Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  The spread of the Internet has proven a technological boon to snapprenticeship, as well as third-party valorization of freely provided labor. Not just open-source projects, but vanity sites such as MySpace and Facebook and Google aggregate information provided gratis into databases and derivative formats that can be sold to advertisers or other aggregators. Reviews and ratings provided for free may appeal to the vanity of autodidacts, but they play a major marketing role in the business plans of sites such as Amazon and Netflix. Software that is thrown open to “beta testing” in fact confiscates all matter of quality-control stress testing that constitutes unpaid labor for the corporations that then turn around and sell the revised source code. Alternatively, websites that aggregate the voluntary unpaid contributions of bloggers are then capitalized and sold to information conglomerates. A little appeal to vanity has been leveraged into massive appropriations of unpaid labor time in the online world.91

  The dispersed character of the Internet would seem ideally apportioned to summon forth this profusion of free labor; but old-fashioned face-to-face labor has also experienced the redoubled cultivation of snapprenticeship as a cost-saving device. Indeed, students made desperate by the dearth of employment available for new job entrants since the crash of 2008 have flooded into “internships,” even to the extent of paying for the opportunity to provide free labor on a temporary basis to some of the largest and richest corporations in existence. In the ultimate neoliberal inversion, a business enterprise now exists to auction off internships, so that hapless selves desperately seeking upgrading can actually pony up serious money to work for nothing.92 Vague promises of getting one’s foot in the door and spinning networking connections rarely materialize, while the overeducated supplicant performs the most menial of tasks for less than a pittance.

  As if getting domestic college students to work for free were not sufficiently cost-saving, one firm has taken the notion of international student exchange programs and turned it into a cheap way to recruit and sell temporary manual labor. Come to America and immerse yourself in the culture!

  That’s the pitch on the flashy CETUSA website recruiting young college students from around the globe to work shit jobs in the US, on J-1 visas ostensibly for cultural exchange. In this case, CETUSA [Council for Educational Travel in the U.S.] delivers the students to SHS Onsite Solutions, a temp agency furnishing workers to Exel North American Logistics Inc. The latter, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, manages all the labor and operations at the big Hershey warehouse, packing and distribution center. The students pay around $3,000 to get into the program, then earn around $8 an hour, from which exorbitant rent and other fees are docked till they get down to somewhere between $140 and $40 PER WEEK of intense factory labor.93

  This situation appeared in the New York Times after an organized walkout from the indentured student workers at Hershey. CETUSA then decided to retaliate, and terminated the visas of some of the ringleaders, effectively getting them deported. The subcontracting arrangement allowed them to claim plausible deniability about the labor practices. Similar programs then came to light at other employers, because the larger program run by the State Department had placed 130,000 students in jobs during 2011.

  The poor clients of CETUSA did get an education in “neoliberalism for dummies” for their trouble, although it may not have been the one they bargained for. The main lesson of snapprenticeship is that murketing works.

  2) Buycotting. The second great neoliberal innovation in murketing is the creation of the phenomenon of “buycotting,” or as it is sometimes called, “ethical consumerism” (Yates, “Critical Consumption”). Instead of seeming to bypass the market altogether, as in the first case, here everyday participants are enticed to believe that it is possible to mitigate some of the worst aspects of market organization by paying an “ethical premium” for particular commodities and helping to make the world become a better place. Previous generations had sought to punish firms that were perceived to violate ethical norms by boycotting them, viz., organizing the wholesale withdrawal of purchasing power from the products of the targeted firm. In the current neoliberal era, people have been weaned off the notion that concerted political abdication from market behavior can ever succeed in its objectives, and instead have been seduced into believing that the market itself can offer sufficient choice in expression of political programs along the entire spectrum. Worried about global warming? Imaginative entrepreneurs have endeavored to purvey “carbon offsets” to consumers. Want to help African AIDS patients? Get yourself an AMEX Red Card. Want to support small independent producers in underdeveloped countries? Other entrepreneurs have conveniently developed “fair trade” brands for coffee, textiles, glass, and other imports.94

  The intellectual defenses surrounding the phenomenon of buycotting are especially instructive concerning the ways that the NTC has managed to neutralize its political opponents through the techniques of murketing. It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovations in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the “same” result. But what has been often overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of a neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowels of the NTC is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right. For buycotting always constitutes a tactical half-measure within the neoliberal project: one observes this in the initial promulgation and subsequent scuppering of carbon cap-and-trade schemes (described in chapter 6), including consumer purchase of “carbon offsets”; one observes it again in the imposition of “health insurance mandates” as a preemptive substitute for the single-payer system found in Europe, and then followed rapidly with the subsequent sabotage and rebellion against them in the United States, once they became the “centrist” approach to health care reform. The same dynamic has now has been kicking in with some forms of ethical consumerism. Buycotting exists to lull the uncommitted into belief that they can reconcile their skepticism of market results with redoubled participation in market purchases; only then to reprimand them for failing the efficiency test in the sphere of their ethical purchases.

