Their rush to “Competition is inevitable” is our link---It’s ruling class naturalization of the constructed order which expands neoliberal competition into educational and rhetorical spaces which must be challenged.

Despite emergency appeals to social solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic and the rediscovery of society by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the idea of the individual still lies at the very heart of ruling class ideology.1 The ruling class need to promote the idea that capitalism is self-evident and natural rather than organised in the interests of a small group of people.2 Pivotal to this naturalisation of capitalism are assumptions about human nature and motivation. The idea of the atomised, self-seeking human underpins the commodification of individualised labour power the foundation of capitalist production. In his book Marxs Theory of Alienation, philosopher István Mészáros explains the double advantage of this cult of privacy and idealisation of the abstract individual for the ruling class.3 He explains how it protects them from being challenged by the rabble at the same time as providing the illusion of escapism to individuals who, mystified by the mechanisms of capitalist society, feel powerless and isolated. The idea of the individual as the basic unit of society, in what is heralded as a meritocracy, also serves to paint the ruling class as deserving of their wealth, power and privilege, while blaming the working class for their lack of success. Ultimately, the ruling class asserts the primacy of individuality as a bulwark against notions of community and solidarity in the working class, which not only threaten its profits but potentially the very existence of capitalism itself.

This article makes two arguments. First, I argue that there has been a shift in the rhetoric and ideology of the ruling class under neoliberal capitalism in the new millenium. This ideology now centres on successful individuals being enterprising, resilient and robust. It is incumbent on socialists to understand, analyse and challenge these ideas, which we are bombarded with on a daily basis, telling us what it is to be human, promoting individualism and claiming that there is no alternative. Ideas about individual motivation in society have been used to bolster the intensification of work, shift blame for inequality onto working-class people and give a new twist to women’s oppression. Nevertheless, the grip that these ideas have on the minds of workers is overstated. Indeed, ruling-class ideas about the individual are not static or consistent, but must be continually renewed and remoulded to defend them from constant challenges in the workplace and by social movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Second, I argue, that Karl Marx, contrary to critics who claim that he had no theory of human nature, developed such a theory in The German Ideology, with his co-author Friedrich Engels. Marx stated that the first premise of human history was the existence of living human individuals. Nevertheless, he proposed a materialist analysis of these human beings, arguing that individuals can only be understood in the context of their environment, which is constantly transformed through human action. The individual must therefore be understood through an analysis of material conditions of production, and, more specifically, in the relationship between capital and labour that Marx describes in his theory of alienation. Moreover, the conditions for resistance are always present because exploitation in the labour process is intrinsic to capitalism. This opens the possibility of collective action, enabling workers to break through the dominant individualistic ideas of the ruling class.

The neoliberal self

By the beginning of the 21st century, the term neoliberalism had become well established in the vocabulary of the left.4 Nonetheless, there are continuing debates about its meaning and scope, including its relationship to other forms of capitalism.5 Alex Callinicos defines neoliberalism as an economic policy regime whose objective is to secure monetary and fiscal stability and that is legitimised by an ideology that claims that markets are best treated as self-regulating.6 In line with this understanding, I argue that neoliberalism is a series of policies (privatisation, flexible labour markets, monetary policy) bolstered by rhetorical focuses (market forces, the retreat of the state and entrepreneurship) that aim to deal with the deep contradictions within capitalism, particularly the falling rate of profit of the global capitalist economy.7

Based on the edifice of his 1978-9 lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault claimed to have exposed the emergence of a new type of individual under neoliberal capitalism the neoliberal self.8 Foucault argued that a progression had taken place from the self-interested economic man, primarily concerned with market exchange, associated with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, towards the competitive individual of neoliberal capitalism.9 People have become entrepreneurs of themselves, destined to constantly improve their human capital. This idea has since gathered pace in academic circles, among some activists and even within the ruling class itself, spawning a plethora of articles and books that analyse how neoliberal thinking has seeped into popular culture, education and ideas about women’s oppression.10 Foucault argued that the extension of the logic of the market into non-economic spheres of everyday life has made this reworked version of the individual all-encompassing and ubiquitous.

Some Marxists have also emphasised the deep penetration of neoliberal ideas about the individual. For example, the opening pages of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism declare that neoliberalism…has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world.11 Similarly, Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos argues that these ideas drill into every aspect of our existence:

Neoliberalisation is generally more termite-like than lion-like… Its mode of reason bores in capillary fashion into the trunks and branches of workplaces, schools, public agencies, social and political discourse, and above all, the human subject.12

These ideas have a powerful resonance with people’s lived experience of capitalism. Competition seems to invade every nook and cranny of daily life, from league tables in schools and universities to television shows in which cooking, dating and painting become tournaments with only one winner. In the workplace, managerial devices such as performance-related pay place workers in competition with one another. However, claims about the totalising nature of these neoliberal ideas from Foucauldians and some Marxists have a pessimistic logic. In The Happiness Industry, William Davies comes to the gloomy conclusion that obligatory competitiveness exerts a depressive psychological effect whereby people search inside themselves for the source of their own unhappiness and imperfect lives.13 The figure of the fragmented and atomistic individual that is at the heart of ruling class ideology also has echoes on the left, where it feeds into doubts about the potential for working-class solidarity and its ability to change society. Moreover, this type of pessimism often overemphasises the differences between neoliberalism and earlier eras of capitalism. After all, although Foucault’s arguments take the notion of the individual under neoliberal capitalism in a new direction, ideas about the atomised, self-seeking individual can be traced back to the inception of capitalism.