by
Jacobin
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The decline of neoliberalism is emphatically not the decline of capitalism, so what does it mean to say neoliberalism is past its sell-by date? Neoliberalism is not, after all, just a set of policies that can be discontinued and replaced with something else — neoliberal capitalism has birthed a complex global economy that isn’t going to change overnight. Moreover, neoliberalism is also an encompassing set of orienting ideas that pervades all spheres of life; its core ethos of faith in private enterprise, ever-expanding commodification, and bootstrap individualism remains robust.
For these opinion makers, the death of the post-Communist liberal world is a terrible thing. For them it represents something great that has been thrown away in a fit of stupidity.
The funeral dirge for the liberal world order goes something like this: After World War II, some forward-thinking Americans began setting up a system of rules and institutions that allowed global trade, investment, and democracy to flourish. This system evolved and improved over the decades, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving us container ships full of Poäng chairs and PlayStations, all while boosting wealth and democracy for the global poor.
According to liberals, the linchpin of this awesomeness was the United States unselfishly superintending the global economy and providing a model of democracy that world masses aspired to and authoritarian governments feared. [...]
on people who mourned Clinton's loss because they liked the way things were going
This legitimacy crisis is what has birthed Trump. And the muddled nature of his vision speaks to the impasse that countries find themselves in. The reigning centrist elites and their party alliances are seen as hopelessly bankrupt, and the Left has no power to enact its demands. This leaves the Right to speak to working people’s fears and anger, but that right is itself divided between capitalist elites and social conservatives. Trump simply stepped into a vacancy, an opportunist capitalist speaking the confused language of an angry right-populist vision.
However, discussions of the peddling of digital selves by gray-market data companies and Silicon Valley giants are usually separate from conversations about increasingly exploitative working conditions or the burgeoning market for precarious, degrading work. But these are not separate phenomena — they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism.
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But the degradation of work is not a given. Increasing exploitation and immiseration are tendencies, not fixed outcomes ordained by the rules of capitalism. They are the result of battles lost by workers and won by capitalists. The ubiquitous use of smartphones to extend the workday and expand the market for shit jobs is a result of the weakness of both workers and working-class movements. The compulsion and willingness of increasing numbers of workers to engage with their employers through their phones normalizes and justifies the use of smartphones as a tool of exploitation, and solidifies constant availability as a requirement for earning a wage.
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The smartphone is central to this process. It provides a physical mechanism to allow constant access to our digital selves and opens a nearly uncharted frontier of commodification.
Individuals don’t get paid in wages for creating and maintaining digital selves — they get paid in the satisfaction of participating in rituals, and the control afforded them over their social interactions. They get paid in the feeling of floating in the vast virtual connectivity, even as their hand machines mediate social bonds, helping people imagine togetherness while keeping them separate as distinct productive entities. The voluntary nature of these new rituals does not make them any less important, or less profitable for capital.
"they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism" similar to what I say in my tech dev for the many piece
Today, the dominant discourse governing discussion of markets, states, and companies is neoliberalism, and Mackey’s free-market business model and historical narrative fit neatly within this framework. In this vision, the economic sphere is “an autonomous, self-adjusting, and self-regulated system that [can] achieve a natural equilibrium spontaneously and produce increased wealth.”
But the free-market historical narrative lacks empirical weight. As economic historian Karl Polanyi argued decades ago, capitalist markets are a product of state engineering, not nature.
The history of industrial development in the United States, often considered the epicenter of free markets, demonstrates the political nature of markets. The history of market formation in the United States reveals an industrial structure supplied by goods and capital extracted from slave labor and facilitated through a state-sponsored, genocidal land grab.
Far-reaching government legislation protected domestic markets and infant industries from external competition, and federal and state governments played a central role in the development of physical infrastructure (canals, railways, telegraphy) and the creation of huge bodies of agricultural and industrial knowledge — all essential elements in the genesis of American industrial capitalism.
At the same time, society’s greatest inventions and innovations of the past two hundred years — rockets to the moon, penicillin, computers, the Internet — were not bestowed upon us by lone entrepreneurs and firms operating in free markets under conditions of healthy competition. They were the work of institutions: CERN and the Department of Defense created the Internet, while Bell Labs — a subdivision of AT&T, freed from market competition by federally granted monopoly rights — generated transistors, radar, information theory, “quality control,” and dozens of other innovations central to our epoch.
Designating the market as natural and the state as unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo. It makes the current distribution of power, wealth, and resources seem natural and thus inevitable and uncontestable.
But of course this isn’t true. States shape, sustain, and often create, markets, including neoliberal markets. The complexion of those markets depends on the balance of class forces at any given point in time. Capitalist markets, and the inequality and degradation they engender, are a political creation not a product of nature. Nature and society (and states and markets) are inseparable — simultaneously produced by humans through ideological, political, and economic processes.
Understanding this enables us to challenge the dominant idea of natural, free markets and the emancipatory potential of the firm promised by Mackey.
very simple point but worth remembering