This post is part of our symposium on Mutant Neoliberalism. You can find the full symposium here. 

Verónica Gago – 

In an interview, Michel Foucault said that when “actually existing” socialism was put in scare quotes, as if it were not exactly “real,” the only thing the scare quotes revealed was the strength of an abstract ideal that theorists invariably used as a measuring stick to evaluate, and theoretically marginalize, whatever was actually happening on the ground. What if we were to apply such an ironic qualification to neoliberalism? Consider Latin America, for instance: Is there an “actually existing” neoliberalism in Latin America that fails the normative ideal of its theorists? Is this a geographically specific version of neoliberalism that has just been marginalized due to the region’s peripheral reality and unique history? It would seem, instead, that the opposite is true: The problematic feature of neoliberalism is its polymorphism, its capacity to combine and adapt. The thesis of this book points to precisely this capacity: neoliberalism’s mutant character.

With this thesis, the book seeks to answer a conjunctural question which I will also consider in this comment: Why is neoliberalism—in different geographies—allied with extreme conservatism, and even with fascism, today? The book also addresses a longstanding question which we have repeatedly posed in these years of permanent crisis: Is there any force that is capable of burying neoliberalism? Indeed, each new conjuncture only differently conjugates the question: Can the coronavirus pandemic annihilate neoliberalism? Following William Callison and Zachary Manfredi’s text on the notion of mutant neoliberalism and the possibility of its extinction, the chapters in the book respond to this series of questions with a complex answer: Even political conjunctures that seem to be animated by an opposition to neoliberal presuppositions can ultimately give them new impetus, reassembling and relaunching neoliberalism in ways that demonstrate its mutant cunning.

I would like to do two things in this comment. First, I will examine key aspects of recent Latin American developments in order to suggest a certain genealogy of neoliberalism. Second, I will address Etienne Balibar’s chapter in the book, linking it to the dynamics of generalized indebtedness in subaltern populations, and drawing connections with the recent cycle of feminist struggles.

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This post is Part II of David Grewal’s response to Mutant Neoliberalism, Part I is available here. You can find the full symposium here. 

David Grewal – 

As I noted in my first post, it is possible that the COVID-19 pandemic will force a reckoning with the democratic deficit in the European Union and prompt a renewal of left-wing politics across the continent. However, the existing constitutional machinery of the five presidencies that make up the EU is both complex and considerably resistant to change, even (perhaps especially) in a crisis. In 2014, in a review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, I wondered what we could expect from “today’s unhappy alliance between the remnants of the old workers’ parties of Western Europe and the Bundesbank?” It was mainly a rhetorical question: I expected very little from the political alliance behind “zombie” neoliberalism in Europe. But in light of what Callison and Manfredi term neoliberalism’s mutations, it is worth noting what has in fact come to pass since then: electoral defeat after electoral defeat for the left (and even center-left). This trend should give pause to those who think further federalization will provide the answer to Europe’s deep ordoliberal tendencies, and yet that seems to be the only path that many progressives in Europe can imagine (another TINA, but a teleological one).

Following Cooper’s cogent analysis, what we should expect is precisely what we have been seeing: stasis at the level of the institutions and far-right electoral strategies that leverage anti-austerity sentiment among ordinary voters by promising something that the straitjacketed parties of the mainstream center-left and even the far left have been mostly unwilling to offer: a break with neoliberalism and, if that agenda requires it, a break with ‘Europe.’ Again, the COVID-19 pandemic seems more likely to consolidate rather than repudiate this trend. It will not soon be forgotten that even pro-EU governments in France and Germany called a panicked halt to the export of medical equipment to a stricken Italy while national borders were raised again across the continent.

These events brings us to the second piece I want to discuss, Slobodian and Plehwe’s history of the rise of Eurosceptic neoliberalism, “Neoliberals against Europe,” which presents an important counter to any simplistic equation of the EU with neoliberalism (or ordoliberalism) and hence of Euroscepticism with anti-neoliberalism.

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This post is part of our symposium on Mutant Neoliberalism. You can find the full symposium here. 

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian –

Ken Loach’s 2016 film I Am Daniel Blake (2016) depicts post-crash austerity in all of its bleak barbarity. The plot revolves around the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged carpenter, who attempts to navigate the British welfare system after a heart attack makes it hard for him to work. The authorities don’t seem to agree with Blake’s cardiologist, who deems him unfit to work, so they send him down a rabbit hole of denied unemployment claims, rejected appeals, idiotic make-work and financial destitution. The message the system sends to our unlucky hero is that he is not worthy: of the state’s resources, of an employer’s goodwill, of anyone’s sympathy, of his own basic humanity. On Michel Feher’s assessment, we might add another shortcoming: he isn’t creditworthy, either.

There are thousands, if not millions, of Daniel Blakes struggling to get by in the world, many of whom have even less going for them than this fictional white man living in Newcastle. In his contribution to Manfredi and Callison’s Mutant Neoliberalism, Feher views these individual lives as the final domino in a decades-long cascade of policy decisions that made creditworthiness a prerequisite for getting by in the world—whether one is an individual, a company, or a country.

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This post is part of our symposium on Mutant Neoliberalism. You can find the full symposium here. 

David Grewal – 

Mutant Neoliberalism is an excellent collection of essays canvassing what editors William Callison and Zachary Manfredi rightly diagnose as the changing face of neoliberalism – really, the multiplicity of national, transnational and post-national neoliberalisms – evolving in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Instead of a mortal wounding, the crisis generated the paradox, as several authors in the collection note, that neoliberalism’s failures led to more, not less, neoliberalism. Crises generated by neoliberal prescriptions (privatization, financialization, austerity, etc.) are said to be solvable using more of the same, while radical reform proposals face the usual assessment (TINA = “there is no alternative”). This fact led to the conception of neoliberalism after the crisis as a “zombie” formation, the onward march of the undead, but Callison and Manfredi rightly note that events around 2016 seem to have altered this diagnosis. Instead, neoliberalism now seems less “zombie” than what they term “mutant,” proliferating in new forms, and hybridizing with traditional and new right social and political movements, sometimes in spite of manifest ideological and programmatic differences between them and the “pure” form of post-war neoliberalism (of Hayek, Mont Pellerin, and so ).

All this seems right and interesting. I want to focus in this brief response on the place of the “international” in this diagnosis, particularly as it concerns debates in the European context. It seems to me that both the undead (“zombie”) and the hybridizing (“mutant”) aspects of contemporary neoliberalism are deeply interrelated and best understood in relation to the problem of international economic integration (a.k.a. “global capitalism”). I will focus therefore on two excellent contributions to the volume, one by Melinda Cooper (“Anti-Austerity on the Far Right”), which looks at the anti-neoliberal politics of far-right movements in Europe during the interwar rise of fascism, and then again from the 1970s to the present; and another by Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe (“Neoliberals against Europe”), which studies right-wing Euroscepticism in relation to a politics of national neoliberalisms.

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