Category: Neoliberalism

What’s In a Name?

John Quiggan (author of Zombie Economics [Princeton UP, 2012] and a regular blogger on the best blog in the universe, Crooked Timber), recently decided to jettison the name “social democracy” as a description of his political position. Here is his complete post on that decision:

“As I mentioned a while ago, in the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve described my political perspective as “social-democratic”. In earlier years, I mostly used “democratic socialist”. My reason for the switch was that, in a market liberal/neoliberal era, the term “socialist” had become a statement of aspiration without any concrete meaning or any serious prospect of realisation. By contrast, “social democracy” represented the Keynesian welfare state I was defending against market liberal “reform”.

In the decade since the Global Financial Crisis, things have changed. Socialism still describes an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program, but an aspiration to a better society is what we need now as a positive response to the evident failure of neoliberalism.

On the other side of the ledger, nominally social democratic parties nearly all failed the test of the crisis, accepting to a greater or lesser degree to the politics of austerity. Some, like PASOK in Greece, have paid the price in full. Others, like Labor in Australia, are finally showing some spine. In practice, though, social democracy has come to stand, at best, for technocratic managerialism, and at worst for capitulation to the demands of financial capital.

So, I’ve changed the description of this blog’s perspective to socialist. I haven’t however, adopted the formulation “democratic socialist” which was used, in the 20th century, to emphasise a rejection of the Stalinist claim to have produced “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. That’s no longer necessary.

As has been true for most of the history of the modern world, the only serious threat to democracy is now coming from the right. So, it’s important to defend democracy as well as advancing the case for socialism.”

This is more sparse and more cryptic than one would have wished, but it does speak to one of my obsessions: why isn’t social democracy, which seems to have the best track record of actually delivering (particularly in Scandinavia, but elsewhere in Europe as well) general prosperity, equitably distributed, along with robust civil liberties and a functioning safety net, the preferred position on the left in 2018? Social democracy has had demonstrable, on the ground, successes—which is more than can be said for any of the left’s other alternative programs. And neoliberalism, recognizing that fact, has devoted most of its energies to discrediting and dismantling the gains social democracy made from 1900 on. The neoliberals know where the greatest threat to their hegemony lies.

So: to abandon social democracy seems to me to let the neoliberals win. They set out to drive it from the field—and the left is folding up its tents and ceding the field to our new overlords. We will console ourselves with vicious attacks on center-left politicians like the Clintons and hasten to the highlands of a pure “socialism” that is even more vague than it is pure.

Obviously, I think the left should be doubling down on social democracy, on fighting to protect and/or restore what social democracy put in place in the 1945 to 1970 period, while also offering an extension of social democratic policies (universal health care, progressive tax rates, strict regulation of financial and other markets, government thumb on the scale to insure a balance of power between labor and capital when negotiating conditions of employment etc.). There is good evidence that these things work; capital’s hatred of them is just one parcel of that evidence.

Yet: Quiggan’s post gives me pause on three counts.

I take very seriously the fact that social democracy, as a rallying cry and as a program, seems to hold no appeal for young left leaners. Let’s say “young” means anyone under 45. It just doesn’t resonate. Again, that may be just a symptom of how successful the neoliberal smear campaign has been, but that doesn’t change the fact on the ground that clamoring for social democracy is not going to galvanize the left today.
More substantially, of course, Quiggan’s assertion is that social democracy has discredited itself (no matter what discrediting neoliberalism engineered) by acquiescing in the austerity policies imposed after 2008. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but all his policies are recognizably social democratic. He pretty much wants to enact “the second bill of rights” that FDR proposed in his 1944 State of the Union address. Perhaps today’s “socialist” is just yesterday’s “social democrat” coming to us under a new, more fashionable, name. We would have to get some fleshing out of what “socialism” is meant to convey in order to answer that question. Old wine in new bottles? It would be a classic case of claiming that those who call themselves “social democrats” have sold out, are no longer really worthy of the name because they didn’t stand up for social democracy in the aftermath of 2008, so we are going to walk away, cede them the name, call ourselves socialists, and fight for what they betrayed. The left (and the right) fractures in this way all the time.
The true substantial nub, however, remains where it always has been in the debate between social democrats and socialists: can a leftist politics tolerate the existence of a capitalist market? Is regulation good enough, supplemented by declaring certain crucial things—like health care and transportation—“public goods” whose supply cannot be entrusted to the market? Or is the capitalist market so antithetical to equality, justice, and democracy that it must be dismantled in favor of a different way of organizing economic production and consumption? Socialism, as I understand it, always thought the market—even a regulated market—was unable to deliver a society or a polity that could deliver socialism’s goals. There could be—and should be—no compromise with markets. Whereas social democracy was all about forging such a compromise.