  This buycott dynamic is played out at a homely level in everyday life with one commodity many people swear by: the cup of coffee from the local barista. Coffee is the second most valuable basic commodity exported from developing countries, just after petroleum. Subsequent to the failure of an attempted OPEC-style coffee cartel in the 1980s, the organization Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLOI) was created to define and organize a subset of the coffee market, combining certification of origin of the coffee in specially designated producer cooperatives, a fixed price floor to be paid to these producers, and branding as “fair trade coffee.” This FLOI version of fair trade coffee accounts for approximately 4 percent of the “specialty coffee” market in 2009;95 other branding initiatives run by large conglomerates (such as Starbucks’ “Conservation International”) offer some category vaguely approximating “fair trade” but with much-curtailed restrictions on the growers and price floors, which ends up being “FLOI-lite.” Customers rarely have the time or patience to pay much attention to such subtle distinctions.

  Customers buycotting fair trade coffee often pay a premium, and feel they are striking a blow for the faraway small producer vis-à-vis the globalized mass product. Fair Trade USA produces ad
vertising to foster this impression; it suggests on its website:

  Instead of creating dependency on aid, we use a market-based approach that gives farmers fair prices, workers safe conditions, and entire communities resources for fair, healthy and sustainable lives. We seek to inspire the rise of the Conscious Consumer and eliminate exploitation.96

  However, the results have been less than unequivocal. For instance, while branded fair trade coffee may indeed come from sanctioned cooperatives, it may also be packaged by prison labor or used to launder drug money. Furthermore, the majority of fair trade planters manage to sell only around 20 percent of their output to fair trade markets, so on balance, the brand has had little impact upon poverty at the ground level.97 The commodification of “social justice” tends to be a dicey proposition even predicated upon the best of intentions, but in this instance there is constant pressure on FLOI to loosen its definitions and slacken its demands for certification throughout the commodity chain. In practice, the FLOI system is devised to make it possible for coffee consumers to “express themselves” through purchases, more than it is about changing the supply chain; this is a signal characteristic of neoliberal life, as we have argued.

  However, now that fair trade coffee has achieved a substantial presence in the marketplace, along comes a concerned member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective just in time to insist that you only hurt yourself by purchasing fair trade coffee.98 Primarily, the critique rests upon a standard neoclassical economic argument about misaligned “incentives”: it is asserted that whenever prices rise, co-ops sell their inferior beans to the FLOI system and reserve their quality stock for the utterly free market in specialty coffees—in other words, the fair trade brand dupes clueless café liberals into paying more for a crappier cup of coffee. Unabashedly taking a page from the left, this critique also suggests that the FLOI funds don’t really trickle down to a substantial degree to the peasant level, and that free trade has proven little more than a marketing ploy that channels much of the profits back into advertising. It is not that these questions have been settled by concerted empiricism—they have not—but the payoff comes in the moral of the story: if you had capitulated to the wisdom of the totally free market in the first place, everything would have worked out just fine.

  Ultimately, buycotting exists to preempt state regulation of working conditions, product standards, best practices, and the like by inserting brands where conscious intervention would normally be imposed. It takes as its inspiration the neoliberal doctrine that the state is in many respects indistinguishable from a market, except in its handicapped ability to provide “services.” This has been taken to an extreme in Sicily:

  Proponents of buycotting see these premiums as pure political expression . . . Some even argue that cash-voting goes further than ballot-casting: we buy, and therefore incentivize producers, every day; but we vote far less often. “We are convinced that how people buy can be more effective than how they vote,” said Francesco Galante, director of Comitato Addiopizzo, a civic group in Palermo, Sicily, that has taken on the mafia using an analogue of fair-trade labeling. In 2004, some volunteers in Palermo decided to bypass politicians: they approached local businesses, many of which paid the mafia ‘pizzo,’ or bribes, and asked them to certify that they paid pizzo no longer; in exchange, the Comitato brought them business from pizzo-averse Sicilians. Today 400 businesses and 9,000 customers have joined, even though products from the law-abiding companies often cost more.99

  E) Biopolitics Is Here to Stay.

  One of the oddities of contemporary everyday neoliberalism is that people rarely get worked up anymore when encountering overt cruelty to the poor or murketing or endless scams consisting of privatized schemes of self-improvement, and seem to have passively capitulated to fallout from the crisis, but do tend to get distinctly queasy when entrepreneurialism of the self digs down deep into the corporeal. Somehow, that pound of flesh is deemed all the more offensive or transgressive when it really is a pound of flesh traded in the marketplace. There is something about the experience that seems to trigger a gag reflex, piercing the complacency of all the other encounters that demand acquiescence in the worldview descended from Mont Pèlerin. Perhaps the only thing that keeps us from being permanently nauseated is that we ply our trades believing most corporeal enhancements and fungible soma to be merely science fiction conceits; they resemble the implausible cyborgs that populate late-night reruns. We are irreducibly intact at the cellular level; that is our rock-bottom quiddity; no one can take that away.

