CHAPTER 1

steps toward an ecology of late capitalism

Neoliberalism, let us say, is a socioeconomic philosophy embedded to varyingdegrees in Euro-American life. In its media presentations, it expressesinordinate confidence in the unique, self-regulating power of markets asit links the freedom of the individual to markets. At a lower decibel leveland high degree of intensity, it solicits modes of state, corporate, church,and media discipline to organize nature, state policy, workers, consumers,families, schools, investors, and international organizations to maintainconditions for unfettered markets and to clean up financial collapses, eco-messes,and regional conflicts created by that collusion.

Neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism are thus not exactly the samething, at least since neoliberalism displaced the latter in Euro-Americanthought between 1935 and 1960. Neoliberals, as Michel Foucault has shown,often do not think that markets are natural; they think markets are delicatemechanisms that require careful protection and nurturance by statesand other organizations. The state does not manage markets much directly,except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role increating, maintaining, and protecting the preconditions of market self-regulation.The most ambitious supporters want the state to inject marketprocesses into new zones through judicial or legislative action, focusing onsuch areas as academic admissions, schools, prisons, health care, rail service,postal service, retirement, and private military organizations. Notehow such shifts will implicate more and more citizens in the vicissitudes ofnonstate, corporate practices, where the ability to discipline and channelconduct increases.

So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect, and expandmarket processes. And political leaders espousing neoliberal economicsthe most fervently—such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the twoBushes, and David Cameron—often turn out also to be bellicose defendersof conservative Christianity, moralism, and/or a specific image of the nation.Neoliberalism, a selectively active state, a conservative brand of Christianity,and a nation of regularized individuals surrounded by marginalizedminorities often complement one another, even if periodically they are atodds with one another.

What, then, are some of the political movements and modes of stateactivism supported by neoliberalism? They include, with varying degreesof support from different leaders, laws to restrain labor organization andrestrict consumer movements; corporate participation on school and universityboards; corporate ownership and control of the media; a jurisprudenceand court decisions that treat the corporation as a person with unlimitedrights to lobby and campaign; court policies that treat money as amode of speech to be protected by the state; demands for bankruptcy lawsthat favor corporations at the expense of those working for them; specialcorporate access to state officials to maintain inequality and restrain unemploymentbenefits; extensive discipline of the workforce; legal defense ofcorporate financial power to limit consumer information about the policiesthat affect them; the ear of state officials who regulate credit and the moneysupply; use of the state to enforce debt payments and foreclosures; hugemilitary, police, and prison assemblages to pursue imperial policies abroadand discipline the excluded and disaffected at home; meticulous street andinstitutional security arrangements to regulate those closed out of the neoliberalcalculus; huge state budgets to promote the established infrastructureof consumption in the domains of highway expenditure, the energygrid, health care, and housing codes; state cleanup of disasters created byunderregulated financial and corporate activity; and state or bureaucraticdelays to hold off action on global climate change.

The corporate, media, state, evangelical, and think-tank cheerleaders ofneoliberalism also deflect attention from ways state or neoliberal capitalismstrives to order workers, consumers, localities, and international institutionsto fit the neoliberal dictates of market behavior. It is an effective ideologicalstrategy and a destructive and dangerous organization of privateand public energies. The activist, neoliberal state becomes most transparentduring an emergency or meltdown, but it is always operative.

Perhaps the quickest way, then, to dramatize the difference between classicalmarket liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism is to say that theformer wanted the state to minimize interference with "natural" marketprocesses as it purported to leave other parts of civil society to their owndevices, while the latter campaigns to make the state, the media, schools,families, science, churches, unions, and the corporate estate be orderedaround neoliberal principles of being. This version of state activism providesa brand of statism that helps to draw together into one political assemblage,at least in America, differential priorities among neoliberals,evangelicals, neoconservatives, and the Vatican. There are others.

The Subjective Grip of Neoliberalism

Several angles of criticism have been brought against neoliberalism.Marxists focus on how its celebration of the market covers up exploitationand crisis tendencies internal to capitalism. Keynesians and Social Democratsfocus on how it overplays the self-regulating power of markets andunderplays the recurrent need of states to seed growth after a downturn,to provide unemployment support, and to spur consumer demand by atax system that dampens inequality. Liberal Christians, atheists, Muslims,and Jews berate its heartlessness and readiness to leave those on the bottomout in the cold. Maverick market theorists such as Fred Hirsch focuson how the combination of consumer sovereignty and unconscious marketprocesses regularly generate severe consumer binds, until it becomes moredifficult to make ends meet for people of...