The Tyranny of Common Sense

Mexico's Post-Neoliberal Conversion

Irmgard Emmelhainz

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438485959
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

As one of the first countries to implement a neoliberal state apparatus, Mexico serves as a prime example of the effects of neoliberal structural economic reform on our sensibility. Irgmard Emmelhainz argues that, in addition to functioning as a form of politico-economic organization, neoliberalism creates particular ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. It reconfigures common sense, justifying destruction and dispossession in the name of development and promising to solve economic precarity with self-help and permanent education. Pragmatism reigns, yet in always aiming to maximize individual benefit and profit, such common sense fuels a culture of violence and erodes the distinction between life and death. Moreover, since 2018, with the election of a new Mexican president, neoliberalism has undergone what Emmelhainz calls "post-neoliberal conversion, " intensifying extractavism and ushering in a novel form of moral, political, and intellectual hegemony rooted in class tensions and populism. Integrating theory with history and lived reality with art, film, and literary criticism, The Tyranny of Common Sense will appeal to academics and readers interested in the effects of neoliberalism and, now, post-neoliberalism in Mexico from a broader, global perspective. Originally published in Spanish in 2016 as La tiranía del sentido común: La reconversión neoliberal de México, the English edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to encompass a critical vision of the current regime.

CHAPTER ONE

Neoliberal Sensibility and Common Sense

IN HIS 1993 NOVELLA, La leyenda de los soles (The legend of the suns), Homero Ardijis paints a sunken, deforested Mexico City with dead vegetation, the volcano scape destroyed, and trash everywhere. He describes it as a “boundless and foreign world,” a city that underwent “gradual loss of soil, air and water … the loss of its own self.”¹ The environment imagined by Ardijis for Mexico City in 2027 is dysfunctional and violent, the dictatorship exacerbated by indescribable forms of control and violence. He portrays a city scourged by evils perceived as being of the same kind: crime, corruption, pollution. On the background of Ardijis’s apocalyptic visions of the city, akin to the ruined earth in Elysium (2013) filmed in Tijuana, are the neoliberal reforms promised in the 1990s: a road of prosperity for all that which became the answer to the problems of corruption of public service and bureaucracy, and the dysfunctional government body in the 1970s and 1980s. The “transition to democracy” heralded in 2000 when the PAN (National Action Party) took power after the PRI’s (Institutional Revolution Party) seventy-year-long reign, assuring the end of the perfect dictatorship and the beginning of real democracy: alternation, citizen participation, and an antagonistic struggle for consensus between civil society, the PAN, the PRI, and the leftist party PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).

More than twenty-five years after Ardijis’s novel was published, I live in “CDMX,” a branded Mexico City and a key locality in the economic and cultural map of globalization. With most of the public services privatized, it has become an archipelago of sophistication and wealth where the quality of gasoline blued the sky. We enjoy “first-world” infrastructure and services; there are police officers in every corner, including eventual checkpoints, and informal vendors and beggars have been removed from public spaces. Beautiful “public” green areas flourish—some of them kept by neighbors, corporations, or private businesses, instead of the municipality, under a program called “Adopta un área verde” by the city’s government (Adopt a Green Area). The city I inhabit and the privileged areas in which I circulate are far from the dry, dark desert of violence that Ardijis imagined in his novella. After twenty years of privatizations, concessions, and the implementation of “zonification”—which means that every one of Mexico City’s delegations or boroughs is oriented toward their optimal economic vocations—privileged territories, like in many cities throughout Latin America and increasingly all over the world, coexist side by side with misery belts or slums. That is to say, privileged areas in which the government and the private sector are present to protect and apply an array of techniques of governance, coexist with misery belts or zones of sacrifice of environmental devastation inhabited by populations that have been made redundant by neoliberal reforms, This creates relationships of injurious interdependency between both kinds of populations, the latter a by-product of the expansion of the scope of migration from the mid-twentieth century of the present, continuous migration of rural population to urbanized areas.

