To begin, I can’t write a post on neoliberalism without talking about the Zapatistas, who first entered the global stage in 1994 as a militant resistance organization against neoliberalism. This greatly important and currently living movement is often credited for sparking the anti-globalization movement and popularizing the term “neoliberalism”. To learn about the Zapatistas and their beliefs on neoliberalism, you can read their 2005 Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. Their horizontal governing structure has recently changed for the first time since the Sixth Declaration and you can learn more about it at that same website which is where they share their official communications.
The term “neoliberalism” addresses the interlocking relationships of several key trends over the last forty years that form the social, economic, and political conditions that determine the distribution of life chances (Spade 2015, 21-22). These trends include: (1) “a significant shift in the relationships of workers to owners, producing a decrease in real wages, an increase in contingent labor, and the decline of labor unions”; (2) “the dismantling of welfare programs”; (3) “trade liberalization” also known as globalization; and (4) “increasing criminalization and immigration enforcement” (Spade 2015, 22). This is entwined with “the rollback of the gains of the civil rights movement and other social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, combined with the mobilization of racist, sexist, and xenophobic images and ideas” that justify these forced changes (Spade 2015, 22). This mobilization of hierarchy weaponizes concepts of “freedom” and “choice” to conceal institutionalized inequalities and derail social justice movements.
The real wages of Americans have stagnated since the 1970s along with the decrease in bargaining power of the workers (Spade 2015, 22). Significant changes to law and policy have overturned certain benefits (such as old age pensions and health care) and have made labor organization more difficult, which means fewer workers are unionized (Spade 2015, 22). Additionally, more workers have been pushed into contingent labor, working without job security or benefits (Spade 2015, 22). Neoliberalism positively spins the precarity of contingent labor as allowing increased flexibility and entrepreneurial choice, but in fact there is loss of real compensation through both wages and benefits (Spade 2015, 22). These already insufficient benefits have been continually decreasing since the 1970s while restrictions on eligibility have been increasing (Spade 2015, 22). This is exemplified by “lifetime limits, new provisions excluding immigrants, family caps”, and more (Spade 2015, 22). This is a part of the regime of neoliberalism that seeks to end welfare through substantial policy changes, which affects workers, old people, poor people, and people with disabilities (Spade 2015, 22).
Trade liberalization or globalization assists the “upward distribution of wealth” in conjunction with other imperialist mechanisms that impact the sovereignty of countries (Spade 2015, 23). Transnational corporations utilize trade liberalization to dismantle protections of workers and the environment while imperialist organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank utilize debt schemes to coercively disempower countries (Spade 2015, 23). This has significant effects on the lives of people in these impoverished countries, resulting in preventable deaths, hunger, and environmental destruction (Spade 2015, 24). These conditions prompt increased migration as people seek safety and survival. This illustrates how the Global North is complicit in the migration that it criminalizes.
The effects of globalization have additional domestic impacts, including domestic job loss as corporations seek cheaper (more exploitable) workers (Spade 2015, 24). The frustrations of the domestic working class due to the reduction of labor power, job security, and compensation of wages and benefits is often funneled towards racism and xenophobia by politicians and media (Spade 2015, 24). This energizes racialized ideology and policies of “law and order”, which derail mobilization around beneficial economic reforms while increasing law enforcement as the solution to “crime”, which at its core is a manifestation of “social problems rooted in poverty and the racial wealth divide” (Spade 2015, 24). The criminalization and targeting of racialized and impoverished others is further justified and “fueled by the rhetorical devices of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror” (Spade 2015, 24). Through this rhetoric, drug addiction becomes a crime rather than a health issue, and social protestors and immigrants are seen as dangerous terrorists (Spade 2015, 27). This criminalization and alienation of “the other” is weaponized to deconstruct social welfare policies and services (Spade 2015, 27).
Additionally, the neoliberal regime has resulted in “a major rollback in the law reform gains of the civil rights movement”, which led to “a new doctrine of colorblindness that took the teeth out of these law changes and preserved the racial status quo” (Spade 2015, 28). This is exemplified by the illegalization of affirmative action and school desegregation programs as well as anti-discrimination laws that block the ability to prove discrimination (Spade 2015, 28). These mechanisms function as attempted proof that U.S. law is racially equal and therefore inequality is the fault of the individual (Spade 2015, 28). In reality, this is a misunderstanding of how racism works, as it individualizes racism and erases institutionalized forces and historical context. Racial disparity is inherent in a nation-state that is founded upon “slavery, genocide, land theft, internment, and immigration exclusion” and policies that “exclude people of color from the benefits of wealth-building programs for U.S. citizens like Social Security, land grants, credit and other homeownership support” (Spade 2015, 43). The normalization of this systemic racial disparity as equal opportunity allows for the rhetoric of reverse racism, “a concept that misunderstands racism to suggest parallel meanings when white people lose opportunities or access through programs aiming to ameliorate impacts of racism and when people of color lose opportunities due to racism” (Spade 2015, 43).
