"A Brief History of Neoliberalism", Chapter 7

Having cornered the ideological market via naked repression and the subtler re-organization of what Gramsci calls "common sense" (i.e. "the sense held in common"), neoliberalism has on the one hand effectively foreclosed mainstream debate "as to which of several divergent concepts of freedom might be appropriate to our times" [183-184]. Under neoliberalism, freedom is simply market freedom, and rights boil down to individual property rights; even FDR's Keynesian policies and wishy-washy "Obamanomics" sound like communist extremism given neoliberalism's ideological ambiance. On the other hand, through its history of accumulation by dispossession, social corrosion and natural despoliation, neoliberalism itself accounts for "the emergence of diverse oppositional cultures that from both within and without the market system either explicitly or tacitly reject the market ethic and the practices neoliberalism imposes" [185]. Harvey argues in Chapter 7 that although there are signs of growing discontent within policy circles as regards the performance of much-touted neoliberal solutions, true change has to come from "outside the frames of reference defined by this class power and market ethics while staying soberly anchored in the realities of our time and place" [188]. To leap over our shadow in this way is possible in any case because the neoliberal organization of consent has its limits as well as its unintended consequences, and because "these realities [of our time and place] point to the possibility of a major crisis within the heartland of the neoliberal order itself" [Ibid.].


Neoliberalism is rife with economic and political contradictions. These can be contained through locally damaging but globally manageable financial crises, but only at the cost of practices departing significantly from neoliberal theory [Ibid.]. This suggests that despite its continuing hegemony in the ideological arena, neoliberalism is "in trouble if if not actually dead as a viable theoretical guide to ensuring the future of capital accumulation" [Ibid.]. Moreover, the contradictions of neoliberalism cannot rule out an Argentina-2001-type situation even in US, which would have catastrophic consequences for local as well as global capitalism [189]. This is of course a doomsday scenario, but as Harvey argues (and backs up with a painstaking reconstruction and expansion of Marx in his stellar The Limits to Capital), "there is a limit to which this system can progress" [190].


That there's a limit means not only that it is increasingly difficult for American capital to be realized (in Marx's precise sense), but that in simple terms, it's running out of frontier. Rosa Luxemburg (in The Accumulation of Capital) famously argued that capitalism needs a non-capitalist outside to survive (for example: a crisis of over-accumulation in the centers of global capitalism can be mitigated by forcing open "primitive" or "under-developed" foreign markets through economic pressure or open imperialism). This theoretical insight has been critiqued, refined and expanded by subsequent theorists, but at bottom it means that capitalism survives via periodic cycles of primitive accumulation or, as Harvey prefers to term it, "accumulation by dispossession". At the most general level, a look at recent history appears to bear this insight out. What we are witnessing now in the US, especially as regards the housing bubble and the ruination of vast swaths of the population through consumer debt, is a truly cannibalistic form of capitalism: American capital, effectively, is visiting accumulation by dispossession on American citizens.


An unworkable, cannibalistic neoliberal order will either fall on account of its own contradictions, in particular the class struggle it perpetuates and exacerbates, or it will consolidate its class rule by more and more open neoconservative authoritarianism (neoconservatism being a natural rather than monstrous or unaccountable offspring of neoliberalism). As Harvey states, "regimes of accumulation rarely if ever dissolve peacefully" [189]. Neoliberalism will not go gentle into that good night for the very reason that it is about class power, and not about economic efficiency and material abundance for the many. We can expect that the struggles surrounding the G20 coordinated austerity plan and so on will only sharpen as things develop. We can also expect increasingly open class warfare on the part of the rich to the extent that their economic "solutions" reveal themselves for what they are: accumulation by dispossession visited on the general public, with a view to further enriching the upper class. If class warfare on the part of the dispossessed is also inevitable, to the extent that this category embraces an increasingly large portion of the general population, the field is ripening for insurrection and - this is our hope in any case - for revolution.


This opens the question of the particular characteristics, direction(s) and prospects of the emergent resistance to the neoliberal order. If the recent G20 convergence in Toronto has taught us anything, it's that parliamentary politicians and the traditional organized or "official" Left continue to play the same game as their neoliberal masters. A Black Bloc of a few hundred smashing corporate storefronts caused a mass moral panic among a Left that could not even conceive of the moral rightness of property damage against the order that it professes to oppose. The official Left did the conservative government and mainstream media's job admirably in quickly denouncing militant comrades as terrorists, criminals, or agents-provocateurs. This is an exemplary case of what Lukacs long ago identified as the fetishization of legalism; apparently the mainstream Canadian Left is incapable of imaging cases where tactics may be illegal, but also morally right and pragmatically called for. Evidently, it has not even done the necessary prerequisite work of untangling the questions of legality, morality, and tactical soundness.


