A bit of cultural theory
At the end of my last post, I promised that over my next three posts we’d explore three spheres of concerted neoliberal activity, namely, corporations and the workplace; financial markets; ideology. I know you’ve been waiting eagerly, so here we go.
Among neoliberal states, there are many diverse economic and social practices. Cultural critic David Harvey, however, points to two core principles common to them all. First is the need to create a good business climate for capitalistic endeavors. Second is the need to create an equally good investment climate. Moreover, in doing both, labor and the environment are treated as mere commodities—that is, labor is allowed few or no collective rights while the environment is given little or no time to regenerate (70).
In this post, I focus on that good business climate for capitalistic endeavors—that is, the wage-earner in the neoliberal corporate environment and workplace. In my next post (sorry to make you wait again), I’ll take a close look at the good investment climate engineered by neoliberalism.
I don’t think I let any cat out of the bag by noting here that both of these neoliberal spheres are motivated by profit and operated by exploitation.
Applying this bit of cultural theory
Although neoliberal theory touts its business environment as one of freely negotiated contractual obligations between juridical and rationally acting individuals in an open marketplace, in practice (as discussed in my two earlier posts on Neoliberalism, 13 & 27 March 2024), we see it leading instead to the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. At the heart of this trend is the modern corporation.
At the outset of this century, law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan regarded the large, Anglo-American, publicly traded business corporation as the world’s dominant economic institution. A quarter of the way into our century, that appraisal, I think, is all the more accurate. We are surrounded by corporate culture, iconography, and ideology as these entities posture themselves, similar to the medieval Catholic Church, as infallible and omnipotent. Says Bakan two decades ago: “Increasingly, corporations dictate the decisions of their supposed overseers in government and control domains of society once firmly embedded within the public sphere” (5). In the neoliberal era, corporations have been set loose to pursue their single-minded goal of maximizing profits within a commercial setting that promotes the privatization of anything that can be bought and sold on a market, the deregulation of everything from state oversight, and the supposedly equal competition among individuals, firms, and territorial units (e.g. cities, states, nations).
The consequences of this situation have been grim—and are getting worse still.
Regulation:
To assume a level playing field of competition among all business players is obvious nonsense and runs contrary to all experience of capitalism. Asymmetric power always exists in a market and grows worse over time, leading eventually to monopoly and oligopoly. Without the state to regulate fair practices, players with less capital and limited access to key information cannot compete.
The absence of effective state regulations leads to other problems as well. New technologies can be manipulated and positioned in ways detrimental to the public good but advantageous to private gain—such as pharmaceutical products or the internet. Corporations also routinely externalize liabilities, that is, avoid paying the full cost of doing business by shedding responsibilities outside the market. A common example is the dumping of noxious waste into the environment rather than spending the money to treat it safely. Another is not providing workers with sufficient health care benefits or a living wage, thereby throwing those responsibilities onto state welfare programs—which, by the way, neoliberals always look to dismantle.
As a driving engine of neoliberal economics, corporations—possessing the legal status but not the ethical potential of an individual person—routinely apply less than civic-minded business habits. Bakan argues, in fact, that corporations have become amoral and socially destructive organizations. He goes so far as to liken the modern corporation to a psychopath. Pointing out a striking resemblance of personality traits, Bakan notes that “the corporation is singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context” (56).
Other shared characteristics between the corporation and the psychopathic personality include a sense of irresponsibility, the manipulation of others, grandiosity, a lack of empathy and asocial tendencies, the refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions and the inability to feel remorse, and finally a superficiality when dealing with others (Bakan 56-57).
Not surprisingly, all of these sociopathic traits are defining characteristics of Donald J. Trump as well.
It’s important to recognize the tilted and cut-throat business climate fostered by the relentless pursuit of deregulation that’s at the core of neoliberal economic policy.
Immigration:
Within this hostile neoliberal environment, people find themselves on their own, held responsible and accountable for their own actions and well-being in such a way that any shortcomings are attributed to their own failures and inadequacies rather than the result of systemic malfunction. At the macro level, while capital is free to hunt the globe for cheap labor, labor is not free to cross international borders in search of the best job situation. Although such issues always are pitched in political and cultural terms of immigration policy, in effect workers find themselves corralled and thereby exploitable by multinational corporations (Harvey 65-66; Chang 26-28).
Unsurprisingly, immigration conflicts typically pertain to rich, predominantly white, northern countries barring the entrance of people of color from poorer, southern countries. It seems that, generally, not only do well-off white people not like to mingle with impoverished non-whites, but they enjoy as well the less-expensive commodities produced by “disposable workers” toiling in despotic and appalling conditions in foreign sweatshops (see Harvey 168-170).
In America, the rightwing loves to demonize immigrants even as these migrant workers perform labor essential to our economy (such as agricultural work), pay taxes, and commit little crime.
Labor:
At the micro level, the neoliberal workplace is a precarious place to be even in wealthier countries. As mentioned above, the trend for a few decades now has been toward insecure, lower-wage jobs that bring little to no benefits. At the same time, more and more state welfare provisions—health care, public education, social services—have been withdrawn. Victims of these changes—in effect, discarded workers—are blamed for bad individual behavior, marginalized socially and politically, and increasingly jailed.
This situation has come about, however, from the measurable and dismal failure of neoliberalism as an economic policy to stimulate worldwide growth and capital accumulation.
An illusion of success exists due to the tremendous and ostentatious wealth of the elite. In fact, as Harvey shows, “The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization ... has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income” (159). As we’ve seen, this redistribution has been upward. The accumulation practices used by neoliberals are largely those Marx observed during the rise of capitalism when populations were expropriated of land and resources in the process of being transformed into wage-laborers.
