In 1996, the war on poverty was ended and the war on the poor began.

In response to
populations deemed sexually, racially or economically abnormal, Clinton introduced
welfare reform to solve the supposed crisis ofmoral dependency. Exclusions arose on
the basis of drug use, reproduction, wage Labor, Or Time on welfare, with the
attendant mechanisms of regulation and control. The welfare state metamorphosized
into the penal state, Enabling neoliberalism’s unopposed expansion

Wacquant [Loic, Prof, of Sociology at U.C. Berkeley and Centre de sociologie] europeenne, Paris,
Punishing the Poor; The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, 2009]
The resolutely punitive turn taken by penal policies in advanced societies at the close of the twentieth
century thus does not pertain to the simple diptych of "crime and punishment," It heralds the
establishment of a new-government of social insecurity, "in the expansive sense of techniquest and procedures aimed at
directing the conduct of the men"17 and women caught up in the turbulence of economic deregulation and the
conversion of welfare into a springboard toward precarious employment; an organizational design within which
the prison assumes a major role and which translates, for the groups residing in the nether regions of social space, in the
imposition of severe and supercilious supervision. It is the United States that invented this new politics of poverty during
the period from 1973 to 1996, in the wake of the social, facial, and antistatist reaction to the progressive movements
of the pre-ceding decade that was to be the crucible of the neoliberal revolution.18 This is why this book takes the
reader across the Atlantic to probe the entrails of this bulimic penal state that has surged out of
the ruins of the charitable state and of the big black ghettos.
The argument unfolds in four steps. The first part ("Poverty of the Social State") shows how the rise of
the carceral sector partakes of a broader restructuring of the US bureaucratic field tending to criminalize poverty and its
consequences so as to anchor precarious wage work as a new norm of citizenship at the bottom of the class structure while
remedying the derailing of the traditional mechanisms for maintaining the ethnoracial order
(chapter 2). The planned atrophy of the social state, culminating with the 1996 law on "Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity," which replaced the right to "welfare" with the obligation of "workfare," and the sudden
hypertrophy of the penal state are two concurrent and complementary developments (chapter
3). Each in its own manner, they respond, on the one side, to the forsaking of the Fordist wage-work compact and the
Keynesian compromise in the mid-1970s, and, on the other side, to "the crisis of the ghetto as a de-vice
for the sociospatial confinement of blacks in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution and the wave
of urban riots of the 1960s. Together, they ensnare the marginal populations of the metropolis in
a carceral-assistantial net that aims either to render them "useful" by steering them onto the track of
deskilled employment through moral retraining and material suasion, or to warehouse them out of reach in the devastated
core of the urban "Black Belt" or in the penitentiaries that have become the latter's distant yet direct satellites. 19
The second part ("Grandeur of the Penal State") dissects the modalities and identifies the
engines behind the ascent of the penal state in the United States. Chapter 4 retraces the onset
of a regime of permanent and generalized carceral hyperinflation without precedent in a democratic society, while
crime rates stagnated and then receded, and sketches the lateral expansion of the "penal dragnet" that now holds
several tens of millions of Americans in its mesh by means of judicial supervision and criminal
databanks. Chapter 5 documents the stupendous expansion of the means devoted to the punitive
supervision of the poor and weighs the astronomical financial and social costs of the, ascent of the correctional institution
among public bureaucracies while the economic and social weight of the state diminishes. It also shows how the
country's authorities have strived to enlarge their carceral capacity by resorting to private
imprisonment, by hardening conditions of detention, and by shifting part of the cost of their
confinement onto the inmates and their families.
The third part ("Privileged Targets") explains why the "great confinement" of fin-de-siecle America strikes
first and foremost the subproletariat of the black ghettos undermined by deindustrialization, among the declining fractions of
the working class (chapter 6), and the reviled figure of the "sex offender," among vectors of deviance
in violation of the Puritan ethic of work and domestic order (chapter 7). It gives us an opportunity
to stress the properly symbolic effects of the unleashing of the penal system, especially how the
latter reinforces, by dramatizing it, the legal, social, and cultural demarcation between the
community of "law-abiding citizens" and criminals, so as to turn the latter into a sacrificial
category that concentrates within itself all of the negative properties (immorality, poverty,
blackness) that this community wishes to expel outside itself. The penalization of poverty thus vividly
reminds everyone that, by its sole existence, poverty constitutes an intolerable offense against this "strong and definite state of
the collective conscience" of the nation that conceives of America as a society of affluence, and "opportunity for all."
The central thesis of the present book resides in its very architecture that is, in the empirical and analytical
rapprochement it effects between social policy and penal policy. These two domains of public action continue to be approached
separately, in isolation from each other, by social scientists as well as by those, politicians, professionals, and activists, who
wish to reform them, whereas in reality they already function in tandem at the bottom of the structure of classes and places.
Just as the close of the nineteenth century witnessed the gradual disjunction of the social
question from the penal question under the press of working-class mobilization and the
reconfiguration of the state it stimulated, the close of the twentieth century has been the
theater. of a renewed fusion and confusion of these two issues, following the fragmentation of
the world of the laboring classes**—its industrial dismantlement and the deepening of its
internal divisions, its defensive retreat into the private sphere and crushing feeling of downward
drift,
its loss of a sense of collective dignity, and, lastly, its abandonment by Left parties more
concerned with the games internal to their apparatus than with "changing life" (the motto of the
French Socialist Party in the late, 1970s) ; leading to its near disappearance from the public
scene as a collective actor.20 It follows that the fight against street delinquency now serves as
screen and counterpart to the new social question, namely, the generalization of insecure wage work and
its impact on the territories and life strategies of the urban proletariat.
In 1971, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward published their classic book Regulating the
Poor, in which they argue that "relief programs are initiated to deal with dislocations in the work
system that lead to mass disorder, and are then retained (in an altered form) to enforce work."21
Thirty years later, this cyclical dynamic of expansion and con-traction of public aid has been superseded by a new
division of the labor of nomination and domination of deviant and dependent populations that couples welfare services and
criminal justice administration under the aegis of The same behaviorist and punitive philosophy. The activation of
disciplinary programs applied to the unemployed, the indigent, single mothers, and others "on
assistance" so as to push them onto the peripheral sectors of the employment market, on the
one side, and the deployment of an extended police and penal net with a reinforced mesh in the
dispossessed districts of the metropolis, on the other side, are the two components of a single
apparatus for the management of poverty that aims at effecting the authoritarian rectification of
the behaviors of populations recalcitrant to the emerging economic and symbolic order. Failing
which, it aims to ensure the civic or physical expurgation of those who prove to be "incorrigible" or useless*. And much as
the development of modern "welfare" in the United States from its origins in the New Deal to the contemporary
period was decisively shaped by its entailment in a rigid and pervasive structure of ethnoracial
domination that precluded the deployment of inclusive and universalist programs, we shall see (especially in
chapters 2 and 6) that the expansion of the penal state after the mid-1970s was both dramatically accelerated and
decisively twisted by the revolt and involutive collapse of the dark ghetto as well as by the subsequent ebbing of public
support for black demands for civic equality.22
In the era of fragmented and discontinuous wage work, the regulation of working-class
households is no longer handled solely by the maternal and nurturing social arm of the welfare
state; it relies also on the virile and controlling arm of the penal state. The "dramaturgy of labor"
is not played solely on the stages of the public aid office and job placement bureau as Piven and
Cloward insist in the 1993 revision of their classic analysis.23 At century's turn it also unfolds its stern
scenarios in police stations, in the corridors of criminal court, and in the darkness of prison cells.24 This dynamic coupling-of-
the Left and Right hands of the state-operates through a familiar sharing of the roles between the sexes. The public aid
bureaucracy, now reconverted into an administrative springboard into poverty-level employment, takes up the mission of
inculcating the duty of working for work's sake among poor women (and indirectly their children): 90 percent of
welfare recipients in the United States are mothers. The quartet formed by the police, the court, the prison,
and the probation or parole officer assumes the task of taming their brothers, their boyfriends or husbands, and their sons: 93
percent of US inmates are male (men also make up 88 per-cent of parolees and 77 percent of
probationers). This suggests, in line with a rich strand of feminist scholarship on public policy, gender, and citizenship, 25
that the invention of the double regulation of the poor in America in the closing decades of the twentieth century partakes of
an overall (re)masculinizing of the state in the neoliberal age, which may be understood in part as an oblique reaction to (or
against) the social changes wrought by the women's movement and their reverberations inside the
bureaucratic field. Considering that feminist social scientists have conclusively demonstrated
that one cannot explain the constitution and trajectory of welfare states without factoring gender into the core
equation, there is reason to think that fully elucidating the rise of the penal state will likewise require bringing masculinity
from the periphery toward the center of the analysis of penalty.*
Within this sexual and institutional division in the regulation of the j poor, the "clients" of both
the assistantial and penitential sectors of the state fall under the same principled suspicion: they
are considered morally deficient unless they periodically provide visible proof to the contrary.
This is why their behaviors must be supervised and regulated by the imposition of rigid protocols
whose violation will expose them to a redoubling of corrective discipline and, if necessary; to
sanctions that can result in durable segregation, a manner of social death for moral failing —
casting them outside the civic community of those entitled to social rights, in the case of public
aid recipients, outside the society of "free men" for convicts. Welfare provision and criminal justice are
thus animated by the same punitive and paternalist philosophy that stresses the "individual responsibility" of the "client,"
treated in the manner of a "subject," in contraposition to the universal rights and obligations of the citizen 26 and they reach
publics of roughly comparable size. In 2001, the number of households receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the
main assistance program established by the 1996 "welfare reform," was 2.1 million, corresponding to some 6 million
beneficiaries. That the same year, the carceral population reached 2.1 million, but the total number of "beneficiaries" of
criminal justice supervision (tallying up inmates, probationers, and parolees) was in the neighborhood of 6.5
million. In addition, as we shall demonstrate in chapter 3, welfare recipients and inmates have
germane social profiles and extensive mutual ties that make them the two gendered sides of the
same population coin.
It follows that if one wishes to decipher the fate of the precarious fractions of the working class in their relation to the state, it
is no longer possible to limit oneself to studying welfare programs. One must ex-tend and supplement the
sociology 6"f traditional policies of collective "well-being"—assistance to dispossessed individuals
and households, but also education, housing, public health, family allowances, income
redistribution, etc.—by that of penal policies. Thus the study of incarceration ceases to be the
reserved province of criminologists and penologists to become an essential chapter in the
sociology of the state and social stratification, and, more specifically, of the (decomposition of
the urban proletariat in the era of ascendant neoliberalism. Indeed, the crystallization of a liberal-
paternalist political regime, which practices "laissez faire et laissez passer" toward the top of the class .structure,, at ' the level
of the mechanisms of production of inequality, and punitive paternalism toward the bottom, at the level of their social and
spatial implications-demands that we forsake the traditional definition of "social welfare" as the product of a political
and scholarly common sense overtaken by historical reality. It requires that we adopt an
expansive approach, encompassing in a single grasp the totality of the actions whereby the state
purports to mould, classify, and control the populations deemed deviant, dependent, and
dangerous living on its territory. The study of welfare-turned-workfare must thus be closely coupled with the
investigation of what I call prisonfare: the extended policy stream that responds to intensifying urban ills and assorted socio-
moral turbulences by boosting and deploying the police, the courts, custodial institutions (juvenile detention halls,
jails, prisons, retention centers), and their extensions (probation, parole, criminal data bases and
assorted systems of surveillance, supervision and profiling such as Background checks" by public
officials, employers, and realtors), as well as the commanding images, lay and specialized idioms, and bodies of
expert knowledge elaborated to depict and justify this deployment chief among them the tropes of moral indignation, civic
urgency, and technical efficiency).
TANF SYMBOLICALLY grants the state jurisdiction to shape the poor into productive
and healthy members of society. Those who cannot conform are allowed to die.

Dean [Mitchell, Prof. of Sociology @ Macquarie University, 2002, Cultural Values, No. 1 & 2]
Indeed, in one of his best known lectures on ‘political rationality’, Foucault argues (1981, 2001b) that
modern states have the potential to become ‘really demonic’. They do this because they contain elements of
political power derived from what he calls ‘the city-citizen’ game with those of a pastoral care of
life and the living found within the ‘shepherdflock’ game. What is dangerous about the states of the
twentieth century, according to this statement, is the way in which they combine, articulate or
reinscribe aspects of two trajectories of rule sourced from the Hebraic and the Greek parts of
Western political traditions. These are the powers of a self-governing political community, later understood as
deductive sovereign right of death and the productive biopolitical powers of life and the living. Foucault himself
returned to the theme of the emergence of a politics of life and death several times, particularly where he sought
to discuss state racism, national and state socialism, the Holocaust, genocide, and the development of total war. ‘Massacres
have become vital’, he wrote (Foucault 1979a: 137; see also 2003: 239–64).
[He continues]
As the current government of refugees demonstrates, or the history of indigenous peoples within lands of colonization, there is hardly a form of the liberal
government of the state that does not rest upon domination, coercion, violence or the threat and symbolics of violence. It is impossible to examine the constitutional
legitimacy of the founding of states such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, for example, without confronting the violent appropriation of
land and extirpation of its inhabitants that this entailed. All this occurred with the blessing and active participation of the founding thinkers of modern
constitutionalism such as John Locke, as James Tully (1995: 70–8) has shown, despite the apparent contradiction with the accepted principles of sovereignty and
‘welfare reform’ in the United States in the 1990s, particularly after the passing of the
consent. A more recent example is the history of
federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This is partially a history of the forcible
clearing off the welfare rolls those who would not conform to the requirements that they look and find paid employment or
enter a training programme (Mead 1997; Peck 1998; Schram 2000).
This point about the multiform character of ensembles of rule can be quite easily made in relation to the ‘ethos of
welfare’. Of what does this ethos consist? From Foucault (1981, 2001c), it is about an effort to maximize the security
of the population and the independence of its members. This entails balancing the labour of forming a community of
responsible, virtuous and autonomous citizens with a pastoral care of their health, their needs and their
capacities and means to live. The ethos of welfare is a potent admixture of rights and obligations, freedom and
coercion, liberty and life. It is formed through practices of freedom by which citizens are formed and
form themselves, on one side. Yet these are located within a web of sovereign powers by which subjects are bound to
do certain things. These include the use of deductive and coercive powers of taxation, of systems of punishment, detention,
expulsion and disqualification, and of compulsion in drug rehabilitation, child support, immunization, workfare programmes
and so on for the achievement of various goals of national government.
More fundamentally, these sovereign powers consist in decisions as to what constitutes a normal frame of life, and
hence of what constitutes public order and security, and when such a situation obtains (Schmitt 1985b: 9). Today there are various rationalities
of the government of the state that attempt to provide a means of deciding this normal frame. Among communitarians, such as Etzioni (1996), this
normal frame is decided upon by the shared moral values of communities. Among sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1998) and Ulrich Beck (2000),
this normal frame is defined by the processes that lead to a new kind of institutionally negotiated individualization and cosmopolitanism. Among new paternalists,
such as Lawrence Mead and his associates (1986, 1997), it is decided by the views of the citizenry made known by their representatives in the Congress.
There is an agreement between all three groups that, however we decide the content of this normal, everyday frame of life, at least certain
populations can be invited, expected and, indeed, obligated,to follow it. As Giddens puts it (1998: 37),
We need more actively to accept responsibilities for the consequences of what we do and lifestyle habits we adopt. The theme of responsibility, or mutual
obligation, was there in old-style social democracy, but was largely dormant, since it was submerged within the concept of collective provision. We have to find
a new balance between individual and collective responsibilities today.
Fifty years ago, T. H. Marshall smuggled in sovereign notions of rights to justify the pastoral character of the welfare state in his classic essay, “Citizenship and
Today, “welfare reform” , and its instruments of workfare, emphasizes the converse of rights,
Social Class” (1963).
obligations, when it demands the transformation of the individual as a condition of the exercise of a pastoral, and
indeed paternalist, care. Both cross the threshold between the political-juridical order of sovereignty
and pastoral government of conduct. For Marshall, pastoral care is a function of social rights;
for new paternalists, communitarians and Third Way social democrats, sovereign
instruments bind those receiving pastoral care to paternally defined collective obligations.
Summing up this part of the argument, government, understood as the conduct of conduct, is
one zone or field of contemporary power relations. To understand those relations we need to take into account
heterogenous powers such as those of sovereignty and biopolitics. The exercise of power in contemporary
liberal democracies entails matters of life and death as much as ones of the direction of conduct,
of obligation as much as rights, as decisions on the fostering or abandonment of life, on the right to
kill without committing homicide, as well as of the shaping of freedom and the exercise of choice. Nevertheless,
having distinguished this heterogenous field of power, there are key thresholds that are crossed
in which these distinctions begin to collapse. Sovereign violence, its symbols and its threat, is woven into the
most mundane forms of government. The unemployed, for example, are to transform themselves into active job-seekers or
participate in workfare programs under the sanction of the removal of the sustenance of life. In contemporary
genetic politics and ethics, too, we enter thresholds where it becomes unclear whether we
are in the presence of the powers to foster life or the right to take it. The biopolitical, the
sovereign, the governmental, begin to enter into zones of indistinction.
[He continues]
The institutional means for the shaping of conduct thus also carry with them the threat of sovereign violence, the symbolics of violence and violence
itself. Thus the establishment of institutions and markets to provide for the long-term unemployed or the single parent is accompanied by a fundamental
Behind the agreements which the unemployed or the single parent must contract into in
threat to the life and dignity of the individual.
return for subsistence is the threat of an ultimate sanction, a withdrawal of assistance and thus a withdrawal of the means of
life. Perhaps even more effective than the actual sanction are the symbolics of threat that accompanies the designation of a life
that is deemed ‘unworthy’, in the language of National Socialists, or ‘undeserving’, in the language of nineteenth-century
moralizing philanthropy. The question of violence, of micro-violences, of the symbolics and threat of violence, of legal and
legitimate violence, as much as the various forms of the ‘conduct of conduct’ and the governing through freedom, including and especially the
contract, is a component of certain types of contemporary liberal rule.
The key intelligibility of contemporary rule is given in more than in its economic self-image. The problem of new forms of productive, efficient and
entrepreneurial economic citizenship and rights here meets new forms of moral discipline, restraint and, above all, obligation. The problem of
contemporary rule is not simply about economic competition and networks in a globalized (or regional) economy, but about disorder, dysfunction, social
The personal disorder of the welfare recipient, and the beneficial moral effects of the
pathology and welfare dependency.
supervision of the boss, are as important as increasing the productivity of the population for contemporary welfare reform in
the USA (Schram 2000: 36–7). Moreover, the development of the ‘working poor’ in low-paid, insecure, non-unionized
jobs establishes a population subject to wide discretionary uses of the arbitrary powers of the boss. These powers
might decree no talking at work, no drinking of water during work time, and use of only
designated breaks to go to the toilet (Ehrenreich 2001). At the heart of certain contemporary
transformations of government is not simply the economic concern, in which the production of a certain form of economic
citizenship is necessary for economic security in a global economy. It is also a political one in which the diagnoses of disorder
and pathology require the reimposition of authority and the reinscription of not only the poor but all groups and classes
within a hierarchy.
[He continues]
There is nothing new to this scenario, as Smith’s lectures suggest. However, we should also
consider Agamben’s thesis that sovereign power is becoming indistinct from biopolitics. In
this case, the sovereign decision on the establish- ment of a particular form of life (bios) meets matters of mere existence
(zoe) itself. Whether we consider the welfare of the poor, the rights of refugees or indigenes, biomedical
interventions, or environmental catastrophe, we are not simply faced with the enhancement of the life of the
population but the sovereign decision on bare life, of that life which forms the exception for our moral and political
existence and which, ultimately, can be allowed to die or even killed without committing homicide.
Thus, I demand that the United States federal government increase welfare as
a universal entitlement for the dispossessed by closing Marine Corps Air
Station Futenma.
endorse the plan as a movement of movements coalescing around a demand for economic redistribution. the
poor, dislocated, all forms of devalued life will occupy and disrupt public space, using welfare as a metaphor to
challenge spatial and biopolitical divisions, to expose neoliberalism’s disavowed excess, and to politicize our
shared vulnerability for collective resistance

