Paradoxes of Neoliberalism

Summary

The script explores neoliberalism as a system of paradoxes, highlighting three main contradictions: the coexistence of market rationality with conservative moral agendas, the depoliticization of social risks versus hyper-politicization of national security, and the expansion of humanitarianism amid growing inequality. It critiques neoliberal policies' impacts on marginalized groups, including immigrants and sex workers, emphasizing how these policies reinforce social inequalities through gender, racial, and economic lenses. The discussion also addresses issues like the commodification of personal finance, criminalization, and the transformation of charity into a tool for wealth redistribution, ultimately questioning the meaning of freedom in such a framework.

Takeaways

• 🔄 Neoliberalism presents itself as amoral, focusing on market principles and rational calculation, yet it often supports conservative moral agendas.
• 🌐 Neoliberalism depoliticizes social risks, encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own risks, while hyper-politicizing national security issues.
• 💸 It exacerbates wealth and resource inequality, yet promotes global humanitarianism and human rights interventions.
• 🏭 Neoliberal policies often lead to the ravaging of vulnerable populations while celebrating the expansion of humanitarian efforts.
• 💵 The ideology of neoliberalism is linked to neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, affecting global economic and political dynamics.
• 🚔 Neoliberalism's paradoxical nature is evident in advocating for cutting social services while supporting massive military spending.
• 🏦 Financial management under neoliberalism is highly gendered, with women often stereotyped as irresponsible with money, despite being the majority of financial service users.
• 🌎 Understanding free trade's impact requires acknowledging historical colonialism and how it continues to exacerbate global economic inequality.
• 📜 Laws like SB 1070 use neoliberal terms to justify the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, reflecting neoliberalism's role in shaping legislation.
• 🏛️ Neoliberalism redefines poverty as a moral failing, influencing how charity and voluntarism are perceived and utilized.
• 🚫 Withholding subjugated knowledge, such as ethnic studies, is a form of neoliberal control that reinforces individualism over collective histories and systemic issues.

Q & A

What are the three major paradoxes of neoliberalism mentioned in the script?

The three major paradoxes of neoliberalism mentioned are: 1) Neoliberalism positions itself as amoral and market-oriented, yet it ushers in conservative moral agendas. 2) It depoliticizes social risks while hyper-politicizing national security. 3) It ravages vulnerable populations while celebrating humanitarian or human rights intervention.

How does neoliberalism's approach to morality and market principles create a paradox?

Neoliberalism presents itself as a system focused on market principles and rational calculation, devoid of moral considerations. However, it often ends up promoting conservative moral agendas related to family, gender, and sexuality, thus creating a paradox between its claimed amorality and its actual influence on moral issues.

What is the relationship between neoliberalism and the politicization of national security?

Neoliberalism encourages individuals to take personal responsibility for their own risks, which depoliticizes social issues. In contrast, it hyper-politicizes national security by invoking fear of external threats like immigration and foreign influence, leading to increased military spending and border control.

How does neoliberalism contribute to the polarization of wealth and resources?

Neoliberalism is said to exacerbate the distribution of wealth and resources, leading to a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This polarization is coupled with an expansion of humanitarianism, creating a paradox where the same system that creates vulnerability also celebrates intervention to address it.

What is the connection between neoliberal policies and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

The script suggests that while neoliberalism advocates for cutting government spending and reducing deficits, it also supports high levels of military spending. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of conflicts that seem irrational from a purely neoliberal economic perspective but can be understood within a broader context of neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and post-colonialism.

How does racialization work within neoliberal policies?

The script indicates that neoliberalism has led to an increase in racialized violence, including the expansion of criminalization, immigration enforcement, and militarized borders. This racialization is part of the apparatuses of violence that disproportionately affect minority and vulnerable populations.

What is the role of gender stereotypes in personal financial management under neoliberalism?

Gender stereotypes are mobilized to support norms of personal financial self-management. Women are often portrayed as either irresponsible with money or overly cautious, while men are seen as rational money managers. These stereotypes have been used to promote individual financial responsibility, with a shift in perception following the financial crisis that now frames women's risk aversion as smart.

How does neoliberalism affect the understanding of poverty?