Harvey himself speculates on the shape of the resistance to come, taking shots at Hardt-and-Negri style abstractions as well as principled narrowly-focused local activism. There must be a global analysis to guide the resistance, but he allows that an expanded account of the local will continue to be a vital point of leverage in future struggles. Essentially, demands, agendas and tactics must be locally tailored and appropriate, but they must also be revolutionary - and this, precisely, entails a view to unity and an emergent form of activist organization. Neoliberalism's self-serving, empty and formally negative rights discourse must also be opposed by a more robust and positive vision of human rights, namely in terms of a right to economic security and prosperity.


The main lesson to take away from Harvey, in any case, is the following: "if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is. The mass of the population has either to resign itself to the historical and geographical trajectory defined by overwhelming and ever-increasing upper-class power, or respond to it in class terms" [202]. In practical terms this means a subject-position cleansed of a neoliberal "common sense" that would have over seventy percent of Canadian citizens cheerfully condoning the repressive actions of a police force hired to ensure that dispossession of public assets could go unimpeded. As regards the general content of this subject-position, the Industrial Workers of the World put it best perhaps, in the preamble to their constitution: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism", Chapter 4

Harvey emphasizes the "universal tendency [of neoliberalism] to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in society ... to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization" [118]. This tendency is no accident. Recall that he interprets neoliberalization as a redistributive process: the rich, through force of arms, political maneuvering and the construction of mass consent, gut social infrastructure and break or co-opt organized labour and social movements in order to line their own pockets and cement their class power. Chapter 4 describes the geo-historical particulars of this process over the past few decades. Neoliberalization has had far from universal consequences on the world stage. Harvey enumerates local conditions, geo-political and other particular factors to sketch an explanation of why some countries have fared better than others, and why at particular times. Nonetheless, he suggests that neoliberalism, which touts itself as the only cure for sick economies, is neither a panacea, nor, but for the very small minority of the ultra-rich, anything resembling a medicine.

The proof that neoliberalism is about class power and not about economic efficiency and abundance is in the numbers. Harvey underscores that the true economic success stories of the 80s and early 90s belonged not to countries implementing neoliberal policies, but more mixed economies like Germany and Japan, which followed corporatist or at least more traditonal/integrated models of employment and social spending. Such models "did not, however, facilitate the restoration of class power" [89]. Those pushing the neoliberal agenda had therefore to discipline these economies and bring them full stop into the neoliberal fold. Harvey enumerates the components of their project: the "turn to more open financialization" (i.e. speculative capital) [90], "the increasing geographical mobility of capital" (outsourcing, etc) [92], persuasion, cajoling and coercion of many "developing countries" by the "Wall Street-IMF-Treasury complex" dominating the Clinton years (recall the fate of post-Apartheid South Africa) [92], and finally, the "ever more powerful ideological influence" exerted by "the global diffusion of the new monetarist and neoliberal economic orthodoxy" [93]. These factors came together to form the so-called "Washington Consensus" of the mid-90s, cementing the view that neoliberalism is the only answer to what ails the world's economies.

So here we are in 2010 in the midst of a protracted global economic crisis. Neoliberalism has continued to wreak havoc on the environment and punish the most marginalized. South American countries, having had more than enough neoliberalism (it was there that neoliberalization was first pulled off, by open violence), experiment with different economic models. Insurrectionary anti-capitalist situations are blooming in Greece, Nepal and India.

The question becomes: why, given all this mass unrest and the repeated failure of neoliberal policies to provide a stable and healthy economy, are we swallowing the neoliberal pill the G20 has offered us? Naomi Klein has pointed out in The Shock Doctrine that neoliberalism is an ideology, in the sense that it seals itself off hermetically by employing the fallacy of "the exception that proves the rule". Refuting instances, for example massive unemployment and social unrest resulting from neoliberalization, are chalked up to not enough neoliberalization. Even when austerity measures provoke widespread revolt, the neoliberal line is to continue to insist that the market is distorted by state intervention, or, more baldly, to claim that the people losing their jobs and social programs are personally responsible, and in any case simply ignorant of the benefits that will come. The argument that neoliberal policies are necessary to foster "a good business climate", so ubiquitous as to seem a tautology, is similarly ideological [117]. Given that neoliberalization consistently produces mass social unrest, it is unclear how it is able to claim that it is best suited to attract investors.