Pinkus & Giorgi, [Karen, ProfessorS of Italian, French, and Comparative Literature at USC & Gabriel,
Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at USC. 2006 “Zones of Exception:
Biopolitical Territories in the Neoliberal Era”. Project Muse]
The piquetero movement originating in Argentina during the '90s, is an extraordinarily powerful
and creative response to the mechanisms by which neoliberal modernization constitutes entire
populations as "residual" and "nonviable" within the narrative of social transformation, showing
at the same time to what extent the fracture brought on by neoliberalism takes place at the level of the biopolitical,
that is, at the level of the inscription and (re)production of "human life," from the biological to
the social. Formed by ex-State employees left jobless after the privatizations during the '90s,3 the
piquetero movement became a "movement of movements" articulating multiple demands from diverse social sectors
marginalized by neoliberal rule, from the new unemployed to the "structurally" poor and the retired, and politicizing spheres
of the social that had remained for a long time distinct from politics (such as poor women and children).
The neoliberal reforms in Argentina, as is well documented, dismantled the structure of one of the
largest welfare states of Latin America. The aim was to replace the welfare state with the neoliberal "model of
entrepreneurship" regarded as the key to social and economic dynamism.4 Instead of the disciplined
worker subjected to the State company—which on many occasions supposed networks of
political clientelismo, that is, political "exchange of favors" through State jobs and social aid—the
new era promoted a work [End Page 101] culture focused on business and the necessity of
converting oneself from "employee" into "entrepreneur." Those who failed to adapt to the new model—to the
new equation between capital, work, and life designed by neoliberalism—became economically "nonviable," "surplus
population," residues of History. In fact, this was the fate of many of the Argentine "future
entrepreneurs" who failed to "reinvent" themselves due less to their inability to adapt to the new
rules (or, as some with racist undertones suggest, because they lacked "work culture") than to
the dismantling of the productive structures of the country at the hands of financial speculation.
The case of Argentina, where in a few years large sectors of the populations were pushed to the
threshold of indigence by the neoliberal reforms, has become the monstrous mirror for other
processes that take place throughout the entire planet; it is in this violently altered landscape that the
piqueteros movement emerges around 1996, from the critical situation of individuals and populations thrown to the threshold
of absolute poverty and lacking any form of aid from a State that eliminated most of its traditional structures of social
protection.
Instead of rallying at traditional political sites such as public squares, in front of government
buildings or at factories, piqueteros emerged as a political force demonstrating at national routes
and city streets with picket lines (piquetes), turning themselves into obstacles to circulation and
contesting the ways in which the public space is used. The first piquetes in the mid-'90s took
place on national highways in the provinces of Neuquén and Salta.5 Later the methodology
migrated to the cities and to the other provinces, where the protestors blocked key access to and from the
cities, as well as central avenues and significant urban sites. Piqueteros' methodology of protest, as much as
their very existence as a political force, is thus a contestation of the new political distributions of space, and of the
very notion of "public space" in the context of increasing privatization and zoning of "safe areas," as well as of violent
containment of "dangerous" individuals and populations in controlled areas. The piquetes are thus significant not
only because of the resistance they posed to the neoliberal rule in a context of wide
complacency of the middle classes, and the creation of new forms to politicize and contest a
brutal dismantling of social protection, but principally because they expose the extent to which
neoliberalism constituted itself as a politics of space, that is, as an economy of territorial distribution, location, and separation
of individuals and populations (in terms of included/excluded, employed/unemployed, legal/illegal, productive/nonproductive,
healthy/unhealthy, and so forth) that at the same time deepens former social divisions and transforms them in new ways.
Perhaps the most evident icon of the neoliberal politics of space is the gated communities that
proliferated in Argentina during the '90s, called "countries," using the English word (evoking, at
the same time, the rural scenario and a different nation, as a "country" within the country). The
gated community maps the boundaries between the "inside"—wealth, safety, cleanliness, quality
of life, and so forth—and an "outside" marked as dangerous, unclean, crowded, and miserable.
This logic of internal borders, of tracing new boundaries or retracing old ones, shows to what
extent neoliberalism imagines itself as a politics of space by which the "quality of life" (wealth,
health, safety, beauty, cleanliness, and so forth) can be cordoned and secured in a given
territory (and thus produced as an effect of the territorial division). And it is precisely this logic that
piqueteros disrupt, pointing not only to the inequality and injustice of such a design, but principally to a structural
ambivalence, a sort of internal failure or fracture that dislocates the neoliberal boundaries and
divisions. [End Page 102]
This ambivalence springs from the very mechanics of neoliberalism. At the same time that the neoliberal
State cuts most of the social protection and abandons to their own fate those who are expelled by the new economic game, it
develops mechanisms to contain these populations: urban surveillance, police control, housing projects where the "leftovers"
produced by the neoliberal reforms can be separated and kept away from the rest of society and whose circulation and
movements can be regulated and controlled by police and private security. Thus entire sections of the conurbano
of Buenos Aires (the cities surrounding the capital) that had been working-class neighborhoods
until a few decades ago, have become territorial "containers" for populations now considered
"nonviable."6
Neoliberalism has not only increased the number of poor; it has also transformed the ways in which
poverty as such is dealt with and inscribed in the social landscape and the public imagination. It
turns poverty—or the threshold of "absolute poverty," the limit of indigence—into a terrain where the very
status of the "human" is called into question, that is, the terrain where the normative and recognizable
forms of life are split from "mere life," from the life reduced to biological survival and abandoned by
both the legal and the social order. The indigence that neoliberalism constantly reproduces is placed at
this crossroads between the suspension of the legal order and the restriction, or simple
elimination, of social protection: in this double suspension, which neoliberalism has rendered
systematic, human lives are turned into zōē. The neoliberal politics of space thus reflects this
more fundamental, biopolitical division between "human" and "less than human": the "outside"
of the neoliberal city is not merely the periphery or "dangerous zone." It is the biopolitical
threshold that traces the difference with the "less than human," with those bodies marked and
presented as degraded, unrecognizable life that have become more immediate than ever.
By interrupting streets and routes, by disrupting the public order of the city,7 pique-teros bring back
the life that has been banned and that the neoliberal city wants to contain or make invisible. But this reinscription is not only a
call to the State for jobs and social aid or to other social sectors to create new modes of solidarity, reversing their
stigmatization in the media; it is also a dislocation of the strategies of separation and confinement of bare life. The
interruption of a central avenue in the city or a national route in the provinces is a way to
prevent not only the separation and invisibility of the poor, but also to contest the territorialization of what is fundamentally
biopolitical, rendering paradoxical the territorial mappings of inclusion/exclusion, and exposing the mechanism by which
neoliberalism divides life in productive/nonproductive, healthy/unhealthy, included/residual subjects, at
the same time that it makes these distinctions vertiginously unstable and precarious.8 The translation of the
biopolitical divisions into the neoliberal politics of space is, as we see, condemned to failure.
Spatial distributions can, temporarily, contain and, in a way, materialize or even realize the
difference between the "assimilated" and the "residual," but eventually the distinction—threshold
and ambivalence—reinscribes itself inside, fracturing the bios and disrupting the order with
residues that cannot be contained in any outside, fundamentally because there is no longer an
outside: the biopolitical division takes place within life itself, at the level of the way life is
inscribed and (re)produced, and not at the level of material spaces and political boundaries. The
excluded, the outside is zōē: the merely biological life is what constitutes the external threshold
of our societies. And it is this external threshold that is systematically reinscribed inside: the more neoliberalism pushes
away its residues, the more they break into its order; the farther they are expelled, the stronger their disruption through the
faultlines of the social map. As Agamben writes:
The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space, but
instead contains at its very center a dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every
form of life and every rule can be virtually taken.
[HS 175]
Piqueteros, as well as other forms of biopolitical struggle, act within this "dislocating localization" of which
Agamben speaks. They exist at that point where the strategies of containment cannot confine in space what is
a general biopolitical condition, not because "we all are residual," but because we are all constituted at the threshold in which
our humanity is separated and split from "mere life." In neoliberal societies this threshold becomes ever
more unstable and paradoxical given the economy of protection and abandonment of life. The
threshold of exclusion is thus increasingly mobile—and it is exactly this mobility that we think is captured by Agamben's
notion of exception: a mobility that should not be understood purely in spatial terms, but in terms of the "dislocating
localization" that takes on different space-temporal configurations as it emerges from a biopolitical logic. The dislocation
piqueteros inscribe in the neoliberal city exposes the threshold of destitution and precariousness to which everybody is
virtually exposed under neoliberalism. As a society of risk the neoliberal society universalizes the
possibility of social and economic destitution. By inscribing themselves in the public space as
desocupados, as social residues, and by politicizing the very limit that separates them from the rest of society,
piqueteros expose precariousness as a shared condition and turn it into a dimension of (bio)political struggles. It is very
significant, in this sense, that the most interesting cultural production in Argentina and Latin
America takes place around this ambivalent threshold of exclusion and precariousness, which becomes a zone
of aesthetic and ethical experimentation and an instance where new commonalities can be explored. Literary texts by
Rodolfo Fogwill, Diamela Eltit, Fernando Vallejo, João Gilberto Noll, or Mario Bellatin, for instance,
explore, in the most diverse ways, the relationship between language and this life stripped of
social place and legal recognition, even a legal name, as a dimension where new subjectivities,
new logics of experience, and alternative economies of sociality and affect can be investigated.
The threshold of "bare life," its disruption in the neoliberal city, can be turned, then, into the
instance of exploration of new political and cultural practices. [End Page 104]
Sociologists Maristella Svampa and Sebastián Pereyra write that piqueteros are the movement of
those who "have nothing but their own body exposed in the streets" [30]. The expression
resumes exactly our point here: it is the mere life of a body, not a person's status as citizen,
worker, or human fellow, nothing but their own body, whose self-exposure dislocates the
strategies of containment and turns its residual life into force: force of interpellation as much as
material, physical presence. If the piqueteros were marked as "surplus," if they were defined and
constituted as such by managerial decisions as much as by a media discourse that insistently
depicted them as "leftovers," "misfits," and "scum," they reinscribed that threshold and
transformed it into political force and into new modes of subjectivity.
Piqueteros played a key role in the mobilizations that brought down the Argentine government in 2001 in the middle of a
catastrophic economic default. Large sectors of Argentine society, many of which had attacked the
movement in the '90s, turned the piqueteros into the symbol of the resistance against neoliberalism. In the new era
opened by the current government of Nestor Kirchner, which claims a center-left position and the
responsibility for normalizing the social, economic and political life of Argentina, some sectors of
the movement were coopted by the government in an alliance aimed to keep social peace and to
open new possibilities for the excluded. In a global economic context that seems auspicious for
Argentina's upper and (some) middle classes, the more combative sectors of piqueterismo are,
once again, stigmatized as misfits and criminals. The criminalization of protest on the basis of
the disturbance of public order and obstruction of public streets has been one of the most salient
reactions against piqueteros during the recent years [see Svampa]. And in the new conjuncture
allegedly aimed at expanding "social inclusion," the nonplace of the piqueteros in society is once again
instantiated as exception: the "banned life" whose presence in the social order is a disruption as well as a challenge to the
normative mechanisms and the systematic violence by which neoliberalism turns "life" into "human life," and vice versa.
Neoliberalism cannot expand to new markets there are no new markets left the result
is a snake eating its own tail: Economic Crisis and Bloody Genocide. Every historical
genocide has been preceded by a period of economic desperation, when ethnic
identity is all that is left to hold onto. This instability is unending and accelerating,
eventually going global and making extinction inevitable.
Pramono ‘03 [Siswo, PhD Candidate ANU @ Canberra School of Social Science, Journal of
Economic and Social Reaserch 4 (2), 115-138]
If genocide relates to policy that gives effect to the destruction of particular group(s),
leading to the collapse of the whole societies, then a discussion focusing on how
neoliberalism destroys the working class might help reveal its genocidal mentality.
Neoliberalism is by nature genocidal (and suicidal) because in order to survive, it has
to eat its own tail. In other words, by 'killing' the working class, capitalism is digging
its own grave. When the working class is dying, society is dying, which at the end will lead to the death of capitalism itself. But what or
who is the working class? The working class, which is condemned to extinction by neoliberalism, should be viewed as socio-cultural, rather than
solely an economic institution (Polanyi, 1944; see also Block and Somers, 1984). The working class, therefore, is a socio-cultural institution of
workers —blue and white collars— for whom "employment is far more than a measure of income: … it is the essential measure of self-worth" of
individuals in a society based on work (Rifkin, 1995: 195). The emphasis on class is nevertheless significant because this working class represents
. The end of history in
an important segment of human society that is threatened by the integrated mode of global production
fact has led the world to the end of work: the alienation of the concept of work from
its socio-cultural environment. As the world is now entering the Third Industrial
Revolution —the era of the information super highway— technology has caused
productivity to be uncoupled from mass labour (Rifkin, 1995). Economic neoliberal
creed, then, dictates rationalisation and efficiency in all lines of production through
job killing methods like downsizing, out sourcing, and re-engineering production
(Martin and Schumann, 1997). The result is an alarming massive unemployment that
has already led to global upheavals as symbolically expressed in various protests in Seattle in 1999, Washington DC in
2000, Quebec and Genoa in 2001. Thus, the end of work, in the sense described above, means a ‘requiem for the working class’ (Rifkin, 1995).
The point is that the neoliberal perception of values of society and the free market, especially the ones related to the concept of work, is such
that globalisation will soon become the global trap that undermines not only the global economy but also, and most importantly, the human
society. Neoliberal perception of values of society and the free market has "created the delusion of economic determinism as a general law for all
human society" (Polanyi, 1968: 70). Thus, human society is transformed into a market society (Gill, 1993), a society based on laissez-faire
capitalism. The immediate result is the corrosion of the value of work and worker as an integral part of social structure. Market society, according
workers are no
to the neoliberal creed, demands the commodification of money, land, and labour. While labourers are real people, the
longer considered as humans but commodities and therefore are subject to the law of
supply and demand. Work is merely an economic of subsistence; a labour sold at market price. For the capitalist who hires the worker,
labour is associated with the cost of production. To maximise profit, this cost must be ‘rationalised’ at the lowest level. The market society in effect has
relegated the economic and social role of work (the role of which will be dealt with later in this paper) to merely a factor of production. The
commodification of workers is nonetheless detrimental to the society for two reasons. Firstly, as argued by Polanyi (1944:133), that the capitalist
"had no organ to sense the danger involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker". Thus, as had been foreseen by Marx and
Engel (1997) in their Communist Manifesto, capitalism develops with increasing exploitation of the working class. Secondly, since workers are
commodities, it will be at the disposal of the capitalist to put them to work or
to dismiss them. But work is one of the important pillars of the orderly society. The individual self-interest, which is not limited to the economic
one, brings woman and man to take part in organisations such as markets and factories (Homans, 1971). These organisations, then, function as
external systems that impose social control upon the individual member. The cessation of this relationship, in the case of unemployment, leads
toward the condition Durkheim called anomie: the loss of contact, and therefore control, of the social organisation over the individual (cited in
Homans, 1971: 69). High
mass-unemployment thus causes social disorganisation. The industrious working class is turned into a potentially violent mob or law-breakers. If
this happens, normally the authority resorts to a pragmatic solution: reinforces security and builds more prisons. Britain, for instance, allocated
870 million Pound Sterling, which was considered the largest expansion of penal institutions this century, to built twenty-six new prisons
between 1983 and 1995. Similar policies have been followed in the US, France, Germany and most other Western industrialised countries (Teeple,
1995). As "the social
fabric is tearing apart" (Martin and Schumann, 1997: 103), the demise of the working class is incurring tremendous social cost to societies. The
commodification of workers, and the social cost associated with this, is rooted in the liberal perception of laisses-faire capitalism. Laissesfaire
capitalism, which is considered "natural" by the liberals, has been
adopted in Western economic and political culture (Burchill, 1996). Western individualism is in this way reduced to homo economicus (George and
Sabelli, 1994: 8) based on the belief that the pursuit of material self-gain is the ‘natural’ drive of human beings. Market society, too, is "natural"
since such society is created by the economic drive of its members. But, according to Polanyi (1944), nothing is natural. Both the individual
preference (e.g. economic drive) and market society is engineered and facilitated by the state. States pave the way for a free market economy by
enforcing deregulation and liberalisation as obliged by the Ten Commandments of the Washington Consensus. In 1947, half a century before the
Consensus, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had only 23 member countries. In 1994, GATT’s membership vastly expanded to
include 128 countries. The World Trade Organisati on has a potential membership of 152 countries and territories (WTO, 1995: 4,9). Thus, states
are the loyal marketeers of laisses-faire capitalism This "artificial" process (rather than "natural") described above has become ironic. As the
world is entering the Third Industrial Revolution, of which technology is the driving force, laisses-faire capitalism dictates efficiency for the
maximisation of material gain. Machines can potentially replace about 75 per cent of jobs in the industrial nations. If one takes the US as a
particular example, the machine proletariat can replace more than 90 million jobs of its 124 million human labour force (Rifkin, 1995: 5). Thus,
the so-called efficiency for profit maximisation poses threats to the very existence of the working class and human society as a whole.
What happened in the West has now transferred itself to the Rest. In Huntington’s (1998) thesis, the West’s success in material gain, the hard
culture, paved the way to the acceptance by the Rest of the Western laissesfaire capitalism, the soft-culture. This laisses-faire soft-culture has
transferred itself to the developing world through economic "reformism". And the main engine of such reform is the powerful international
financial
institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank (Bierstekker, 1992) and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) (Gill, 1993).
Laisses-faire capitalism induces a consumptive lifestyle and this consumptive live style has been and is still being structurally installed in the
developing world, mostly by local intellectuals who were educated in the West. During the Cold War, Rostow’s development theory appealed to
many leaders of developing countries. According to Rostow (cited in Todaro,1985:63), all countries must proceed in steps of development —
stages of growth— the process of which is started with traditional society and completed with the attainment of the age of high mass
consumption. This latest stage of development serves at best the interest of global capitalists because it induces rampant consumerism. It is in
this context that Fukuyama (1989: 18) calls upon the "common marketisation of the world". Thus, the
 The existing capitalist regime is not
Western fallacy is now the global fallacy, permeated by the capitalist regime.
sustainable because, despite its capability to tremendously increase productivity, it
induces increasing mass unemployment (McKinley) and the worsening of the social
security net of the working class: a process Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’
(cited in Gill, 1993: 81). Thus, the common marketisation of the world has neglected
the alarming social cost: the demise of the working class. The foundation of the capitalist regime was laid
shortly after World War II, but the development of the regime was intensified in the 1970s. The political setting was chaotic: America’s defeat in Vietnam,
relative decline of US power, then, triggered the development
economic recession and the oil crises. This

of hegemonic stability and regime theories in American universities (Knutsen, 1997).