Under neoliberalism, poverty is often reinterpreted as a moral failing rather than a result of systemic issues. This perspective shifts the focus from societal support to individual responsibility, suggesting that poverty is a result of personal shortcomings rather than broader economic or social structures.

What is the impact of neoliberalism on charity and voluntarism?

Neoliberalism encourages a resurgence in voluntarism and charity as solutions to social problems caused by its own policies. This can lead to a transfer of resources from already marginalized groups to less critical needs, and it also shifts the burden of social support from the state to individual volunteers and charities.

How does withholding access to ethnic studies relate to neoliberalism?

Withholding access to ethnic studies is a form of neoliberalism because it discourages collective and systemic thinking in favor of individualism and personal responsibility. Ethnic studies challenge the neoliberal focus on the individual by emphasizing the importance of understanding historical and systemic forms of exploitation.

What is the broader context in which neoliberalism operates, as suggested by the script?

The broader context in which neoliberalism operates includes neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and post-colonialism. These frameworks help explain how neoliberal policies can be extractive and exacerbate inequality, rather than promoting fair trade and balanced economic development.

Outlines

00:00

🔄 Neoliberalism's Paradoxes

The paragraph discusses the concept of neoliberalism through the lens of three major paradoxes. The first paradox is neoliberalism's positioning as a system based on market principles rather than morality, yet it promotes conservative moral agendas related to family, gender, and sexuality. The second paradox involves the depoliticization of social risks, where individuals are held responsible for their own risks, while national security is hyper-politicized with a focus on threats like immigration and foreign influence. The third paradox highlights the exploitation of vulnerable populations alongside the celebration of humanitarian interventions. The speaker suggests that understanding these paradoxes is crucial for grasping the complex operation of neoliberalism and its impact on society, including the rationale behind wars and military spending.

05:01

📉 Neoliberalism's Impact on Society and Activism

This paragraph delves into the domestic effects of neoliberalism, including growing wealth divides, stagnating wages, and attacks on labor and welfare. The speaker describes the expansion of racialized violence through increased criminalization, immigration enforcement, and militarized borders. They also discuss the legal and social paradoxes of freedom, particularly for sex workers and trafficking victims, where freedom is equated with incarceration under certain conditions. The speaker's own work with sex workers is highlighted, showing how neoliberalism's sexual agenda and moralistic approach to domestic relationships clash with the realities of sex work and trafficking.

10:02

💰 Personal Finance in the Neoliberal Era

The paragraph examines the gendered aspects of personal finance under neoliberalism, where individuals are expected to manage their own financial futures with little support from social safety nets. It discusses how women are often portrayed as poor financial managers, either through overspending or fear of investment, while men are seen as rational money managers. The financial crisis led to a reversal of these stereotypes, with women's risk aversion now seen as smart and men's as the cause of financial instability. The speaker also touches on the difficulty of explaining the problems with free trade without understanding the historical context of colonialism and empire, which shaped how resources are extracted from weaker economies.

15:03

🏛️ Neoliberal Tools in Law and Social Norms

This paragraph focuses on how neoliberal principles are used in legislation, such as SB 1070, an anti-immigration law that criminalizes undocumented immigrants in ways beyond federal law. The speaker argues that neoliberal terms like personal responsibility and strong family values are used to justify the law, which targets a specific segment of the population. They also discuss how neoliberalism reinterprets poverty as a moral failing and how charity and voluntarism are mobilized to manage poverty, often transferring resources away from those who need it most. The speaker calls for a critical interrogation of these neoliberal strategies and their impact on social justice.

20:08

🚫 Suppression of Ethnic Studies under Neoliberalism

The final paragraph addresses the suppression of ethnic studies as a form of neoliberalism that encourages individualism and personal responsibility over collective histories and systemic exploitation. The speaker argues that ethnic studies challenges the neoliberal focus on the self by emphasizing the importance of understanding historical and systemic oppression. They suggest that this framework, which values individual choice and freedom, is a cover for maintaining the status quo and perpetuating violence.

