The Countercultural Logic of Neoliberalism

David Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351118644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why, since the financial crisis of 2008, has neoliberal capitalism remained seemingly impregnable? Why, when it is shown as no longer capable of delivering on its economic promises does its logic pervade all facets of contemporary life? How has it seduced us? This book examines the seductive appeal of neoliberalism by understanding it as a fundamentally counter-cultural logic. Unlike earlier modes of capitalism, neoliberalism is infused by spirit of rebellion and self-creation, with the idealised neoliberal subject overturning traditional morality whilst creating new modes of being based on risk and excess. Tracing the development of the logic of neoliberalism from its beginnings in the thought of Friedrich Hayek in the wake of the post-war period, through the work of neoconservative writers overcoming and moving beyond what they perceived as the nihilism of both the counter-culture and capitalism of the 1960s and 70s, to its establishment as a new moral order underpinning the economic system from the 1980s onwards, the author argues that it is only through a clear understanding of the seduction of neoliberalism that it can be overcome by reimagining our relationships to work and society.

1 Bohemia, counterculture and rebellion

Against the organisation

By the late 1950s the American middle class was at its height. In the years after the Second World War America had looked to its middle class to reach towards the “city on a hill” as they gathered the comforts of mass production around them. The generation who fought in the war came home to the GI bill which sent millions into higher education helping to create a modern workforce. This was a time when differences in white- and blue-collar salaries were low and people from different fields of work lived in the same communities. This expansion of middle-class comfort was a specific goal of post-war administrations as they fought to celebrate the American way of life in contradistinction to the communist enemy in the USSR (Samuel, 2014). High marginal tax rates that were needed for the war effort remained in place, and this had led to a levelling of wealth inequality. The gap between the top and bottom of society had closed significantly since its peak during the 1920s (Picketty, 2014, pp. 291–294). The backbone of the middle-class boom during the post-war period was the great American corporation that had arisen after the Wall Street crash and over the course of the war. Typified by the Ford Motor Company, these organisations had a collectivised outlook where the ultimate purpose of business seemed to be service rather than profit. Exemplified by the famous five dollars a day wage, the idea of service described a relationship between company and society that was cooperative and not based on bare exploitation. This period of market reformism held that business, the individual and society all had a common responsibility for each other’s success. Writers such as Chester I. Barnard and Elton Mayo imagined a paternalistic corporation that placed a moral constraint on capital accumulation, leading to secure employment and good wages. Others, such as Peter Drucker, saw corporations as being embedded in society with concrete stakes and whose decisions had wider impacts than simply on the share price (Christiansen, 2015). The fortunate effect of such ideas and policies was increased consumer power and so increased consumption. Indeed, by the late 1950s economists such as Rostow (1999) were conceiving of the era of consumer capitalism as the highest stage of social development.

At the head of this model of corporate capitalism was a benevolent company led by paternalistic executives. The role of the paternalistic executive was portrayed in the Hollywood cinema of the period. Career movies such as Executive Suite (1954), Women’s World (1954) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) portrayed the corporate executive acting within and for the corporate bureaucracy. Importantly, the idealised figure does not show the concerns of an individualist but demonstrates a selflessness both towards the corporation, his family and so, by extension, the nation (Boozer, 2002). Films portraying the bureaucratic corporation were mirrored in films that showed another form of corporate life, war movies. War films of the mid-1940s, in an effort to produce characters that could embody the virtues considered necessary to achieve victory through cooperative effort, celebrated collective virtues over individualism. The Second World War was fought through tank, bomber and naval crews and massive infantry armies, but American mythology had always celebrated the individual, not the collective. The figure of the frontiersman, asserting his own morality and mode of being on an untamed continent, was the story that nestled at the heart of the American imagination. The mythology of American fiction developed to meet the needs of a modern industrial war effort. Films such as John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) show the move from the individual to cooperative and demonstrated the development of an integrated, democratic unit. Other films, such as The Fighting Seabees (1944), explicitly critiqued individualism as brave but ineffective against cooperative effort (Landon, 1989).

The corporate culture that developed during the war and continued after it overturned the individualist ideology of the frontier. Subsumed into the organisation, the individual was diminished in the name of the collective good. In one sense, this could be seen as a blessing because the culture of American capitalism before the war had led to the great depression and poverty for millions. Individualism and venality had produced immeasurable wealth for some but at the expense of a society and economy that functioned. Corporate boards now developed products for consumers; workers (white male ones) had secure employment and access to the products of that work. Modern science had unravelled the power of the atom. The state was run by experts.

