Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital
Whether they call on the Left to modernize its project or to return to its values, advocates of a renewed progressive agenda at least agree on the need to break down the hegemony of neoliberalism. With this as their objective, the “modernizers” recommend what ultimately amounts to the administration of pain reducers: they want measures that would lessen the social effects of neoliberal policies, along with regulations that would spare some institutions from the influence of neoliberal management. Supporters of an “authentic” Left, meanwhile, call instead for a frontal opposition to neoliberalism, advocating an unapologetic program of wealth redistribution, greater security for salaried workers, and broader public services. These are in many ways opposite strategies, of course, but in both cases neoliberalism is approached from without — whether to limit its negative effects and contain its ambitions or to oppose it with an antagonistic logic. My own objective in the following pages, by contrast, is to explore the possibility of defying neoliberalism from within — that is, by embracing the very condition that its discourses and practices delineate.
Such an approach is informed both by Michel Foucault’s reflections on the early days of feminism and by Karl Marx’s analysis of the “free laborer.” Consider Foucault first:
For a long time they tried to pin women to their sex. For centuries they were told: “You are nothing but your sex.” And this sex, doctors added, is fragile, almost always sick and always inducing illness. . . . But the feminist movements responded defiantly. Are we sex by nature? Well then, let us be so but in its singularity, in its irreducible specificity. Let us draw the
consequences and reinvent our own type of existence, political, economic and cultural.1
Instead of rejecting sexual norms that were meant to colonize and subject women, Foucault claims, early feminists endeavored to work through them, that is, to embrace them but only to impart them with unexpected meanings and to put them to unforeseen uses.
Now, take Marx: liberal capitalism, the author of Capital tells us, is inseparable from the notion of the “free laborer.” Behind this label, however, what one really sees is a worker whose freedom amounts to dispossession. Indeed, the free worker has been robbed of everything: the capacity to choose his or her occupation, the ownership of the means of production, and the product of his or her activity. This is the lot of the salaried worker, whose labor power is rented out to an employer — who in turn decides on the use of this labor power and owns both the tools of production and the product itself. As Marx also points out, however, bourgeois law establishes an equivalence, a formal equality between the salaried worker and the employer: both are understood as subjects who are free to dispose of their property (be it labor power or capital) and to exchange it at its proper value in the marketplace.2 Does this mean that the role of the labor movement is to denounce the fiction of the free laborer and call on workers to refuse it as an ideological deception? While it is certainly part of the Marxist heritage (for better and for worse) to expose the “formal” equality offered by liberal democracies as a condition of reproduction of the “real” inequalities created by capitalism, it is also the case that the labor movement (including in its Marxist variant) has organized along rather different lines: labor unions have indeed relied on this very notion of the free laborer, and the labor movement even developed as a movement of free laborers whose union and solidarity were meant either to maximize the exchange value of their labor power or, in a more radical vein, to precipitate the crisis of capitalism — since the infamous tendency of the rate of profit to fall (due to the mechanization of industry) means that capitalists always need to increase the exploitation of labor power.
In short, one can hear in both Marx and Foucault a call to accept and inhabit a certain mode of subjection in order to redirect it or turn it against its instigators. The question remains, however, of knowing who is the subject of neoliberalism or, more precisely, of knowing what type of subjectivity is being simultaneously presupposed and targeted by neoliberal policies. On this question, Marx and Foucault once again offer invaluable lessons: Marx, first, because the relation between the neoliberal condition (which I shall try to define) and the condition of the free laborer may be understood in terms of homology and genealogy (i.e., the neoliberal condition is to neoliberalism as the condition of the free laborer is to liberal capitalism). Foucault, too, is helpful, because he chose neoliberalism as the topic of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979 — at the precise time when this economic theory was becoming the new orthodoxy (Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, and in July of the same year Paul Volcker, the architect of the monetarist revolution, became chairman of the Federal Reserve).3
To define the traits of the neoliberal condition, let us first return to the free laborer analyzed by Marx. As Marx has shown us, insofar as it treats us as subjects who are free to dispose of what resources we own (be it capital or labor power), liberalism can legitimately claim to be a humanism, for it never confuses what we are with what we own and therefore never treats us as commodities that can be appropriated. We are sovereign subjects, free to dispose of what we own, and this grants us inalienable rights (such as the right not to be taken for commodities and the right to bargain over what we own and thus sell it at the best possible price). At the same time, this also leaves us with needs and aspirations that cannot be reduced to interests (which could be satisfied according to the law of supply and demand). In other words, liberal capitalism recognizes and even presupposes that we do not grow spiritually rich in the same way that we acquire material wealth. The difference between the two kinds of growth is an essential feature of the liberal condition insofar as the latter predicates the reproduction of subjects who will make good use of their natural propensity to optimize their interests on various forms of nurturing through which disinterested care is both provided as emotional nourishment and morally valued as a necessary complement to profitable endeavors.
Indeed, from a liberal perspective, love, religion, and culture cannot be reduced to a mere calculus of interests: they delineate an existential realm where human desires are not optimally managed through bargaining and the interplay of selfinterested exchanges but are either met or humbled by the manifestation of disinterested feelings — such as divine charity, parental and spousal devotion, social and national solidarity, love and compassion for humanity, and so on. Such a realm is not only meant to complement that of the market, that is, to supplement what market relations can deliver; more than just a safety net, it is required for the formation of subjects who can distinguish between the negotiable and the inalienable and may expect to be treated according to this distinction. For it is only when the demarcation between the negotiating subject and the negotiated commodity is clearly established and enforced that the free laborer can safely submit to the laws of the market without losing his or her sense of (moral) dignity and (political) sovereignty.
As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, socialist movements largely adopted the Marxist critique of the notion of the free laborer, according to which free laborers are alienated in two senses: they are alienated insofar as they do not have control over their life (i.e., they are denied the ability to choose their activity, while both the means of production and the outcome of their labor belong to others), but they are also alienated insofar as liberal law and ideology rob them of the consciousness of their exploitation (since they are invited to consider themselves as owners of their labor power and thus as subjects endowed with a freedom that is equivalent to that of their employer). However, as mentioned above, socialists did not merely recognize and expose the fictitious and ideological character of the freedom granted to the free worker: they also seized on this construct, both in an effort to bolster the price of labor power (through the work of labor unions) and to criticize working conditions (for violating the essential distinction between man and commodity, between the laborer in his or her inalienable dignity and the labor power that he or she owns and rents out).
This dual way of appropriating the figure of the free worker has allowed the labor movement to achieve considerable victories, compounded in the advent and development of the welfare state in its various dimensions. However, in the past three decades, claims based on class interests (e.g., demands for better wages and better job security) or humanist appeals (e.g., “we are not commodities”) have become less and less successful. Though this evolution, which is distinctive of the neoliberal era, can be read in terms of the crisis of the Fordist socioeconomic compact and its impact on the bargaining power of labor vis-à-vis capital, my contention is that it also reflects the decline of the type of free laborer and its gradual replacement by a new form of subjectivity: human capital. Indeed, as I shall argue, the rise of human capital as a dominant subjective form is a defining feature of neoliberalism.
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Notes
An earlier version of this article appeared in Raisons politiques, no. 28 (2007).
- Michel Foucault, “Power and Sex,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977 – 1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 115 – 16.
- Karl Marx, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power,” chap. 6 of A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 of Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977).
- See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.