Neoliberalism in everyday life

Recently, I was reading Richard Seymour's excellent blog Lenin's Tomb. He had put up a speech there that he had made at the International Socialist network. I was very struck by these lines:

"He [Foucault] understood it [neoliberalism] as a comprehensive project for transforming society, right down to the micro-physics of self-hood. He wrote that neoliberals sought to install new techniques of ‘self-government’, that is disciplinary means, using incentive and punishment, of getting people to accept the idea of themselves as entrepreneurial agents, enjoying the thrill of risk.

We see this with the way in which welfare and the penal state is re-organised. It doesn't necessarily reduce the costs of expenditure, but it does attempt to fundamentally change people's behaviour - for example, if you have a small child, don't just stay at home and look after her. Outsource the childcare to a minimum wage babysitter, and go out and bet on various opportunities on the market. Take a few jobs, buy some shares, reinvent yourself with new clothes and a new body, take a flutter in a casino - the revival of gambling under neoliberalism is not coincidental. If you're not very good at this, then we have bureaucratic punishments, the casual sadism of everyday life, the pleasure of mocking and humiliating the wretched - the rise of the bear-baiting show, exemplified by Jeremy Kyle, is also not a coincidence.

Now people don't change suddenly into Thatcherites; they don't wholeheartedly swallow the neoliberal dogmas. But it gradually forms part of the fabric of their everyday experience: and the structure of incentives and punishments makes you a mug not to adopt certain neoliberal behaviours - turn your house into an asset, treat your body as a saleable commodity, refit your personality according to the needs of buyers on the labour market, and so on. (You see this increasingly with Facebook, where employer-friendly profiles show constantly exuberant, happy, sociable, well-connected people - fuck 'em.) It shapes culture not just in the sense of representation - films, literature, popular science, and so on - but in the Raymond Williams sense of 'ordinary culture', the anthropological sense, the way people live.

So when we look at polls that say that over 70% of people support welfare cuts, we know that this doesn't mean they fully subscribe to the neoliberal project - its exoteric doctrines are too riddled with crudities and contradictions for that to be true. But we also know that they are profoundly affected by neoliberal governmentality, and the conception of themselves and everyone around them as entrepreneurial agents; and thus the conception of 'the market' as the almighty information processor and distributor of just rewards and punishments.

And we should see this as part of an ongoing, long-term project. If you think about the way student loans have been deployed, and the way the education system is being financialised, this is designed to impose a new kind of disciplinarity - even though the higher education system remains a state apparatus, it comes to be experienced not as a public good, but as a commodity that enhances your entrepreneurial self. And the more that is reinforced, the more it undermines - at an ideological level - the division between producers and consumers; the idea is that we're all producers, and we're all consumers. Some of us just happen to be more successful than others. Hence, the basis for 'class consciousness' is eroded"

That is a fascinating passage. It gallops through several really interesting ideas. I'm not sure which bit of Foucault he is referring to (probably just a bit I haven't read). But the idea that Neoliberalism is a more all-embracing ideology than it first appears seems quite true to me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a religion. It has its totems, its gods, its prophets. It also has a religion's desire to define "good" and "bad" in quite a fixed way.

One thing that particularly rings true is the bland aggression of insisting that people maximise efficiency all the time - and that you, you personally, are always to blame for any failure to do what your masters require. Thus, in an office environment, you might be loaded down with work - your company might keep taking on new projects without calculating whether its existing workers can deliver them - you might be constantly called on to do other, unscheduled things - you might, in short, be put in an impossible position - but if you fail to do everything that your managers want you to do, you are to blame. Why? Because you need to learn better "time management".

You can learn a lot about an ideology by which solutions it forbids. Human beings are clever: left to our own devices, we can usually come up with ways around a problem. If that problem is that we have an economy that has very high levels of unemployment or, in the case of America, a health-care system that is manifestly failing a large proportion of society - well, these are problems that humans, being clever, can potentially solve.

But not every political system is comfortable with every solution. Ayn Rand accuses "collectivist" philosophies of denying that part of human nature that wants to trade, to make markets, to remain in control of the things that we create. (I'm not saying Ayn Rand is right - I think that her philosophy is a self-contradictory mess that promotes a political situation that undermines the values on which it is built; but that is a discussion for another time).

Neoliberalism rules out the possibility of state or collective action. This despite the fact that it might be the simplest or most efficient way to solve certain problems. A universal health care system makes use of the economies of scale which only the government can provide to deliver health care more cheaply and efficiently than the baroque and wasteful internal market that the US currently uses. There are all sorts of productive facilities standing idle that could be used by unemployed people to start making new things and contributing to the economy again. And so on.

But the Neoliberal cannot accept such solutions, because they involve doing things that Neoliberal ideology cannot, ever, recognise as good. If you challenged a Neoliberal (or a member of one of Neoliberalism's subsects, which includes most libertarians) then he would come up with all sorts of reasons not to try those solutions at all. Most of those reasons would be rooted in highly debateable or disproved claims about economics, or - if you dug deep enough - on claims to be able to foresee the future (see this blog for a large number of posts asking quite reasonable questions about neoclassical and neoliberal economics).

It seems to me that this is a fundamentally mystical belief - a religious belief, really, although the spirituality in which it is rooted seems to me to be Satanic. It has a diabolical grandiosity, promises everything in return for very little, talks in terms of a kind of perfectionism that I more associate with mental illness than with psychological health.

What is interesting about Seymour's comment is that it suggests that if we import the values of Neoliberalism into our everyday life, we will wind up doing something similar: ruling out options, dismissing ways of acting, because we have been convinced in advance that only certain things are right. If Neoliberalism is, effectively, a religion - and I think that it is - then we are all of us living in an intensely spiritual environment, where an alien - possibly one might say spiritually toxic - belief system surrounds us, constantly pressing us to define "good" and "bad" in misleading ways. One of the ways in which it hurts us is by encouraging us all to blame ourselves for problems which are structural or systemic - and, of course, by strongly discouraging us from any thoughts about changing the system.

That doesn't seem like a very healthy or happy state for any person to be in: self-blaming, but denying oneself any alternative way of being. It seems like the sort of state of mind that would lead, quite naturally, to depression.