What is Neoliberalism? - YouTube

One of the important tasks that, you know,

the term neoliberalism has been performing

is as a way to gather together and explain the social policies

over the past 30, 40 years that have resulted in

a tattered social safety net

and redistribution of all kinds of power and resources upward.

The term neoliberalism emerged pretty much from

the scholarship - critical left scholarship -

done on and about Latin America

as a way of naming, in a much more more

critical incisive way, some of the economic policies being imposed

through the IMF and the World Bank, what was called the Washington Consensus.

So rather than talking as, you know, Bill Clinton did about globalization as

this sort of fabulous

connecting up of everything and flows of capital around the world in a totally

positive way,

neoliberalism was a name for -

a more negative name, a more critical name - for policies that

forced countries that were having to borrow a lot of money from the IMF or

the World Bank,

forced them into structural adjustment reductions

of social welfare programs and so on. And then we saw what I was seeing in my

research at that time

was how those same kind of structural adjustment policies were being

deployed in the US as well, so it wasn't just about

a kind of imposition

on developing countries, but what was also then turned around as social policy in the US

the reduction of the welfare state.

Sexuality and gender

are such embodied

spheres that on one hand, you -

it is very private, it is very individual -

and on the other hand, it has tremendous

social importance.

So from Foucaultian biopolitical perspective,

you know, you need to target sexuality to - in order to,

in order to make sure that everybody falls in place. So I think if you

apply that

to the neoliberal logic, then

you need people to fall in line according to certain

gender and sexual norms, in order to

to ensure the smooth operation of neoliberalism,

especially when it is about the retrenchment of the state,

when it's withdrawing all this other social support,

you need a certain stable order

of heterosexual reproductive family

in order to progress.

So I think gender, sexuality is a necessary

part of the larger - I wanted to say warfare, but -

strategy of neoliberalism.

So neoliberalism refers to several things. It's been used as a periodizing schema

to describe a related constellation of changes that have happened over roughly

the last four decades.

And it's also theoretical shorthand for summarizing the ways in which various

schools of thought

see the most significant amongst these changes.

There are probably three main schools

of analysis that seek to capture these

different and interrelated changes. The first

school is the neo-Marxist school and is indebted to theorists like David Harvey

who talk about neoliberalism as a project of upward

redistribution of economic resources

through policies like structural adjustment and IMF policy,

literally a shift in economic resources from

the poor and working classes to

elites. Second major school thought is the neo-Foucaultian school associated with

theorists like Nikolas Rose, Wendy Brown,

which sees neoliberalism as more of a cultural project

and talks about the ways in which new market rationalities get

embodied and subjectively incorporated

into self-responsiblized neoliberal subjects.

The third school of thought is associated with

social scientists who work on theorizing state transformations

and is associated with people like the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant,

who talk about neoliberalism as a new mode of statecraft and are particularly

interested in the shift from the welfare state to the carceral state,

the rise of a new securitized state apparatus, and, in particular,

the growth of mass incarceration or "hyperincarceration,"

as he calls it, as the paradigmatic state project.

All of this goes together, right, in this sort of neoliberal frame

of concentrating wealth, extracting more and more and more from

poor people - extracting it from people

not only by making conditions of work worse, making wages lower, making sure

nobody has

pensions or health benefits, all those sort of literal ways, adding free

trade agreements that make

it easier to capture wealth and exploit laborers and the environment all

over the world -

but also through actually making money off

imprisoning people and off of

every aspect of domestic and international warfare.

So there's sort of this new level of profit-making

that's also a form of intense social control that

certainly makes it difficult to - it's hard for resistance in many ways.

So we have a new law, SB 1070,

which uses the implicit

key terms of neoliberalism to

help itself congeal into this law, so the key terms being

things like personal responsibility, law abiding citizen,

strong family values. All of those things

are mobilized by the law

in order to criminalize a certain segment of the population:

immigrants who are undocumented.

The term neoliberalism sometimes can allow us to

look at a bunch of things that would be, that might be analyzed as disparate,

siloed incidences, and instead look at them together

and think together about - for example, instead of looking at the criminal and

immigration system separately,

which the law might tell you to, the law says one is a civil system, the other

is a criminal system,

they're different. Instead, we can understand, together, a broader trend

of expansion of racialized imprisonment and then we might see something different

about how - Wow! The same companies own

the criminal prisons as the immigration prisons. Interesting.

The US never gave up on the spectacular power

of the predisciplinary

sovereigns and we still have the whole circus of

death penalty here, for example, and

shaming of people on workfare.

We still

have a very moralistic and violent society and

indeed, a sort of fetishization

of power and structure.

So we have to understand that

these forms of power are asynchronous and occur

at the same time, and that for poor people

we still have much more of

these older forms of power. Disciplinary power and sovereign power

are far more important than self-managing power.

And that's really the forms of

neoliberal governance which make more sense for understanding

poverty management in the US.

So I think that in order to understand neoliberalism,

we've got to bring these two literatures together,

bring together the Marxist tradition and the Foucaultian tradition

in a way which speak more clearly to each other.

What we have in Mexico is a very - it's very puzzling

because just as neoliberal

policies regarding the welfare state are underway,

at the same time, we get a universal right

in the capital city, and I mean abortion rights in public clinics.

So, of course, neoliberalism is by no means

something that is advancing in a very

monolithic way, but it gets played out

very differently, even according to

the people who are in power -

their interests, their takes on

the welfare state, their takes on modern notions of citizenship.

The political culture has moved, so it's not

neoliberalism as a set of policies, but it's a set of policies that

circulate and get implemented in

law and in institutions

because these feelings and ideas about who's deserving

and who's not deserving have become so pervasive.