What Quiggan tells us—and I certainly agree—is that the social democrats caved in, for whatever reason (threats of capital flight or total market collapse or the sheer corruption of political elites in cahoots with the rich), to capital’s demands following 2008—and gave away most of the store. The issue, of course, is whether, when push comes to shove, social democracy will always cave, that capital always holds the cards that allow it to blackmail the politicians into doing capital’s bidding. That is the conclusion socialists reach: social democracy is no bulwark against capital’s depredations—and never can be. And so we need something completely different.

If that is claim, then the socialists need to step up to the plate. What do they propose? And how do they propose to get there? These are familiar, time-worn questions—greatly complicated if the soi-disant socialist also proclaims strict fidelity to democracy. What democratic pathways can be mobilized to get from here (neoliberalism) to there (socialism)?

Bleak Thoughts on a Grey Day

We interrupt the regularly scheduled blog posting for some passing gloom. I will get back to Arendt on life tomorrow.

Reading Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. (Harvard UP, 2015). It is sensible and clear and convincing. Except for the continual exposure of “contradictions.” It remains an article of faith on the left that contradictions are symptoms of instability. Yet the contradictions cited are, often, simply logical ones. For example, Butler’s belabored discussion of how soldiers are “dispensable” (i.e. cannon fodder) even while their existence and work is “indispensable” to the nation’s survival. That barely works above the level of wordplay. Even more substantial contradictions—for example, between needing consumers to fuel the economy and failing to pay workers adequate wages—are manageable in both short and long terms. The periodic “crisis” of capitalism have done little to undermine it. We could say, I guess, that capitalism’s ingenuity is endless, or (more to my liking) that power’s ability to withstand both protest and dysfunction should never be doubted.

Power, as Boltanski’s work considers, sometimes yields to critique, mollifying it by adopting certain reforms, and sometimes simply ignores critique, refusing to give an inch. Which strategy is adopted depends on the situation and the calculations that situation elicits. But power does not abdicate. Which is perhaps a way of saying that I have lost my liberal faith. Instead of thinking there is “some justice” to be had, I am more inclined, in these dark times, to say that people find niches, that they find out ways to hide in the interstices of a system big enough and complex enough for there to be corners that aren’t totally colonized. That is, we don’t live in a fully totalitarian world just yet—and a fully totalitarian world would be awfully hard to actually construct and maintain. But the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Habermas’s phrase) proceeds apace.

I usually dislike abstractions like “capitalism” and “power”–and dislike imputing agency to them. But there is something to be said for systematic imperatives. The US manufacturer who must lower labor costs or go out of business because the product can be produced more cheaply elsewhere. The maufacturer’s agency in such a case is so compromised as to be almost non-existent. The same cannot be said as easily for politicians or judges. The Paul Ryans and Samuel Aliotos of the world have much to answer for–and are (this is what hurts) generally immune from ever being held to account. So the theoretical issue is how to adequately account for both human agency and for systematic functionings. I don’t think the notion of “contradiction” helps in either case–and I certainly don’t believe that “contradictions” drive the system’s evolution over time. Tensions between competing goals that require trade-offs yes, opposing forces yes, conflict yes, but contradictions no. All kinds of things can co-exist without compelling change or adjustments.