Keywords

💡neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is an economic and political philosophy that emphasizes free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction of public spending. In the video, it is described as having paradoxical effects, such as promoting market principles while ushering in conservative moral agendas. The speaker discusses how neoliberal policies contribute to wealth polarization and the rise of racialized violence.

💡paradoxes

Paradoxes refer to seemingly contradictory statements or situations that may nonetheless be true or valid. The video identifies three major paradoxes within neoliberalism, such as its amoral stance versus promoting conservative moral agendas, the depoliticization of social risks versus the hyper-politicization of national security, and the ravaging of vulnerable populations versus the celebration of humanitarian intervention.

💡depoliticization

Depoliticization is the process of removing political elements or considerations from a subject or issue. The video discusses how neoliberalism encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own risks, thus depoliticizing social risks, while at the same time, it hyper-politicizes national security issues like immigration and foreign influence.

💡hyper-politicization

Hyper-politicization refers to the excessive politicization of certain issues. In the context of the video, it is used to describe how national security is politicized to an extreme degree, with fears of invasion by immigrants and foreign cultures used to justify stronger borders and increased military spending.

💡vulnerable populations

Vulnerable populations are groups of people who, due to various reasons such as economic status, race, or social position, are more susceptible to harm or negative impacts of policies. The video discusses how neoliberalism leads to the continuous ravaging of these populations through wealth polarization and the dismantling of social safety nets.

💡humanitarianism

Humanitarianism is the practice of providing relief to those in need, especially in the form of aid. The video contrasts the ravaging of vulnerable populations with the expansion of humanitarianism globally under neoliberalism, suggesting a paradox where the same system that exacerbates inequality also promotes aid and human rights intervention.

💡racialized violence

Racialized violence refers to violence or aggression that is directed towards individuals or groups based on their race or ethnicity. The video speaker mentions the development of 'apparatuses of racialized violence' under neoliberal policies, such as the expansion of criminalization and immigration enforcement in the United States.

💡consumer freedom

Consumer freedom is the ability of individuals to choose and purchase goods and services freely. The video discusses how freedom for the middle classes under neoliberalism is often equated with consumer freedom, while for less privileged individuals, freedom can paradoxically become associated with incarceration.

💡financial self-management

Financial self-management refers to the personal responsibility for managing one's own finances. The video highlights how neoliberalism promotes the idea that individuals should take care of their own financial future, leading to a commodification of financial services and an emphasis on personal financial responsibility, which is also highly gendered.

💡free trade

Free trade is the economic principle that supports the free flow of goods and services across national borders without restrictions. The video critiques free trade as a neoliberal policy that can exacerbate inequality by allowing stronger economies to extract resources from weaker ones, rather than promoting fair trade.

💡voluntarism

Voluntarism is the practice of voluntary action for the benefit of the community or individuals. The video discusses the resurgence of voluntarism as a neoliberal strategy to address the social issues caused by neoliberal policies, suggesting that it shifts the responsibility for social welfare from the state to individual volunteers.

Highlights

Neoliberalism presents itself as amoral, focusing on market principles and rational calculation, yet it often supports conservative moral agendas.

Neoliberalism depoliticizes social risks while hyper-politicizing national security, leading to a regime of fear and calls for stronger borders.

Despite ravaging vulnerable populations, neoliberalism also promotes humanitarian or human rights intervention, creating a paradoxical relationship.

Wars fought under neoliberalism, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, seem irrational from a purely economic standpoint but have broader neo-colonial and neo-imperial contexts.

Neoliberal policies lead to an upward distribution of wealth, increasing wealth divides, stagnating wages, and attacks on labor and welfare.

Racialized violence has increased with the expansion of criminalization, immigration enforcement, and incarceration rates in the United States.

Despite legal advancements against discrimination, material conditions have worsened with growing poverty and criminalization.

Freedom in a neoliberal context is often equated with consumer freedom for the middle classes and, ironically, incarceration for less privileged groups.

Sex workers are targeted and regulated under neoliberalism, reflecting a strong moral and sexual agenda that opposes the commercialization of sex.

Neoliberalism encourages individual financial responsibility, leading to a commodification of financial services and gendered stereotypes in personal finance management.

Free trade under neoliberalism can exacerbate inequality by allowing stronger economies to extract resources from weaker ones.