  This abiding somatic integrity of the self is the last great double truth of the neoliberal era. It is the rock-solid foundation of our freedom, and yet the fleeting evanescent product of the imperative of flexibility. It is a myth promoted by the orthodox neoclassical economist, if only because dispelling it would reveal the great gaping emptiness of their entire edifice:

  Should we bar people from improving a very bad economic lot because it requires a deprivation of their personhood? Justice may not be “served by a ban on desperate exchanges” as, for example, selling human organs . . . An immediate reaction might well be to let each individual decide what is essential to his or her self-constitution and act accordingly . . . To put the matter another way, who is to decide what is essential to the constitution of the self other than the self ?100

  Who or what indeed, once we start swapping out body parts, neural transmitters, biological components, and somatic identities? This breathtaking interpretation of “freedom” has not in fact been passed down through the annals of legal or institutional tradition; rather, it has been the catalytic agent in many recent interventions to render the fleshy body better tuned to respond to the exacting demands of the marketplace. The self, inevitably, takes the hindmost.

  Legal systems have sought to draw bright lines where identity begins and ends, although this has come under increasing pressure in the last three decades. The universe is conventionally divided up into three big categories: items and bodies that are prohibited in every instance; items and bodies that are deemed inalienable; and items and bodies that are both legal and alienable, but where exchange under the profit motive is banned or limited. The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits both slavery and sale of military conscription, moving these phenomena into the second category from prior full commodity status. Sale and commercial possession of babies was subsequently presumed to occupy the first category, although we shall observe that this is rapidly eroding. Various drugs of potency in altering mental identity have been allocated to categories one and three. Steroids and other muscle enhancements in certain professional sports are relegated to category one, but for everyone else they fall into category three. The sale of human organs and gametes was long presumed to fall into the third category, but that, too, is changing. The outsourcing of certain bodily functions, such as the carrying of a human embryo to term, used to fall into category two, but that has lapsed into commodity status. Categories can sometimes differ across geographic boundaries: European law often prohibits the outsourcing of surrogacy. The fact that somatic selfhood can be sliced, diced, and reshuffled in such dramatic fashion in a relatively short time frame only goes to show that once we submit to a regime of entrepreneurship of the self, then the Archimedean fulcrum of personhood starts to slip rather perilously.

  Because each of these corporeal phenomena threatens to sport a sensationalistic aura, the literature on this particular aspect of everyday neoliberalism has enjoyed somewhat better coverage than in our previous four instances of the neoliberal lifeworld. Pop culture in particular has been endlessly fascinated with the conundrums of somatic identity and emotional selfhood, so we can here rapidly point to relevant academic writings on these topics. Some Foucauldians have also been active in exploration of the topic.101 All that has been missing in the hubbub has been exposition of the explicit links to the neoliberal project.

  Outside of the obvious corporeal interventions in self-enhancement such as
plastic surgery and liposuction, many of the earliest experiments in neoliberal self-alteration came out of the drug culture of the 1960s. While drugs such as caffeine, amphetamine, and Benzedrine had long been used to boost awareness, experimentation in the 1960s with drugs such as LSD, peyote, and psilocybin was oriented to subvert and otherwise alter mental identities in the user. Whereas the hippie drug culture was notionally an artifact of a rebellious counterculture, in fact the experience of taking these psychotropic hallucinogens provided one of the early testbeds for the discipline of the neoliberal transmogrification of the self. Some of the drugs heightened the experience of being a spectator at one’s own performance, while others fostered dissociation from past behavior; endless analysis of trips after the fact reinforced belief in the plasticity of the self.

  From this baseline, all that was required to activate the neoliberal playbook was to reorient these attitudes and practices from a feckless narcissism to a conviction that one was engaged in concerted self-modification to propitiate a market rationality far more omnipotent than anything promoted by any counterculture. One way this happened was a progressive shift in emphasis to the image of a “neurochemical self,” itself a bubbling brew of neurotransmitters and electrolytes, which required pharmaceutical management and enhancement.102 Both pharmaceutical companies and the neuroscience community promoted a doctrine of the brain as the primary corporeal organ responsible for conferring identity and selfhood. This heightened academic activity in turn attracted the attention of the economics profession, always on the lookout for any nouveau trend in the physical sciences to co-opt and absorb (not to mention new funding sources to tap). Hence another neoliberal development has been the rise of subfields of “neuroeconomics” and behavioral economics, which purport to reconcile the insistence of older neoclassical economics upon the irreducible rationality of the self with the newer neoliberal imperative to optimize the self on a daily basis.103 For some, this suggested that the solution to the economic crisis could be outsourced to an alliance of Big Pharma and some Internet startups, recapitulating the neoliberal commandment that the solution to any market problem is redoubled market innovation: