Rethinking neo-liberalism
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Last Modified: January 17, 2008 Issue: November 2007 |
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The term ‘neo-liberalism’ is one that is commonplace in both academic and activist circles. Understood as capitalist imperialism by some, as market-based policies by others, neo-liberalism is a contested term that continues to have exceptional significance in a period of renewed globalization and transnationalism.
Aihwa Ong’s latest book, Neo-liberalism as exception, is a multifaceted exercise in expanding upon our understanding of neo-liberalism in relation to citizenship and sovereign power. As a collection of essays mostly published over the past decade, the work draws heavily on the governmentality school of socio-political thought. The book’s central thesis is one that runs counter to the dominant perspective of neo-liberalism as an economic doctrine. Instead, Ong argues that neo-liberalism can be understood as a malleable technology of governing, designed and employed to include particular types of individuals and populations while excluding others. Equally important, the empirical work included in this volume fills a void in current discussions of neo-liberalism, which often focus predominantly on the North American experience. In offering an alternative and revealing analysis, Ong covers a wide spectrum of issues from the East Asian and South-East Asian regions. Of particular interest to the author are the ways in which different regimes employ technologies of neo-liberalism, be they authoritarian, democratic or communist.
Ong’s anthropological and ethnographic approach to neo-liberalism and citizenship is presented in part as a critique of authors such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who contend, inter alia, that a uniform global labour regime is emerging. Rather, Ong argues in favour of more localized and situated analyses of labour regimes, focusing on the various manifestations of ‘translocal publics’, for example, where specific interests intersect and are given particular formulations (p. 62). As an alternative to examining ‘identities’, which are often simplified interpretations of national groups or ethnic communities possessing considerable diversity, the book emphasizes that the concept of translocal publics describes ‘the new kinds of borderless ethnic identifications enabled by technologies and forums of opinion making’ (p. 63). Ong’s work examines a wide range of regional events and assemblages, from the Chinese diaspora after the 1997 Asian financial crisis (chapter 2), to foreign domestic workers in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong (chapter 9).
Neo-liberalism as exception is also a critique of juridical-legal interpretations of the connections between citizenship and government. Ong argues that this method is evident in Giorgio Agamben’s focus on the bifurcation of the population into two halves: zones of citizenship, consisting of political beings, and zones of bare life, consisting of those without citizenship protections (p. 22). Instead, Ong contends that a ‘temporal conceptualization of the politics of exception’ is a more appropriate means for recognizing the validity of other ethical regimes - such as the various world religions - that also ‘operate along the continuum of inclusion and exclusion, though without mapping onto the same division between citizens and bare life’ (p. 197). In contrast to Agamben, Ong argues that new modes of analysis are necessary for examining the ways in which those without territorialized citizenship might make claims, whether through local communities, NGOs or corporations (p. 24). While most of the book’s content consists of essays already published elsewhere, Ong also presents new contributions, and has reworked and reorganized the existing material to provide an ethnographic perspective critical to an understanding of the global economy and socio-political systems. By placing each article in a particular context that reveals new insights into neo-liberal transformations of citizenship and sovereignty, Ong brings theoretical potency and empirical energy to a growing field of scholarship.
Originally published in: International Affairs 83(4), 2007.
Eliot Che is a researcher and web developer. He studies the political implications of technological transformation and the social effects of virtual space.
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Neo-Liberalism and the role of Government.
May 23, 2010 by politicalsnapshots.w…
Neo-Liberalism and the role of Government.
When a government abdicates its responsibility in regulating the economy (as did the U.S. government), capitalist greed accompanied by all sorts of illegal amassing of wealth by the few, at the expense of the majority in society takes place. In other words, policies of neo-liberalism compel governments to abandon regulation of the economy, so that only profit- making becomes the law of the land. Society be damned. The citizen is only a consumer. The government is only a facilitator of business exploitation.
A government as a body that has the power to enforce environmental, labor and consumer laws was required by neo-liberal philosophy to abandon its most critical responsibility of social policy to “market forces”. While it is true that Democracy gives ordinary people a significant voice in government, at the end of the day, who makes the policies that the U.S. government pursues, is what matters. When that question is properly answered, then, we will find out who has power in America.
If a government relinquishes its central and essential duty of protecting the poor. If it fails to tackle unemployment, poverty, and income disparity in society, then, who is it working for? When the government makes it its religious duty to propagate privatization and market deregulation, then we see the sleeper hold neo-liberalism has on government. “Under Neo-liberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit”. Giroux.
Explaining the danger of neo-liberalism on society, Henry A. Giroux writes,
“Neo-liberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not, dangerous ideologies of the 21st century. Its pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world”.
Unlike president Reagan who believed that the “government was a problem, not a solution”, President Obama says, “ that the real issue was not whether government ought to be big or small but whether what it did actually worked”. President Obama in his speech on overhauling financial regulation, seems to have understood the failure of neo-liberalism and the economic destruction it has brought on the U.S. in specific, and the world in general. Moreover, he has made the government’s ceding its responsibility as one of the main culprits for the United States’ financial meltdown. Obama said:
“Now, one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we’ve known in generations — at least since the ’30s. And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility — from Wall Street all the way to Washington — that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great depression. A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s what happened too often in the years leading up to this crisis”. (Neo-Liberalism, Anarcho-Capitalism).
For the first time in the last thirty years, the bankruptcy of neo-liberalism is so obvious that neither sorcery nor religion could save it. According to Naomi Klein, Neo-Liberalism “has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences. Wall Street crisis should be for neo-liberalism what fall of Berlin Wall was for Communism”.
Professor Mekonen Haddis.
Yes, neo-liberalism has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor. I think it is time that the poor and middle class should start fighting back. Otherwise, it will still be a case of the polarization of classes where the rich are still getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.