The US, argues Little (1997), should maintain its hegemonic status, otherwise there
will be a shift in the balance of power to the detriment of neoliberal economic
principles governing the existing capitalist regime. If one employs Keohanne and Nye’s (1987) perspective of
Complex Interdependence, an early contribution to regime theory, she or he could detect that the existing capitalist regime, in fact, enhances the
increasingly unbalanced interplay among the actors who represent the factors of production. These actors include the Multinational Corporations (MNCs),
which represent capital; the states, which represent the diminishing-national power over what Polanyi (1944) called fictitious commodities: money, land and
labour; and trade unions which represent workers. These actors are now facing the reality of the global order: the shifting economic structure of production
and consumption and the changing political structure of sovereignty (Gill, 1993). Thus, the core issue of political economy is to find a ‘link and match’
between the prevailing state centric system and the economic system that is becoming non-territorial and globalised (Tooze, 1997). As labour forces are
relatively immobile or localised (McKinley), notwithstanding the recent trend of the increasing number of migrant workers, the economy is moving toward
integrated production of goods and services (Tooze, 1997). This will affect the balance of power in the relationship between the MNCs, the states, and the
unions. The MNCs are becoming the dominant actors of the globalised economy; they undertake 65 per cent of international trade, about 50 per cent of which
is carried out within their own networks (Martin and Schumann, 1997). In the early 1980s, the size of annual production of Exxon was larger than the GDP of
New Zealand, Hungary, Portugal, and Ireland combined. By the same token, General Motor’s size of annual production was larger than Austria’s GDP (Kegley
et al., 1988). As powers of capital encroach on political realms, MNCs have considerable power to succeed in state-firm diplomacy for the following reasons.
Firstly, MNCs successfully employ the strategy of divide –to play states and unions off against each other— and rule. Secondly, this divide and rule strategy
can be pursued because the operations of MNCs are no longer based on comparative advantages but absolute advantages through integratedproduction
(Martin and Schumann, 1997). Thirdly, MNCs have seized thepower of sophisticated technology, which enables them to create ‘jobless growth’ that has
fundamentally changed the correlation between (mobile) capital and (immobile) labour (Martin and Schumann, 1997). Last but not least, MNCs have
successfully influenced the development of international law (eg, GATT Rounds and WTO) and municipal laws to the benefit of their operations (see the
increasing legal barriers against workers and unions depicted in Table 2), and hence, challenge attempts to establish international law and regulations that
might help strengthen the political leverage of the working class. States’ economic power has been diminished by the MNCs’ integrated production. It is an
irony that in their efforts to seize a handful of benefits from the world market, states tend to act as repressive agents of these global capitalists. The
International Confederation of Free Trade Union reported in 1996, as follows: Workers’ most basic right to organise in trade unions is still blatantly denied,
often by law, in a number of countries: Burma, Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In others,
such as Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, North Korea and China, so-called trade unions exist but serve merely to transmit the
orders of the state to the workers (italic added)
(ICFTU, 1996: 7).
Thus, rather than protecting the unions, states have promoted the interest of global capitalism by violating the unions’ rights. Table 2 depicts the
increasing violations of trade union rights at the global level from 1992 to 1994. It also shows that while the numbers of arrest and dismissal
decreased the numbers of murders, injuries, government interference, and legal barriers against unions increased. Thus, from the perspective of
Galtung’s structural interests among the political elites and the capitalists. The states in many cases colluded with the MNCs to exploit the
economic sources at the expense of the working class (Teeple, 1995). The trade unions, the main purpose of which is to control the supply of
labour that the corporations can use (Fischer and Dornbusch, 1983), are the losing party. New technology and global policies of the MNCs, which
are micro-economic in nature, undermine the global labour market. The situation is always that supply of labour severely exceeds demand. It is
speculated that the world is shaping into a 20:80 society which means, 20 per cent of the global population will suffice to keep the world
economy going, with 80 per cent left unemployed (Martin and Schumann, 1997). The unions, too, are losing their members: "in 1980 more than 20
per cent of all employees and workers still belonged to a union, whereas today the figure is 10 per cent" (Martin and Schumann, 1997: 120). The
trade unions will lose their power vis a vis the MNCs. If this happens, it would be the end of the working class. And the "killing" of the working
class is by nature genocidal, since this will lead to the collapse of the entire society. A case study of the US global politics might help revealing
such a possible global collapse.
4. American neoliberal global politics
The long history of US imperialism provides the best example of the practical politics
of neoliberalism. Major General Smedley Butler of the US Marine Corps, who were twice awarded the Medal oh Honor, and who were
acknowledged by General Douglas MacArthur as one of the great generals in American history, testified in 1933 about the US imperialism in Latin
America: There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger-men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle-men'
to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparation and a 'Big Boss' Super- Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military
man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty three years and four months in active military service as a member
of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And
during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a
racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. I helped make Honduras 'right' for
American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and
Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for
the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in
1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its
way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a
few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents (cited in Ali, 2002: 259-260).
As such, for the genocidal global politics of the US, military establishment and
neoliberalism are like bow and arrow. In other words, as argued by Friedman, a
columnist of the New York Times (28 March 1999): "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." An "axis of evil" was then drawn between the
World Trade Center and Pentagon, and hence between neoliberalism and military establishment, in the pursuance of genocidal global politics.
Scepticism is thus a way to view the current neoliberal global politics.
The danger is present and imminent. The bulk of humans on earth are deprived,
economically and hence, socially, by the neoliberal market fundamentalists. Most
individuals, borrowing the words of Staub (1989:35), experience "attack on or threat
to life, material well-being, or self-concept and self-esteem." Staub, in his The roots of evil (1989),
devoted a substantial part of the volume to examining the psychology of hard times and how difficult life conditions can lead to genocide or
intensify the existing genocide. And, for him, a key-word of genocide is "aggression". It does not follow, however, that all kinds of aggression will
end up in genocide, but there can be no genocide without aggression. As such, the next task is to reveal the possible linkage between the
neoliberal global social structure and the increasing act of genocidal aggression within states and without. An adaptation from Staub's study
about psychological states and processes that promote aggression can help clarify such a linkage. In this context, the neoliberal global politics
The neoliberal global
should be viewed as genocidal attacks to the real and potential victims of the neoliberal imperialism.
politics incite anger, rage, and the motive for retaliation and harm
doing (Staub, 1989). Only a few, perhaps, would formally condone the September 11,
which represents attacks against the World Trade Center - Pentagon "axis of evil",
and the Bali carnage of October 12, which represents attack on the Washington -
Canberra axis. But many would understand such genocidal attacks as retaliation
against the practice of the US neoliberal global politics. The following is a note of conversation in
New York between Tariq Ali, the author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms,
and a white-bearded Latino taxi driver who drove him to the airport:
[Ali]: Where were you on September 11th?
[Driver]: (looking at [him] closely in the rear-view
mirror) Why do you ask?
[Ali]: I just wondered.
[Driver]: Where are you from?
[Ali]: London.
[Driver]: No, I mean where are you really from?
[Ali]: Pakistan
[Driver]: I'm Taliban. Look at me. No, no. I'm from
Central America. Can't you tell?
[Ali]: I just wondered whether you were anywhere near the Twin Towers that day.
[Driver]: No, I wasn't but I wouldn't have cared if I was.
[Ali]: What do you mean? [Driver]: It wouldn't have mattered if I had got killed.
The important thing is that they were hit. I was happy.
You know why? [Ali]: No. [Driver]: You know how many people they've killed in Central America. You know?
[Ali]: Tell me.
[Driver]: Hundreds of thousands. Yes, really. They're still killing us. I'm really happy they were hit. We got our revenge. I feel sorry for the ones
who died. That's more than they feel for us.
Ali]: Why do you live here?
[Driver]: My son is at school here. I'm working to pay for his education. We had to come here because they left nothing back home. Nothing. No
schools. No universities. You think I'd rather be here than in my own country? (Ali, 2002: 291-292).
The Latino taxi driver in New York was no fan of Major General Butler or bin Laden, or perhaps, had never heard about them. But he shared with
Major General Butler the disgust towards the US exploitation of Latin America. And he, too, shared the grievance to free the world from neoliberal
The point is that those who live under the
exploitation as articulated in bin Laden's Declaration of War (1996).
neoliberal global oppression share the same desire to retaliate. Retaliation aside, aggression, for
Staub (1989: 39), "is an effective self-defense, since it communicates that [genocidal] instigation does not pay and makes renewed instigation
less likely." But such a communication will only be effective if the conflicting parties speak the same language of violence. Here, self-defense, for
one, tends to be interpreted as anticipatory or pre-emptive self-defense. As such, the self-defense always represents naked aggression (eg, the
case of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the corresponding attacks of Afghanistan and Iraq). Second, each party can play victim of the
other, and thus use the notion of self-defense as the ground of its aggression. Determination to commit self-defense is not only practical, but also
psychological. The neoliberal global politics can also incite to the desire to protect the psychological self such as identity and self-esteem (Staub,
1989).
Protection against who? A protection against the perceived hegemon, for one, can give rise to the desire for harm doing as suggested in the
previous point. But, worse, often "it employs such 'internal', psychological means as
scape-goating or devaluation of others, which eventually provides a basis for violence against them" (Staub, 1989: 39). Those who attempt to
protect the psychological self can arbitrarily determine the "others", which might
include minority and unwanted groups, which have nothing to do with the provoking hegemon. Thus, for instance, facing the mounting US
military threat at the end of 2001, the anti-American sentiment within the Taliban
regime was directed against the non-Phustun Afganis such as Hazaris, Tajiks and Uzbeks. And in the 1991 Gulf War, the anti-American sentiment
within the Iraqi regime was directed against the Kurd minority. The next
instigating factor to observe is the question of (in)justice. A sense of injustice can incite resentment, anger, and violence (Staub, 1989). For
instance, following the political reform in 1998, Indonesia is becoming more democratic but poor. Yet, it is the democratisation —more than the
simplistically alleged radicalism— which gives rise to the anti-American sentiment. More and more Indonesians dare
to challenge, although with little success, the practice of US neoliberal global politics. Why should Indonesians who work for an American leading
sportswear company in Indonesia be paid less than US$ 2.00 per day for a
product worth US$ 45 - US 80 in American market? (McKinley, 2001). Aside from the question of (in)justice, the rising anti-American sentiment in
Indonesia, and in the third world in general, which has sometimes led to violence, should be viewed as a result of frustration, acute deprivation,
and sense of powerlessness. Such psychological conditions will motivate peoples to regain a
sense of personal efficacy and personal power. If people feel vulnerable to diseases, poverty, the constant threat of military pre-emptive strikes
and weapons of mass-destruction, and, ultimately, death, then killing (eg,
homicide, genocide) "may give the killer a feeling of invulnerability and power over [the] death" itself (Staub, 1989: 41). Such killings elusively
help improve a sense of personal power. And this personal power is a
psychological tool to help survive the increasing uncertainty, anarchy or chaos. "Chaos, disorder and sudden profound changes, especially when
accompanied by frustration, threat, and attack," for Staub (1989: 41), "invalidate the conceptions of self and world that serve as guides by which
chaotic changes from a society based on the
new experience acquires meaning and life gains coherence." As such,
value of work to a workless society, as discussed in the previous section, would
trigger moral panic until the arrival (or the acceptance) of a 'new' ideology that is
perceived as able to provide a renewed comprehension. If you were deprived from
material gain, why would you not embrace something against (or destroy) all kinds of
material gain? (eg, the case of Taliban anti-modernisation policy in Afghanistan) If
you were deprived of a better life (and in no way can attain this) why would not you
embrace a sub-culture that destroys all kinds of lives (eg, the case of terrorist
ideology). In either case, albeit suicidal genocidal, you were no longer a loser. Thus,
the neoliberal global politics help the appeal of such destructive (and murderous)
ideology in the decaying society. The point is that not only is the neoliberal theory-as-
practice genocidal, as depicted in the previous sections, but also it inflicts difficult life
conditions that increase the severity of the existing global genocide. Most big cases
of genocide happened in the backdrop of difficult life conditions. Turkey committed
genocide against the Armenians after years of humiliation —losses of territory, power,
and global political status— before and during the World War I. Difficult life condition
following the defeat of Germany in World War I helped Hitler's rise to power. And the
Holocaust was committed in the years when Germany was losing World War II. In
Cambodia, the Polpot regime committed genocide in 1970s after years of civil war,
starvation, and misery. In Argentina, severe economic problems preceded genocide
(Staub, 1989). In Rwanda, the collapse of the coffee industry, the country's main
national earning, preceded genocide. And in Indonesia, symptoms of genocidal
society have been apparent since the collapse of the national economy following the
Asian economic meltdown in 1997. With the neoliberal theory-as-practice, genocidal
global politics is materialised and intensified.
5. Conclusion
The course of neoliberal globalisation seems to have headed toward ‘creative
destruction’ of the very important social fabric of global societies. The social
disorganisation at the global level will incur unbearable social costs for human
civilisation. It is thus the responsibility of every one who has the power –political,
economic, scientific, and moral— to lead the international community to alter this
deadly genocidal course. If the world is to take Polanyi’s critiques seriously, there is
an urgent need to review the neoliberal perception of values of society and the free
market. The present capitalist regime must be changed in order to become a
sustainable one. The capitalist regime must serve at best the basic tenet of
liberalism, that the economy must work to the good of the majority, not the vice
versa. Otherwise homo economicus3 could develop into homo homini lupus4, and
hence rampaging genocidal societies at both local and global levels.

UTILITARIANISM IS THE FOUNDING DISCOURSE OF GENOCIDE. UTIL HIDES THE SOVEREIGN

DECISION OF WHO LIVES AND WHO IS KILLED BEHIND A LEGITIMATING DISCOURSE OF A
UNIVERSAL NOTION OF THE GOOD LIFE. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THOSE IN POWER, THOSE WHO
PROFIT DECIDE THE GOOD LIFE AND VIOLENTLY IMPOSE IT ON THE POPULATION.
Narkunas ’07 [J. Paul, Prof. @ CUNY, Theory and Even, 10:3, 2007]
The statistics may expedite, however, a form of "cultural natural selection" or "survival of the statistically fit/correct" through sustained development of ever-more meticulous statistical
analysis. Culture functions thereby through an epistemological norm that measures its origins and telos through statistics. The epistemological norm takes an ontological quality due to a certain
nominalism, a process that reductively grasps representation and epistemology as the final limit of analysis. Culture relies on a set of mutually accepted and institutionalized protocols, what Raymond
Williams called a "structure of feeling," in order to take particular forms and practices as exhibiting the work of cultures, giving representation or form to the world. To believe in cultures suggests the need to take

, the agent
for granted the pre-determined state of the world or universe as a form, whereby cultures are sets of a larger species. To use Heideggerian language by way of Kant

presumes the frame [Gestell] of the world in the production of the world as a picture,
with the ability to render the world as an object of reflection.15 As Heidegger acknowledged, the human is one such
frame that is challenged by changes in technology; the human sciences provide the epistemological material to fill the human frame with a coherent picture [bild], while paradoxically also
unraveling its field of experience in world through technological standardization.16 The human differentiates itself from animals and other forms of life by being thrown into a particular culture and
acquiring the specific national language of its community to communicate with others in this community. This creates a horizon for thinking the species ontologically as a being within a culture. A human can not

.
be without a culture to inhabit as the expression of this being. However, the reduction of human ontology to its statistical representation by UNESCO's recognized cultural processes creates a statistical being

Life not only becomes statistical, but also enframed within epistemological schema.The
World Culture Reports measure culture through normalizing human practices that are useful, calculating thereby in a self-sustaining fashion the limits of life - human and otherwise - through rationalized culture.
The WCRs define forms of life within particular geographies, and bestow intelligibility to disparate political and economic practices that become the mythological origin of global humans as useful objects.