Added to these techniques have been efforts to reverse worker gains won during the post-war Keynesian era, things such as pensions, paid vacations, access to education and health care, and the like.
Harvey calls the overall neoliberal strategy “accumulation by dispossession”; that is, the rich gain because everyone else suffers loss. The process has four main techniques.
First, privatize hitherto public assets of all kinds—from utilities to military service to prisons—so that they become money making activities for corporations (see also Mittelstadt; Wang).
Second, deregulate financial systems in ways that promote speculative and predatory behavior and that favor rich insiders (discussed in the next post).
Third, manage and manipulate global financial and debt “crises” as a means to extract money from developing countries.
Fourth, use the state—once it has been neoliberalized—as an instrument of redistribution via lawmaking, cutbacks to public programs, subsidies and tax breaks for corporations, unfair tax codes and practices that favor the wealthy, and, whenever needed, state violence in the form of police action and incarceration against the poor and against civic protest.
Each of these neoliberal mechanisms has been operating in high-gear for several decades.
Neoliberal Practices and Effects:
Mid 20th-century economic historian and social philosopher, Karl Polanyi, famously points to a fundamental misstep of capitalism: the insistence on treating land, labor, and money as commodities, as items to be bought and sold on the market. Polanyi counters that these things are not innately articles of trade, that “the commodity description of labour, land, and money is entirely fictitious.” More to the point, subjecting these things to the marketplace is hugely destructive to the social fabric. With regard to workers in particular, Polanyi writes:
For the alleged commodity ‘labour power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labour power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. (73)
However, humans and nature reduced to assets are fundamental practices of liberal capitalism. The neoliberal practice of capitalism ratchets up this dehumanization and environmental ruin markedly.
What Polanyi warned against is increasingly coming to pass: “human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation.” As a result of overuse, industrial pollution, and competition for dwindling resources, the natural world would become less and less fit for human habitation, with “neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed” (73).
In this neoliberal hellscape, the common person, meaning anyone outside of the top 10% of wealth-owners, scrambles for decent shelter, employment, education, health care, retirement security, and so forth while frantically attempting to avoid burdensome debt.
Workers are not only turned into captive labor forces globally by draconian immigration policies, but they are made vulnerable within individual nations by the zealous, oftentimes violent anti-union activities of companies and neoliberal authorities.
As a result, observes Harvey, “The individualized and relatively powerless worker then confronts a labour market in which only short-term contracts are offered on a customized basis” (168). Job security—and the long-term benefits that come with it—thus become largely a thing of the past. In the United States currently, such worker isolation can pertain equally to agricultural workers, factory-line workers, service-industry workers, office workers of all kinds, adjunct faculty in academia, even contract-workers for fabulously rich companies like Google.
In short, if you’re not invested in the shareholder side of the neoliberal corporation and workplace, you’re probably in deep trouble already or likely heading in that direction.
The embedded liberalism of the post-World War II economic settlement built and enabled the American middle class. Since 1980, neoliberalism slowly has been wringing the life out of it.
In sum, neoliberalism is hyper-efficient at abusing labor.
So what?
What’s needed at this point is a really good example of everything I’ve described above. For that really good example, I’m going to put you in the expert hands of someone who REALLY knows what he’s talking about when it comes to economic issues: Robert Reich (among many other accomplishments, U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993-1997 and recently retired Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley).
I recommend that you subscribe (for free) to Robert Reich’s daily Substack newsletter at:
With that newsletter, you’ll have available Reich’s plain-spoken explanations of economic theory, history, and current issues. Like Ha-Joon Chang’s book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Reich’s newsletter is an excellent way to be an active economic citizen capable of making informed economic and political decisions. Whether you agree with Reich’s social and political viewpoints or not, you’ll be getting in his newsletters accurate assessments of economic matters as well as candid opinions about their social impact.
That is, worthwhile cultural fare for you to ponder.
As a specific example of what I’ve outlined in this post—that is, what motivates the neoliberal corporation and how it operates its neoliberal workplace—please read Reich’s recent newsletter titled “The man who sacrificed workers to shareholders” (5 April 2024).
In this piece, Reich tells the story of a hard-charging, downsizing CEO during the go-go neoliberal 1990s who considered it his economic duty—if not his God-given right—to screw over employees and communities in order to enrich—even more—wealthy corporate shareholders.
And, oh yeah, to rake in huge bonuses for himself.
Reich explains two important, diametrically opposed economic concepts that Americans largely have forgotten after living for nearly half a century inside the bubble of neoliberal ideology. These are: stakeholder capitalism versus shareholder capitalism.
I strongly suggest that you give Reich’s post a read to discover what these two concepts are.
Why?
Because once you understand the difference between these two approaches to capitalism, you’ll see clearly the neoliberal brutality of accumulation by dispossession in action.
Works Cited and Consulted
(For a discussion of particular problems and contradictions with neoliberal business practices, see Harvey 64-70; for a close analysis of the neoliberal state in action, see Harvey’s chapter 3. For a closer discussion of the mechanisms for “accumulation by dispossession,” see Harvey 159-165; more generally, see his chapter 6, “Neoliberalism on Trial.” For a debunking of the foundational neoliberal myth that markets can and must be “free,” and that they must remain untouched by the state in order to work their economic magic, see Chang’s Thing 1, Thing 16, and Thing 19.)
Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Chang, Ha-Joon. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Penguin, 2011.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2005.
Mittelstadt, Jennifer. The Rise of the Military Welfare State. Harvard UP, 2015.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, 1954.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series, 2018.
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