I met up with a former student yesterday who has been spending time in Ladakh in Northern India, writing a book for school children that aims to help preserve the local language and culture. The community is about 250,000 people and was relatively isolated until recently. Now it depends heavily on tourism in place of its traditional pastoralist economy. 300,000 tourists last year. Eco-tourists, trekkers, but also cultural tourists, so we are in ethnicity inc. territory. Creeping colonization. His work is honorable, but it will also be monetized. How to think about the “contradictions” involved here, that the preservation of a culture is also a means for incorporation into a global tourist industry? Certainly, these contradictions do not imply instability. They just entail different goods, each of which will find ways to accommodate the others. The results will be messy–but so are all social systems, all cultures. The messiness may often our sense of logical coherence or consistency, but it doesn’t mean the result will be short-lived or a source of deep discomfort to those living within it.

Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century

I am about 2/3rds of the way through The Long Twentieth Century, which has been a slog, but also worth the effort. I will get back to the “life” stuff in subsequent posts, but want to pick up on three points from Arrighi today.

One: Arrighi is a fairly orthodox Marxist in that he firmly believes that economics drives history and, in particular, offers the explanatory causes for all armed conflicts. Even more fundamentally, he believes that the exigencies of profit are the main drivers of all economic activity. There is a logic to how and where profit can be made, as well as cycles that move capital from seeking profit through trade to seeking it through financial transactions. Individual actors in capitalism have few, if any, options. They must do what profit demands in any particular situation. The iron laws of capitalism rule.

Interestingly, however, Arrighi recognizes that no profit could even be made if all actors only pursued profit. Thus, he must posit that some people are otherwise motivated. If everyone were motivated by profit, trade would come to a standstill because no one would make trades unless able to make a profit—and profit, finally, is a zero-sum game. It is zero-sum because, unlike the fantasized barter exchange that is equally advantageous because I need eggs and your need clothes, the introduction of money translates all exchanges into the same currency. I only make a profit if the eggs I exchange for clothes are worth less in monetary terms than the sum you give me, part of which I expend on clothes, the rest of which I pocket as profit. (Kiernan had a friend once who refused to sell any properties in Monopoly because his older sister had so consistently taken advantage of him in the past. The result was an endless game, because no one could ever go bankrupt if not monopolies ever got formed. That might prove a functioning economy, but it certainly isn’t a capitalist one.)

So what motivates people besides profit? Arrighi answer (which, unfortunately, he doesn’t develop at all) is “power and prestige.” War provides a consistent boon for those seeking profit—and most wars, he seems to think, are actually motivated by the need to protect or to expand sources of profit. But he does seem to admit that aggrandizement, the quest for power and status apart from profit, can also motivate conflict, competition, and war. And the profit seekers are more than glad to, in Country Joe’s words, “supply the army with the tools of the trade.” War is not only a great consumer of merchandise (manufactured goods) but also a major source of debt (i.e. of profits for financial capital). The potlatch that is war serves profit precisely because it does not seek profit itself, representing a different desire instead, one that cold-eyed profit seekers can exploit.

There are, of course, other ways to seek status besides war—and that leads us to topic number two.

Two: We are familiar with “crises of overproduction,” the paradoxical creation of poverty during economic downturns where the problem is not a scarcity of goods, but a surfeit of them. Less often noted is the problem of a surfeit of capital, a crisis of “over-accumulation.” Arrighi is particularly good on this species of crisis, one that seems particularly acute in our day and age. For starters, the two types of crises can be (although they need not be) related. When markets are saturated, when there is not sufficient demand to meet supply and hence production is slowed because there is too much stuff around and no place to sell it, then capital might also begin to accumulate for lack of any place to invest it. You can’t put the capital to work because there is no need for increased production.

In this situation, capital will move from production to financial markets. Arrighi, in fact, believes that this movement from relying on commodities for profits to relying on selling money to make profits is the grand cycle of capitalism, with the movement to finance capital in the world’s dominant economy—first the Italian city-states, then the Dutch, then the British, then the US—marking the moment of transition from one site of dominance to the next. The newcomer begins by taking over production from its predecessor until it, too, exhausts the profit capacities of production and moves into finance. In this vision, the US, having moved from production to finance somewhere in the 1970s is in decline, with Asia bidding to become the next hegemonic capitalist site.