SB 1070, an anti-immigration law, criminalizes undocumented immigrants in ways that go beyond federal immigration law, using neoliberal terms to justify its actions.

Neoliberalism reinterprets poverty as a moral failing and encourages voluntarism as a solution to social problems caused by its policies.

Charity under neoliberalism can involve a transfer of resources from older working-class women to middle-class youth, as seen in the example of bingo halls in Canada.

Withholding access to subjugated knowledge, such as ethnic studies, is a form of neoliberalism that discourages collective understanding in favor of individualism.

Neoliberalism's framework of choice, freedom, and individuality is a cover for maintaining the status quo and exacerbating existing forms of violence.

Transcripts

I think to understand neoliberalism, we need to think of it as a set of paradoxes

and I think there are three major paradoxes

to look at. The first one is really

how neoliberalism likes to position itself

as an amoral orientation that

is not about morality, is about market principles,

is about rational calculation,

and yet, if you look at how it's contextualized

on the ground, you see that it ushers in

a lot of conservative moral agendas about family,

about gender, about sexuality. So that's the first set of paradoxes.

The second set of paradoxes that I think we can identify

is the depoliticizing,

the depoliticization of social risks and

the hyper-politicization of national security.

So on one hand, you're supposed to be

responsible for your own risks, you're encouraged to take risks

and then take responsibility for those risks, and

it's not about the society, it's not about institutions,

it's not about unequal distribution of resources, it's about yourself.

On the other hand, there

is this regime of fear about how

the country's being invaded by immigrants,

by foreign culture of political influences

so we need to strengthen our borders, we need

more resources [and] international security. So

the third set of paradoxes, I think,

is on one hand, there is a continuous

ravaging of vulnerable populations.

On the other hand, there's the celebration of

humanitarian or human rights intervention.

So because neoliberalism really polarizes

distribution of wealth and resources and

yet, at the same time, there is this expansion of humanitarianism

globally. And so the two

seem to be, rather than a set of solutions for a set of problems,

they grow symbiotically together. So I think

that we need to pay attention to these three sets of

paradoxes in order to understand the complex

operation of neoliberalism and how it affects

What is the function of these wars that are being fought? And

you would think trying to cut government spending and lower

deficits, why

are these wars fought in

Afghanistan and Iraq and Lord knows where next?

There's no explanatory framework for that

within the genealogy of neoliberalism that's

really combined to what has happened in the Global North. In order to understand

that, to see how those -

what those wars are about,

and why it's okay -

why the same people who advocate cutting spending for

every kind of social service will advocate military spending

over the roof, not just for the companies that

make profit on producing goods

for the military, but on what is the point

of fighting these wars, right, in the first place

when they look on the surface to be utterly irrational

from the point of view of neoliberal policy alone,

that there's a broader context

of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism

and of post-colonialism - they're various

shifting frames you can think of

that expand that framework enough so that you can start talking about the

connections between, you know,

the ways that military spending fits with

slicing a social safety net and why -

how it is racialization works

within policies on neoliberalism.

Part of what it has meant to me in activism is a few things:

a way of talking about what Lisa Duggan has called

a set of conditions that have produced an upward distribution of wealth,

that's a really key baseline for thinking about it, like what is this

range of things that have happened.

And when we're looking at that domestically, we see things like

growing wealth divides, stagnating wages, attacks on labor,

attacks on welfare, and the dismantling of

the minimal poverty alleviation programs the US has. So sort of like

worsening conditions,

rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, and this drastic development

of what I call apparatuses of racialized violence:

major expansion of criminalization, major expansion of

immigration enforcement, militarized borders, more people locked in cages

than ever anywhere on Earth right here in the United States right now.

So those two things happening are really big, and then a third piece of it

is - it may be particularly interesting to me as a legal scholar and

and legal activist - is the ways that

those things that happened during a period when supposedly,

we've all become declared equal under the law, right? During this period

of the last 40, 50 years, supposedly,

racism, sexism, ableism became

illegal United States and we have anti-discrimination laws and hate crimes laws

and there's been this sort of purported

legal resolution of these long-term tensions, problems,

violences. Yet on the material level,

those things have worsened and deepened with this growing poverty and

growing criminalization and immigration enforcement.