Philosophically this situation was captured through the work of a Russian emigre to France, Alexandre Kojève. Kojève was a scholar of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel and, during the 1930s, he gave a series of lectures in Paris that deeply affected a generation of thinkers (Kojève, 1996). Kojève’s philosophical anthropology relied heavily on the concept of the end of history which is characterised as the end of ideological conflict and debate about the political organisation of society. The end of history represents the point at which man is satisfied by the desire for recognition having been met. Kojève understood the need for recognition as that belonging to the philosophical subject. The individual subject recognises itself as existing in the world but what it desires is confirmation that it exists from another being like itself. The subject desires the knowledge that another subject exists as it itself exists, i.e. the subjective consciousness wants to know that the other is also a subjective consciousness. This desire for recognition ferments a life and death struggle with the other because the subject realises that it can only be sure that the other is a subjective consciousness like itself, if it is willing to risk its own life in order to demonstrate its subjectivity. This desire for recognition does not however end as planned because one subject, preferring not to be killed, surrenders and becomes the slave, not the equal, of the other. The master remains unrecognised as a subject because the slave, being unable to risk himself, is not worthy of giving recognition. The slave, on the other hand, is now put to work for the master and learns that recognition can come in other forms. Through the outputs of creative labour, the slave can now recognise his own self. The political history of humanity is, on this Kojèveian reading, driven by this desire for recognition with the changing structures of social organisation representing progress towards a state of universal recognition. The end of history was ushered in through the universal values embodied in the French revolution in which recognition was given by the state to the subject. All that was left was for the state to do was to organise the efficient administration of life within mutual recognition.

In a famous footnote to his published lectures on Hegel, Kojève reflects on the condition of man at the end of history. Kojève describes post-historical man as, properly speaking, ceasing to exist as a subject when there is nothing left to negate. This is how history ends through the lack of a need for action. Kojève describes post-historical man as “content as a result of … artistic, erotic and playful behaviour” (1996, p. 159). Post-historical man is contented through culture. But this contentment is a curious one; it denotes a lack of something more to do rather than an emotion such as joy. Post-historical man is content because he has nothing to do and has no great metaphorical mountains to climb (though perhaps real ones in his leisure). Kojève goes on to describe the post-war world as one that contained different inflexions of the post-historical. He describes the USSR and the US as, for all intents and purposes, the same. Post-war America, due to the reduction in inequality and the relative prestige of the average white, male citizen was, in many ways, classless. This world, built on the techno-scientific domination of nature and materialism, was not so dissimilar to that of the USSR, just richer. He says, “I was led to conclude that the ‘American way of life’ was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the world prefiguring the ‘eternal present’ future of all humanity” (1996, p. 161). The American experience was, on this reading, the destiny of the world.

However, beneath the rising affluence and apparent security of post-war America a deep dissatisfaction seemed to be growing that was spiritual rather than material (Inglehart, 1977). Such a dissatisfaction was narrated in the novel by Sloan Wilson, but not the film version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson, 2005). The hero, Tom Rath, rejects the corporate world in favour of his own individual autonomy. A series of books by C. Wright Mills (2002), William H. Whyte (1960), Vance Packard (2007) and David Riesman (1961) criticised the stifling conformity of corporate America. Whyte, an editor of Fortune magazine, a management publication, attacked the denouement of the individual within the corporate structure which undermined creativity in what he called a “fight against genius” (1960, pp. 190–201). The corporation was trying to mould creative workers into a single collective image and was thus undermining the creative effort in-itself.

The philosopher Georges Bataille, who attended Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in Paris during the 1930s, seems to have reached the heart of the matter in a letter he wrote to Kojève. Bataille notes that, “the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’” (1997, p. 296). In the post-historical state, where legal recognition and equality is given to all and material affluence has provided comfort, there is nothing more to do; Bataille questions if this is really enough. After being granted universal recognition, human subjectivity, as negativity, becomes unemployed. What happens to this unemployed negativity is the question of the end of history because, although desire is declared to be satisfied, it is not. For Bataille, “It brings into play representations extremely charged with emotive value … these representations intoxicate him” (1997, p. 298).

Ostensibly, the administrative state provided secure work for the American people and access to education, whilst good homes and consumer goods were open to all (the white population at least). Perhaps most importantly, the reduction in inequality had made the United States partly a classless society; this is why Kojève saw commonalities with the USSR. The US had accomplished what the USSR desired. But, this classless universal recognition did not, in fact, satisfy. This is what Mills and others had noted at the time and was the gap that Bataille saw in Kojève’s reasoning. The negativity of the human subject, the need to negate the given in order to assert one’s own existence was not satisfied by abstract recognition. Bataille posited the concept of unemployed negativity to describe the human subject in this situation. This negativity did not necessarily have political goals or ideological conflicts but a simple need to affirm its own existence through negation. The question of the end of history and the affluent society was therefore the question of this unemployed negativity.

As Whyte had noted, individual creativity, even in what one might assume to be creative industries, was filtered through a corporate decision-making process that may have been efficient but failed to provide satisfaction. America, which had been constructed, in the imaginary at least, on heroic individualism, was cut off from its own mythological self-image through the sedentariness of the post-historical and by the corporate ideology of the post-war period. The heroic individual was abandoned in favour of the corporation that provided material comfort but stymied spiritual satisfaction. Americans were estranged from the ideology of Americanness in which the sovereign individual dominated. Writing some years later, Westhues noted that these conditions, in which the individual is not able to reach the ideological promise of the society, form the basis of a disillusionment that sparks a countercultural reaction to the dominant social order (Westhues, 1972, p. 30).