One possibility, then, is for capital to move from the former hegemonic site of production (the US) to the new one (China). But, for fairly obvious reasons, capital is not entirely mobile. For one thing, nationalist sentiments weigh against allowing the importation of too much “foreign capital.” There are also risk factors: the worry that foreign lands might not be stable. And there are transaction costs of moving into a different legal/banking regime and working in a different currency.

For various reasons, then, some (at least) excess capital will desire to stay home. And that leads to bubbles and to creative “financial instruments” and to Ponzi schemes and other forms of fraud. The bubbles, I would argue, are always often tied to status. The inflated value of the “bubbled thing” (if I can invent a term) relies not simply on its supposed ability to be cashed in for a certain sum, but also for the prestige of owning such an expensive, highly valued commodity. Currently, real estate and art works clearly play this role. They are great places to park excess money, because they can be rationalized as investments, not just frivolous spending. But owning a New York apartment or a painting by Monet is also conspicuous consumption. More bang for the buck: prestige plus a profit to be made.

Another factor drives bubbles, I think. The search for safety. That seems paradoxical since bubbles contain enormous risks—if we believe that value must, in the final instance, be tied back to something “real.” A very different dynamic is at work, I think. The world is a dangerous, unstable place—and seems more dangerous every day. (That fear of its dangerousness is, most likely, pretty constant across time. There are always ample reasons for fear.) The money being parked in New York and London and Vancouver real estate and in paintings by the masters is money being siphoned out of risky environments and salted away in places perceived as safe. The American who buys a high-end New York apartment can’t find a better place to invest his excess capital. The Chinese citizen who does the same is squirreling away his excess capital in a safe place. Both acquire the prestige of having a place in New York.

The quest for status does lend itself to expenditures that are pretty much complete financial losses: high-end clothes and accessories, fancy vacations. There is money to be made in the luxury trades and never more so than in times of slack production and excess capital. Education is a funny hybrid in such times. It is clearly a prestige item—the fancy prep schools, the elite colleges—but can also be rationalized as an investment. It is hard to know if the return on investment (given the differential in initial outlay) for going to Harvard exceeds that of going to Grand Rapid State—mostly because the place from which the respective students start is so vastly different that the assessment of eventual outcomes (in terms of income or of other measures of economic well-being) cannot isolate the specific contribution of the degree. But people love to spend money on things they think can also be justified as “investments.” One need only look at the immense sums American parents are spending on sports training/competition for their children, justified as possibly leading to that child getting a scholarship to college.

In sum, profit depends on their being other powerful motives that overrule profit for some people. As Marx put it on the more basic level of the material needs for subsistence, capitalism is in the business of turning your needs into weaknesses that it can exploit. The whole thing doesn’t work if there aren’t some people who do not pursue profit relentlessly and to the exclusion of all else.

Three: Arrighi argues that a major innovation of the American century, the time of its economic hegemony which encompasses the “long twentieth century” of his title, is the modern corporation. In particular, the modern corporation—think Ford, Exxon, Kodak, Ma Bell—combined mass production with mass marketing. These companies used the fact of being first in producing some product to gain massive market share by aggressively organizing its distribution and advertising operations. Newcomers (i.e. potential competitors), Arrighi argues, did not face overwhelming technical obstacles to produce products with the same efficiency as the first-comers. What the newcomers lacked was a way to crack into the market in sufficient volume to underwrite the capital costs of mass production. Organizing the market in ways that orient it toward one’s firm is equally as necessary as establishing an efficient mode of production. Where the two do not co-exist, the firm will not thrive.

On the one hand, this assertion still seems true. Apple and Google and Amazon are prime examples. They were, in some ways, technical innovators, although there were certainly personal computer makers in the 1980s who were Apple’s equals, and Amazon never did anything all that innovative technically. In Arrighi’s words, “the transnational corporations that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . were strictly business organizations [i.e. were not state/business hybrids like the East India Company and South Africa Company of the British hegemonic period] specialized functionally in a particular line of business across multiple territories and jurisdictions” (250-51). They integrated “the process of mass production with those of mass distribution within a single organization” (248).

