Bourdieu on neoliberalism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Dec 9 08:52:30 PST 1998


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 *

______________________________________________________________

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure

and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable

consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions

that it inflicts, either automatically or --more unusually -- through

the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary

Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour

costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is

the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order

were no more than the implementation of a utopia - the utopia of

neoliberalism - thus converted into a political problem? One that,

with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in

conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it

has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a

narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality,

it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational

orientations and the economic and social structures that are the

condition of their application.

To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of

the educational system. Education is never taken account of as such at

a time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and

services as in the production of the producers themselves. From this

sort of original sin, inscribed in the Walrasian myth (1) of "pure

theory", flow all of the deficiencies and faults of the discipline of

economics and the fatal obstinacy with which it attaches itself to the

arbitrary opposition which it induces, through its mere existence,

between a properly economic logic, based on competition and

efficiency, and social logic, which is subject to the rule of

fairness.

That said, this "theory" that is desocialised and dehistoricised at

its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true

and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not

just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a "strong discourse" -

the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman's

analysis (2). It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it

has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a

world that it contributes to making what it is. It does this most

notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate

economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these

relations of forces. In the name of this scientific programme,

converted into a plan of political action, an immense political

project is underway, although its status as such is denied because it

appears to be purely negative. This project aims to create the

conditions under which the "theory" can be realised and can function:

a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives.

The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market

is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation. And it is

achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive

action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is

the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), designed to protect

foreign corporations and their investments from national states) that

aim to call into question any and all collective structures that could

serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market: the nation,

whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work groups, for

example through the individualisation of salaries and of careers as a

function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of

workers; collectives for the defence of the rights of workers, unions,

associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its

control over consumption through the constitution of markets by age

groups.

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and

economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders,

financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic

politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of

laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies

advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms,

they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences.

Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from

social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic

system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of

logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints

regulating economic agents.

The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress

of information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility of

capital. It gives investors concerned with the short-term

profitability of their investments the possibility of permanently

comparing the profitability of the largest corporations and, in

consequence, penalising these firms' relative setbacks. Subjected to

this permanent threat, the corporations themselves have to adjust more

and more rapidly to the exigencies of the markets, under penalty of

"losing the market's confidence", as they say, as well as the support

of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to obtain short-term

profits, are more and more able to impose their will on managers,

using financial directorates to establish the rules under which

managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring,

employment, and wages.

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).

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. 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.

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).

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. 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.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests

of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic

states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which

they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough

specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute

decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the

neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and

social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual

formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and

theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of

logic with the logic of things.

These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to

submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look

down upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they

do not recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their

mathematical games, whose true necessity and profound complexity they

are often incapable of understanding. They participate and collaborate

in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its

consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist party and give

learned counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it

cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few failures,

imputable to what they sometimes call "speculative bubbles", it tends

to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like

certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.

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,

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. 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.

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 transition to "liberalism" takes place in an imperceptible manner,

like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view. Its most

terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects

themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance to which

this transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the

old order by drawing on the resources it contained, on old

solidarities, on reserves of social capital that protect an entire

portion of the present social order from falling into anomie. This

social capital is fated to wither away - although not in the short run

- if it is not renewed and reproduced.

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.

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.

_________________________________________________________________

* 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.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1998 Le Monde diplomatique

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