>>> Doug Henwood sends:
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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(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)
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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
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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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