The conservative ideology of neoliberalism extended into social justice politics as the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s were dismantled by the criminalization of social movements and replaced with nonprofits (Spade 2015, 29). This nonprofit sector grew to fill the holes of the government’s abandonment of social welfare policies and services and created “a new elite sector of law and policy reform” that is mostly white, upper-class, and funded by wealthy donors, which further marginalizes vulnerable communities and results in misaimed agendas and solutions (Spade 2015, 29-30). This often manifests as the reduction of interconnected issues to single issues and identities, which disregards how dismantling power requires a multifaceted analysis, and the prioritization of formal legal equality, which only benefits the elite leadership who is “already served by existing social and economic arrangements” (Spade 2015, 30-35). With the symptomatic solutions of nonprofits, people lose access to “direct, survival-based services” that tackle systemic inequity through the politicization of these services (Spade 2015, 97-98). The elite structure of nonprofits also discourages vulnerable communities’ building of “networking relationships for analysis and resistance”, which is crucial to “the base-building organizing that produces the mass mobilization required for effective social justice movements” (Spade 2015, 98). This is how the nonprofit industrial complex “undermines the transformative potential of social justice work” (Spade 2015, 98).
As resources are funneled into these “quantifiable outcomes”, transformative movements become “underfunded and systematically dismantled” (Spade 2015, 29). Thus, directly democratic and participatory forms of organization are replaced by “hierarchical, staff-run organizations operated by people with graduate degrees” (Spade 2015, 30). In effect, the criminalization of social movements and the nonprofit industrial complex work in tandem to “[establish] narrow parameters in which social movement work [can] occur–solely in forms that do not threaten the white supremacist political and economic status quo of the United States” (Spade 2015, 96). This is why the limited support of nonprofits is funded while social movement work that “exposes and challenges these root causes and conditions of harm and subjection is targeted for destruction” materially and ideologically (Spade 2015, 96).
Similarly, law reform strategies that focus on legal equality are ineffective in addressing oppression as they do not expand the barriers of systemic social and economic hierarchies and only function within them, thus maintaining “conditions of suffering and disparity” (Spade 2015, xv-1). The lesbian and gay rights movement won formal legal recognition and equalities that had costly compromises, including missed coalition opportunities and the alienation of those continually affected by homophobia (Spade 2015, xv-xvi). For example, the determination of marriage as imperative for receiving benefits overlooks “how race, class, ability, indigeneity, and immigration status determine access to those benefits” and narrows the political agenda to a restoration and preservation of privilege (Spade 2015, 31). Likewise, hate crime laws do not deter violence against subjected people, and instead its focus on punishment increases funding and resources for the criminalization systems, which targets subjected people and is where much of this violence actually occurs (Spade 2015, 34). Additionally, this movement has been assimilated into the neoliberal agenda as their strategies move towards privatization, criminalization, and militarization; this is a direct disservice and endangerment to those most vulnerable to state violence (Spade 2015, xv-xvi). Thus, engagement with the electoral process by voting in representatives or passing laws is not sufficient for transformative change (Spade 2015, 3). As “critical political and intellectual traditions” have analyzed, true resistance and transformative change occurs with the examination of the “operations of power and control”, which identifies the actual conditions of vulnerable people thus allowing for more effective strategizing towards increased life chances (Spade 2015, xv).
All subjections require an analysis of the complexity of power. The forces of neoliberalism avoid this analysis in order to sever social issues of the nonprofit, law, and other sectors from “a broader commitment to social justice”, thus perpetuating the “maldistribution of life chances” that harms marginalized people (Spade 2015, 36). The reformism of nonprofits and law mirrors the “neoliberal shift toward the politics of inclusion and incorporation rather than redistribution and deep transformation” (Spade 2015, 29). It is important to examine how these regimes and strategies actually affect people materially, rather than accepting claimed accomplishments (Spade 2015, 10). Otherwise, reform work “merely tinkers with systems to make them look more inclusive while leaving their most violent operations intact” (Spade, 2015, 47). This illustrates how power is decentralized and distributed in different ways, rather than residing with an individual or specific institution (Spade 2015, 2).
The decentralization of power is illuminated by a “multivector analysis of law, power, knowledge, and norms” (Spade 2015, 3). The term “industrial complex” acknowledges the multiple methods of subjection that includes “laws and policies to education, health care, social service, media, and even our own self-conceptions” which dissolves the idea of there being a “central source of power or decision-making” (Spade 2015, 3). Rather, power emerges from the circulation and normalization of the “regimes of knowledge and practice” that “distribute vulnerability and security” (Spade 2015, 4). From this, the concept of a national population is constructed “as those who meet racial, gender, sexual, ability, national origin, and other norms” and how they must be protected from those outside of these norms (“threats” or “drains”) (Spade 2015, 5). These normalized constructs are often seen as neutral and are often invisible, but yet they can cause more harm as they determine life chances, structures, and contexts (Spade 2015, 5).
Neoliberalism normalizes the conditions of inequality primarily through denying its existence, normalizing existing unequal conditions, and individualizing inequality with the rhetoric of “freedom” and “choice” (Spade 2015, 28). In this way, systemic inequality has become a divisive and controversial subject while the “long-term myth of meritocracy” and the “renewed rhetoric of personal responsibility” proliferates (Spade 2015, 28). This suggests “moral fitness” of those with upward mobility while those struggling are “blameworthy, lazy, and, of course, dangerous” (Spade 2015, 28). We must always question, examine, and resist the unrelenting material and ideological effects of neoliberalism if we seek transformative change.
Works Cited
Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke University Press.