Words of Warning: Global Networks, Asian Local Resistance, and the Planetary Vulgate of Neoliberalism

Globalization is the first and last word in the vocabulary of media pundits, cultural commentators, economists, politicians, and activists. Its attributed characteristics are many. It is first cause and last effect, the ultimate constraint, the final enabler, the absence of freedom, the latest greatest hope. So diverse, so opposed, so contradictory are these coexisting others that one might almost describe the term as the final resting place of an earlier harbinger of momentous change, dialectic. So spaecious (spacious and specious) is its semiotic play that, with a greater sense of irony, one might describe it as the most significant floating signifier of the new century.¹ Yet when the meaning of lived human being is at stake, diversity, opposition, and contradiction rarely make for peaceful coexistence. Rather, such significance, such weight of time and place, facilitates practices of compaction, constriction, and exclusion. Neoliberalism is the loudest voice, a first among unequals in the discourse of globalization. According to Pierre Bourdieu, neoliberalism has become the "planetary vulgate" of modern capitalism.² The power of the vulgate resides in the socialization of uncritical citizens. But the East Asian financial crisis of 1997 and those that have followed reveal the disjuncture between word and deed, promise and fulfilment, stated intentions and consequences. As a result new forms of resistance have begun to emerge. Neoliberalism is parasitic upon the illusion of our own powerlessness and its own global irresistibility.³ To counteract it is to understand that only I can act for myself and that I am responsible, but only through the connection of local, regional, and global networks of critical action can neoliberalism be effectively opposed.4 The Internet is part of what makes this possible, and new organizations, such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), Third World Network, and Focus on the Global South are exploiting this technology in conjunction with traditional activism as a means to overwriting the vulgate. As such they are a contribution to the creation of a genuinely critical civil society or Habermasian public sphere, radicalized within and beyond nation-states.5

The Subcutaneous Character of Neoliberalism

According to Bourdieu, neoliberalism is a screen discourse or the universal clothes of the new imperialism—cultural, economic, and political. As such it permeates language, offering a ready vocabulary replete with consequences for lived human being. Yet it is proffered as a simple, commonsense, in-the-world pragmatism. Its pragmatism is one of accommodation, of the inevitability of the world. It seeks what Jacques Rancière calls "the oldest task of politics," the illusion of its depoliticization.

6 Concomitantly, it reduces the social to issues of technical expertise. Such a strategy resonates powerfully (in all senses of the word) with Frankfurt school themes of modernity.⁷

Neoliberalism is an alliance of political conservatism (small c), with its emphasis on freedom to (as opposed to freedom from), and neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics assumes that men and women are hardwired to follow self-interest and that unimpeded self-interest produces a spontaneous and economically ideal order.

⁸ This is expressed prosaically as the "discipline" of the market, using such ancillary terms as competition, innovation, dynamism, and choice. Beneath these terms lurks a methodology of mathematical modeling where aspects of behavior that cannot be assigned a numerical value are deemed irrelevant. Neoclassical economics is one of the final bastions of the Chicago school dictum of 1926, "When you cannot measure, your knowledge becomes meagre and unsatisfactory."

Neoliberalism's point of synthesis between conservatism and neoclassical economics is the concept of individualism. The autonomous rational human is the rationale of the neoliberal ideology of the minimal state; of legislated nonintervention, privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization; and of repealed trade, exchange rate, and financial flow barriers. The neoliberal autonomous human is a particular kind of rational actor. The...