It occurs to me that a similar “crowding out” operates in politics. The difficulties of forming a “third part” or a new lobbying firm or a new social movement are enhanced by the presence of highly organized players already on the field. Thus, for example, there is no strong anti-NRA group. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) might be a counter-example—and provide a model for those in favor of gun control to follow. Of course, there was hardly a strong lobby for drunk driving, the way that the NRA is a strong lobby against gun control. In any case, the advantages of being there first are only secured by also being organized. An organized player in the field only attracts more resources by virtue of their power and visibility. And, for that reason, I think (as has been a theme of so many of my musings) that the anarchist love of leaderless, horizontal, non-organized action so prevalent in many radical circles today is a losing strategy. Organization (money, boots on the ground, a well-articulated set of objectives, and a coherent strategy for advancing toward those objectives, a strategy followed consistently by the organization’s members) will defeat an amorphous protest group every time.

And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of Boltanksi and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism is that the monster corporations of the middle twentieth century are dinosaurs, too cumbersome to respond quickly and adroitly to rapidly changing conditions on the ground. IBM is just one poster child (GM and GE are others) for the supposed liabilities of the big firm. Paired down, focused firms like Toyota, Southwest Airlines, and Dell computers can take on the big boys—and win—because they can keep costs down and quality high. It is hardly that these successful new firms are unorganized. But the organization is highly decentralized; responsibility for different aspects of the operation are widely dispersed—including, in many cases, to other firms who, by way of contract, provide key support services or even key component parts. Such “outsourcing,” whether overseas or domestic, drives down costs, even as it increases accountability.

In politics, then, aspirant newcomers might want to consider how to play the disadvantages of size against the established players, the existing parties. I must admit I am not sure how that would work. For all the supposed “down-sizing” of the big dinosaurs in order to become leaner (and definitely meaner), it is not as if market share has changed all that drastically. Coke and Pepsi still dominate the soft drink business; the big breweries buy up craft breweries almost as quickly as Apple and Google buy out any possible competitors. I guess I would say that today’s firms are less uptight than the GM of 1950 about the need to do everything in-house, the need to be the employer of record of everyone whose work was needed to make the company function. But today’s firms are even more obsessed with controlling the market. Hence the endless customer satisfaction research.

Enough for now. The big question still looms—as it always does for me. What causes (there were obviously several) explain the “return of ruthless capitalism.” Why were labor costs and profit levels that were deemed satisfactory in 1960 were no longer acceptable to capitalists in 1980?

Responses to Neoliberalism

To summarize: Boltanski and Chiapello (B&C), like most analysts of neoliberalism, offer a fairly convincing portrait of the changes it has wrought. Specifically, neoliberalism has 1) reorganized the “firm” and its productive processes, focusing in on the “core” mission or product, while relying on “supply chains” for the delivery of ancillary services (cleaning, payroll etc.) and of needed parts. The result is high salaries and (paradoxically) job security (with benefits) for the most mobile and skilled workers—and “contract” positions for the less skilled, whose lack of mobility is exploited. In short, more and more work is “outsourced” to companies that must compete to get that work by driving down wages. Such “outsourcing” is both domestic and global. Jobs that can be moved to overseas locations where wages are lower are. Jobs like cleaning, health care, social services that must be done on site in the “developed” country are outsourced to service firms.

2) Even as the “firm” gets smaller in terms of its “core” workers, it goes global (or transnational) in order to gain the mobility required to successfully compete. Globalization means a) hiring labor or contracting with service firms anywhere in the world where costs can be driven down, b) sheltering profits and assets in locales that allow for the evasion of taxes, c) creating credible threats of capital flight and enabling blackmail of governments for “concessions” and “incentives” in return for locating the firm there, and d) continues the relentless search for new markets that has been characteristic of capitalism from the start.

3) B&C note, without giving much emphasis to, the ways in which neoliberalism “commodifies” activities, services, and (can we say) “affects” that were previously deemed private. Examples would be care of elderly family members or of children (old age homes and day care centers) and love relations (Match, Tinder, Grinder and the rest). Anything and everything can be monetized. This feature of neoliberalism can be seen as simply an intensification of capitalism’s in-built need to “grow”—with the invention of new markets along with the more complete exploitation of existing markets a signal “imperative” of capitalism.