Under Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico came to be governed through a complex network of relationships and forms of power that complemented each other: violent state repression, government of opinion, and repressive tolerance, along with the criminalization of dissidence, labor precariousness and debt as forms of submission, and fear and insecurity caused by “organized crime” or “narco violence.” In sum, a form of oligarchic totalitarianism was set up, supported by government legislation and surveillance, political forces that propelled a redistribution of wealth focused on the private sphere, media and cultural production in detriment to public infrastructure, and health and education systems. In this manner, neoliberal politics systematically exerted violence on bodies and forms of life, creating a form of sovereignty described as “deep power,” comprised by decision-making behind closed doors by financial and political elites. That is to say, key choices concerning the economy came to be negotiated in secret within the limitless reign of capital, enclosing the space of political decision-making by shutting out the rest of the population.² Under this form of power, the government became the guarantor of the accumulation of capital hidden behind a smoke screen, where political processes foreign to issues of political decision-making were made public; for instance, cultural wars, corruption scandals, and human rights violations. At the global level, the new oligarchs had taken up the task to transform all nation states into servile instruments to enrich themselves and increase their power through neoliberal reforms and financial capitalism.³ These elites are characterized by their lack of roots and alliances with nation states and carelessness about the injuries they could cause to workers or the environment. They tend to live inside gated communities and may float above traffic in otherwise congested cities, and they operate above borders, laws, and national and international regulations.⁴ Thus, in order to legitimize the neoliberal politics that favored the elites while causing dispossession, extermination, and violence, state institutions were “hollowed out”—or rather, molded—to serve the interests of global capital in the name of “development” and “economic growth.” A state of exception of permanent insecurity was normalized in which unprecedented and unthinkable levels of violence came to be part of the fabric of daily life and fodder to the Infosphere (the mass media and the culture industry). The collateral damage of neoliberal predator capitalism expanded to destroy social ties and safety networks, relying on social Darwinism as a form of subjection and extermination, thereby legitimizing neoliberal politics of exclusion and violence.

One of the reasons for the normalization of extreme violence was the neoliberal institution—grounded on our colonial structures that remain intact from the past—of racialized disposability. This means that it no longer makes sense to think about the world as divided into “first” and “third”; rather, we are seeing modernized pockets of privilege and cultural sophistication coexist with enclaves inhabited by “redundant populations.” This sector of the population has differential access to health care, citizenship, debt, education, and jobs. Some of them live in “zones of sacrifice,” or the literal contemporary manifestation of coloniality. These zones are inhabited by communities surviving with the toxic load of our systemic need to consume fossil fuels undergoing slow violence,⁵ and their common and sustainable autonomous forms of life are being destroyed in the name of well-being and development. Moreover, their destruction is de facto sustaining the privileges of people living in modernized enclaves who are denying, yet justifying, their annihilation under the logic of development and inclusion in global markets.

For the past forty years, people have been dispossessed and forcibly displaced to misery belts, rural cities, or to the north. Meanwhile, urban centers operate with measures like gentrification and the penalization of what are known as “quality of life crimes” such as: itinerant selling, homelessness, or vagrancy. There, “social cleansing” is the rule. Furthermore, the land of millions of people is being expropriated and given to private corporations in the name of “public interest” to create agroindustrial farms of Special Zones of Economic Development (SEZs), infrastructure projects like dams, highways, car manufacturing, growth of marihuana and poppy, or kitchens for chemically designed drugs; or they are transformed into extractivist zones. It is a fact that Mexico is a leading producer in silver, tenth in gold and copper and among the top ten in lead, fluorite, bismuth, and other minerals. Since 2000, the Mexican government has given hundreds of mining concessions to foreign companies, mostly Canadian.⁶ The consequence: environmental devastation manifesting as the rapid appearance of dead rivers, dry wells, bare mountains, toxic oceans, and deforested woodlands, all reflected on a damaged and impoverished social environment subject to precariousness and unthinkable levels of social violence.

It could thus be argued that neoliberalism is a form of ecological, social, and cultural reengineering that has destroyed the environment while reproducing a culture of consumption, stupidity, and illiteracy. As an intensified phase of colonial capitalism, the current manifestations of neoliberalism bring to light the fact that violence has sustained the system of Western supremacy by violence through extractivism exerted on Indigenous peoples’ territories and bodies and specific forms of violence against women. Parallels may be drawn between the extraction of reproductive labor and financial exploitation and the capture of the sensible realm and vital forces by both financialization and automation; language has been expropriated by corporatized education, music by TV contests, flesh and sexuality by mass pornography, the city by the police and corporations, and our friends by Darwinist competitivity and precarious working conditions. Paul B. Preciado articulated the continuity of colonialism in the present in this manner: “If the annihilating workings of sixteenth-century colonialism hid behind the shine of Potosí silver, today, behind the screens are hiding the most extreme forms of neocolonial, technological and subjective domination.”⁷