***

Who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.

– Allen Ginsberg, from the poem Howl, 1954–1955 (Charters, 1992)

László Benedek’s film The Wild One (1953) shows some of the tensions of post-war America. On the one hand the film is presented as a warning to small-town America of the dangers presented by out of control and purposeless youth, but on the other it offers a seductive image of this rebellion. The film begins with a warning that the supposedly shocking scenes that follow are a representation of real events, but the opening scene also presents a solution. A group of motorcycle riding youths led by Johnny, played Marlon Brando, rides into a small town that is hosting a motorcycle race. The gang drives through a stop barrier causing marshals to jump out of the way, then, after briefly watching the race they, as a group, walk across the track in front of a rider. Their unconcern with their own safety appals the locals but is done for their benefit. The gang members are attempting to demonstrate their willingness to risk their lives for no other reason than prestige and, we sense, out of their own boredom. One local resident who remonstrates with the gang is invited to take part in a drag race with Johnny, the resident declines and is then called chicken by the gang. He walks away. The man feels no need to take part in a dangerous battle for prestige with the gang leader. Small town suburban life is, at this moment, shown to be satisfactory and safe; the man feels no need to prove himself. Then a curious thing happens: the local sheriff arrives and tells the gang to leave and threatens to throw them in jail if they don’t. Surprisingly, Johnny leads the gang away. The sheriff and Johnny stare at each other momentarily and the gang leave with some respect for him, primarily, it seems, because he stood up to them, thus demonstrating his willingness to risk himself. He is therefore deserving of respect. The opening seven minutes give the moral lesson of the film, ‘outlaws’ (as the gang are described) need a firm hand and a strong father figure. Indeed, when the sheriff first enters, one of gang remonstrates by saying sarcastically, “We want to watch the thrilling races, Daddy”. They crave a father. Post-war America, it seems, may not be providing this.

The film presents a second, romantic, message regarding Johnny and his gang. The Wild One is a Western set in modern America and the gang members embody the rugged individualism of American mythology though they are absent of the moral code that governs the classic myth. The film therefore has commonalities with later Westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) or Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) which gloried in nihilistic violence whilst romanticising the outlaw living beyond social rationalisation.

Johnny leads the gang of outlaws, The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, from small town to small looking for fun and to intimidate ‘squares’ who are derided for their lack of imagination and the general banality of their culture. The real action of the film starts when the gang enters a second town. The townsfolk, initially excited, come out of their shops and children chase the motorcycles through the street. The bar owner, sensing an opportunity, instructs his assistant to put more beers on ice. We quickly learn that there is a difference between the two towns in the capabilities of the local sheriff. When there is an accident between one of the motorcycles and a car the sheriff instinctively wants to avoid any kind of confrontation. With one of their members injured the gang members stay in the town and decamp to the bar. Johnny finds the jukebox and puts on a soundtrack of bee-bop that will remain throughout the rest of the movie. The soundtrack and the language of the gang, a pastiche of hip speak, tie this group of youths to Beat culture. The film therefore predates the arrival of Beat culture to a mainstream audience by four years for, although already written, Jack Kerouac’s seminal On the Road was not published until 1957, Ginsberg’s poem Howl (which cited The Wild One¹) had not yet been written, and Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro”, had not been conceived. It is these initial scenes in the bar that establish the seductive appeal of the film. The exotic speech and music as well as the mannerisms of the gang fly in the face of the staid culture of the 1950s. This is typified in an interaction between Johnny and Cathy (the niece of the bar owner and daughter of the sheriff). Cathy wants to know what the group do at the weekends, and wonders if they go to dances. Johnny, horrified, declares such things to be square and says that the point is simply to “go!” Johnny’s attitude is encapsulated moments later when asked by another girl what he is rebelling against; “What have you got?” is the reply. Johnny and the gang are juxtaposed against small-town life and thus the safety and comfort of post-war America. The need to rebel is presented as something primal, in this sense they seem to typify Bataille’s concept of unemployed negativity. There is no obvious material need for this rebellion, yet there is still a need. Cathy herself admits this when she tells Johnny of her dreams of escape – she feels the stifling atmosphere too.

In his essay, “The White Negro”, published in Dissent in 1957, Norman Mailer described the culture of the hipster that had developed in the years following the end of World ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bohemia, counterculture and rebellion: against the organisation
• 2 Neoconservative backlash and capitalist nihilism
• 3 Bohemia and moral economy of neoliberalism
• 4 The image of libidinal capitalism: from the Protestant ethic to the ecstasy of the entrepreneur
• 5 The politics of transgression and liberty: the Alt-Right and techno capitalism
• 6 Bohemia, post-capitalism and dreaming with our eyes open: an outline of a post-neoliberal politics
• Index