Bourdieu on neoliberalism ANNOTATED Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Dec 9 13:11:26 PST 1998 Previous message: Bourdieu on neoliberalism Next message: Bourdieu on neoliberalism ANNOTATED Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] Search LBO-Talk Archives Limit search to: Subject & Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort Annotations below >>> Doug Henwood sends: LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - December 1998 UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION The essence of neoliberalism ______________________________________________________________ What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic. By PIERRE BOURDIEU * ______________________________________________________________ (Sure, the basic contradiction of capitalism is that production is social (collective) and appropriation is private (as in a market). Neo-liberalism's programme aggravates this contradiction . Production is more social than ever. People from thousands of miles apart working on the same car, for example. Yet, a smaller elite is appropriating a larger and larger amount of the product, and this goal dictates production, not the needs of the "Collective"-C.B) -clip- Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual merit; individualised career paths; strategies of "delegating responsibility" tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were independent contractors. This pressure toward "self-control" extends workers' "involvement" according to the techniques of "participative management" considerably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3). (Capitalist production makes alienation rife. It creates a dog eat dog society. The greatest division of the working class "collectives" capitalism makes is into individuals. The above described pattern is not new - CB) In this way, a Darwinian world emerges - it is the struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support through everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress. (Marx and Engels noted that Darwin found Hobbes war of all against all in the animal kingdom. Social Darwinism reprojects this back onto bourgeois society. The struggle of all against all, dog eat dog, the rat race has always been an "essence" of capitalism - CB) Without a doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the "harmonious" functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed. ( With real full employment ( not 4% "un" as "full") and the right to a job, capitalism wouldn't last long, because there would be no scabs and all strikes would be won by the workers. Thus, capitalists are irreconcilably opposed to full employment and the fundamental right to a job - C.B.) This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the "theory of contracts"). Organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust, co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising, employment "at will" and the right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction). (Abolition of the "at will" employment doctrine is part of my draft 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for a right to a decent job) Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. (Capitalism is a SYSTEM, not a policy of individual capitalist. Capitalists have always had to act as capitalist under penalty of ruin if they didn't -CB) Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses. ( "Like the Marxism of an earlier time" ??? Marxism is the least like a religion of any ideologies. It is the essence of anti-relgion. Some people have treated it uncritically. But Marxism is not the main example of uncritical thinking. All of the bourgeois ideologies are equally or more uncritical. The stereotype of Marxism as more like religion than liberalism or existentialism or postmodernism benefits the bourgeoisie and the neo-liberals in exactly the project Bourdieu is analyzing in this essay. This is definitely true in the U.S. France may have a slightly different history. Even post-modernism with its branches of anti-naturalism founds a sort of new supernaturalism- C.B) And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, ________ (This has always been an "essence" of capitalism. -CB) the progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural production, such as film, publishing, etc. through the intrusive imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major trends. First is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm. __________ (The "collective" institutions won't counteract the effects of the infernal machine if they are not organized and class and socialist conscious. In other words, to get rid of the infernal machine , we still need a revolutionary organization of the working class, a party of some type, no doubt a new , new type.- CB) Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour. (Is the essence of this new ? -C.B.) Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss? Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox. The obstacles encountered on the way to realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today to be imputable to rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise. (The problem, the paradox of reforms in relation to revolution: we've heard of that before. What is to be done ?-C.B) But these same forces of "conservation", which it is too easy to treat as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that, under the appearance of simply defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding "privileges" (which is what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified. ( He's counting on "left conservatives" of a sort. -CB) How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or better yet the supranational state - a European state on the way toward a world state - capable of effectively controlling and taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public interest. Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of "shopkeepers") that the new belief system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment. (Here's a new idea. the public interest will emerge from the vision of communists when it seizes the consciousness of the working class masses - KM) Maybe Bourdieu thinks people need the same old ideas (Marxism) but won't listen unless they are in a new vocabulary.Especially in France, Marxist lingo is old hat, "religious" dogma. That's not the problem in the U.S. where Marxism is the "Devil's" dogma. Charles Brown Detroit _________________________________________________________________ * Professor at the Collhge de France Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (1) Auguste Walras (1800-66), French economist, author of De la nature de la richesse et de l'origine de la valeur ("On the Nature of Wealth and on the Origin of Value")(1848). He was one of the first to attempt to apply mathematics to economic inquiry. (2) Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. (3) See the two journal issues devoted to "Nouvelles formes de domination dans le travail" ("New forms of domination in work"), Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, nos. 114, September 1996, and 115, December 1996, especially the introduction by Gabrielle Balazs and Michel Pialoux, "Crise du travail et crise du politique" [Work crisis and political crisis], no. 114: p.3-4. _________________________________________________________________ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1998 Le Monde diplomatique