Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  When the Occupy movement sat down in Zuccoti Park, they set out to wrest the title for Purity of Populist Expression away from the Tea Party, but almost instantaneously revealed a dearth of appreciation of what might materialize that could render them different. Indeed, many of the obsessions and even some of the language disturbingly mirrored those of their purported opponents. True, they did not immediately set about selling T-shirts, cocked hats, and placards, but the attempt to convince the masses that they should reinterpret their victimhood as a form of empowerment was an agenda without a narrative. In their quest for a more pure democracy, they renounced the existing structures of government, and consequently, abandoned the rafts of state and local unionized workers who were right then being shed by cash-strapped states and municipalities. The disparagement of government was one script practically plagiarized from the Tea Party. The gutting of government employment was an active political battleground (in places such as Ohio and Wisconsin resisting union-stripping and decertification) contemporaneous with OWS, but because it concerned unions, the Occupiers tended to act like it didn’t exist. But more to the point, the Tea Party was consciously organized to give its recruits things to do and upbeat political identities to inhabit, all revolving around the commercialization of protest. All OWS offered were endless feints toward an oxymoron of an anarchist powwow, complete with tents. It was a murketing ploy, only bereft of anything to sell. OWS did not sufficiently appreciate the topography and extent of its opponent’s political organization coupled with its cultural scripts, and for that reason made no coherent attempts to craft and supply an alternative. Or, to phrase it more cruelly, Occupy believed in the bedtime stories of the power of spontaneous order welling up from below, but was in the dark about the realpolitik of the modern privatization of protest.

  I believe this was true even for more relatively modest attempts at protest, such as various undertakings to mobilize public support for federal regulators to more seriously discipline the banks. I choose here one example at random, the effort by the economist Simon Johnson to petition the Fed Board of Governors to remove JP Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, from the Board of Governors of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.13 Without meditating upon the sheer improbability of the Fed actually rebuking the heads of the banks that own and control it, we will focus here instead on the pedestrian mechanics of this attempt at the promotion of the simplest form of political protest. Johnson couldn’t organize the petition himself, so he outsourced it to a new-media website, change.org. The qualms begin when one learns that this is a private for-profit corporation, or as it states, “Change.org is a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns to change the world. We’re proud to be a certified B Corp, using the power of business for social good.”14

  Qualms turn to disquiet when the fine print informs anyone who uses the site that their personal information may be passed on to the person/organization initiating the petition; further, it may also be shared with third parties, may be disclosed to authorities or other legal petitioners, and may even be sold under certain circumstances. In other words, perhaps unwittingly, Simon Johnson is exposing those who sign on to his petition to all the usual dangers of data aggregation, surveillance, and analysis familiar from the long history of high-volume for-profit direct mail operations. Johnson’s “protest” orchestrates the harvesting of information for private profit and political machinations, precipitating an asymmetry, weakening the movement in the name of symbolic action. Furthermore, although Jamie Dimon will never ever be ousted by any such petition, or similar symbolic political activity,15 thousands of people will enter their names into a database archiving the expressed hostility to the banksters, and someone, somewhere, is making a profit.

  In the topsy-turvy world of neoliberalism, you may think that you are busily expressing your innate right to protest the cruel and distorted state of the world; but in most cases, you are echoing scripts and pursuing an identity that has already been mapped out and optimized beforehand to permit the market to evaluate and process knowledge about you, and convey it to the users with deepest pockets. Protest has been murketed. You get to express yourself; they get to make money. If you are smart, the neoliberals anticipate you might just realize you could eliminate the middleman, and end up commercializing your protest on your own.

  Never forget: for neoliberals, the preordained answer to any problem, economic or otherwise, is more markets.

