Rhizombie

Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy

I’m currently reading this book and it’s been extremely helpful for me, but I wanted to highlight this quote from a recent interview because it’s relevant to my last couple posts:

Q: How is Trump a fitting emblem for our age of modern finance? You wrote a blog post that says he traffics in unpredictability—do you think the markets will carry on regardless of his politics?

Trump is not antineoliberal. He is attempting to be a charismatic fascist which fully included supporting capitalists and a managerial class

Agreed. But he has been heralded, by many on the Left, as a “sign of the times,” i.e., as a rejection of the neoliberal policies of globalism/unilateral free trade that led to the loss of American manufacturing jobs overseas. Trump ran on an anti-globalist, protectionist platform. He has bowed out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, plans to divest millions from the World Bank, and vowed to slap high tariffs on overseas imports/restructure NAFTA, etc. 

I mean it’s a bit laughable in the cold clear light of day, but there is something to be said for the dangers of positing Trump as somehow external to/unequivocally opposed to neoliberalism (Zizek is the most stupid example, but pretty much everyone on the Left has gone along with this even if they haven’t followed it to its logical conclusions). At the risk of conflating historical fascism with (”neo”)fascist ideology, Esposito’s diagnoses of Nazism (politics of death was internal condition for politics of life) might be helpful here. Also Marx vis a vis the Melinda Cooper I’ve been reading: capital transcends all barriers, but it must occasionally impose an internal limit, a return/preservation of the conservative social order, in order to sustain itself. 

Honestly you probably *could* get in, depending on the particular program you’re applying to, but the real question is *why* you would want to. I always recommend my students who want to go to grad school take a year or two off and try to do something else. At the risk of sounding like a a bitter old grump, graduate school will drain you of all self esteem and any joy you find in academic pursuits. That’s not even getting into the exploitation of grad student labor and the fact that if you manage to finish you’re more than likely to adjunct--making less than minimum wage with no job security.

Melinda Cooper, Family Values

Marx was talking about the superstructure of society. And that's not what identity politics mean. ._.

The vulgar reading of base/superstructure here is precisely the target, because it relegates cultural phenomenon (eg the social value of gender and sexuality) as merely the epiphenonmenon/ideological abstractions reducible to their economic/material conditions. Cooper’s point (and mine) is that any phenonmenon cannot be easily divided between economic/material on the one side and cultural/social on the other. This is a very common critique of Marx (at least the Marx of the German Ideology and Early Manuscripts), so not sure what the issue is.

I meant identity politics broadly understood (and largely derided by many Marxists) as post-war identity-based forms of political contestation. The dismissal of identity politics by Marxists is derived from the above distinction between “real”/serious politics that aim to change material economic exploitation and what is sometimes referred to as the “artistic left”/cultural politics which seek to address liberation from a particular set of social relations (gender norms, racial inequality, etc.)--this division has a long history, beginning with that base/superstructure distinction, through Frankfurt school language of recognition versus redistribution, and the general division between class and identity politics today). Cooper (and many other theorists) respond by saying this is a false distinction or at least one that we can’t easily make, and in addition we should question the implicit causality therein (material-->cultural). 

This particular text is looking at how the 2nd wave feminist critique of the Fordist family wage is considered by many Leftists (she takes Streeck, Boltanski, Chiapello, and even Nancy Fraser to task) to be the reason for the increasing “flexibility”/feminization of labor broadly. So “identity politics” in the form of 2nd wave feminist demands are blamed for the loss of the welfare security of the Fordist family wage (never mind that this wage solidified normative gender roles/sexual division of labor and was therefore a form of “identity politics” itself--again that distinction between economics/culture is difficult to claim here). Even more disturbing is the fact that these Leftist theorist seek to reestablish some form of the family wage, and therefore re-solidify the family (albeit in a more “progressive” form) as having a priori social value/take the form of cultural norm. So the presumably “Leftist” politics is revealed to be deeply socially conservative. That’s not even getting into how it displaces social insurance to the normative domain of the family/household (and why it bears some similarities to neoliberal calls to reinstate the family wage or even universal basic income).

Melinda Cooper, Family Values

Melinda Cooper, “Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism”

Interesting. What I don't see with any clarity is what this implies for effective resistance. What is to be done?

Not sure if there’s a single answer. The idea is in better diagnosing the contemporary neoliberal (finding this term less and less satisfactory but for sake of clarity) regime of capitalism we can better come up with strategies of resistance. It seems to me the Left is caught between concession/reform/welfare state type response or stuck using the same strategies of the workers movement/Marx that were useful for opposing industrial capitalism but less so for finance capitalism. I believe this is because we haven’t really kept up with how capitalism has fundamentally changed/mutated and shedding light on that is one of my primary aims in this project.

But someone like Feher would say the answer is actually found in following the example of Marx: just like how the worker’s movement adopted/adapted the position of the “free laborer” and the strategy of negotiation with employers in order to raise wages (even though wages/the price of their labor power was the source of their exploitation), so too should we appropriate the position of the investee and the strategy of speculation in order to change the current conditions of accreditation and ultimately valuation (rather than labor and ultimately production). He says something to the effect of “we should become gamblers.” Not sure exactly/effectively what that looks like, but I do believe he’s on to something. 

In writing the diss, my main concern has been trying to formulate the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism effectively, and to make sense of phenomenon that don’t seem particularly attributable to either--at least as they are theorized by economists/political theorists. I’ve become convinced that today the dominant subjective mode (what I am tentatively calling the “speculative” subject) is in fact one that is an unintended effect of neoliberal governmental policies, financialization (ironically a process that many neoliberal economists were/are opposed to), and in the realm of psychic/social life, post-war theories of identity formation that would trickle down via activism around minoritized subject status to the culture at large (and this explains the strange confluence or analogical relationship between post-war theories of subjectivity and neoliberalism and also the cultural preoccupation with identity--on the Left and the Right).

 Anywayy, building upon the critique of Marx I borrow from Foucault, I’m adding another amendment to Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism and prescription for resistance: Increasingly, the model of a company making profit by exploiting its workers (Marx 101) is giving way or at least becoming secondary to a model where shareholder value derived from seeking credit from investors is the primary source of wealth for a corporation/institution/state. Following Michel Feher, this shift means we also should shift our object of critique from exploitation by employer (Marx and worker’s movement) to the selective allocation of capital by investors who decide which project/programs/people are “worthy” of investment. 

I’ll paraphrase Feher at length here, because I find his argument convincing at the same time that I am a bit tentative: