Abstract
Neoliberal Lives tells us what is by now a familiar story, tracing the transition from the “Golden Age” of US capitalism—the brief period from the 1930s to early 1970s in which our economic, political, and social lives benefited from the expansion of state power as a countervailing force to capital—to the subsequent bipartisan corporate-conservative backlash that sought to undo that aberrant period.
Here that corporate-conservative backlash goes under the rubric of “neoliberalism,” a term that often inspires internecine left debate about both its meaning and its usefulness as a descriptor. No less a thinker than Ruth Wilson Gilmore has had occasion recently, when talking to Daniel Denvir on The Dig podcast, to observe that 90 percent of the time she uses the word she’s not entirely sure what it means.
One of the services this book provides is to deliver a concise, thoughtful overview of how the terms has been and is used, followed by the authors’ own definition: “a class-based project which emerged as a political practice in the late 1970s, aimed at redistributing wealth and power towards the capitalist class. It makes ample use of the state in doing so through the uneven refashioning of institutions and relations in the image of the market” (6). Or as they put it later, “neoliberal capitalism is a class-based political project undertaken to more favorably position business in its struggle to enhance the conditions for profitability” (17). Notice that this approach makes clear that neoliberalism does not privilege “small government” or “free markets,” but will happily use state power to advance capitalist interests.
Chapter 1, “A Political Economy for Yacht Owners,” tackles the definitional debates and lays out the theoretical and historical framework for the book (with more than a mere nod to Polanyi and Marx), walking us through the economic conditions and political mobilizations that spurred the post-1930s state expansion and then the right-wing mobilization to roll it back. In so doing, it “positions neoliberalism as a class-driven response to previously encountered barriers to capitalist expansion” (10). The rest of the book then documents the material consequences of neoliberalism by moving from the abstract to the concrete, tracing the effects of this neoliberal turn on a range of particular policy areas and, importantly, their effects on human well-being.
Chapter 2 focuses on work/labor and income, documenting the “dismantling [of] government supports that ensured that workers’ incomes were not solely determined by the market for labor” (28), highlighting the many ways in which labor market dependence was reinforced, from the “welfare reforms” of the 1990s, which limited (already meager) access to cash welfare benefits; successfully fighting back efforts to increase the national minimum wage; making unions harder to form and sustain; upper-income tax cuts (which in turn freed up more money from the wealthy to be invested in politics); contractionary monetary policy (to lower wages); and trade policy that expanded opportunities for the import of cheap manufactured goods, another source of downward pressure on wages (while the costs of education, housing, and health care skyrocket). The result is another familiar litany: higher corporate profits alongside widening inequality, declining intergenerational mobility, longer work weeks, rising deep poverty, and higher levels of debt (including usurious payday loan schemes and other legal means to extract money from the most vulnerable).
The environment and climate change are the subject of chapter 3, and another case in which any regulation is too much in the inescapable logic of neoliberal capitalism and nature, like labor, is merely another resource to be exploited and extracted. This is undertaken through an expansion of property rights and the increasingly successful ploy to characterize any regulation that affects corporate profitability as an illegitimate “taking” under the Fifth Amendment, while turning over public lands to private profiteering, and hacking assiduously away at “the legal structures that regulate capital’s access to nature” (73). The results are markets in trading pollution “credits,” oil spills, the destruction of animal habitats on water and land both, dirtier air and water (especially in poorer communities of color), and, of course, the continued drumbeat of ruinous carbon emissions. But thanks to things like “catastrophe bonds,” capital will nonetheless continue to prosper, at least for time, while millions are turned into climate refugees and others die from heat, drown in floods, burn in fires, perish from new diseases, or starve as food supplies are disrupted. As they write, “the only reasonable, non-utopian reaction to this from below is full-scale rebellion on every front” (86).
Chapter 4 documents the ways in which US health exceptionalism distributes preventable harm broadly across the population. As they summarize the research, “people live longer and enjoy healthier lives where income inequality is the smallest” (99). Poverty, inequality, lack of access to healthy food, shoddy food safety regulatory regimes, higher stress levels, poor access to health care, and greater exposure to pollutants and other industrial chemicals are products of the United States’ weaker regulatory and welfare states that generate poorer health outcomes across almost all dimensions than in other rich democracies despite the United States having the higher per capita health spending. It is another means by which the inexorable logic of the neoliberal state privileges private profit-taking above collective well-being.
Education, the subject of chapter 5, is yet another arena in which people in the United States fare worse than their counterparts elsewhere, thanks to anti-tax mobilizations that have starved public schools of funding; neoliberal ideology arguing (typically without evidence) for the virtues of private over public institutions (that rationalizes the siphoning off of public funds into private hands with voucher programs and the like); and the attendant “competition” model that creates incentives for schools to “teach to the test” (with the limited ability of teachers to effectively push back thanks to the assault on so many of their unions or efforts to unionize). These public institutions are less able to provide adequate education not merely because they are starved for resources (or drained of them) but that many of the conditions described above—poverty and poor health chief among them—impede educational achievement. Here is another instance, as with health care, in which US spending is comparatively high but nonetheless generates mediocre results. The story is as grim for public higher education.
It is worth noting that at the core of each of these tragedies is the work of orthodox economists giving legitimacy to public and private acts of exploitation and expropriation alike.
Chapter 6 shows us the ways in which all of this (and more) is both cause and consequence of an increasingly antidemocratic and antimajoritarian politics, “in which political power is skewing ever more heavily towards the very top of the income distribution, in which elections are increasingly money-driven, and in which electoral outcomes weigh less heavily than the resource-intensive ability to engage in the policy process” (166). One of the successes of the neoliberal project is that it has normalized the extraordinarily money-soaked US political system, in which a growing body of research clearly demonstrates that, especially at the national level, only the wealthy have meaningful influence on the policy-making process.
One way to think about this account is to recognize that almost every key institution in the United States has been captured by these neoliberal forces, whose driving force is corporate power and profits, consequences be damned. As the authors conclude, while noting recent social movement and workplace organizing activities, “We offer no ray of hope, only an account of the toll taken by neoliberal capitalism on the vast bulk of people in the United States, and our blunt assessment of the terrible costs of working class ‘adaptation’ to the neoliberals’ mitigation of the latest round of capitalist crisis” (225).
As with so many of such efforts as this sharp, accessible volume, those most in need of it are probably least likely to read it, but nonetheless it is an excellent primer on the ways in which the current order harms us all and what the obstacles (and opportunities) are for change.