In Canada, where the G20 was recently hosted, the situation does not appear to be so bad. Nonetheless, we feel the effects of the global meltdown and are told that cutting public infrastructure will somehow get us back on our feet. The Toronto police ever so politely reminded us with rubber bullets, sound cannons, kettling, illegal searches, detentions, and even made-up laws that it is very naughty of us to show our disagreement. Heartbreakingly, over seventy percent of Canadians feel the police response was justified, and almost no one has even bothered to look into how the G20 mandate affects them. But this is only consistent with what Harvey is saying: "It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism" [119].

"A Brief history of Neoliberalism", Chapter 2

Neoliberalization being in the most general terms a re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the very rich, Harvey asks in Chapter 2 how exactly such a blatantly unjust process could have been pulled off. The answer is fairly simple when looking at countries like Chile and Argentina: labour leaders, community organizers, socialist politicians, etc, were jailed, tortured and assassinated by police and military. Demonstrators and strikers were beaten, killed, and terrorized. Social wealth and infrastructure were sold off, in short, under truncheon blows and at gunpoint.

But what about the United States and Britain, where neoliberalism "had to be accomplished by democratic means"[39]? Harvey argues that the success of neoliberalism (i.e. from the point of view of the rich) was prepared in these countries by a construction of consent; this implied gaining hegemony over, mobilizing and manipulating what Gramsci calls "common sense", defined not as that which is sensible, but merely as "the sense held in common" [Ibid.]. Cultural and traditional beliefs, values and fears were employed, in short, to "mask other realities" - namely, the brute economic facts of post-Fordist capital accumulation and the dismantling of social institutions to further line the pockets of the wealthy [Ibid.]. Neoliberalism employed ideological tools especially where existing social mores, traditions and institutions posed barriers to neoliberalization by brute force alone.

This is not to say that Reagan and Thatcher failed to use bribery, threat and an increasingly militarized police to great effect. Rather, it is to point out that existing values were also manipulated in such a way as to render the great majority of the American and English populations blind and complicit to the looting of their own hard-earned social infrastructures. Take for instance the ideal of personal freedoms, which, many Americans flatter themselves has long been a hallmark of their country. As Harvey points out, "Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold" [41]. This is because at the level of personal property rights and freedoms, neoliberalism delivers (that is, to the rich and to a certain strata of corrupt labour); moreover, through its media it aggressively drives home the point that there are no other personal freedoms worthy of the name.

The real coup pulled off by neoliberalism with respect to "common sense", however, was to separate the ideal of personal freedoms, i.e. property freedoms, from that of social justice (whereas, for instance in May 68 in France as well as other left-libertarian crests of history, these formed an ideological knot). The ideology of personal freedoms, divorced from social justice, naturally became a bulwark against state intervention in the economy. Note that corporations are considered persons; therefore the personal freedoms of, to take a contemporary example, BP, serve as a legal and ideological barrier to the idea that the company owes anything to anyone for what it has extracted, and the resultant environmental costs. The success of neoliberalism in organizing "common sense" in this way accounts for the ubiquitous and totally bizarre images of poor Americans marching in the streets for their right to not be able to afford cancer treatments. It also accounts for the dominant perception that property destruction by militants (and cops disguised as militants) at the Toronto G20 convergence was violence par excellence, whereas beatings, unlawful detentions and sexual assaults by police officers against peaceful protesters were largely ignored by mainstream media and roundly praised by all levels of Canada's (increasingly neoliberal) government.