A lot of people have succumbed to the neoliberal limitation of autonomous action and have begun to think of themselves mainly as consumers or victims (of narco or state violence), and they are prey not only to the culture of hedonistic pleasure, but also of fear and violence. This is why one of the consequences of neoliberalism is the production of a collective existential crisis of agency. This crisis led to the current form of authoritarianism rooted in historical, pedagogical, and cultural Mexican traditions, which has taken further form as a net of control that proliferates, displaces, molds, and subjects under the guise of a neo-populist fight against corruption and petit bourgeois decadence (the 1% is invisible from this equation).

If the consequences of neoliberal policies have been so dire, I must ask, what has made neoliberalism prevail? One of the reasons I can think of is to consider neoliberalism as the intensification of violence inherent to modern capitalist sensibility that manifests itself in our relationships to the world, nature, things, and beings, presupposing the creation of surplus value, unlimited growth, and development by way of the mercantilization of life and the marketization of human and nonhuman forms of life. Neoliberalism, moreover, has become the filter through which we now perceive and understand that which cannot be verbalized, a form of common sense that permeates our basic ability to understand and judge things based on a fear of others; it means existing in survival mode and having as goals hedonistic pleasure and generating surplus value. The neoliberal violence against the sensible, furthermore, means that sensibility and common sense are the battlefields on which individual options and collective forces of economics and politics are at play. From this point of view, “neoliberalism” designates at least three different things: the restructuration of capitalist social relations; a political party that at every juncture (it does not matter if left or right) tries to expand the free-market economic policy favoring corporations and the oligarchy; and governance through specific forms of coercion. The kind of neoliberal violence against individuals that subsumed desire to market forces, however, is no longer enough to sustain the neoliberal economic politics, which explains why neofascisms are being implemented worldwide. If neoliberalism had taught us to live according to free-market imperatives, now that it is in crisis, it is showing us its true, hostile face, attacking what remains of autonomous life forms and spaces with the intensification of extractivism, gender violence, intolerance, and militarization. The self-governing and governing techniques of coaching, repressive tolerance, and the promise of success and riches had been powerful tools of neoliberal subjection. But now that the incompatibility of neoliberalism and democracy is obvious, its “side effects” (such as environmental devastation, massive dispossession and displacement, and the COVID-19 pandemic, increased precarity and poverty) are impossible to deny. Therefore, the system needs to find other techniques like repression and the expansion of hatred against all who refuse to comply to the mandates of the free market. But what got us here is neoliberal common sense, the product of violence against the sensible at the basis of neoliberal subjectification.

Hannah Arendt described common sense as deriving from sensibility, or from the experience of the materially and sensually given world; it is the sense data that we share with others, enabling us to live and judge from a singular perspective in our common world.⁸ Similarly, Suely Rolnik defines the sensible as the human capacity to perceive and feel to apprehend the world—what we denominate reality. The modes of existence or reality are articulated according to sociocultural codes that configure people, their places, and their distribution in the social field, which are inseparable from the distribution of access to material and immaterial goods, as well as from hierarchies and representations. Such codes orient the ways in which we apprehend the world; our perceptions and feelings are already associated to codes and representations that we project upon perception, which allow us to make sense of it.⁹

Therefore, common sense is shared meaning, with the potential to create a sense of belonging in social and political terms. Neoliberal common sense, however, is tied to a crisis of relationality, diagnosed by Félix Guattari in the 1980s, an exacerbated form of modern alienation. In Guattari’s view, this crisis is due to the reduction of kinship networks to the bare minimum, the poisoning of domestic life by the gangrene of mass-media consumption, the ossification of family life by a standardization of behavior, and the reduction of neighbor relations to their meanest expression.¹⁰ This crisis translates to a common sense of hostility toward public schools, social security, and other institutions focused on helping the weakest and administering the commons. Slowly, public institutions were privatized and government functions subcontracted, under the justification that they would be more competitive and offer higher-quality services. The mechanism for achieving this worked as follows: first, subsidies were taken away to make the organism or institution inoperative; then, unions were demonized and their independence and agency were limited. In order for the given public institution to stop being a disaster, people accepted privatizati...