Neoliberal-Managerialist Revolution
Discussion
Arran Gare:
"The defeat of the New Left meant not only a defeat of their radical agenda, but the defeat of the social democratic consensus that had dominated the West since the end of World War II. It resulted in the triumph of neoliberalism with an agenda to free markets from government controls and to dismantle the welfare state. Neoliberalism as a movement was initiated by the Austro-Hungarian minor nobility whose comfortable lives had been disrupted by the breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after their defeat in World War One (Slobodian, 2018). Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek were the leading figures in this. The problem as they saw it was the involvement of the masses in politics. Foucault identified the beginnings of neoliberalism in a conference at Freiburg University in 1938, although it has since been shown to have originated earlier. It began as a reaction to Bolshevism and Woodrow Wilson’s support for the right of nations to self-determination. Neoliberals lumped together communism, Naziism and social democracy as mass movements leading to serfdom, and embraced Walter Lippmann’s argument in The Phantom Public of 1927 that the world have become too complex for democracy and ruling elites should manufacture the consent of the rest of the population. After World War II they met at Mont Pèlerin in Switzerland to establish a movement to create a global market and to impose markets on all facets of life, reversing developments associated with Keynesian economics and the emerging social democratic consensus, recreating the kind of order that existed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on a global scale. They looked for support from big business, and big business was advancing rapidly in the post-war era with the development of transnational corporations. With this financial support they set up think-tanks around the world and penetrated the economics departments of universities and even tried to influence schools (Mirowski, 2009). They were most successful at the University of Chicago where they recruited Milton Friedman. While, neoliberal economics was the main vehicle for promoting their agenda. it was supported by the revival of social Darwinism through the development of sociobiology based on the notion that organisms are merely vehicles for the reproduction of selfish genes (as its most famous exponent, Richard Dawkins put it), which in turn could be understood as information encoded in DNA molecules, and psychology defending genetic determinism and arguing that some races are intellectually inferior to others. Von Hayek (1976) and Friedman (1962/1982, p.2f.) dismissed the quest by governments for social justice.
The threat from the New Left together with the problems of stagflation in the 1970s provided the crisis they needed to push through their policies. Effectively, they succeeded in a struggle for cultural hegemony, not just against the New Left, but against the social democratic consensus of the post-war era. Neoliberals were able to dominate the policy formation of governments, both right and more significantly, the left from the late 1970s onwards, utilizing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to impose these policies on recalcitrant nations, or where it was deemed necessary, assassinating political leaders or invading countries. Policies involved eliminating trade barriers and constraints on the movements of capital, dismantling the welfare state, privatizing (or rather, plundering) public assets, undermining trade unions, reducing taxes on corporations and eliminating where possible redistributive taxation systems, while expanding security systems to control the population. It also involved imposing a new management philosophy on public institutions to make them function like business corporations. This included education and research institutions.
Through such policies the labor movement was effectively destroyed, globally and in almost every country apart from North Western Europe. China was included in this world order after the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping, so workers in First World countries found themselves having to compete for work with Chinese workers working 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, and living in dormitories. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe in 1991 added these countries to the global market, suppling cheap educated labour to Western Europe and America. These developments were facilitated by advances in information technology allowing easy communication within transnational corporations, control of the mass media, and unprecedented levels of surveillance. The development of container ships, which made international transport far cheaper, was also important. The outcome was a global corporatocracy based in transnational corporations operating in a global market ruling over fragmented communities and isolated individuals. Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” was becoming a reality.
This transformation involved the hollowing out and effectively subverting what democracy there had been. This has been well analysed by Carl Boggs (2000). To achieve this, far more effort had to be devoted to the manufacture of consent. This involved massive spending on public relations and advertising, the new mind control industries, and where possible, transforming education. This was achieved by taking up themes of the New Left and reformulating them. For instance, the New Left were reacting to constraints on freedom imposed by institutions, and the burden of being locked into a career. This was associated with the defence of libertinism by some of the New Left. Illustrating this strand in New Left thought, Dany Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the New Left in Paris in 1968, later ran a kindergarten and claimed to have engaged in sexual activities with very young children, describing it as a beautiful experience. Elsewhere, the use of drugs was defended. In general, it amounted to what Marcuse had characterised in One Dimensional Man (1964) as “repressive desublimation.” The Neoliberals argued that the way to freedom is through free markets, where everyone is free to do what they like, providing life and property are respected. Many former New Leftists embraced this project and joined the corporate world to make capitalism more flexible, attacking the role of the welfare state, advancing what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2007, p.195ff.) described as The New Spirit of Capitalism. With this new spirit, the impositions of trade unions were dissolved, eliminating the protection they provided for workers. People could also be free from lifetime commitment to a particular career. In this way, the precariarization of work was portrayed as liberating. People were relieved of the onerous demands of being citizens and could define themselves as consumers. Such freedom could be extended to freedom to take drugs and to have one’s own opinions without others questioning them and asking for their beliefs to be justified. In this way the life of dialogue, essential for democracy, could be closed down. People could be relieved of the obligation to make commitments, and be allowed to live for the present. The extreme anti-elitism of some of the New Left (which later led them to embrace postmodernism) was harnessed to oppose those valuing education as the formation of character, which implied that people who had had their humanity cultivated by education were superior to other people. All hierarchies, except those associated with income or sport, were devalued (Bourdieu, 1984, p.370f.; Gare, 1995, p.18f.). Essentially, there was a largely successful project to depoliticise the population while those with wealth were given the freedom to buy politicians and political parties, buy control of the institutions of the state, buy control of people’s minds through the mind control industries and control of the media, and plunder public assets, all the while being relieved of responsibility to society. In short, in accordance with the image of humans as homo economicus, people were urged to act in their own selfish interests and focus on consumption, forgetting about democracy, the common good and notions of justice."