  The Full-Spectrum Approach to Neoliberal Political Mobilization

  The potent combination of top-down funding and organization with bottom-up incubation of commercial activity within the very same protest movement is certainly one very important explanation why the neoliberals have outclassed their opponents in political organization in the crisis, at least in the United States. But there is another, more comprehensive handicap that gives the neoliberals a crucial edge. Perhaps because of its Russian doll structure, the NTC has managed to provide not just isolated individual single-issue political proposals to respond to the various controversies (say, privatize Social Security, “incentivize” the National Health Service, hobble public-sector unions, undermine public schools with voucher schemes), but in the really big instances of political donnybrooks, they have been able to promote and coordinate interlocking full-spectrum braces of alternative policies that expand until they entirely fill the public space of perceived alternatives. The genius of the Neoliberal Thought Collective has been to appreciate that it is not enough to dangle a utopian vision just beyond reach as eventual motivation for political action; the cadre that triumphs is the side that can simultaneously mount a full set of seemingly unrelated political proposals that deal with the short-, medium-, and long-term horizons of action, combining regimes of knowledge and interim outcomes, so that the end result is the inexorable movement of the polis ever closer to the eventual goal. The shrewd strategy of simultaneously conducting both a short game and a long game, superficially appearing to the uninformed to be in mutual conflict but united behind the scenes by overarching theoretical aims, is probably the single most significant explanation of the triumph of neoliberal policies during a conjuncture where their opponents had come to expect their utter refutation. The left, clinging to an obsolescent vision of pragmatism and committed to rational compromise, has seen rings run around its meager attempts to come up with remedies for the crisis.

  Since any analytical statements that delve into neoliberal practice have to avoid the Scylla of conspiracy theories as well as the Charybdis of endorsement of their trademark notions of spontaneous order, it will be necessary to insist that their contemporary full-spectrum approach to politics has not been comprehensively described anywhere by any of the major neoliberal thinkers. The approach instead grows directly out of their hallmark organization of the thought collective, in conjunction with their specific theoretical commitments concerning the role of knowledge in markets. In other words, the Russian doll organization of Mont Pèlerin, affiliated think tanks, dedicated funding agencies, academic units, and astroturf operations is nicely suited to promote seemingly alternative policies emanating from different compass points within the hierarchy of the NTC; what melds this policy entrepreneurship into a monolithic agenda is precisely the sociology of knowledge that grows out of their core epistemological commitments. A few historians have begun to glimpse the larger mechanisms at work here, although incongruously, this has occurred far more often in the history of science and technology, rather than in the seemingly more germane areas of political science or sociology.16 Precisely for that reason, it will be more convenient for expository purposes to make the case for a full-spectrum neoliberal offensive first in the case of a political controversy in the natural sciences—here, the other major crisis of our time, the threat of global warming due to the human-initiated emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

  The outline of the neoliberal response to global warming over the last three
decades may seem an ill-considered detour from the current topic of the global economic crisis, but rest assured, it is not. Starting with notions of the Natural is one efficient way to get to the heart of neoliberal philosophy.17 The objective of the rest of this chapter is to describe the template of neoliberal policy response in an area where it has been coming to be understood in perhaps the most elaborate detail, and then to demonstrate that the pattern has been essentially the same as that found in the responses to the economic crisis covered in this book. Contrary to the raft of writers who insist that modern neoliberalism is far too variegated, contingent, flexible, and local to constitute any sort of unified political movement, I shall insist that there indeed has been a standard-issue Neoliberal Playbook in responding to big political challenges; and furthermore, its scripts constitute the major reason that the NTC has come through the economic crisis unscathed. The full-spectrum mobilization strategy can then retrospectively begin to clarify some of the incidents recounted in previous chapters. What at the micro level might appear chaotic and wavering turns out to have been a canny stratagem from an altitude of 10,000 feet.

  The Neoliberal Response to Global Warming

  Neoliberals depart from the simplistic dichotomies of distinct spheres of State vs. Market inherited from classical liberalism along two rather obvious axes: they have a very different conception of what a market does, and a novel doctrine of what the role of the state should be in their ideal utopia. Recapitulating chapter 2, neoliberals more or less reject the older notion of a market as a physical allocation device; instead, they invest the market with superhuman qualities of information processing—the Ultimate Cyborg—in that it is literally taken to be smarter than any human being, and further, to convey just the right information to those who need it in real time. The market is still treated as one special aspect of nature—no one is ready to renounce that particular cultural obsession18—but nature itself is portrayed as ineffably complex, after notions developed in cybernetics and systems theory: evolving, adaptive, nonlinear, chaotic. This ontology constitutes the core of the neoliberal critique of socialism: no human intelligence could ever understand itself, much less the roiling appearance of chaos which constitutes its natural environment, to a degree sufficient to plan the economy, because the reasons it musters are always less complex than the phenomena it would wish to master. However, contrary to their libertarian fellow travelers, neoliberals also subscribe to the doctrine of a strong state, one poised and willing to build and maintain the world of markets, which in their view conforms to their vision of ever greater freedom. The neoliberals concede that it may appear that the existing market system sometimes fails; but the answer to these hiccups is to impose more markets, since nothing else can ever begin to cope with the complexity of evolution. The prescription for market failures is always more markets; however, that prescription can only reliably and successfully be imposed by a strong state. Moreover, since democratic electorates are always clamoring for bread and circuses, which threatens to thwart the telos of economic improvement from their perspective, a strong state must vigilantly strive to keep them in line; ideally, a state controlled by neoliberal politicians. This sometimes appears confusing to outsiders, who cannot understand how neoliberals can so blithely demonize the state and simultaneously concede its necessity.

  Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper have done us the service of outlining how the neoliberal political project has taken substantial inspiration from modern scientific disciplines such as ecology, in portraying social systems as complex adaptive systems. They particularly highlight the notion of “resilience” promoted in the systems ecology literature, starting with the papers of Crawford Holling. As they put it:

  Hayek defines the radical freedom of the market by its indifference to all external limits and transcendental laws . . . The laws of the market rest on no pre-existent foundation: their very resilience serves as proof of concept, in the same way that the law of natural selection constantly proves or disproves the viability of chance mutations in nature.19

  What they do not stress sufficiently, however, is that Hayek and his followers have been able to endow the market with such transcendental legitimacy because they subscribe to a seldom-examined ontological tenet: rules (which Hayek equates with “society”) do evolve, as does nature; but the market is treated as both uniform and invariant. This commitment has been seconded by the Chicago School of economics. The market can dependably sanction success or failure of human endeavor because it is the Rock upon which the complex chaotic maelstrom dashes; the market is the zero point from which all motion and change is measured. The market itself is never chaotic, because it exists outside of time. The market must be generic and unwavering, because if it were completely embedded in historical time (like society, like nature), then it could in principle be just as clueless about the true telos of human striving as any deluded human being; in other words, it could get things wrong.

  Here we observe how neoliberals depart substantially from orthodox neoclassical environmental economics. The neoclassical economists tend to approach problems in the biosphere as symptoms of a glitch in the market—granted, a stunted and inarticulate notion of market failure, but market malfunction nonetheless—whereas neoliberals will never countenance that approach. We have previously mentioned how the so-called Coase Theorem was an intentional intervention to undermine and dissolve the whole neoclassical notion of “externalities,” and the theory of public goods built around it. In a slogan: for neoclassical economists, nature is simple and eternal, while markets seize up due to market flaws (external commodity definitions) rooted in that very same nature; the neoclassical solution is for the state to mimic the way an ideal market should have performed, in order to rectify these unfortunate lacunae. Conversely, for neoliberals, problems in the biosphere arise because of the intrinsic complexity and chaotic trajectories of both nature and society, which will never be adequately comprehended by human science. Those problems, they insist, are never the fault of the market. Understandably, people will always seek to respond to some perceived biosphere crisis by attempting to tinker with and reform economic activity, but they are deluded, and must be shunted into harmless pursuits. In a slogan, for neoliberals, humans can never be trusted to know whether the biosphere is in crisis or not, because both nature and society are dauntingly complex and evolving; therefore, the neoliberal solution is to enlist the strong state to allow the market to find its own way to the ultimate solution. It can accomplish this only if the invariant character of the market is allowed to manifest itself in all its glorious resilience.

  The role of the neoliberal state is therefore threefold: to becalm and mollify the restive public who are provoked to constrain or neutralize the market in response to problems; to reiterate and deploy the Neoliberal panacea that the way to address any (falsely) perceived market failures is to introduce more markets; and finally, to facilitate the market in discovering its own eventual transformations of nature and society which will transcend any biosphere crisis. By contrast with orthodox neoclassical economics, this entails not one, but a whole panoply of diverse “policy” responses, the sum total of which are jointly attuned to bring about the final end of capitulation to the greater wisdom of the ineffable market. I should like to argue here that one of the reasons that the neoliberals have come to triumph over all their ideological rivals in recent decades is that they have managed to venture beyond any simplistic notion of a single “fix” for any given problem, but always strive instead to invent and deploy a broad spectrum of different policies, from the most expendable short-term expedients to medium-term politics to long-horizon utopian projects, all of which may appear to outsiders as distinct and emanating from different quarters, but in fact turn out inevitably to be nicely integrated so as to produce the eventual capitulation of nature and society to the market. Certainly the left has produced nothing that remotely compares in terms of sophistication—either in this case, or as later, concerning the global ec
onomic crisis.