4) B&C also note, but say very little about (and this is a fault), the growth of “finance capitalism” within the neoliberal framework. For Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century, the resort to finance capital (i.e. the move from a reliance on selling actual goods to a reliance on “financial products” as the major source of profit) is a recurrent feature of “mature” capitalist economies. The finance phase, in his view, marks the “end” of hegemony as capitalism moves its prime site from one locale to another. In his schema, Italy, then Holland, then Britain, and then the US served as capitalism’s center. Our current financial era would, thus, mark the end of US dominance and be setting the stage for Chinese hegemony. Such transitions, in Arrighi’s way of telling the tale, are inevitable because capitalism is never the fully mobile and dispersed entity that B&C appear to think it has become. Rather, capitalism’s competitive mode means that it combines with nationalism to breed conflict oriented to fighting over which country will be the world’s dominant economic power. The transition period from one hegemon to the next is particularly violent, so we should expect a very turbulent next 50 years if Arrighi is right. B&C, on the other hand, appear to expect/accept a transnational financial system, with multinational banks and firms (like Goldman Sachs) presiding over it—banks and firms with no particular location and no significant national loyalties. Thus, B&C are among those who see neoliberalism as marking the decline in power and relevance of the national state. Capital is more powerful than the state.

5) Finally, B&C argue that the “new spirit” of capitalism, the motivating story that neoliberalism tells in order to win consent and to get people moving, is the by-now familiar one about “human capital.” It is a story that, if spun right, is about “freedom.” You, the worker, are no longer tied to a firm or to a job. You are free to develop your talents and interests, to move from one firm to the next, or even to strike out on your own as an entrepreneur. You are in control of your own destiny, in a world in which creativity, innovation, daring, and energy are rewarded. Self-fashioning is the challenge and the thrill. Lean in. And just so that won’t seem entirely isolating and asocial, a premium skill to be developed is the ability to work in teams since it is the “network” and “networking” that are the keys to productivity.

B&C are clear that neoliberalism augments suffering. It creates many more losers than winners, it increases inequality while it shreds the safety net. It is haunted by the fact that it celebrates the creation of the relationships that are the core of “networks”—and hence the interpersonal skills that leads one to have multiple relationships—while retaining an awareness that “cashing in” on relationships renders the whole notion of such friendships suspect. Trade mars everything it touches, wrote Thoreau—and neoliberalism is energetically striving to mar everything, to turn everything to account. Dissidents will lose out, but there do remain refuseniks, those who insist on holding some things aloof from the market.

So what kinds of resistance do B&C imagine? Here we run up against the paradox that the most radical positions are so often very conservative. Radicals are all about what has been lost. (Or, alternatively, we can say that we are facing a crisis of the radical imagination, that the lack of any new ideas is a deep and paralyzing failure. Radicals are, at least right now and perhaps always, fighting the last war. B&C do talk about the ways in which the labor movement, in particular, was caught entirely off-guard by the innovations of neoliberalism and, hence, proved powerless to stop them.) It is certainly true that loss aversion provides a powerful affective tool for radical movements. It is easier to get people out into the streets to protest something that has been taken away from them than to get them motivated by an image of something they have never had.

So: B&C spend some time talking about “intrinsic value,” basically appealing to a sense that some things—art, love, family, friends, health—should not be commodified. A rear-guard action if there ever was one. (I don’t mean to sneer here. Holding some things apart from the market is central to sanity and happiness. But the issue is how to “politicize” this desire. Exhortation is not going to do the trick.)

B&C also rely on that old standard: the in-built “contradictions” of capitalism that render it unstable. They make the usual apocalyptic noises about the coming crisis, that moment when people will just have suffered too much and will do something, they know not what, but something to force some changes. We know how that story goes. Capitalism has weathered its contradictions, and the pronouncement of such threats of its inevitable demise, with aplomb for quite some time now.