As regards what might be called the North American scene, two points especially are noteworthy here: so-called "postmodernism" and Reagan's organization of a Christian conservative "moral majority" to back the GOP. The first, which comprises a kind of cynical-radical chic, Harvey devastatingly critiques in his The Condition of Postmodernity (required reading for anyone dabbling in the often polluted waters of continental theory). Postmodernism as Harvey reads it is an ideology of personal property rights and the "freedom" to pursue petty, amoral pleasures (Coke or Pepsi? Gay porn or straight? You see?? You're free!!!). This hedonistic ideology has hamstrung or at least significantly confused a substantial section of what would otherwise be the radical youth; therefore neoliberalism has proven "more than a little compatible" with it [50]. The flipside of postmodernism is, of course, the organization of the Christian Right. By grafting "family values" onto an economic programme destructive of the very roots of healthy family life among the poor, Reagan ensured the support of those who would have had the most to gain from his deposal. (It should of course also be underscored that the Democrats, who would otherwise represent a cultural and social counter-pressure to the GOP, have long since been compromised to the core. Chances of election under neoliberalism are slim to nil barring deals with the corporate devil, as it were.)

The story in Britain was much the same - strike breaking, bait-and switch maneuvering, selling off bits and pieces of the social safety net - but it's notable that Thatcher's approval was in the dumps prior to the Falklands/Malvinas war. Reagan and other neoliberal leaders were not slow in taking Thatcher's cue; when things look bad for the neoliberal state, organize a war against a country which can hardly defend itself, and be sure to mobilize as much fear and national pride as possible. This is a model we have inherited, with terrible consequences.

Harvey is sure to underscore the failure of the Left to beat the neoliberals at their game in terms of the "common sense" factor. They lacked an adequate response, but also a positive programme. This underscores that the educational and, dare I say it, propagandistic wing of the new social movements has its work cut out for it. But what about Obama, and his audacity of hope? Can't he be called on to save us? Here is what Harvey has to say: "[The genius of Reagan and Thatcher] was to create a legacy and a tradition that tangled subsequent politicians in a web of constraints from which they could not easily escape. Those who followed, like Clinton and Blair [and, evidently, Obama], could do little more than continue the good work of neoliberalization, whether they liked it or not" [63].

Alain Badiou, "Polemics"

(Verso, 2006)

Unsurprisingly, Canadian mainstream media is near unanimous in its reading of this weekend's G20 protests. The basic picture is that certain "anarchists" have created - you guessed it! - "anarchy" in Toronto, and are now in the process of being duly rounded up and punished. Democracy [sic] is saved! The Ottawa Sun, not fit to line an animal's cage, has even gone so far as to paint the clashes solely in terms of poor, defenceless riot cops harrassed by rocks, molotovs and bottles of urine. No mention of police wading into the supposedly safe "free speech zone", clubbing and pepper-spraying peaceful protesters.

To be clear: there has been violence on both sides. What I take issue with is that whereas property destruction by certain militant factions is almost universally denounced as "violence" or "terrorism" (including from the mouths of certain yellow labour representatives), actual violence against the bodies of those exercising their democratic rights has proven almost unthinkable as such. The headline of a local daily newspaper sums it up nicely: "Law and disorder". You can guess that the "law" has had no part in fomenting the disorder.

In the wake of the protests, the task ahead of the radical Left is legal defence, solidarity actions, community organization, and the dissemination of accurate information contra the mainstream media consensus. But additionally, some of us may also take solace in and gather strength from theory. I've had this argument too many times to repeat here, but I can personally attest to the bewildering and psychologically damaging effects of being at odds with and shut down by the armed wing of the dominant "democratic" situation. Theory is not exactly therapy, but it can be a means of getting one's bearings when this is desperately needed. It is of course not its own end. But in a situation of general police action, there is, I suggest, perhaps no better well at which to quench one's thirst than the writings of Alain Badiou.

Badiou's Polemics reminds us that representative "democratic" politics is not a cuddly affair. It is underpinned by violence and abject fear. His entire philosophical project is, in effect, an attempt to think the coming-to-be of that which is unthinkable within the representative-democratic situation - precisely, a properly communist politics from below - and to delineate an ethics of militancy which defines the human being in positive terms. Badiou promotes such virtues as courage, fidelity and endurance, leaving off with the dominant ethics of eternal guilt in face of the Other. I would suggest that a reading of Polemics will help those in North America to think their situation, despite the fact that there's much in the book that is slightly dated and mostly pertinent to French politics. One finds painstaking dissections of the Paris Commune and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a philosophical engagement with zionism and anti-semitism, and perhaps most importantly for the present, an attempt to think a radical subject-position relative to the dominant consensus.

Organize your communities; but read and think deeply, and as if your lives depended on it.

A Short Thought on the G20

When looking at the cops, the protesters, and the politicians, I think we ought to keep in mind Bertolt Brecht's well-known quip:

What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?