Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism

Neoliberalism, let us say, is a socio-economic philosophy embedded to varying degrees in Euro-American life. In its media presentations, it expresses inordinate confidence in the unique, self-regulating power of markets as it links the freedom of the individual to markets. At a lower decibel level and high degree of intensity it solicits modes of state, corporate, church and media discipline to organize nature, state policy, workers, consumers, families, schools, investors, and international organizations to maintain conditions for unfettered markets and to obscure or clean up financial collapses, eco-messes and regional conflicts created by that collusion.

Neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism are thus not exactly the same thing, at least since neoliberalism displaced the latter in Euro-American thought between 1935 and 1960. Neoliberals, as Michel Foucault has shown, often do not think that markets are natural; they think they are delicate mechanisms that require protection and nurturance by states and other organizations.¹ The state does not manage markets much directly, except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role in creating, maintaining and protecting the preconditions of market self-regulation. The more ambitious supporters want the state to promote market behavior in new zones through judicial or legislative action, focusing on such areas as academic admissions, schools, health care, rail service, postal service, and private military organizations.

So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect and expand market processes. And political leaders espousing neoliberal economics—such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and David Cameron—often turn out also to be bellicose defenders of conservative Christianity, moralism, and/or a specific image of the nation. Neoliberalism, a selectively active state, a conservative brand of Christianity, and a nation of regularized individuals surrounded by marginalized minorities often hang together, even if points periodically arrive where they are at odds with one another.²

What, then, are some of the political movements and modes of state activism supported by neoliberalism? They include, with varying degrees of support from different leaders, laws to restrain labor organization and restrict consumer movements; corporate participation on school and university Boards; favorable tax laws for investors; corporate ownership and control of the media; court decisions that treat the corporation as a “person” with unlimited rights to lobby and campaign; demands for bankruptcy laws that favor corporations at the expense of those working for them;³ special corporate access to state officials to maintain inequality and restrain unemployment benefits; extensive discipline of the work force; the legal defense of corporate, financial power to limit consumer information about the policies that affect them; the ear of state officials who regulate credit and the money supply; use of the state to enforce debt payments and foreclosures; huge military, police and prison assemblages to pursue imperial policies abroad and discipline the excluded and disaffected at home; meticulous street and institutional security arrangements to regulate those closed out of the neoliberal calculus; huge state budgets to promote the established infrastructure of consumption in the domains of highway expenditure, the energy grid, health care, and housing codes; state clean up of disasters created by under-regulated financial and corporate activity; and state/bureaucratic delays to hold off action on global climate change.

The corporate/media/state/evangelical/think-tank cheerleaders of neoliberalism also deflect attention from ways state/neoliberal capitalism strives to order workers, consumers, localities and international institutions to fit the neoliberal dictates of market behavior. It is an effective ideological strategy and a destructive and dangerous organization of private/public energies. The activist, neoliberal state becomes most transparent during an emergency or meltdown, but it is always operative.

Perhaps the quickest way, then, to dramatize the difference between classical market liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism is to say that the former wanted the state to minimize interference with “natural” market processes as it purported to leave other parts of civil society to their own devices, while the latter campaigns to make the state, the media, schools, families, science, churches and the corporate estate be ordered around neoliberal principles of being. This version of state activism provides the brand of statism that...