Neoliberalism, Reaction, and Pandemic: A Brief Debate
In reading Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, I found myself thinking more about contemporary right-wing reaction to, and within, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the relationship of this reaction to the larger conservative/neoliberal political and economic order.
Brown spends significant time examining the theories of the progenitors of neoliberal ideology, most notably Friedrich Hayek. For Hayek, there are two governing forces in the world that enable freedom: the free market and traditional morality. These two forces must be protected by the (very limited) state in order to ensure their proper function and thereby also secure individual freedom. Freedom, for Hayek, means the absence of state intervention, or coercion of behavior from a force greater than individuals. Such constructions as society and politics are dangerous misconceptions of the relations of individuals to one another, which function to justify the expression of authority over the freedom of individuals. The free market; that is, a market without rationally planned constraints in the interest of the common good, maximizes this freedom, constrained only by moral tradition, to which individuals voluntarily conform. While Hayek repudiates state intervention in the realms of the market and morals, the role of the state is that of ensuring that individual morals and markets remain unconstrained. This is manifest in an extreme rejection of politics, and the relegation of all power to the private sphere.
Contemporary neoliberalism, however, does not share the free market and free morality in the private sphere that Hayek envisioned. Rather, the state functions as a tool of global capital, generating conservative morality, and shaping markets in the interests of multinational corporations. For this reason, Brown emphasizes that there is a significant break between the neoliberalism we encounter today and the neoliberalism that its progenitors theorized. According to Brown, the seeds for the increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism of today already existed in Hayek’s formulation. Because the state was necessary to protect the free market and moral tradition, when challenged by the liberal left/left seeking to ensure protections for subordinated populations, increased state authority was necessary to counter this “democratic totalitarianism.” In this way, the moral sensibilities of large corporations oppositional to equality have been politically codified, encouraging the right-wing to take up arms in defense of authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump. Brown insists that Hayek would be dismayed to witness such a manifestation of neoliberalism; one bloating state authority and political rules, rather than ensuring individual freedom. I am not sure, however, what is at stake in this characterization for Brown. It seems clear that she does not intend to resuscitate Hayek, nor idolize today’s neoliberalism. What explanatory power does Brown’s emphasis bring to our understanding of neoliberalism and what is to be done to overcome it?
There is another possible interpretation of neoliberalism today, particularly in its relationship to COVID-19 right-wing reaction, which is more attentive to the necessary underlying logic of the capitalist system of which neoliberalism is a particular form. Rather than positing a significant disjuncture between early neoliberalism and its contemporary realization, a Marxist approach to the problem might emphasize that which is common between its two forms. This commonality can better explain how the conservative working class is mobilized simultaneously against rational planning and governmental authority to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, in much the same way as Hayek suggests that religion supports spontaneous and unplanned interaction, and simultaneously in support of global capitalist economic and political hegemony in opposition to the free markets and morals that Hayek idolizes. Hayek’s neoliberalism and the neoliberalism of today share a common premise: the division of the political and the economic and the relegation of moral and economic considerations to the private sphere. In other words, real power is removed from the political sphere and capital is free to endlessly valorize itself and concentrate economic (and, in reality, political, because the political can never truly be separated from the economic) power in the hands of a few. Such a division of politics and economics is not a feature of human life, but a phenomenon that is historically particular to capitalism and its ideological obfuscation of its core tension: the contradiction of use value and exchange value. This contradiction is motivated away from human ends (use), and towards primarily exchange.
Alongside many other historical factors such as morality, logic, contestation, environmental conditions, etc., capitalist accumulation takes on many forms, of which neoliberalisms are a few. As forms of capitalism, all manifestations of neoliberalism share in this common political/economic obfuscation of capitalism’s contradictions. As a system oriented primarily and exclusively towards the endless accumulation of capital over and against human lives, freedom, and morality, capitalism is indifferent to the method by which this accumulation continues. This means that under conditions of stress, such as leftist demands for humanization, or the natural limits of earth’s resources, capitalism predictably turns to increased political authority (the constitution of false consciousness) and economic authority (austerity & precarity) to ensure this end.
It now matters little what Hayek thought of his neoliberal theory; the theory already contained within it the same contradictions as capitalism in general, contradictions which are consistently exposed in the precarity of the working class, left and right alike. In this sense, the right-wing reaction we see today is a reaction to real contradictions in the economic and political system. That reaction, however, can pose itself against neoliberal politicization and authority while maintaining the essence of the system generating the need for increased authority and repression, just as Donald Trump’s supporters and COVID deniers have.
This is not, however, a radical break from neoliberalism. At stake in this perspective is the legitimacy of popularized neofascism as a critique of capitalism. To avoid recreating the very contradictions that produce problems of precarity and also right-wing reaction, the reactionary “critique” must be understood as a logical extension of capitalist morality under stress, and disavowed. While the differences between early neoliberal theory and contemporary neoliberalism astutely identified by Brown are certainly real, they only seem significant if we take neoliberal theorists such as Hayek at their word without looking closer at the underlying assumptions of their system. Brown’s criticism, while providing many useful tools for a critique of neoliberalism, loses sight of what is at stake in critique, and downplays crucial underlying capitalist contradictions, which are captured by this similar, yet competing, perspective.
