas about who's deserving
and who's not deserving have become so pervasive.