Political Generations

In his foreword to Grégoire Chamyou’s The Ungovernable Society, Michael Hardt describes neoliberalism as a “great renewal of reactionary thought” which I thought was an odd perspective for one of the main popularizers of autonomist Marxism - which sees neoliberalism as a deepening and an expansion of capitalist logic, rather than any kind of return - to take.

The bundle of changes that took place between the 1970s and 1990s which we now (tend to) call neoliberalism has taken a long time to achieve even the little coherence it currently has. At the time of the elections of Reagan and Thatcher it was thought of as neoconservatism; later, in the 1990s it tended to be called globalization; until the interventions of Jameson and Harvey - which showed that postmodernism was the cultural or superstructural expression of the neoliberal project - it was often equated with postmodernism itself. In the centre and on the right, the neoliberal transition tended to be thought of in terms of post-industrialism, information or knowledge or service economy, etc, etc. For the autonomists, it was the period of the post-Fordist social factory.

The centre and the right tended to see neoliberalism as the freeing of the market and of the individual as both consumer and as entrepreneur. The impositions of the welfare state - required in order to pay for social services and to keep the plunder and exploitation in capital in check - had been an unwarranted “big state” interference in the pure logic of neoclassical economics. Better to let the market work smoothly on its own, as god intended; Reagan and Thatcher’s sustained and destructive attack on labour rights (the miners, the air traffic controllers) was simply clearing away the grime of the welfare state to get the market economy back in perfect order.

From that perspective, the 20 years or so of the welfare state must appear a liberal, if not a progressive paradise. This, I think, is what informs Hardt’s view of neoliberalism as a renewal of reaction: the welfare state provided a beacon of progress between 1945 and 1973. This, too, informs John Buschman’s critique of the “new public philosophy” which came in to American policymaking along with Reagan. The reframing of every social, moral, and cultural question in terms of economic efficiency is the problem, Buschman argues, and both librarianship and American society would be better off if we could return to a prior golden age of classical liberalism and restrained capitalism.

Michael Hardt was born in 1960, so his earliest years were spent in the heyday of the welfare state. He was in his 20s in the 1980s, when the lid began to come off the neoliberal revanche against the welfare state. I suspect that whether or not you see neoliberalism as a return to a pre-welfare-state form of reaction (i.e. neoconservatism) or whether you see it as a new phase in the capitalist logic of restructuring and the replacement of living by dead labour depends on whether you experienced the welfare state or not. I was born in 1977, so my 20s bridge the turn of the century; I was 22 when the anti-globalist “Battle for Seattle” took place. But perhaps more importantly, the recurring crises, the systemic poverty, the attacks on labour, were the fabric of the society I grew up in. The amount of 1950s/60s-nostalgia - both in terms of reruns (I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) or pastiches like Happy Days - was an attempt on the one hand to convince those who had lived in at least some part of the welfare state that it continued to exist; and on the other to convince those of us who had never known the welfare state that it had truly existed, that a golden age was possible.

In librarianship, we continue to see this play out in debates over values, critique, policy, power, and strategies for change. There are those who think that the pillars of the welfare state continue to operate, and that our failure to live up to them requires revisiting our “core values”. And there are those of us who think that the welfare state was, at most, a temporary reprieve from the inexorable logic of capital which must be resisted and attacked; that the “core values” of the postwar period were historically conditioned by the time, if they meant anything at all. Perhaps the core values have only ever been propaganda and ideology. There are many points of view in between these two extremes.

I don’t want to equate these political generations with age. Generations are cultural as much as temporal, and the milieu in which one comes of age - television, siblings (older or younger), class, race, gender, broader political culture - all play a role in the construction of individual perspectives. But I think it’s important to underline how neoliberalism can be understood in two very different ways depending on one’s experience of and perspective on the welfare state itself. For me, there can be no nostalgia for a welfare state I never knew, and so neoliberalism does not seem like a relapse or fall from some exalted peak. Rather it is the next step in the evolution of the inhuman and antihuman requirements of capital.

EDIT: Melissa Hubbard reminded me that nostalgia for the welfare state is deeply involved in a nostalgia for a period when women and people of colour “knew their place” and could be relied upon to support the status quo through their hyperexploited (and non-industrial) labour. The rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement were challenges to the welfare state that the neoliberal movement capitalized on. It is certainly true that for autonomist feminists like Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, neoliberalism could not be a “renewal” because the exploitation of patriarchal capitalism centred around the white, male industrial worker did not pause for post-war reconstruction.