Marxist accounts fail— subjectivity reformation key in a world that has moved to neoliberalism

It is my contention that Foucault’s “post-Marxist” insights about the intrinsic link between productive practices of power and forms of the subject must remain central in our critical analyses of the neoliberal turn. While in many Marxist accounts neoliberalism is understood simply as an intensification of capitalist exploitation, which is heightening the fundamental class antagonism between capitalists and laborers, from a Foucauldian perspective it must be understood as a new configuration of power relations that produces new forms of the subject. We have to recognize the historically specific ways that the instability and the persistent crises of capitalism have been negotiated in recent decades through neoliberal forms of governmentality – new political technologies of power and social regulation. Many socialist writers have lamented that the retreat from class analysis in the academy in the eighties and nineties was one of neoliberalism’s most effective weapons because it prevented class-consciousness from developing as the appropriate response to the rise of neoliberalism. While the spread of neoliberalism is clearly inseparable from the structural logic of capitalist accumulation, to view the subjects it produces simply as class subjects who lack the appropriate consciousness of their situation is nevertheless problematic in my view. While it is important to acknowledge that in his lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics(2008), Foucault describes technologies and rationalities rather than their actual empirical outcomes, empirical and experiential evidence gives weight to the theoretical claim that the neoliberal reorganization of Western societies has resulted in new forms of the subject – a new understanding of ourselves. Social volatility and economic risks have become increasingly central for profit making and the financialization of everyday life requires new kinds of subjects and social networks (Floyd 2009, 196). Neoliberal governmentality has dramatically extended the reach of the markets and market rationality and thereby produced the corresponding subjects who are compelled to behave as market actors – consumers, individual investors and entrepreneurs – across several dimensions of their lives. As Foucault shows, neoliberal techniques scramble the traditional opposition between capitalists and workers in the sense that subjects are increasingly conceived and conceive themselves as entrepreneurs of the self, who attempt to maximize their “human capital.” Whether we focus on the reforms of pension plans and healthcare, revisions of copyright laws or the restructuring of universities, we are increasingly required to view ourselves as market-actors and to behave accordingly. These new forms of governmentality and social regulation are misrecognized insofar as they are identified as “merely” cultural or superstructural. The historically specific practices of power in which we must engage daily in order to go about our lives are not just symbolic, cultural or discursive practices as Foucault’s Marxist critics sometimes claim. They are essentially material, social and economic practices that are organized through neoliberal rationality and embedded in law and political institutions, but also in everyday social relationships. Hence, we are not confronted merely with ideological fiction that could be dispelled through the development of appropriate class-consciousness; we are confronted with a new kind of social reality. What the Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism downplays in my view, however, is the necessary “failures” of neoliberal governmentality to constitute entrepreneurial subjects – the neoliberal constitution of others.” The obstacles in the way of developing class consciousness are also “objective” in the second sense that we are witnessing other, radically new forms of subjectivation that are brought about by the global, neoliberal turn: the unemployed and the undocumented subjects, as well as the neocolonial, disposable subjects of the global South. It is widely acknowledged by numerous socialist writers that the composition of the workforce has dramatically changed in the last decades due to the globalization and neoliberalization of our economies. The industrial working class has been shrinking in all Western countries at a rapid rate, and has been largely replaced by post-industrial, service-sector workers, who are largely female and in part-time or precarious employment. Instead of social relations based on relatively stable forms of wage-labor, the growth of insecurity and negative flexibilization have come to increasingly characterize all work. Moreover, the majority of the poorest and the most oppressed people in the world today are not wage-laborers. They are people who have to eke out a precarious existence in the informal economy because capitalism appears to have no use for them at all. In other words, the forms of exploitation have not only assumed radically new forms, but it has become increasingly unclear what the class relations are and how we are situated in their intersections. It is imperative to also theorize these new forms of the subject and the political potential they hold for radical social transformation. That requires acknowledging the limits of both Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, as well as traditional Marxist class analysis, and moving beyond them.