LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - December 1998
UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION
The essence of neoliberalism
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What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective
structures which may impede the pure market logic.
By PIERRE BOURDIEU *
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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.
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* 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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