Utility becomes the moral and ethical register for thinking humans as a form of use
value, suggesting the need to consider the moral and ethical legacy of utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham's and Mill's moral philosophy of utilitarianism offers an important corrective to the
transcendent scope of Kantian ethics and the hope of the categorical imperative - act as if your actions were universally equivalent.17 Rather than a set of guiding transcendent moral principles and
duties humans naturally have and or follow, utilitarianism proposes an immanent and historical model of "means" with the understanding that eventually human ethics would be universalized through
equalization ("ends"). Indeed, utility acknowledges a radical temporality and specific historical and immanent conditions for establishing or thinking utility as "...a theory of life on which this theory of morality is
grounded..."18 For utilitarianism, happiness is purportedly the sole end of all human action at once limited or unlimited, individualizing and massifying. To understand human ends, Bentham proposed in his
utilitarianism the "greatest happiness principle" to shore up "good" human practices in defining utility: "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or
happiness...or...to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness."19 Mill would extend a more precise if similarly ambiguous definition: "Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that
actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and
the privation of pleasure."20 Utilitarianism was invested in the idea of creating subjects through character, of establishing a common consensus or notion of what pleasure and thereby
happiness could encompass by what was rendered visible:
...utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the
interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble
association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness
prescribes...a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual modes of action.21 Rather than a virtual theological a priori on the good or overarching principles (moral law)
of Kantian ethics, utilitarianism indicates a historical process to establish useful principles of happiness through the standardization of character rendered within the sensible world. Any notion of incoherent force or

power in effectuating this character would seemingly be evacuated due to a normative claim to democratic or equalizing desires in establishing the universal
character of utility through acts and beliefs made manifest and true. Karl Marx in Capital, Volume One acknowledged the universalizing danger of utilitarianism in describing Bentham:
"If I had the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius by way of bourgeois stupidity...with the driest naiveté he assumes that the modern petty bourgeois, especially the English petty
bourgeois, is the normal man. Whatever is useful to this peculiar kind of normal man, and to his world, is useful in and for itself. He applies this yardstick to the past, the present and the future."22 Marx identifies
Bentham's establishment of universals in time and from specific practices of the bourgeois Englishman that are then generalized as part and parcel of a universal human condition, what he describes elsewhere as
the great civilizing mission of capital in socializing humans. Bentham - whom Foucault once described as more important to the history of philosophy than Kant or Hegel and depicted Bentham as the primary figure

through the machinery of panopticism - normalized humans through the

of the disciplinary society

production of souls as a mechanism of power that straddles the visible and invisible
worlds.23 UNESCO proposes a more recent incarnation of these techniques by conceiving human life ontologically through utilitarian mechanisms of usefulness and
maximizing happiness for bourgeois global elites or the "global human." The "global human" is knowable through its ability to generate value for the marketplace or for nation-
states, or in other words its capacity to generate value by recognizing humans as commodities.24 Specific cultures may only enter into the (global) "being human" when they
add value for the market, when they work efficiently. In short, forms of human culture exist because of a pragmatic value. Rather than arbitrary and contingent variables of
humans that connect to an inherent or universal being, they demonstrate their value because they have "proven" to be effective, just, or ethical. Needless to say, this is not an
ontological fact of being human, but the naturalization of a regime of value as ontology, whereby humans have being or life when they represent value. Adding value marks the
limits of humanity, when the object of the idea is profit, a danger of what I call utilitarian humanism. This is my central claim: Rather than commodities as objects of utility
deployed by humans, human practices and traditions offer a similar scale of use for humans as commodities to "sustain development." 25 Human actions or creations, as well as
humans in their very ontology, could offer for UNESCO a virtually limitless production of new forms of sustainable subjectivities within the generalized structure of the "global
human."UNESCO's WCRs respond to inhuman forces of globalization in the economy and statecraft by reasserting an ontological notion of the human as utilitarian.26 Through my
above engagement with the WCRs and diagnosis of the dangers of life conceived as utility, I want to stress how culture is not only a site of resistance, self-reflection, and form of
being, but an epistemological system of identification and containment in creating the global human as utilitarian. Despite terms like creative diversity and pluralism, culture has
value and use for maximizing happiness and pleasure, and reducing pain, creating a system of organization to expedite those regimes of value, while offering the "performance"
of emancipation within categories of use. The specific attributes of the particular culture, race, or ethnicity, however, are less important than their contributions, their value, to
understanding the "total human system" recognized through cultural and human attributes that embody utilitarian value. Specific cultural formations can then heighten the
efficiency of the global human system. A utilitarian humanism emerges from "a reserve of knowledge and experience about good and useful ways of doing things" (WCR 1998,
18).To summarize up to this point: Utilitarian humanism can be identified via two
separate mechanisms: 1. A useful and productive human will have culture. 2. Certain
cultures are more useful than others; therefore, cultures of expedience should thrive.
Utilitarian humanism may function, thereby, in governmental fashion, deciding the
limits of the community. Instead of the citizen, state, culture, or nation, the very limit of the species and life becomes the governmental horizon of judgment. Giorgio
Agamben in Homo Sacer uses the work of Michel Foucault on biopower to argue convincingly that the sovereign decision of who or what can

be regarded as a form of life that is protected by law (in the community or nomos) is
reconfigured to define what a human is and can be, where life exists.27 For Agamben "naked life" is "life that
can be killed but not sacrificed." Unrecognized through humanist or Enlightenment political categories and therefore unprotected by classical political theory and legal mechanisms, life is read instead through the
biological functions of the species as still pre-differentiated energy.28 His diagnosis indicates how naked life resides in a zone of indistinction, permitting the potential for new forms of politicization or forms of life
that can be executed, tortured, or merely put to death without any legal recourse. Borrowing from Foucault he describes how certain forms of life are made to live and others let die. In contradistinction to
trauma and abjection theorists on life like Judith Butler, Agamben expounds that not all "naked life" exists de facto in a state of abjection. He does not claim that naked life is merely expendable and needs to be
reformed into classical political categories, like liberal democracy. Naked life does not reside in a politicized category of the human; it's neither democratic, republican, socialist, nor totalitarian, but stands in for
energy or potentialities - acategorical thinking for possibilities of life.Nevertheless, because it is unrecognized through cultural or political modes of life, naked life may be seized for practices

a purported
deemed utilitarian and useful, which is the new measure of (sustainable) happiness for all life. Indeed, could culture, as a free floating mechanism of value that describes

human way of life, be rendered an attribute for the market to judge certain
populations as life "worth living," and others unrecognized through culture or
utilitarian categories as not quite living or the unliving? UNESCO exemplifies one institution that may, wittingly or unwittingly, render such
"governmental" decisions on what life is worth living, and turn naked life, unrecognized as cultural or useful, into expendable life. Naked life could shuffle between a form of value worth living or one that must
reform itself into useful cultural classifications or die, but never as a form of existence that could live without value measured culturally in potentia or in reserve.29 UNESCO's utilitarian humanism, by establishing a
certain ontic faith in culture, innocently decides who lives and dies in the global system. How might cultural critics and theorists, witting or unwitting, contribute to this project? UNESCO's exemplary faith in
consensus, legitimation, and the debate of reason rely on habitual strategies for conceptualizing cultures as benevolent systems of utilitarian management to cultivate humans and establish continuity between
past, present, and future. For example, Arjun Appadurai and Katerina Stenou in the 2000 WCR argue for "sustainable pluralism" within nation-states and across and among states: "Sustainable pluralism thus
defines a situation in which a finite number of culturally diverse groups are organized to relate so that each has maximum opportunity to reproduce its identity and to evolve creatively over time."30 Different
identities, races and ethnicities can turn into objects of knowledge that eventually are made "knowable" through the tracking of different cultural identities and histories, and deposited into the archive of knowledge
to facilitate what Appadurai and Stenou call the "political economy of dignity." By multiplying possibilities for the imagination and the capacities of "art as an archive of possible forms," the "political economy of
dignity" will flourish.31 Specific members of each race and ethnicity should, thereby, maintain visibility by creating an archive that can be rendered knowable, a cultural history and knowledge that has been pre-
scripted for them by their forebears. This mode of synthesis, though pluralistic, may only recognize differences, however, by their relationship to the cultural whole (how they differ from a cultural identity or forms
of knowledge) or human whole, what I call above the global human system. In other words, forms of culture-practice and knowledge emerge through the synthesis of disparate elements around an identity that
repeats and becomes institutionalized but sustainable, a dangerous effect of which is "utilitarian humanism." Attractive slogans like "sustainable development,""sustainable pluralism," or Appadurai's other
arguments for "globalization from below" must avoid becoming slogans that merely reassert hegemonic articulations of power by questioning their techniques of incorporation. If humans can only achieve self-
consciousness (in themselves and for themselves) through culture, they could realize themselves emerging as culture in reserve: "utilitarian humanists." "Global humans" are forms of life that are worth

"Other" humans are expendable, but they must

living because they follow the market or cultural consensus of utilitarian humanism.

not be sacrificed callously; that would be waste. Rather, the market and cultural consensus
adjudicate biopolitical decisions, making "humanitarian" gestures for cultural humans
to contribute through creatively demonstrating how their culture has value, even if it
entails bringing conditions that will result in their being killed slowly and systematically, albeit
all-too-sustainably. In a similar vein, life that is not defined along UNESCO's humanistic or
cultural frame could be "made to die." The market and global institutions, often
armed with righteous intentions, exercise decisions on who lives or dies, and produce populations
that are expendable because they have not sufficiently adapted to the "global human consensus." Armed with a self-righteous benevolence that cannot conceive of its technical prowess in killing
without sacrificing, UNESCO and the United Nations can label "other" cultural practices as inefficient at best, but also construe them as terrorist, antagonistic, and/or enslaving because of their incompatibility with
the cultural whole. In the process, despite claims and calls for openness, adaptability, pluralism, and so forth, UNESCO increasingly polices the human community, regulating and extirpating any disturbance in the
utilitarian image of the human it institutionalizes as cultural.

The affirmative’s data attempts to treat International Relations like a physics problem, with universal
environmental conditions and static actors that respond in predictable fashion. These studies are
corrupted by a radical overstatement of the trends they describe. The international sphere is dynamic,
with the motivations of its actors constantly changing across countries, cultures and continents. This
is why 50 years of searching for scientific basis for war has yielded nothing.
Steven Bernstein et al., Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein and Steven Weber, University of Toronto,
The Ohio State University, University of Toronto and University of California at Berkeley . European
Journal of International Relations 2000; 6; 43.
This vision has been largely lost. From the vantage point of the 21st century, it is sadly
apparent that the founding fathers of the behavioral revolution failed to transmit as clearly the
value commitments that motivated their 'scientific' study of international relations. For many of
their students and grand-students, the 'scientific means' has become more an end in itself, and
the 'science' of the social, a jeu d'esprit, like chess . In the worst instances, researchers
choose problems to investigate because the problems are thought to be tractable, not because
they are important. They evaluate solutions in terms of the elegance of the logic rather than actual
evidence. Meanwhile, on the other extreme, those who do study policy problems frequently do
so in isolation from those working seriously with theory. Both communities are thus impoverished.
The founders of the scientific study of international relations would bemoan the separation of
theory from evidence and of logic from data.' Most of all, the founders would reject the
separation of theory from policy and its relative failure to address practical problems of the political
world.
A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international relations.
Recent generations of scholars separated policy from theory to gain an intellectual distance from
decision-making, in the belief that this would enhance the 'scientific' quality of their work. But
five decades of well-funded efforts to develop theories of international relations have produced
precious little in the way of useful, high confidence results. Theories abound, but few meet
the most relaxed 'scientific' tests of validity. Even the most robust generalizations or laws
we can state — war is more likely between neighboring states, weaker states are less likely to
attack stronger states — are close to trivial, have important exceptions, and for the most
part stand outside any consistent body of theory.
A generation ago, we might have excused our performance on the grounds that we were a
young science still in the process of defining problems, developing analytical tools and
collecting data. This excuse is neither credible nor sufficient; there is no reason to suppose that
another 50 years of well-funded research would result in anything resembling a valid theory in
the Popperian sense. We suggest that the nature, goals and criteria for judging social science
theory should be rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in understanding the real world.
We begin by justifying our pessimism, both conceptually and empirically, and argue that the
quest for predictive theory rests on a mistaken analogy between physical and social
phenomena. Evolutionary biology is a more productive analogy for social science. We explore
the value of this analogy in its 'hard' and 'soft' versions, and examine the implications of both for
theory and research in international relations.' We develop the case for forward `tracking' of
international relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an alternative to
backward-looking attempts to build deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply this strategy
to some emerging trends in international relations.
This article is not a nihilistic diatribe against 'modern' conceptions of social science. Rather,
it is a plea for constructive humility in the current context of attraction to deductive logic,
falsifiable hypothesis and large- n statistical 'tests' of narrow propositions. We propose a
practical alternative for social scientists to pursue in addition, and in a complementary fashion, to
`scientific' theory-testing.
Physical and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some phenomena — the trajectories of
individual planets — can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables
need to be taken into account and they can be measured with precision. Other mechanical
problems, like the break of balls on a pool table, while subject to deterministic laws, are
inherently unpredictable because of their complexity. Small differences in the lay of the table, the
nap of the felt, the curvature of each ball and where they make contact, amplify the variance of
each collision and lead to what appears as a near random distribution of balls.
Most predictions in science are probabilistic, like the freezing point of liquids, the expansion
rate of gases and all chemical reactions. Point predictions appear possible only because of the
large numbers of units involved in interactions. In the case of nuclear decay or the expansion of
gases, we are talking about trillions of atoms and molecules.
In international relations, even more than in other domains of social science, it is often
impossible to assign metrics to what we think are relevant variables (Coleman, 1964: especially
Chapter 2). The concepts of polarity, relative power and the balance of power are among the
most widely used independent variables, but there are no commonly accepted definitions or
measures for them. Yet without consensus on definition and measurement, almost every
statement or hypothesis will have too much wiggle room to be `tested' decisively against
evidence. What we take to be dependent variables fare little better. Unresolved controversies
rage over the definition and evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria for
democratic governance and their application to specific countries at different points in their
history. Differences in coding for even a few cases have significant implications for tests of
theories of deterrence or of the democratic peace (Lebow and Stein, 1990; Chan, 1997).
The lack of consensus about terms and their measurement is not merely the result of intellectual
anarchy or sloppiness — although the latter cannot entirely be dismissed. Fundamentally, it has
more to do with the arbitrary nature of the concepts themselves. Key terms in physics, like
mass, temperature and velocity, refer to aspects of the physical universe that we cannot
directly observe. However, they are embedded in theories with deductive implications that have
been verified through empirical research. Propositions containing these terms are legitimate
assertions about reality because their truth-value can be assessed. Social science theories are for
the most part built on 'idealizations', that is, on concepts that cannot be anchored to
observable phenomena through rules of correspondence. Most of these terms (e.g. rational actor,
balance of power) are not descriptions of reality but implicit 'theories' about actors and contexts
that do not exist (Hempel, 1952; Rudner, 1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-
72). The inevitable differences in interpretation of these concepts lead to different predictions in
some contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce widely varying futures (Taylor,
1985: 55).
If problems of definition, measurement and coding could be resolved, we would still find it
difficult, if not impossible, to construct large enough samples of comparable cases to
permit statistical analysis. It is now almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the
causes of wars, the variation across time and the complexity of the interaction
among putative causes make the likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low.
Multivariate theories run into the problem of negative degrees of freedom, yet international
relations rarely generates data sets in the high double digits. Where larger samples do exist,
they often group together cases that differ from one another in theoretically important ways.'
Complexity in the form of multiple causation and equifinality can also make simple
statistical comparisons misleading. But it is hard to elaborate more sophisticated statistical
tests until one has a deeper baseline understanding of the nature of the phenomenon under
investigation, as well as the categories and variables that make up candidate causes (Geddes,
1990: 131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis, 1997).
Wars — to continue with the same example — are similar to chemical and nuclear reactions in that
they have underlying and immediate causes. Even when all the underlying conditions are
present, these processes generally require a catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered by
the decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike other nuclei prompting them to
fission and emit more neutrons, which strike still more nuclei. Physicists can calculate how
many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given pressures are necessary to produce a
chain reaction. They can take it for granted that if a 'critical mass' is achieved, a chain reaction
will follow. This is because trillions of atoms are present, and at any given moment enough of
them will decay to provide the neutrons needed to start the reaction. In a large enough
sample, catalysts will be present in a statistical sense.
Wars involve relatively few actors. Unlike the weak force responsible for nuclear decay, their
catalysts are probably not inherent properties of the units. Catalysts may or may not be
present, and their potentially random distribution relative to underlying causes makes it difficult
to predict when or if an appropriate catalyst will occur. If in the course of time underlying
conditions change, reducing basic incentives for one or more parties to use force, catalysts that
would have triggered war will no longer do so. This uncertain and evolving relationship between
underlying and immediate causes makes point prediction extraordinarily difficult. It also makes
more general statements about the causation of war problematic, since we have no way of
knowing what wars would have occurred in the presence of appropriate catalysts. It is
probably impossible to define the universe of would-be wars or to construct a representative
sample of them.
Statistical inference requires knowledge about the state of independence of cases, but in a
practical sense that knowledge is often impossible to obtain in the analysis of international
relations. Molecules do not learn from experience. People do, or think they do. Relationships
among cases exist in the minds of decision-makers, which makes it very hard to access that
information reliably and for more than just a very small number of cases. We know that
expectations and behavior are influenced by experience, one's own and others. The deterrence
strategies pursued by the United States throughout much of the Cold War were one kind of
response to the failure of appeasement to prevent World War II. Appeasement was at least in part a
reaction to the belief of British leaders that the deterrent policies pursued by the continental
powers earlier in the century had helped to provoke World War I. Neither appeasement nor
deterrence can be explained without understanding the context in which they were formulated;
that context is ultimately a set of mental constructs. We have descriptive terms like 'chain
reaction' or 'contagion effect' to describe these patterns, and hazard analysis among other
techniques in statistics to measure their strength. But neither explains how and why these
patterns emerge and persist.
The broader point is that the relationship between human beings and their environment is not
nearly so reactive as with inanimate objects. Social relations are not clock-like because the values
and behavioral repertories of actors are not fixed; people have memories, learn from experience
and undergo shifts in the vocabulary they use to construct reality. Law-like relationships — even
if they existed — could not explain the most interesting social outcomes, since these are
precisely the outcomes about which actors have the most incentive to learn and adapt
their behavior. Any regularities would be `soft'; they would be the outcome of
processes that are embedded in history and have a short half-life. They would decay quickly because of the
memories, creative searching and learning by political leaders. Ironically, the `findings' of social science contribute to this
decay (Weber, 1969; Almond and Genco, 1977: 496-522; Gunnell, 1982: Ch. 2; Ball, 1987: Ch. 4; Kratochwil, 1989;
Rorty, 1989; Hollis, 1994: Ch. 9).
Beyond these conceptual and empirical difficulties lies a familiar but fundamental difference of purpose. Boyle's
Law, half-lives, or any other scientific principle based on probability, says nothing about the behavior of single units such as
molecules. For many theoretical and practical purposes this is adequate. But social science ultimately aspires — or
should aspire —to provide insight into practical world problems that are generally part of a small or very
small n. In international relations, the dynamics and outcomes of single cases are often much more
important than any statistical regularities.
The conception of causality on which deductive-nomological models are based, in classical physics as well as social
science, requires empirical invariance under specified boundary conditions. The standard form of such a statement is
this — given A, B and C, if X then (not) Y. This kind of bounded invariance can be found in closed systems. Open systems
4

can be influenced by external stimuli, and their structure and causal mechanisms evolve as a result. Rules that describe the
functioning of an open system at time T do not necessarily do so at T + 1 or T + 2. The boundary conditions may have
changed, rendering the statement irrelevant. Another axiomatic condition may have been added, and the outcome
subject to multiple conjunctural causation. There is no way to know this a priori from the causal statement itself. Nor will
complete knowledge (if it were possible) about the system at time T necessarily allow us to project its future course of
development.
In a practical sense, all social systems (and many physical and biological systems) are open. Empirical invariance does not
exist in such systems, and seemingly probabilistic invariances may be causally unrelated (Harre and Secord, 1973;
Bhaskar, 1979; Collier, 1994; Patomaki, 1996; Jervis, 1997). As physicists readily admit, prediction in open systems,
especially non-linear ones, is difficult, and often impossible.
The risk in saying that social scientists can 'predict' the value of variables in past history is that the value of these variables
is already known to us, and thus we are not really making predictions . Rather, we are trying to convince each other of the
logic that connects a statement of theory to an expectation about the value of a variable that derives from that theory. As
long as we can establish the parameters within which the theoretical statement is valid, which is a
prerequisite of generating expectations in any case, this 'theory-testing' or 'evaluating' activity is
not different in a logical sense when done in past or future time. 5