Some theorists have talked about the ways in which

freedom is understood as consumer freedom for the middle classes,

right? And then

for less privileged people freedom,

ironically, can become, in some instances, literally

equated with incarceration, so

which brings up an interesting question: what could be meant by freedom in this

context? Let me just tell you a little bit about my own work because I

work with sex workers who've been

declared or understood to be trafficking victims

by secular and evangelical Christian activists

who don't see this as paradoxical or oxymoronic,

so in their view, through the prison,

sex workers can be rehabilitated so that they can have freedom in a meaningful sense.

So sex workers as well

as the people who are understood to exploit them. And what's interesting about

this and makes you think, what could this possibly mean, is that

in their view freedom is not just doing anything at all,

but freedom can only take place under conditions of constraint,

so the,

the space of prison actually becomes a space of possibility where people

can learn the necessary constraints so that they can exercise meaningful freedoms.

The same thing, the same dynamics are also operative

in the incarceration of people who are arrested for drug crimes, as other

scholars have noted,

a similar kind process here.

In many ways I think she is the perfect neoliberal subject, right?

You are self-managing, your are self-responsible,

and you are seeking for self-advancement, but

because she is a sex worker, so she

immediately is targeted and regulated and policed

as trafficking victim, well,

or, a prostitute, depending on what agenda do you have

in encountering with her.

So that is the one thing - that's why I think that

victims of sex trafficking are very often

the marks of the limits of neoliberalism,

or the sexual limits of neoliberalism. So

in this seemingly amoral

system, there is a strong moral

agenda, especially a sexual agenda,

and it is about a middle-class,

domestic, sexual relationship,

and supposedly egalitarian partnership,

and selling sex just violates that,

and we need to domesticate sex.

Individuals,

through changes in

the structure of retirement and social security

processes, have been called upon to

do their own

work, take care of themselves

financially and into the future, to think about the future. You don't count on a pension,

you actually have to figure out how you're going to have enough money to live when

you're old.

And then of course there's an enormous commodification of financial services and

financial tools,

you know, all those calculators and systems for keeping your accounts

online and

technologies for

for managing, even if you have very little money

you know, you're still supposed to manage it and budget it

and figure it out and it's very,

I mean, it is highly class differentiated so

payday loans on the one hand,

and then all sort of elaborate individual retirement accounts and

financial services for people who are

wealthier, but we're all supposed to be engaged in these processes.

It's actually highly gendered:

women have been told, for the last couple decades at least,

that they're bad at it, that they're particularly bad at it.

We have had recently this whole narrative of women being irresponsible,

specifically irresponsible about money, either

shopaholics, either not able to manage money in that way,

or passive and paralyzed, just afraid

of dealing with the whole problem of investments. And in between that,

the sort of appropriately

healthy, probably male,

rational money manager. So there's the sort of mobilizing of

traditional, of gender stereotypes to promote

the called-for personal financial

self-management. That's flipped a little bit since the financial crisis.

All of a sudden now, women's risk aversion,

what used look like anxious passivity, is all of a sudden

a smart risk aversion and where men are now -

it's now the fault of testosterone that we had the

financial crisis, right, so

men are being made crazy by their hormones and women are the rational ones

whereas it was presumably women's hormones that were the problem before.

So we've had a little reversal in the evaluation, but the gender stereotypes

are actually

the same. So in terms of personal finance, we've really seen

gender stereotypes mobilized in support of

particular norms of personal financial self-management.

It's very difficult starting with your sort of average

audience in the United States to explain what the problem with free trade

is, right? What could be wrong with free trade?

And in order to explain what's wrong with free trade,

you do need a longer history

of colonialism in order to explain how it is that stronger economies

extract resources from weaker economies and how

freedom of trade can actually exacerbate inequality.

You really need to understand the history of empire

in order to understand how that works, like the way that

labor, land, and raw materials have circulated,

have been grabbed by, or circulated to

richer economies and been sucked out of poorer ones.

You have to understand that in order to get how

a policy like free trade could be

extracting resources, rather than existing in

a fair balance trading field, which is the imaginary free trade, right?