More convincing is the way in which B&C talk about the need to translate “indignation” into a program. Here they have something fairly concrete to say. It goes like this. Any system has a number of “tests”—which can be best understood as sites of selection where the distribution of goods and rewards is determined. An obvious example is admission to college or the processes that decide who gets an advertised job. In order to be deemed just, those subjected to such tests in any given system must believe the tests are “fair.” That is, the test must actually a) successfully search for the talents/features relevant to the reward in question (i.e. the SAT must be a reasonably accurate indicator of intelligence) and b) only make its judgment on the relevant talent/features (one’s physical appearance or race or religion are not to be considered in deciding admission to college).

Thus, “tests” are crucial sites for conflict within any social system. They are places where injustices will be identified and where reform (the establishment of tests that are more fair) will concentrate its efforts. Indignation can be channeled into concrete action when directed toward the critique and reform of “tests.” Crucially, B&C recognize that tests are formalized into “institutions” and given some bite by being legally installed. In other words, indignation gains force, an ability to have an impact, when “collectivized” through the establishment/maintenance of institutions and acquiring the power to sanction by being written into law. “Statutes express what can be established about the position of individuals for a certain length of time and in a certain space, independently of how their interaction with others unfolds at any given moment. They presuppose reference to something like institutions capable not only of organizing tests that last, in such a way as to stabilize expectations and define their rhythm, but also of exercising an external constraint in the form of obligations and sanctions” (469-70).

The language here is all about restraining mobility, of creating stability and rules that “last.” Capitalism, in other words, must be held accountable to certain obligations. It has to deliver certain goods—primarily the satisfaction of the material needs of a whole designated population—in order to be given its legitimacy within the set of laws that enable its existence. “It remains the case,” B&C write, “that embarking on this road presupposes pretty much abandoning a quest for liberation defined as absolute autonomy, simultaneously free of any interference from others and any form of obligation laid down by an external authority” (470).

We are returned here to the political, to the need for the state. Capitalism is not going to restrain itself—and it will sing its siren song of liberation, of self-fashioning, of untrammeled freedom, all the while. For B&C, unions were crucial because they provided a way to focalize indignation—and to use its energy in opposition to the firm. “The union also has the advantage of providing points of support outside the firm—places for meeting, pooling information and reflecting, for the development of beliefs different from those put forward by employers, work methods, a socialization of means of resistance, training in negotiating—to which an isolated union representative does not have access” (274-5).

Again, we are on familiar ground. In the absence of unions, the two candidates to take their place are the political party (Lenin continues to stalk the room) and social movements (whether “new” or not). Neither seems particularly well suited to address workplace tyranny and its many abuses. Neither is “in” the firm the way a union was. Still, it would be ahistorical as well as naïve to forget that only the state’s establishment of various labor laws (length of the working day, safety regulations, minimum wage laws, child labor laws etc.) cemented the gains unions fought for. The union must negotiate with capital—but it also must have the state, with its legal powers, come into the fray at some point. Law is not utterly fixed, of course, since it is constantly moving in relation to case law. But law is relatively fixed in relation to capitalism’s endless dynamism—and must be mobilized to constrain capitalism’s restless pursuit of profit.

Finally, all of this resistance to neoliberalism (as to any form of capitalism) must be based, B&C argue, on a theory, an account, of exploitation. Critique, they insist, does change things. Capitalism must respond to critique—either by undertaking actual reforms or by “displacement” (which means the establishment of new practices that sidestep the abuses that critique has identified.) The “social critique” (contrasted to the “artistic critique” in their schema) focuses on issues of justice—and, hence, will tell a story of exploitation. Basically, that story will indicate those whose efforts, whose contributions, are not adequately rewarded.

What B&C fail to notice is that the justice critique can come in two forms. The leftist version highlights inequality—and pushes toward the notion that all should be rewarded equally. In many versions, this becomes the notion that all have a “right” to the basic necessities to lead a flourishing life. This logic leads current leftists to the idea of a “universal basic income.” But the rightist version of this critique often takes the form that the “wrong people” are being rewarded. There is no argument against inequality here. It is just that I am not being rewarded, while some undeserving other is being rewarded. Inequality is great; it is just that whites should be the ones on top, not those Jews, immigrants, or blacks who are parasites and squirreling away what is rightfully mine.