Consider how this plays out in evolutionary biology, the quintessential open system. Evolution
is the result of biological change and natural selection. The former is a function of random
genetic mutation and mating. The latter depends on the nature and variety of ecological 'niches'
and the competition for them. These are in turn shaped by such factors as continental drift,
the varying output of the sun, changes in the earth's orbit, and local conditions difficult to specify.
Biologists recognize that all the primary causes of evolution are random, or if not, interact in
complex, nonlinear ways, and make prediction impossible. Certain kinds of outcomes can be 'ruled
out' in a probabilistic sense, but almost never absolutely. Biologists have attempted to document
the course of evolution and explain the ways in which natural selection works. Historical and
theoretical work has resulted in a robust theory of evolution that permits scientific reconstruction
of the past in the context of a logic that explains why things turned out the way they did.

national debate on the notion of economic citizenship and redistribution exploits

widespread backlash against globalization, dealing a fatal blow to the engine of
neoliberalism nationally

McCulskey [Martha, Prof. of Law @ SUNY Buffalo, 2003 Indiana Law Journal, 78 Ind. L.J. 783]
At the beginning of the twentieth century, American law was the field of a struggle over the
transformation of citizenship in a reintegrated and reconfigured national political economy. 452
The questions of how government should distribute the risks and gains of that economy, and whose market freedom should
be central to a national economy built on and still entangled with slavery, were answered in part by Lochner era
judicial rulings. Those rulings privileged some economic protections as fundamental citizenship rights central to
both societal well-being and individual freedom, but jeopardized other economic protections by positioning these outside the
bounds of good citizenship as the product of special interests and individual dependence. 453
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American law is again the field of a struggle over the transformation
of citizenship in a reintegrated and reconfigured international political economy. The questions of how government should
distribute the risks and gains of this economy, and whose market freedom should be central to a global economy grown from
racialized colonialism, has been answered in part by a powerful neoliberal “Washington consensus” that has worked to
restructure social and economic rights in developing countries. 454 As in the Lochner era, the recently
triumphant free-market ideology promotes some government economic protections as
fundamental personal freedoms essential to aggregate well-being, but disparages and
jeopardizes other economic protections as special interest paternalism that endangers global
welfare. 455 And, as in the Lochner era, the dominant wisdom insists that the greatest equality
will eventually come from markets that are free to reward and reinforce the privileges and
penalties of race, class, and gender stratification. 456 But as the neoliberal promise of a new global
community of peace and prosperity horribly eludes much of the world, 457 cracks in the supposed “free market” consensus
have widened to admit new discussions about the societal benefits of other approaches to economic security. Nonetheless,
most mainstream U.S. “experts” who discuss the global market’s shortcomings remain critical of
the prominent protests against the costs of the policies promoted by the World Trade
Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other organs of global market governance.
459 Though many share the concern for those left out of global market gains, many fear
the protestors’ concerns are misdirected. 460 Why challenge the market just because some
are left out? 461 In the prevailing wisdom, harm to market losers is best addressed by
supplementing the market with protections that alleviate that harm while preserving the
market’s presumed overall benefits. 462
However, attempts to revive social citizenship as a complement or balance to the neoliberal market are caught within a
double bind. In the mainstream view, the welfare state is both the only cure for the neoliberal market’s devastating casualties
and the critical disease the neoliberal market must constantly fight off. Protection against market losses
always threatens to disrupt that market. 464 As a result, either the protection, or the
market losers (or both) must be sharply restrained. 465 This double bind descends from the market
fundamentalism of Lochner that still spooks the project of moving egalitarian economic protections from the
margins to the center of citizenship.
To escape this double bind, advocates of social citizenship must be willing to change rather than accommodate the neoliberal
market and the race, gender, and class hierarchies it embraces. Social citizenship ideals cannot remain outside the market as
complementary goals because those ideals are inextricable from the structures of government rights and responsibilities
inevitably internal to markets. Helping market losers will always seem to threaten the public good if that good is identified
with market winners’ gains. Social citizenship ideals have been sidetracked by the debate between pro-
welfare liberalism and communitarianism over whether to focus on protecting individuals or on
protecting communities. Instead, we should focus on the underlying question of which individuals and what kinds of
communities our markets should be structured to protect and to benefit.