Free trade: oh, that means everybody just gets to buy and sell what they want to

and nobody is going to try to put a stop to it.

But what that has meant historically is that stronger economies

move in and put local economies out of business and take resources

and profits out of those countries and end up dominating

economies in poorer countries in a way that makes it

difficult for those economies to

develop in ways that actually support the local populations because so many

resources are being

sent out by the,

via policies of

so-called - free trade means unregulated, so that the

the poorer economy, then, is not allowed

to protect its own industries so they can grow

or to prevent foreign interests from coming in and taking

profits right out of the country.

With SB 1070, the anti-immigration law,

what is important for people to understand about that piece of legislation

is that although the architects of that law

argue that the law is merely mirroring

federal immigration law, it actually is doing something

other than what federal immigration law does. Namely

it's criminalizing immigrants

who are undocumented in new ways, in ways that they

weren't criminalized by federal law.

So in the very act of criminalizing,

neoliberalism becomes an important tool there

for the law, SB 1070, right? So we have

a new law, SB 1070, which

uses the implicit

key terms of neoliberalism to

help itself congeal into this law. So the key terms being

things like personal responsibility, law abiding citizen,

strong family values - all of those things

are mobilized by the law

in order to criminalize a certain segment of the population:

immigrants who are undocumented.

For people who are caught up in these, in these disciplinary

projects like, say,

people in mandatory drug treatment, people in the

in the prison system, they're being told that

the way to

become good Americans is to, you know, adopt a good work ethic, become

good mothers and fathers,

and often good Christians as well.

I think it's very important for those who are working on social justice

issues to recognize,

recognize how strong these normative projects are

and recognize how

how powerfully successful they are

in terms of

resetting the moral compass for a lot of people.

And that, in some ways, poverty

has become reinterpreted as moral failings.

There's a queue to get into

a charitable bingo hall in Canada, for example,

there are lots of organizations who are seeking slots

to get access to

raise money, and I find it

interesting to look at what they're using that money for.

Often they're using that money to fund

what one analyst

Colin Campbell has called "nice to have services" for middle-class youth,

so: better equipment your hockey team,

for example, or new uniforms

for some other sports team. And this money is coming

from older working class women,

who are the majority of players in bingo halls.

So I think that's a really

interesting example of how charity

is being mobilized in different understandings of political economy,

that gambling can be depoliticized or it

becomes acceptable because we're raising money for good causes through the gambling,

but what's happening there is a transfer of

political and economic resources - economic resources most obviously -

a transfer of economic resources from older working-class women

to nice-to-have services for middle-class kids. And

that definition of charity is one that I think is

helpful to critically interrogate and that

tells me a lot about the increasingly central role

of charities to neoliberal management of poverty

and the way that sometimes that strategy of managing

poverty transfers resources to already-privileged people away from

older working-class women, for example,

as in this example, so that's one way. Another way is the resurgence in voluntarism

that's associated with neoliberalism. So as neoliberalism

as a strategy of accumulating capital

reaches its inevitable limits - that it's not

socially sustainable, that it will generate crisis and it will generate

indigence and dreadful levels of poverty. As it reaches its limits of

social sustainability,

one of the suggested solutions is a resurgence in voluntarism,

that people should give back to the community, that they

should become more involved in voluntary work, that

they can help solve this structural problem

by volunteering their labor to good causes.

Withholding access to subjugated knowledge,

more specifically to ethnic studies, I would say that that is

a form of neoliberalism because one of the things that neoliberalism

does is it encourages people,

all sorts of people, to think of themselves as

individual units, to think of, first and foremost,

of the self and the care of the self and personal responsibility

as the way that we live our lives.

And so when ethnic studies

is suggesting that

that's not enough, when ethnic studies is suggesting that we need to think about

histories of peoples

and systemic relations, or rather systemic

forms of exploitation, then that is

very directly challenging the me-me-me-ness

of neoliberal discourse.

This kind of framework around choice and around freedom and around

individuality, that's basically just a cover for

reorganizing, slightly, things to keep them as much the same as possible

and also enhancing those sorts of violence.