WE must use the debate space to develop a collective vision, an affirmative biopolitics
to challenge neoliberalism’s hegemonic control of society.
Giroux [Henry, Prof. of Cultural Studies and Communication at McMaster University, Social Identities,
September, 2008]
Under the current reign of neoliberalism, the US has entered a New Gilded Age, more savage and anti-democratic than its
predecessor. The current form of market fundamentalism demands a new set of conceptual and analytical tools that engage
neoliberalism not only through an economic optic but also as a mode of rationality,
governmentality, and public pedagogy. The essay develops a biopolitics of neoliberalism,
exploring how it uses market values as a template for realigning corporate power and the state,
but also how it produces modes of consent vital to the construction of a neoliberal subject and a more ruthless politics of
disposability. Within this new form of neoliberal rationality and biopolitics a political system actively involved in the
management of the politics of life and death new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities
and intersection of race and class. As the Bush administration neared the end of its political tenure, the New York Times ran an editorial on the last day of
2007 insisting that the United States had become unrecognizable as a democratic society. Declaring that ‘there are too many moments when we cannot recognize
our country’, the editorial enumerated a list of state-sanctioned abuses, including torture by the CIA and subsequent repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions,
the web of legalized illegality enabling the Bush administration to spy on Americans, and the willingness of government officials to violate civil and constitutional
rights without apology, all done under the aegis of conducting the war on terrorism (New York Times, 2007b, p. A20). Steadfast in its condemnation of the Bush
administration, the editorial board of the New York Times (2007b) argued that the United States government had induced a ‘state of lawless behavior ... since
September 11, 2001’ (p. A20). The New York Times was not alone in its concern. The prominent writer, Sidney Blumenthal (2006), a former senior adviser to
President Clinton, claimed that we now live under a government tantamount to ‘a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditions and
domestic eavesdropping’. Bob Herbert (2006), an op-ed writer for the New York Times, suggestively argued that the dark landscapes of exclusion, secrecy, illegal
surveillance, and torture produced under the Bush regime offer Americans nothing less than a ‘road map to totalitarianism’ (p. A25). The French philosopher,
Jacques Ranciere (2006), may be most concise in arguing that what we have witnessed during the last few decades,
epitomized by the Bush administration, is an image of the future that exhibits a deep hatred of democracy.
While there is little question that since the new millennium, the United States has moved into lockdown (and
lockout) mode both at home and abroad with its burgeoning police state, its infamous title as the world leader in jailing its
own citizens, and its history of foreign and domestic ‘torture factories’ (Davis, 2005, p. 50) 1 it is a mistake to assume that the Bush
administration is solely responsible for transforming the United States to the degree that it has now become unrecognizable to itself as a democratic nation. Such
claims risk reducing the serious social ills now plaguing the United States to the reactionary policies of the Bush regime a move which allows for complacency to
set in as Bush’s reign comes to a close on January 20, 2009. The complacency caused by the sense of immanent regime change fails to offer a truly political
response to the current crisis because it ignores the extent to which Bush’s policies merely recapitulate Clinton era social and economic policy. What the United
States has become in the last decade suggests less of a rupture than an intensification of a number of already existing political, economic, and social forces that
have unleashed the repressive anti-democratic tendencies lurking beneath the damaged heritage of democratic ideals. What marks the present state of American
‘democracy’ is the uniquely bipolar nature of the degenerative assault on the body politic, which combines elements of unprecedented greed and fanatical
capitalism, called by some the New Gilded Age (McHugh, 2006; Greider, 2006; Davis & Monk, 2007; Krugman, 2007a; Uchitelle, 2007; Dreier, 2007; Trachtenberg,
2007), with a kind of politics more ruthless and savage in its willingness to abandon even vilify those individuals and groups now rendered disposable within ‘new
geographies of exclusion and landscapes of wealth’ that mark the new world order (Davis & Monk, 2007, p. ix).
[He continues]
Essential to neoliberalism’s regulative policies and goals is transforming the social state into a corporate state, one that
generously sells off public property to transnational corporations and military contracts to private
defense contractors, and one that ultimately provides welfare to an opulent minority. Government activities and
public goods are now given over to the private sphere. Corporations and religious organizations benefit from government largess while any activity
that might interfere with corporate power and profits is scrapped or dismantled, including environmental regulations, public education, and social welfare programs.
Schools and libraries are now privatized; forests are turned over to logging companies; military operations are increasingly outsourced to private security firms like
Blackwater while private security services now protect the gated communities of the rich; prisons are now run as for-profit institutions by corporations; and public
highways are managed and leased to private firms. Increasingly, government services are being sold to the lowest bidder. In short, capital is now being redistributed
upwards, as power is being transferred from traditional political localities to transnational corporations whose influence exceeds the boundaries and constraints
formerly regulated by the nation-state.
[He continues]
Extending this mode of rationality, the neoliberal economy with its relentless pursuit of market values now encompasses the entirety of human relations. As markets
are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as inefficient, monopolistic, incompetent and thus a threat to individual and
entrepreneurial freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments and citizens. Under neoliberal rationality,
citizens assume the role of entrepreneurial actors, bonded investors, or avid consumers while the state promotes market values throughout every aspect of the
social order. Rather than fade away as some proponents of globalization would have us believe, the state embraces neoliberal rationally as the regulating principle
of society in that it no longer merely endorses market relations, it now must ‘think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions, including the law [just
as] the health and growth of the economy is the basis of state legitimacy’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). The social state now becomes the ‘market-state’ and ‘This state’s
Under neoliberalism, everything is either
relationship to its citizens resembles that between a corporation and consumers’ (Ferguson, 2008, p. 10). 4
made saleable or plundered for profit while every effort is made to reconstruct the predatory state at work prior to the New
Deal. Public lands are looted by real estate developers and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly
hand the public’s airwaves over to broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime
going into the public trust. Within this rationality, the democratic state is replaced by the corporate state and ‘a
generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the measure of all state practices’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). As the state openly embraces
and responds to the demands of the market, it invites corporations to drive the nation’s energy policies, and war industries are given the green light to engage in
war profiteering as the government hands out numerous contracts without any competitive bidding. Similarly, political and natural disasters are turned into
entrepreneurial opportunities, which mark the destruction of the social state, the sale of public infrastructures, the imposition of privatization schemes, and the
privatization of the politics of governance (Klein, 2007; Saltman, 2007a; Saltman, 2007b; Gordon & Gordon, 2008).
As the axis of all social interaction, neoliberal rationality expands far beyond the operations of the corporate state, the production of goods, and the legislating of
laws (Carcamo-Huechante, 2006, p. 414). As a seductive mode of public pedagogy, neoliber- alism extends and disseminates the logic of the market economy
throughout society, shaping not only social relations, institutions, and policies but also desires, values, and identities in the interest of prescribing ‘the citizen-
subject of a neoliberal order’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). Under neoliberal rationality and its pedagogical practices not only are the state and the public sector reduced to
the phantom of market choices, but the citizen- subjects of such an order navigate the relationship between themselves and others around the calculating logics of
competition, individual risks, self-interest, and a winner-take-all survivalist ethic reminiscent of the social Darwinian script played out daily on ‘reality television’.
Moreover,
the survivalist ethic of nineteenth-century social Darwinism has been invoked to reinforce notions of racial hierarchy
and the current neo-liberal agenda has systematically sought to recreate racial segregation and exclusion through the
restructuring of income policies. Neoliberalism also connects power and knowledge to the technologies, strategies, tactics, and
pedagogical practices key to the management and ordering of populations and to controlling consent. Michel Foucault’s concept of
governmentality is crucial for understanding not only how modes of thought, rationality, and persuasion are linked to technologies of governing but also how any
analytic of government must consider the ways power works to create ‘the conditions of consensus or the prerequisites of acceptance’ (Lemke, 2002, p. 52). As
Thomas Lemke (2002) has pointed out, neoliberal modes of governmentality are important for developing the connection ‘between technologies of the self and
technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject and the formation of the state’ (p. 50). 5 As a powerful mode of public pedagogy, neoliberal ideology is
located, produced, and disseminated from many institutional and cultural sites ranging from the shrill noise of largely conservative talk radio to the halls of
academia and the screen culture of popular media (Giroux, 2008). Mobilizing modes of official knowledge, mass mediated desires, and strategies of power, these
sites provide an indispensable political service in coupling ‘technologies of the self and [neoliberal] political rationalities’ as part of a broader effort to transform
politics, restructure power relations, and produce an array of narratives and disciplinary measures (Lemke, 2005, p. 12). As neoliberalism extends into all aspects of
daily life, the boundaries of the cultural, economic, and political become porous and leak into each other, sharing the task, though in different ways, of producing
identities, goods, knowledge, modes of communication, affective investments, and many other aspects of social life and the social order (Foucault, 2003; Rose,
2007). Fundamental to the construction of the neoliberal subject is the acceptance of this official set of orthodoxies: the public sphere, if not the very notion of the
social, is a pathology; consumerism is the most important obligation of citizenship; freedom is an utterly privatized affair that legitimates the primacy of property
rights over public priorities; the social state is bad; all public difficulties are individually determined; and all social problems, now individualised, can be redressed by
private solutions. The under- mining of social solidarities and collective structures along with the collapsing of public issues into private concerns is one of the most
damning elements of neoliberal rationality. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) elucidates this issue in the following comment: In our ‘society of individuals’ all the messes into
which one can get are assumed to be self-made and all the hot water into which one can fall is proclaimed to have been boiled by the hapless failures [of those] who
have fallen into it. For the good and the bad that fill one’s life a person has only himself or herself to thank or to blame. And the way the ‘whole-life-story’ is told
raises this assumption to the rank of an axiom. (p. 9)
Once again, any notion of collective goals designed to deepen and expand the meaning of freedom and democracy as part of
the vocabulary of the public good is derided as taxing and spending big government liberalism or simply dismissed in
neoliberal discourse. More specifically, ‘[c]ollective goals such as redistribution, public health and the wider public good
have no place in this landscape of individual preferences’ (Needham, 2004, p. 80). Instead, neoliberal theory and
practice give rise to the replacement of the social state with a market/punishing state in which political rights are strictly
limited; economic rights are deregulated and privatized; and social rights are replaced by the call to individual preference
schemes and self-reliance. Within the impoverished vocabulary of privatization, individualism, and
excessive materialism that promises to maximize choice and to minimize taxation, the new
citizen-consumer bids a hasty retreat from those public spheres that view critique as a
democratic value, collective responsibility as fundamental to the nurturing of democracy, and
the deepening and expanding of collective protections as a legitimate function of the state.
Defined largely by ‘the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve
all problems’ (Rosen, 2007), the public domain is emptied of the democratic ideals, discourses,
and identities needed to address important considerations such as universal health care,
ecologically responsible mass transit, affordable housing with reasonable mortgage rates,
subsidized care for the young and elderly, and government efforts to reduce carbon emissions
and invest in new forms of energy. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities
crumble and give way to individualized, one-man archipelagos, it is increasingly difficult to identify as a collectivity, to act in
concert, to meet the basic needs of citizens, or to maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services.
[He continues]
In spite of their differences, all of these stories are bound together by a politics in which the logic of the
marketplace is recalibrated to exploit society’s most vulnerable even to the point of transgressing the sanctity of the dead and
to inflict real horrors, enslavement, and injuries upon the lives of those who are poor, elderly, young, and disenfranchised,
because they are without an economic role in the neoliberal order. And as the third story illustrates, a savage and
fanatical capitalism offers a revealing snapshot of how violence against the incarcerated --largely black, often poor, and
deemed utterly disposable-- now enters the realm of popular culture by producing a type of racialized terrorism
posing as extreme entertainment, while simultaneously recapitulating the legacy of barbarism associated
with slavery.
[He continues]
As the social state is displaced by the market, a new kind of politics is emerging in which some lives, if not whole groups, are
seen as disposable and redundant. Within this new form of biopolitics --a political system actively involved in the management
of the politics of life and death -- new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and
intersection of race and class. But what is important to recognize is that the configuration of politics that
is emerging is about more than the processes of social exclusion or being left out of the benefits
of the market, it is increasingly about a normalized and widely accepted reliance upon the
alleged ‘invisible hand’ of a market fundamentalism to mediate the most important decisions
about life and death. In this case, the politics managing the crucial questions of life and death is
governed by neoliberalism’s power to define who matters and who doesn’t, who lives and who
dies. Questions about getting ahead no longer occupy a key role in everyday politics. For most
people under the regime of neoliberalism, everyday life has taken an ominous turn and is largely organized
around questions of who is going to survive and who is going to die. Under such circumstances, important decisions about life
and death have given way to a range of anti- democratic forces that threaten the meaning and substance of democracy,
politics, human condition, and any viable and just vision of the future. In its updated version, neoliberal
rationality also rules ‘our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, increasingly
dominat[ing] almost everything, even moving into areas that were once prohibited by custom in
our country, like commercializing childhood’ (Nader, 2007).
[He continues]
While it has become fashionable to proclaim the end of history and ideology, on the one hand,
and a growing public disengagement with politics, on the other, a seismic shift has taken place in
the United States in the last thirty years. This shift has eviscerated the space of democratic politics as well as the
language in which it is affirmed and contested. Important transformations in the nature of the state, the separation of political
power from economic resources, the emergence of a market that colonizes critical agency in its own interests, and the deployment
of education to the complex forces of a new electronically mediated culture are reflective of a new kind of sovereignty that resides in the market, outside of the
constraining influence of state power. The domination of corporate sovereignty is more porous, expansive, and mobile than anything we have seen in the past. 6
I believe that we have entered into a unique theater of politics that demands a new theoretical discourse for both understanding and overcoming many of the social
problems we are currently facing as a range of anti-democratic tendencies appear to be rewriting the relationship between life and politics, agency and social
responsibility, and the related discourses of hope, critique, commitment, and social intervention. At stake here is the important issue of how to think about
democratic politics in an age that collapses the public sphere into privatized market relations. In order to address this issue, I want to first shed light on some of the
distinguishing features, inequalities, and modes of legitimation that have given rise to a New Gilded Age which has become a code word for the sanctioning of a
savage neoliberal capitalism that seeks to ‘destroy the very possibility of politics, freedom, and consequently, our humanity’ (Bernstein, 2005, p. 76).
Gilded-Age excess is now on display in all of the major media as a referent for the good life. Getting ahead requires a hyped-up version of social Darwinism,
endlessly played out in various ‘reality television’ programs, which represent an insatiable and cut-throat scorn for the weaknesses of others and a sadistic
affirmation of ruthlessness and steroidal power. Getting voted off the island or being told ‘You’re fired!’ now renders real life despair and misfortune entertaining,
even pleasurable. As Zygmunt Bauman (2004) points out, the dominant logic that emanates from the ongoing deluge of Reality TV is clear and consistent:
[T]hat one is of use to other human beings only as long as she or he can be exploited to their advantage, that the waste bin, the ultimate destination of the
excluded, is the natural prospect for those who no longer fit or no longer wish to be exploited in such a way, that survival is the name of the game of human
togetherness and that the ultimate stake of survival is outliving the others.We are fascinated by what we see just as Dali or De Chirico wished us to be fascinated
by their canvases when they struggled to display the innermost, the hidden most contents of our subconscious fantasies and fear. (p. 131)
[He continues]
Of course, there is more at stake here than the emergence of a new class of rich tycoons, there is also the growing threat to the
planet as democracy is largely redefined in the interests of corporate values and profits. Corporate power translates into political power for
the rich and further impoverishment for everyone else. Government policies are made into laws that not only benefit the rich through tax subsidies and legal
protections, they are also used to undercut, under fund, and eliminate social protections aimed to help the poor, aged, and sick, including children. For example, in
the wake of the widening housing and mortgage crisis in which home foreclosures reached over two million and hundreds of thousands of individuals and families
not only risk losing their homes but also any viable place to live, President Bush and his supporters initially blocked a Democratic Party- backed bill that would have
prevented as many as 600,000 home foreclosures, rescuing thousands of borrowers from becoming homeless. In this case, Bush’s allegiance to corporate power
was on full display not only with his decision to side with the banks, Wall Street firms, and mortgage lenders, but also in his response to criticism of his veto of the
mortgage relief bill (Andrews, 2008a). Rather than address the crisis, Bush shamelessly exploited it for his own ideological ends, playing politics with human tragedy
by using the mortgage crisis relief efforts to call on ‘Congress to extend indefinitely his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts’, which largely benefit the rich and powerful
corporations (Andrews, 2008b, p. C1).
The mutually determining forces of every deepening inequality and an emerging repressive
Neoliberalism as a biopolitics of disposability
state apparatus have become the defining features of neoliberalism at the beginning of the new millennium.
Wealth is now redistributed upwards to produce record high levels of inequality, and corporate power is
simultaneously consolidated at a speed that threatens to erase the most critical gains made over
the last fifty years to curb the anti-democratic power of corporations. Draconian policies aimed at
hollowing out the social state are now matched by an increase in repressive legislation to curb the unrest that might explode
among those populations falling into the despair and suffering unleashed by a ‘savage, fanatical capitalism’ that now
constitutes the neoliberal war against the public good, the welfare state, and ‘social citizenship’ (Davis & Monk, 2007, p.
ix). Privatization, commodification, corporate mergers, and asset stripping go hand in hand with the curbing
of civil liberties, the increasing criminalization of social problems, and the fashioning of the prison as the
preeminent space of racial containment (one in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated)
(Associated Press, 2008). The alleged morality of market freedom is now secured through the
ongoing immorality of a militarized state that embraces torture, war, and violence as legitimate
functions of political sovereignty and the ordering of daily life. As the rich get richer, corporations
become more powerful, and the reach of the punishing state extends itself further, those forces
and public spheres that once provided a modicum of protection for workers, the poor, sick, aged,
and young are undermined, leaving large numbers of people impoverished and with little hope
for the future. David Harvey (2005) refers to this primary feature of neoliberalism as ‘accumulation by
dispossession’, which he enumerates as all of those processes such as the privatization and commodification of public assets,
deregulation of the financial sector, and the use of the state to direct the flow of wealth upward through, among other
practices, tax policies that favor the rich and cut back the social wage (p. 7). As Harvey (2005) points out, ‘All of
these processes amount to the transfer of assets from the public and popular realms to the
private and class privileged domains’, and the overwhelming of political institutions by powerful
corporations that keep them in check (p. 161). Zygmunt Bauman (2007) goes further and argues
that not only does capitalism draw its life blood from the relentless process of asset stripping, but it produces ‘the acute
crisis of the ‘‘human waste’’ disposal industry, as each new outpost conquered by capitalist markets adds new thousands or
millions to the mass of men and women already deprived of their lands, workshops, and communal safety nets’ (p. 28). The upshot
of such policies is that larger segments of the population are now struggling under the burden of massive debts, unemployment, lack of adequate health care, and a
brooding sense of hopelessness. What is unique about this type of neoliberal market fundamentalism is not merely the anti- democratic notion that the market
should be the guide for all human actions, but also the sheer hatred for any form of sovereignty in which the government could promote the general welfare. As
Thom Hartmann (2005) points out, governance under the regime of neoliberalism has given way to punishment as one of the central features of politics. He
describes the policies endorsed by neoliberals as follows: Government should punish, they agree, but it should never nurture, protect, or defend individuals.
Nurturing and protecting, they suggest, is the more appropriate role of religious institutions, private charities, families, and perhaps most important corporations.
Let the corporations handle your old-age pension. Let the corporations decide how much protection we and our environment need from their toxins. Let the
corporations decide what we’re paid. Let the corporations decide what doctor we can see, when, and for what purpose. But the punishing state does more than
substitute charity and private aid for government- backed social provisions, or criminalize a range of existing social problems; it also cultivates a culture of fear and
suspicion towards all those others immigrants, refugees, Muslims, youth, minorities of class and color, and the elderly who in the absence of dense social
networks and social supports fall prey to unprecedented levels of displaced resentment from the media, public scorn for their vulnerability, and increased
criminalization because they are both considered dangerous and unfit for integration into American society. Coupled with this rewriting of the obligations of
sovereign state power and the transfer of sovereignty to the market is a widely endorsed assumption that regardless of the suffering, misery, and problems faced by
human beings, they ultimately are not only responsible for their fate but are reduced to relying on their own sense of survival. There is more at stake here than the
vengeful return of an older colonial fantasy that regarded the natives as less than human, or the emerging figure of the disposable worker as a prototypical figure of
the neoliberal order though the histories of racist exclusion inform the withdrawal of moral and ethical concerns from these populations. 10 There is also the
unleashing of a powerfully regressive symbolic and corporeal violence against all those individuals and groups who have been ‘othered’ because their very presence
undermines the engines of wealth and inequality that drive the neoliberal dreams of consumption, power, and profitability. What is distinct about these complex
registers of sovereignty is the emergence of a fundamentally new mode of politics in which state power not only takes on a different register but in many ways has
been modified by the sovereignty of the market. While the state still has the power of the law to reduce individuals to impoverishment and to strip them of civic
rights, due process, and civil liberties, neoliberalism increasingly wields its own form of sovereignty through the invisible hand of the market, which now has the
power to produce new configurations of control, regulate social health, and alter human life in new and profound ways.This shift in sovereignty, power,
and the political order points to the importance of biopolitics as an attempt to think through not only how politics uses power
to mediate the convergence of life and death, but also how sovereign power proliferates those conditions in which individuals
marginalized by race, class, and gender configurations are ‘stripped of political significance and exposed to murderous
violence’ (Ziarek, 2008, p. 90). The notion that biopolitics marks a specific moment in the development of political modernity has been taken up in great detail by
Michel Foucault (1990; 2003). Foucault argues that since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emerging concerns for the health, habitation, welfare, and
living conditions of populations, the economy of power is no longer primarily about the threat of taking life, or exercising a mode of sovereign power ‘mainly as a
means of deduction the seizing of things, time, bodies, and ultimately the seizing of life itself ’ (Ojakangas, 2005, pp. 5 6). For Foucault, biopolitics points to new
relations of sovereignty and power that are more capacious, concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it ‘both useful and
docile’ but also with a body that needs to be ‘regularized’ (2003, p. 249), subject to corrective mechanisms and immaterial means of production that exert ‘a
positive influence on life, endeavour[ing] to administer, optimize, and multiply it’ (1990, p. 137). For Foucault, power is no longer exclusively embodied in the state
or its formal repressive apparatuses and legal regulations (Lemke, 2005, p. 11). Instead, power also circulates outside of the realm of the state and the constraints
of a juridico-discursive concept through a wide variety of political technologies and modes of subjectification, produced through what Foucault calls
governmentality or the pedagogical ‘tactics ... which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what
is not, the public versus the private, and so on’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 103). In this instance, biopolitics does not collapse into sovereign power, just as matters of
consent and persuasion cannot be reduced to the disciplining of the body. As the boundary between politics and life becomes blurred, human beings and the social
forms and living processes through which they live, speak, act, and relate to each other move to the center of politics, just as the latter processes and relationships
become the center of new political struggles. Biopolitics thus marks a shift in the workings of both sovereignty and power as made clear by Foucault for whom
biopolitics replaces the power to dispense fear and death with that of a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. ... [Biopolitics] is no longer a matter
of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a
biopolitics is largely productive,
continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism. (Ojakangas, 2005, p. 6) As Foucault (2003) insists, the logic of
though it exercises what he calls a death function when the state ‘is obliged to use race, the elimination of races, and the
purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power’ (p. 255). Neoliberalism as a mode of biopolitics not only expands the sites, range, and
dynamics of power relations, it also points to new modes of subjectification in which various technologies connecting the self and diverse modes of domination
(Lemke, 2002, p. 50), far removed from the central power of the state, play a primary role in producing forms of consent, shaping conduct, and constituting ‘people
in such ways that they can be governed’ (Lemke, 2005, p. 3). According to Judith Butler (2004), as a mode of governmentality, biopolitics: is broadly understood as a
mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of
goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population. ...Marked by a diffuse set of strategies and tactics, governmentality gains its meaning and
purpose from no single source, no unified sovereign subject. Rather, the tactics characteristic of governmentality operate diffusely, to dispose and order
populations, and to produce and reproduce subjects, their practices and belief, in relation to specific policy aims. Foucault maintained, boldly, that ‘the problems of
governmentality and the techniques of government have become the only political issues, the only real space for political struggle and contestation’. (p. 52)
[He continues]
The biopolitics of neoliberalism as an instance of ‘bare life’ is not only coming more and more to the foreground but is also
restructuring the terrain of everyday life for vast numbers of people. As an older politics associated with the social state and the ‘social
contract’ (however damaged and racially discriminating) 13 gives way to an impoverished vocabulary that celebrates private financial gain over human lives, public
goods, and broad democratic values, the hidden inner workings of ‘bare life’ become less of a metaphor than a reality for millions of people whose suffering and
misery moves from benign neglect to malign neglect (Agamben, 1998, p. 9). Beyond the very visible example of Katrina, there is a host of less visible instances
affecting those dehumanized by a politics of disposability. The logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is visible in the Bush administration’s indifference to
the growing HIV crisis among young black women who ‘represent the highest percentage (56 percent) of all AIDS cases reported among women, and an increasing
proportion of new cases (60 percent)’ (Cromie, 1998). Hidden behind the rhetoric of color blindness and self-help that assists in camouflaging the racist under-
pinnings of much of contemporary society, the HIV epidemic spreads but gets almost no attention from ‘leaders in public health, politics, or religion’ (cited in ABC
Primetime, 2006). 14 The politics of bare life also informs the fury of the new nativism in the United States at dawn of the twenty-first century. Stoked by media
panics and the hysterical populist rhetoric of politicians, racist commitments easily translate into policies targeting poor youth of color as well as immigrant men,
women, and children with deportation, incarceration, and state-backed violence. Extending the logic of disposability to those defined as ‘other’ through the
discourse of nativism, citizen border patrols and ‘migrant hunters’ urge the government to issue a state of emergency to stop the flow of immigrants across the
United States’ southern border (Buchanan & Holthouse, 2006, pp. 29 32). Leading public intellectuals inhabit the same theoretical discourse as right-wing vigilante
groups. For example, internationally known Harvard University faculty member, Samuel P. Huntington (2004), unapologetically argues in Who Are We? The
Challenge to America’s Identity that Western civilization, as it is said to be represented in the United States, is threatened by the growing presence of Hispanic-
Americans, especially Mexican-Amer- icans, shamelessly defined as the ‘brown menace’. 15 The New York Times (2007a) claims that ‘toughness’ is the new
watchword in immigration policy, which translates not only into a boom in immigration detention but also in some cases death to immigrants denied access to
essential medicines and healthcare (p. A22). For them, the new biopolitics of disposability is also evident in the fact that for many black men and women, the war on
drugs signals the emergence of ‘the prison as the preeminent US racial space’ (Singh, 2006, pp. 83 84). b (Moraff, 2007, pp. 1 3). The logic of disposability as an
instance of ‘bare life’ also gains expression in the slave-like conditions many guest workers endure in the United States. Routinely cheated out of wages, held
captive by employers who seize their documents, and often forced to live in squalid conditions without medical benefits, such workers exist in a state that
Congressman Charles Rangel characterizes as ‘the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery’, a statement amply supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center report
(2007), Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States. The growing armies of the ‘living dead’ also include the 750,000 who are homeless in America
on any given night (Eaton-Robb, 2007), along with the swelling ranks of the working poor and unemployed who are either under insured or uninsured and unable to
get even minimum health care. Needless to say, the logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is clearly visible in all of these examples. At the dawn of the
new millennium, it is commonplace for references to the common good, public trust, and public service to be either stigmatized or sneered at by people who sing
the praises of neoliberalism and its dream of turning ‘the global economy ... into a planetary casino’ (Castoriadis, 2007, p. 47). Against this dystopian condition, the
American political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, has argued that because of the increasing power of corporations and the emergence of a lawless state (given
immense power during the administration of George W. Bush), American democracy is not only in crisis, it is also characterized by a sense of powerlessness and
experiences of loss. Wolin (2000) claims that this sense of loss is related ‘to power and powerlessness and hence has a claim upon theory’ (p. 3). In making a claim
upon theory, loss aligns itself with the urgency of a crisis, a crisis that demands a new theoretical discourse while at the same time requiring a politics that involves
contemplation, that is, a politics in which modes of critical inquiry brush up against the more urgent crisis that threatens to shut down even the possibility of
critique. For Wolin, the dialectic of crisis and politics points to three fundamental concerns that need to be addressed as part of a broader democratic struggle. First,
it is no longer possible to assume
politics is now marked by pathological conditions in which issues of death are overtaking concerns with life. Second,
that democracy is tenable within a political system that daily inflicts massive suffering and injustices on weak minorities and
those individuals and groups who exist outside of the privileges of neoliberal values, that is, those individuals or groups who
exist in what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls ‘death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations
are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead’ (pp. 39 40). Third, theory in
some academic quarters now seems to care more about matters of contemplation and judgment
in search of distance rather than a politics of crisis driven by an acute sense of justice, urgency,
and intervention. Theory in this instance distances itself from politics, neutered by a form of self-
sabotage in which ideas are removed from the messy realm of politics, power, and intervention.
According to Wolin (2000),

refusal to adress the individualization and moralization of neoliberalism calls forth the
demonic state, In the realm of devalued lives, Racial others, and inferior genders,
atrocities are justified as the cost of doing business.

Giroux[Henry, Prof. of Cultural Studies and Communication at McMaster University, Social

Identities, September, 2008]
Foucault is acutely aware that the impoverishment of the social order is fed by a society that neither questions itself nor can
imagine any alternative to itself, and that such a rationality not only yields a partial apprehension of how power works but
also feeds the growing ineptitude, if not irrelevance, of (in)organic and traditional intellectuals, whose cynicism often
translates into complicity with the forms of power they condemn. Moreover, Foucault was deeply committed to
analyzing how technologies of power produce particular rationalities, modes of identification,
conduct, and orders of consent, and how they were mediated and integrated through ‘techniques
of the self and structures of coercion and domination’ (Foucault, 1993, pp. 203 204). Foucault’s
notion of ‘governmentality’ suggests that, as Lemke (2002) argues, it is important to see not only whether neoliberal
rationality is an adequate representation of society but also how it functions as a ‘politics of truth’, producing new forms of
knowledge, inventing different notions and concepts that contribute to the ‘government’ of new domains of regulation and
intervention. (p. 55)
While Foucault does not use the term pedagogy, his notion of governmentality is extremely suggestive regarding the
importance of making pedagogy crucial to any notion of politics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) build upon Foucault’s theoretical insights by emphasizing
biopolitics as a productive ‘form of power that regulates social life from its interior’ (p. 23). Hardt and Negri argue that biopolitics not only touches all aspects of social life but is the primary political and cultural
force through which the creation and reproduction of new subjectivities take place, while registering culture, society, and politics as a terrain of multiple and diverse struggles waged by numerous groups. In this
perspective, biopolitics is mediated through the world of ideas, knowledge, new modes of communication, and a proliferating multitude of diverse social relations. Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that this ample
notion of biopolitics registers a global world in which production is not merely economic but social ‘the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life’ that allows diverse individuals and groups ‘to

‘Who we
manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different’, yet sharing a common currency in the desire for democracy (pp. xiv xv). According to Hardt and Negri (2004),

are, how we view the world, how we interact with each other are all created through this social, biopolitical production’ (p.
67). And it is precisely within this transformed biopolitical sphere that they believe new and diverse social subjects sharing a
common project of resistance and democracy can emerge on a global scale. For my purposes, the importance of Agamben’s, Foucault’s, and Hardt and Negri’s
work on biopolitics, in spite of their distinct theoretical differences, is that they move matters of culture, especially those aimed at ‘the production of information, communication, [and] social relations ... to the
center of politics itself ’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 334). Though they may share little else, each of these theorists recognizes that democracy is in danger. Whereas Agamben emphasizes a dystopian biopolitics attentive to the
intensification of a widespread culture of death, Foucault and Hardt and Negri offer us important theoretical tools for addressing the productive and cultural/pedagogical nature of biopolitics. While the concept of pedagogy is implicit in both
the work of Foucault and Hardt and Negri, it is underdeveloped theoretically, particularly around matters of agency, critical consciousness, and resistance. Building upon this absence productively suggests making
pedagogy more central to any oppositional notion of biopolitics, governmentality, and struggle. In the final section of this essay, I selectively appropriate elements of the work of these four theorists in order to develop an analysis
of contemporary biopolitical investments, which in my view offers the best means for challenging the insidious complexity of neoliberalism’s logic of disposability. In addition, I want to draw upon the work of a
number of theorists who make critical pedagogy - the articulation of critical knowledge to experience - central to any viable notion of politics and critical agency. Conclusion. Any attempt to address the current biopolitics
of neoliberalism and disposability must begin by decoupling what has become a powerful hegemonic element in neoliberal rationality the presupposition that the market is synonymous with democracy and the final stage in ‘the telos of history’ (Davis,

it is crucial for intellectuals and others not only to reveal neoliberalism as a historical and social
2008). Against this ideological subterfuge,

construction, but also to make clear the various ways in which its regime of truth and power is being resisted by other countries,
particularly as ‘its magic seems to have faded in the laboratories of the south, especially in Latin America, where once Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador were crowded together as its poster children’ (Martin,
2007, p. 20). Equally important is the necessity to make visible and critically analyze the matrix of ideological and economic mechanisms at work under neoliberalism and how the latter are producing a growing
inequality of wealth and power throughout the globe.[He continues]This logic of disposability is about more than the extreme examples portrayed by the inhabitants of Agamben’s camp. The biopolitics of
disposability both includes and reaches beyond the shocking image of the overcrowded refugee camps and the new American Social Identities Gulag that includes the massive incarceration mostly people of color,

special prisons for immigrants, torture sites such as Abu Ghraib, and the now infamous Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Disposable populations now include the 60 million
people in the United States living one notch about the poverty line, the growing number of families living on bare government subsistence, the 46 million Americans without health insurance, the over 2,000,000
persons incarcerated in prisons, the young people laboring under enormous debt and rightly sensing that the American dream is on life support, the workers who are one paycheck away from the joining the ranks of the
 in ‘disease-ridden Africa’,
disposable and permanently excluded, and the elderly whose fixed incomes and pensions are in danger of disappearing.16 On a global level, the archetypes of otherness and disposability can be found

the Orientalist paradigm that now defines the Arab world, those geopolitical spaces that house the growing refugee camps in
Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America, and those countries from Iraq to Argentina that have suffered under neoliberal economic polices in which matters of structural adjustment are synonymous with the dictates of what Naomi Klein

The camp increasingly becomes the exemplary institution of global neoliberal capital succinctly defined by
(2007) calls ‘disaster capitalism’.

Zygmunt Bauman (2003) as ‘garrisons of extraterritoriality’, functioning largely as ‘dumping grounds for the indisposed of
and as yet unrecycled waste of the global frontier-land’ (p. 138). A biopolitics that struggles in the name of democratic
education and politics becomes impossible unless individual and political rights are protected and enabled by social rights.
This means in part that collective opposition to the punishing state and the sovereignty of the market has to be waged in the
name of a democracy that takes up the struggle for a social state that not only provides social protections and collectively
endorsed insurance but also redistributes wealth and income so as to eliminate the inequalities that fuel and reproduce the
power of neoliberalism and its war on the welfare state, its promotion of an expanded military, its contracting out of major
public services, and its call for a law-andorder state of (in)security.
Biopolitics as a concept in this struggle is essential because it makes visible a neoliberal regime in which politics not only makes life itself a site of radical
unequal struggle, but under the power of global capital produces a politics of disposability in which exclusion and death become the only mediators of the present for an increasing number of individuals and groups. If the exclusion of vast numbers
of people marginalized by race, class, age, and gender was once the secret of modernity, late modern politics has amplified its power to exclude large numbers of diverse groups from a meaningful social existence,
while making the logic of disposability central to its definition of politics, and, as I have argued, its modes of entertainment. But there is something more distinctive about neoliberal biopolitics and a post-9/11 world
than an obsession with necropolitics, where the state of exception becomes routine, a war against terrorism mimics that which it opposes, and death-dealing modes of inequality strengthen, despite the growing
modes of global resistance, the increase in humanitarian aid, the escalating call for more rights legislation, and the growing influence of international law (Comaroff, 2007, p. 207). Neoliberalism’s politics of
disposability not only are maintained merely through disciplinary and regulatory powers, but also work primarily as a form of seduction, a pedagogy in which matters of subjectification, desire, and identities are
central to neoliberalism’s mode of governing. Pedagogy functions as a form of cultural politics and governmentality understood as a moral and political practice that takes place in a variety sites outside of schools.
In this instance, pedagogy anchors governmentality in ‘domain of cognition’ functioning largely as ‘a grid of insistent calculation, experimenta- tion, and evaluation concerned with the conduct of conduct’ (Dillon,
1995, p. 330). But there is more at work here than the ‘domains of cognition’ that shape common sense, there is also a pedagogy of fantasy and desire producing a kind of ‘emotional habitus’ through the ever
present landscapes of entertainment (Illouz, 2007). There is in this case a pedagogical apparatus and mode of seduction that in the name of entertainment invites spectators to watch an unfolding ‘theatre of
cruelty’ expanding across the globe to laugh at exclusion and humiliation rather then be moved to challenge it. And it is precisely at this intersection of pedagogy and politics that neoliberalism must be
challenged. Opposing neoliberalism, in part, suggests exposing the myths and conditions that sustain the shape of late modern politics as an economic, social, and pedagogical project. [He continues]If, as both
Arendt and Dewey argued, human beings become superfluous in societies that eliminate the conditions for debate and critical engagement, it is all the more important to once again rethink the relationship
between democracy and politics in an age that relegates ethics along with the social state to the dustbin of history. Arendt believed that persuasion, reflective judgment, and debate were essential to politics, while
Dewey viewed it as a fragile enterprise that could only be kept alive as an ongoing struggle to preserve a democratic ethos. Both Arendt and Dewey, writing in the shadow of a number of twentieth-century
totalitarian regimes, knew that democracy was fragile, offered no guarantees, and could only be sustained through a democratic ethos that was nourished and cultivated in a diverse number of active public spheres
(Arendt, 1968; Dewey, 1999[1935]). And it is precisely in the struggle over a democratic ethos that modes of resistance need to be mobilized that refuse and transform the narratives, values, and seductions of the
neoliberal ethos. But such resistance cannot be mobilized simply through ideas. Also needed is the promise and reality of public spheres that in their diverse forms, sites, and content offer pedagogical and political
possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy; that is, new spaces from which to cultivate the capacities for critical modes of individual and social agency, as well as crucial opportunities to form
alliances in the collective struggle for an oppositional biopolitics that expands the scope of vision, operations of democracy, and the range of democratic institutions. In other words, a biopolitics that fights against
the terrors of totalitarianism in its various fundamentalisms and guises. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen
informed by particular forms of education, a citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish. Along with Dewey and Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis (1991), the great

public space is not to be experienced as a private affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people
philosopher of democracy, argued that if

experience and learn how to participate in and shape public life, it must be shaped through an education that provides the
decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and respect, all of which connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the
planet, and global democracy. As the intersection of life and politics becomes more pronounced, a progressive biopolitics also points to a discourse of possibility where bare life and legal exception are not the norm,
where the world is no longer allotted without resistance to the winners of globalization, and where individualism and consumerism no longer provide the only sense of possibility, freedom, meaning, and responsibility. As Randy Martin
(2007) points out, neoliberalism along with the public violence it produces does not exhaust all other notions of political expression. He writes: Without discounting the scope of repression by which the state operates, or the ever more elaborate production
of relative surplus populations, consolidating all politics around the figure of death is also a tremendous narrowing of the whole range of social contestations over forms of life and the shape of society ... but this conception of the political is, at the very
least, complicit. (Martin, 2007, p. 141)

WE must use the debate space to develop a collective vision, an affirmative biopolitics
to challenge neoliberalism’s hegemonic control of society.

Giroux [Henry, Prof. of Cultural Studies and Communication at McMaster University, Social Identities,
September, 2008]
Under the current reign of neoliberalism, the US has entered a New Gilded Age, more savage and anti-democratic than its predecessor. The current form of market fundamentalism demands a new set of conceptual and analytical tools that engage
neoliberalism not only through an economic optic but also as a mode of rationality, governmentality, and public pedagogy. The essay develops a biopolitics of neoliberalism, exploring how it uses market values as a

new form of neoliberal rationality

template for realigning corporate power and the state, but also how it produces modes of consent vital to the construction of a neoliberal subject and a more ruthless politics of disposability. Within this

and biopolitics a political system actively involved in the management of the politics of life and death new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and intersection
of race and class. As the Bush administration neared the end of its political tenure, the New York Times ran an editorial on the last day of 2007 insisting that the United States had become unrecognizable
as a democratic society. Declaring that ‘there are too many moments when we cannot recognize our country’, the editorial enumerated a list of state-sanctioned abuses, including torture by the CIA and subsequent
repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions, the web of legalized illegality enabling the Bush administration to spy on Americans, and the willingness of government officials to violate civil and constitutional
rights without apology, all done under the aegis of conducting the war on terrorism (New York Times, 2007b, p. A20). Steadfast in its condemnation of the Bush administration, the editorial board of the New York
Times (2007b) argued that the United States government had induced a ‘state of lawless behavior ... since September 11, 2001’ (p. A20). The New York Times was not alone in its concern. The prominent writer,
Sidney Blumenthal (2006), a former senior adviser to President Clinton, claimed that we now live under a government tantamount to ‘a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditions
and domestic eavesdropping’. Bob Herbert (2006), an op-ed writer for the New York Times, suggestively argued that the dark landscapes of exclusion, secrecy, illegal surveillance, and torture produced under the
Bush regime offer Americans nothing less than a ‘road map to totalitarianism’ (p. A25). The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere (2006), may be most concise in arguing that what we have witnessed during the last few decades,
epitomized by the Bush administration, is an image of the future that exhibits a deep hatred of democracy.

, the United States has moved into lockdown (and lockout) mode both at home and abroad
While there is little question that since the new millennium

with its burgeoning police state, its infamous title as the world leader in jailing its as888xzown citizens, and its history of
foreign and domestic ‘torture factories’ (Davis, 2005, p. 50) 1 it is a mistake to assume that the Bush administration is solely responsible for
transforming the United States to the degree that it has now become unrecognizable to itself as a democratic nation. Such claims risk reducing the serious social ills
now plaguing the United States to the reactionary policies of the Bush regime a move which allows for complacency to set in as Bush’s reign comes to a close on
January 20, 2009. The complacency caused by the sense of immanent regime change fails to offer a truly political response to the current crisis because it ignores
the extent to which Bush’s policies merely recapitulate Clinton era social and economic policy. What the United States has become in the last decade suggests less
of a rupture than an intensification of a number of already existing political, economic, and social forces that have unleashed the repressive anti-democratic
tendencies lurking beneath the damaged heritage of democratic ideals. What marks the present state of American ‘democracy’ is the uniquely bipolar nature of the
degenerative assault on the body politic, which combines elements of unprecedented greed and fanatical capitalism, called by some the New Gilded Age (McHugh,
2006; Greider, 2006; Davis & Monk, 2007; Krugman, 2007a; Uchitelle, 2007; Dreier, 2007; Trachtenberg, 2007), with a kind of politics more ruthless and savage in
its willingness to abandon even vilify those individuals and groups now rendered disposable within ‘new geographies of exclusion and landscapes of wealth’ that
mark the new world order (Davis & Monk, 2007, p. ix).
[He continues]
Essential to neoliberalism’s regulative policies and goals is transforming the social state into a corporate state, one that
generously sells off public property to transnational corporations and military contracts to private
defense contractors, and one that ultimately provides welfare to an opulent minority. Government activities and
public goods are now given over to the private sphere. Corporations and religious organizations benefit from government largess while any activity
that might interfere with corporate power and profits is scrapped or dismantled, including environmental regulations, public education, and social welfare programs.
Schools and libraries are now privatized; forests are turned over to logging companies; military operations are increasingly outsourced to private security firms like
Blackwater while private security services now protect the gated communities of the rich; prisons are now run as for-profit institutions by corporations; and public
highways are managed and leased to private firms. Increasingly, government services are being sold to the lowest bidder. In short, capital is now being redistributed
upwards, as power is being transferred from traditional political localities to transnational corporations whose influence exceeds the boundaries and constraints
formerly regulated by the nation-state.
[He continues]
Extending this mode of rationality, the neoliberal economy with its relentless pursuit of market values now encompasses the entirety of human relations. As markets
are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as inefficient, monopolistic, incompetent and thus a threat to individual and
entrepreneurial freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments and citizens. Under neoliberal rationality,
citizens assume the role of entrepreneurial actors, bonded investors, or avid consumers while the state promotes market values throughout every aspect of the
social order. Rather than fade away as some proponents of globalization would have us believe, the state embraces neoliberal rationally as the regulating principle
of society in that it no longer merely endorses market relations, it now must ‘think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions, including the law [just
as] the health and growth of the economy is the basis of state legitimacy’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). The social state now becomes the ‘market-state’ and ‘This state’s
Under neoliberalism, everything is either
relationship to its citizens resembles that between a corporation and consumers’ (Ferguson, 2008, p. 10). 4
made saleable or plundered for profit while every effort is made to reconstruct the predatory state at work prior to the New
Deal. Public lands are looted by real estate developers and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly
hand the public’s airwaves over to broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime
going into the public trust. Within this rationality, the democratic state is replaced by the corporate state and ‘a
generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the measure of all state practices’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). As the state openly embraces
and responds to the demands of the market, it invites corporations to drive the nation’s energy policies, and war industries are given the green light to engage in
war profiteering as the government hands out numerous contracts without any competitive bidding. Similarly, political and natural disasters are turned into
entrepreneurial opportunities, which mark the destruction of the social state, the sale of public infrastructures, the imposition of privatization schemes, and the
privatization of the politics of governance (Klein, 2007; Saltman, 2007a; Saltman, 2007b; Gordon & Gordon, 2008).
As the axis of all social interaction, neoliberal rationality expands far beyond the operations of the corporate state, the production of goods, and the legislating of
laws (Carcamo-Huechante, 2006, p. 414). As a seductive mode of public pedagogy, neoliber- alism extends and disseminates the logic of the market economy
throughout society, shaping not only social relations, institutions, and policies but also desires, values, and identities in the interest of prescribing ‘the citizen-
subject of a neoliberal order’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). Under neoliberal rationality and its pedagogical practices not only are the state and the public sector reduced to
the phantom of market choices, but the citizen- subjects of such an order navigate the relationship between themselves and others around the calculating logics of
competition, individual risks, self-interest, and a winner-take-all survivalist ethic reminiscent of the social Darwinian script played out daily on ‘reality television’.
Moreover,
the survivalist ethic of nineteenth-century social Darwinism has been invoked to reinforce notions of racial hierarchy
and the current neo-liberal agenda has systematically sought to recreate racial segregation and exclusion through the
restructuring of income policies. Neoliberalism also connects power and knowledge to the technologies, strategies, tactics, and
pedagogical practices key to the management and ordering of populations and to controlling consent. Michel Foucault’s concept of
governmentality is crucial for understanding not only how modes of thought, rationality, and persuasion are linked to technologies of governing but also how any
analytic of government must consider the ways power works to create ‘the conditions of consensus or the prerequisites of acceptance’ (Lemke, 2002, p. 52). As
Thomas Lemke (2002) has pointed out, neoliberal modes of governmentality are important for developing the connection ‘between technologies of the self and
technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject and the formation of the state’ (p. 50). 5 As a powerful mode of public pedagogy, neoliberal ideology is
located, produced, and disseminated from many institutional and cultural sites ranging from the shrill noise of largely conservative talk radio to the halls of
academia and the screen culture of popular media (Giroux, 2008). Mobilizing modes of official knowledge, mass mediated desires, and strategies of power, these
sites provide an indispensable political service in coupling ‘technologies of the self and [neoliberal] political rationalities’ as part of a broader effort to transform
politics, restructure power relations, and produce an array of narratives and disciplinary measures (Lemke, 2005, p. 12). As neoliberalism extends into all aspects of
daily life, the boundaries of the cultural, economic, and political become porous and leak into each other, sharing the task, though in different ways, of producing
identities, goods, knowledge, modes of communication, affective investments, and many other aspects of social life and the social order (Foucault, 2003; Rose,
2007). Fundamental to the construction of the neoliberal subject is the acceptance of this official set of orthodoxies: the public sphere, if not the very notion of the
social, is a pathology; consumerism is the most important obligation of citizenship; freedom is an utterly privatized affair that legitimates the primacy of property
rights over public priorities; the social state is bad; all public difficulties are individually determined; and all social problems, now individualised, can be redressed by
private solutions. The under- mining of social solidarities and collective structures along with the collapsing of public issues into private concerns is one of the most
damning elements of neoliberal rationality. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) elucidates this issue in the following comment: In our ‘society of individuals’ all the messes into
which one can get are assumed to be self-made and all the hot water into which one can fall is proclaimed to have been boiled by the hapless failures [of those] who
have fallen into it. For the good and the bad that fill one’s life a person has only himself or herself to thank or to blame. And the way the ‘whole-life-story’ is told
raises this assumption to the rank of an axiom. (p. 9)
Once again, any notion of collective goals designed to deepen and expand the meaning of freedom and democracy as part of
the vocabulary of the public good is derided as taxing and spending big government liberalism or simply dismissed in
neoliberal discourse. More specifically, ‘[c]ollective goals such as redistribution, public health and the wider public good
have no place in this landscape of individual preferences’ (Needham, 2004, p. 80). Instead, neoliberal theory and
practice give rise to the replacement of the social state with a market/punishing state in which political rights are strictly
limited; economic rights are deregulated and privatized; and social rights are replaced by the call to individual preference
schemes and self-reliance. Within the impoverished vocabulary of privatization, individualism, and
excessive materialism that promises to maximize choice and to minimize taxation, the new
citizen-consumer bids a hasty retreat from those public spheres that view critique as a
democratic value, collective responsibility as fundamental to the nurturing of democracy, and
the deepening and expanding of collective protections as a legitimate function of the state.
Defined largely by ‘the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve
all problems’ (Rosen, 2007), the public domain is emptied of the democratic ideals, discourses,
and identities needed to address important considerations such as universal health care,
ecologically responsible mass transit, affordable housing with reasonable mortgage rates,
subsidized care for the young and elderly, and government efforts to reduce carbon emissions
and invest in new forms of energy. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities
crumble and give way to individualized, one-man archipelagos, it is increasingly difficult to identify as a collectivity, to act in
concert, to meet the basic needs of citizens, or to maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services.
[He continues]
In spite of their differences, all of these stories are bound together by a politics in which the logic of the
marketplace is recalibrated to exploit society’s most vulnerable even to the point of transgressing the sanctity of the dead and
to inflict real horrors, enslavement, and injuries upon the lives of those who are poor, elderly, young, and disenfranchised,
because they are without an economic role in the neoliberal order. And as the third story illustrates, a savage and
fanatical capitalism offers a revealing snapshot of how violence against the incarcerated --largely black, often poor, and
deemed utterly disposable-- now enters the realm of popular culture by producing a type of racialized terrorism
posing as extreme entertainment, while simultaneously recapitulating the legacy of barbarism associated
with slavery.
[He continues]
As the social state is displaced by the market, a new kind of politics is emerging in which some lives, if not whole groups, are
seen as disposable and redundant. Within this new form of biopolitics --a political system actively involved in the management
of the politics of life and death -- new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and
intersection of race and class. But what is important to recognize is that the configuration of politics that
is emerging is about more than the processes of social exclusion or being left out of the benefits
of the market, it is increasingly about a normalized and widely accepted reliance upon the
alleged ‘invisible hand’ of a market fundamentalism to mediate the most important decisions
about life and death. In this case, the politics managing the crucial questions of life and death is
governed by neoliberalism’s power to define who matters and who doesn’t, who lives and who
dies. Questions about getting ahead no longer occupy a key role in everyday politics. For most
people under the regime of neoliberalism, everyday life has taken an ominous turn and is largely organized
around questions of who is going to survive and who is going to die. Under such circumstances, important decisions about life
and death have given way to a range of anti- democratic forces that threaten the meaning and substance of democracy,
politics, human condition, and any viable and just vision of the future. In its updated version, neoliberal
rationality also rules ‘our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, increasingly
dominat[ing] almost everything, even moving into areas that were once prohibited by custom in
our country, like commercializing childhood’ (Nader, 2007).
[He continues]
While it has become fashionable to proclaim the end of history and ideology, on the one hand,
and a growing public disengagement with politics, on the other, a seismic shift has taken place in
the United States in the last thirty years. This shift has eviscerated the space of democratic politics as well as the
language in which it is affirmed and contested. Important transformations in the nature of the state, the separation of political
power from economic resources, the emergence of a market that colonizes critical agency in its own interests, and the deployment
of education to the complex forces of a new electronically mediated culture are reflective of a new kind of sovereignty that resides in the market, outside of the
constraining influence of state power. The domination of corporate sovereignty is more porous, expansive, and mobile than anything we have seen in the past. 6
I believe that we have entered into a unique theater of politics that demands a new theoretical discourse for both understanding and overcoming many of the social
problems we are currently facing as a range of anti-democratic tendencies appear to be rewriting the relationship between life and politics, agency and social
responsibility, and the related discourses of hope, critique, commitment, and social intervention. At stake here is the important issue of how to think about
democratic politics in an age that collapses the public sphere into privatized market relations. In order to address this issue, I want to first shed light on some of the
distinguishing features, inequalities, and modes of legitimation that have given rise to a New Gilded Age which has become a code word for the sanctioning of a
savage neoliberal capitalism that seeks to ‘destroy the very possibility of politics, freedom, and consequently, our humanity’ (Bernstein, 2005, p. 76).
Gilded-Age excess is now on display in all of the major media as a referent for the good life. Getting ahead requires a hyped-up version of social Darwinism,
endlessly played out in various ‘reality television’ programs, which represent an insatiable and cut-throat scorn for the weaknesses of others and a sadistic
affirmation of ruthlessness and steroidal power. Getting voted off the island or being told ‘You’re fired!’ now renders real life despair and misfortune entertaining,
even pleasurable. As Zygmunt Bauman (2004) points out, the dominant logic that emanates from the ongoing deluge of Reality TV is clear and consistent:
[T]hat one is of use to other human beings only as long as she or he can be exploited to their advantage, that the waste bin, the ultimate destination of the
excluded, is the natural prospect for those who no longer fit or no longer wish to be exploited in such a way, that survival is the name of the game of human
togetherness and that the ultimate stake of survival is outliving the others.We are fascinated by what we see just as Dali or De Chirico wished us to be fascinated
by their canvases when they struggled to display the innermost, the hidden most contents of our subconscious fantasies and fear. (p. 131)
[He continues]
Of course, there is more at stake here than the emergence of a new class of rich tycoons, there is also the growing threat to the
planet as democracy is largely redefined in the interests of corporate values and profits. Corporate power translates into political power for
the rich and further impoverishment for everyone else. Government policies are made into laws that not only benefit the rich through tax subsidies and legal
protections, they are also used to undercut, under fund, and eliminate social protections aimed to help the poor, aged, and sick, including children. For example, in
the wake of the widening housing and mortgage crisis in which home foreclosures reached over two million and hundreds of thousands of individuals and families
not only risk losing their homes but also any viable place to live, President Bush and his supporters initially blocked a Democratic Party- backed bill that would have
prevented as many as 600,000 home foreclosures, rescuing thousands of borrowers from becoming homeless. In this case, Bush’s allegiance to corporate power
was on full display not only with his decision to side with the banks, Wall Street firms, and mortgage lenders, but also in his response to criticism of his veto of the
mortgage relief bill (Andrews, 2008a). Rather than address the crisis, Bush shamelessly exploited it for his own ideological ends, playing politics with human tragedy
by using the mortgage crisis relief efforts to call on ‘Congress to extend indefinitely his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts’, which largely benefit the rich and powerful
corporations (Andrews, 2008b, p. C1).
The mutually determining forces of every deepening inequality and an emerging repressive
Neoliberalism as a biopolitics of disposability
state apparatus have become the defining features of neoliberalism at the beginning of the new millennium.
Wealth is now redistributed upwards to produce record high levels of inequality, and corporate power is
simultaneously consolidated at a speed that threatens to erase the most critical gains made over
the last fifty years to curb the anti-democratic power of corporations. Draconian policies aimed at
hollowing out the social state are now matched by an increase in repressive legislation to curb the unrest that might explode
among those populations falling into the despair and suffering unleashed by a ‘savage, fanatical capitalism’ that now
constitutes the neoliberal war against the public good, the welfare state, and ‘social citizenship’ (Davis & Monk, 2007, p.
ix). Privatization, commodification, corporate mergers, and asset stripping go hand in hand with the curbing
of civil liberties, the increasing criminalization of social problems, and the fashioning of the prison as the
preeminent space of racial containment (one in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated)
(Associated Press, 2008). The alleged morality of market freedom is now secured through the
ongoing immorality of a militarized state that embraces torture, war, and violence as legitimate
functions of political sovereignty and the ordering of daily life. As the rich get richer, corporations
become more powerful, and the reach of the punishing state extends itself further, those forces
and public spheres that once provided a modicum of protection for workers, the poor, sick, aged,
and young are undermined, leaving large numbers of people impoverished and with little hope
for the future. David Harvey (2005) refers to this primary feature of neoliberalism as ‘accumulation by
dispossession’, which he enumerates as all of those processes such as the privatization and commodification of public assets,
deregulation of the financial sector, and the use of the state to direct the flow of wealth upward through, among other
practices, tax policies that favor the rich and cut back the social wage (p. 7). As Harvey (2005) points out, ‘All of
these processes amount to the transfer of assets from the public and popular realms to the
private and class privileged domains’, and the overwhelming of political institutions by powerful
corporations that keep them in check (p. 161). Zygmunt Bauman (2007) goes further and argues
that not only does capitalism draw its life blood from the relentless process of asset stripping, but it produces ‘the acute
crisis of the ‘‘human waste’’ disposal industry, as each new outpost conquered by capitalist markets adds new thousands or
millions to the mass of men and women already deprived of their lands, workshops, and communal safety nets’ (p. 28). The upshot
of such policies is that larger segments of the population are now struggling under the burden of massive debts, unemployment, lack of adequate health care, and a
brooding sense of hopelessness. What is unique about this type of neoliberal market fundamentalism is not merely the anti- democratic notion that the market
should be the guide for all human actions, but also the sheer hatred for any form of sovereignty in which the government could promote the general welfare. As
Thom Hartmann (2005) points out, governance under the regime of neoliberalism has given way to punishment as one of the central features of politics. He
describes the policies endorsed by neoliberals as follows: Government should punish, they agree, but it should never nurture, protect, or defend individuals.
Nurturing and protecting, they suggest, is the more appropriate role of religious institutions, private charities, families, and perhaps most important corporations.
Let the corporations handle your old-age pension. Let the corporations decide how much protection we and our environment need from their toxins. Let the
corporations decide what we’re paid. Let the corporations decide what doctor we can see, when, and for what purpose. But the punishing state does more than
substitute charity and private aid for government- backed social provisions, or criminalize a range of existing social problems; it also cultivates a culture of fear and
suspicion towards all those others immigrants, refugees, Muslims, youth, minorities of class and color, and the elderly who in the absence of dense social
networks and social supports fall prey to unprecedented levels of displaced resentment from the media, public scorn for their vulnerability, and increased
criminalization because they are both considered dangerous and unfit for integration into American society. Coupled with this rewriting of the obligations of
sovereign state power and the transfer of sovereignty to the market is a widely endorsed assumption that regardless of the suffering, misery, and problems faced by
human beings, they ultimately are not only responsible for their fate but are reduced to relying on their own sense of survival. There is more at stake here than the
vengeful return of an older colonial fantasy that regarded the natives as less than human, or the emerging figure of the disposable worker as a prototypical figure of
the neoliberal order though the histories of racist exclusion inform the withdrawal of moral and ethical concerns from these populations. 10 There is also the
unleashing of a powerfully regressive symbolic and corporeal violence against all those individuals and groups who have been ‘othered’ because their very presence
undermines the engines of wealth and inequality that drive the neoliberal dreams of consumption, power, and profitability. What is distinct about these complex
registers of sovereignty is the emergence of a fundamentally new mode of politics in which state power not only takes on a different register but in many ways has
been modified by the sovereignty of the market. While the state still has the power of the law to reduce individuals to impoverishment and to strip them of civic
rights, due process, and civil liberties, neoliberalism increasingly wields its own form of sovereignty through the invisible hand of the market, which now has the
power to produce new configurations of control, regulate social health, and alter human life in new and profound ways.This shift in sovereignty, power,
and the political order points to the importance of biopolitics as an attempt to think through not only how politics uses power
to mediate the convergence of life and death, but also how sovereign power proliferates those conditions in which individuals
marginalized by race, class, and gender configurations are ‘stripped of political significance and exposed to murderous
violence’ (Ziarek, 2008, p. 90). The notion that biopolitics marks a specific moment in the development of political modernity has been taken up in great detail by
Michel Foucault (1990; 2003). Foucault argues that since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emerging concerns for the health, habitation, welfare, and
living conditions of populations, the economy of power is no longer primarily about the threat of taking life, or exercising a mode of sovereign power ‘mainly as a
means of deduction the seizing of things, time, bodies, and ultimately the seizing of life itself ’ (Ojakangas, 2005, pp. 5 6). For Foucault, biopolitics points to new
relations of sovereignty and power that are more capacious, concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it ‘both useful and
docile’ but also with a body that needs to be ‘regularized’ (2003, p. 249), subject to corrective mechanisms and immaterial means of production that exert ‘a
positive influence on life, endeavour[ing] to administer, optimize, and multiply it’ (1990, p. 137). For Foucault, power is no longer exclusively embodied in the state
or its formal repressive apparatuses and legal regulations (Lemke, 2005, p. 11). Instead, power also circulates outside of the realm of the state and the constraints
of a juridico-discursive concept through a wide variety of political technologies and modes of subjectification, produced through what Foucault calls
governmentality or the pedagogical ‘tactics ... which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what
is not, the public versus the private, and so on’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 103). In this instance, biopolitics does not collapse into sovereign power, just as matters of
consent and persuasion cannot be reduced to the disciplining of the body. As the boundary between politics and life becomes blurred, human beings and the social
forms and living processes through which they live, speak, act, and relate to each other move to the center of politics, just as the latter processes and relationships
become the center of new political struggles. Biopolitics thus marks a shift in the workings of both sovereignty and power as made clear by Foucault for whom
biopolitics replaces the power to dispense fear and death with that of a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. ... [Biopolitics] is no longer a matter
of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a
biopolitics is largely productive,
continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism. (Ojakangas, 2005, p. 6) As Foucault (2003) insists, the logic of
though it exercises what he calls a death function when the state ‘is obliged to use race, the elimination of races, and the
purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power’ (p. 255). Neoliberalism as a mode of biopolitics not only expands the sites, range, and
dynamics of power relations, it also points to new modes of subjectification in which various technologies connecting the self and diverse modes of domination
(Lemke, 2002, p. 50), far removed from the central power of the state, play a primary role in producing forms of consent, shaping conduct, and constituting ‘people
in such ways that they can be governed’ (Lemke, 2005, p. 3). According to Judith Butler (2004), as a mode of governmentality, biopolitics: is broadly understood as a
mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of
goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population. ...Marked by a diffuse set of strategies and tactics, governmentality gains its meaning and
purpose from no single source, no unified sovereign subject. Rather, the tactics characteristic of governmentality operate diffusely, to dispose and order
populations, and to produce and reproduce subjects, their practices and belief, in relation to specific policy aims. Foucault maintained, boldly, that ‘the problems of
governmentality and the techniques of government have become the only political issues, the only real space for political struggle and contestation’. (p. 52)
[He continues]
The biopolitics of neoliberalism as an instance of ‘bare life’ is not only coming more and more to the foreground but is also
restructuring the terrain of everyday life for vast numbers of people. As an older politics associated with the social state and the ‘social
contract’ (however damaged and racially discriminating) 13 gives way to an impoverished vocabulary that celebrates private financial gain over human lives, public
goods, and broad democratic values, the hidden inner workings of ‘bare life’ become less of a metaphor than a reality for millions of people whose suffering and
misery moves from benign neglect to malign neglect (Agamben, 1998, p. 9). Beyond the very visible example of Katrina, there is a host of less visible instances
affecting those dehumanized by a politics of disposability. The logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is visible in the Bush administration’s indifference to
the growing HIV crisis among young black women who ‘represent the highest percentage (56 percent) of all AIDS cases reported among women, and an increasing
proportion of new cases (60 percent)’ (Cromie, 1998). Hidden behind the rhetoric of color blindness and self-help that assists in camouflaging the racist under-
pinnings of much of contemporary society, the HIV epidemic spreads but gets almost no attention from ‘leaders in public health, politics, or religion’ (cited in ABC
Primetime, 2006). 14 The politics of bare life also informs the fury of the new nativism in the United States at dawn of the twenty-first century. Stoked by media
panics and the hysterical populist rhetoric of politicians, racist commitments easily translate into policies targeting poor youth of color as well as immigrant men,
women, and children with deportation, incarceration, and state-backed violence. Extending the logic of disposability to those defined as ‘other’ through the
discourse of nativism, citizen border patrols and ‘migrant hunters’ urge the government to issue a state of emergency to stop the flow of immigrants across the
United States’ southern border (Buchanan & Holthouse, 2006, pp. 29 32). Leading public intellectuals inhabit the same theoretical discourse as right-wing vigilante
groups. For example, internationally known Harvard University faculty member, Samuel P. Huntington (2004), unapologetically argues in Who Are We? The
Challenge to America’s Identity that Western civilization, as it is said to be represented in the United States, is threatened by the growing presence of Hispanic-
Americans, especially Mexican-Amer- icans, shamelessly defined as the ‘brown menace’. 15 The New York Times (2007a) claims that ‘toughness’ is the new
watchword in immigration policy, which translates not only into a boom in immigration detention but also in some cases death to immigrants denied access to
essential medicines and healthcare (p. A22). For them, the new biopolitics of disposability is also evident in the fact that for many black men and women, the war on
drugs signals the emergence of ‘the prison as the preeminent US racial space’ (Singh, 2006, pp. 83 84). b (Moraff, 2007, pp. 1 3). The logic of disposability as an
instance of ‘bare life’ also gains expression in the slave-like conditions many guest workers endure in the United States. Routinely cheated out of wages, held
captive by employers who seize their documents, and often forced to live in squalid conditions without medical benefits, such workers exist in a state that
Congressman Charles Rangel characterizes as ‘the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery’, a statement amply supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center report
(2007), Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States. The growing armies of the ‘living dead’ also include the 750,000 who are homeless in America
on any given night (Eaton-Robb, 2007), along with the swelling ranks of the working poor and unemployed who are either under insured or uninsured and unable to
get even minimum health care. Needless to say, the logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is clearly visible in all of these examples. At the dawn of the
new millennium, it is commonplace for references to the common good, public trust, and public service to be either stigmatized or sneered at by people who sing
the praises of neoliberalism and its dream of turning ‘the global economy ... into a planetary casino’ (Castoriadis, 2007, p. 47). Against this dystopian condition, the
American political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, has argued that because of the increasing power of corporations and the emergence of a lawless state (given
immense power during the administration of George W. Bush), American democracy is not only in crisis, it is also characterized by a sense of powerlessness and
experiences of loss. Wolin (2000) claims that this sense of loss is related ‘to power and powerlessness and hence has a claim upon theory’ (p. 3). In making a claim
upon theory, loss aligns itself with the urgency of a crisis, a crisis that demands a new theoretical discourse while at the same time requiring a politics that involves
contemplation, that is, a politics in which modes of critical inquiry brush up against the more urgent crisis that threatens to shut down even the possibility of
critique. For Wolin, the dialectic of crisis and politics points to three fundamental concerns that need to be addressed as part of a broader democratic struggle. First,
it is no longer possible to assume
politics is now marked by pathological conditions in which issues of death are overtaking concerns with life. Second,
that democracy is tenable within a political system that daily inflicts massive suffering and injustices on weak minorities and
those individuals and groups who exist outside of the privileges of neoliberal values, that is, those individuals or groups who
exist in what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls ‘death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations
are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead’ (pp. 39 40). Third, theory in
some academic quarters now seems to care more about matters of contemplation and judgment
in search of distance rather than a politics of crisis driven by an acute sense of justice, urgency,
and intervention. Theory in this instance distances itself from politics, neutered by a form of self-
sabotage in which ideas are removed from the messy realm of politics, power, and intervention.
According to Wolin (2000),