Neoliberal market discipline deliberately breaks political subjectivity and weakens solidarity.

Evidence

In extolling Chile’s political miracle, Friedman argued that a free market, unlike a military structure, is typified by dispersed authority – ‘bargaining, not submission to orders, is the watchword’. But submission remained central to his account of the market. Economic pain (like physical torture) was designed to break the political subjectivities that led people to resist the ‘fate’ doled out by the market. Everyone in this country was ‘educated in weakness’, minister of the economy Baraona warned; ‘to educate them in strength it is necessary to pay the price of temporary unemployment, of bankruptcies’. When asked about the high bankruptcy rate, junta member Admiral Merino concurred: ‘Let fall those who must fall’, he said. ‘Such is the jungle of economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality.’ Such statements were a long way from the myth of the sweetness of commerce, but they were not far divorced from the tenets of the neoliberal market, for which, as Michel Foucault has stressed, the central principle was not exchange but competition, with its systematic production of winners and losers. Weakening solidarity and creating competitive subjects was central to what Pinochet identified as the junta’s ultimate goal: ‘not to make Chile a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Foucault’s argument that competition, not exchange, is the central principle of neoliberalism — a key concept for the reader’s debate on market ethics. — connects to: Neoliberalism weaponizes its own rebellious aesthetic to absorb anti-system dissent. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 257; Neoliberals diagnosed intellectual hostility to markets as resentment, utopianism, and ignorance. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 286; Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 218 (+10 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘economic pain as pedagogy’ — how unemployment and bankruptcy were openly framed as educational instruments by the Chicago School in Chile.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed #corroborates (0.95) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 218
• Neoliberal market discipline was adopted to pacify unruly democratic publics #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 122
• Neoliberalism reframed democracy and unions as enemies of market truth. #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 123
• Neoliberal modernisation aimed to destroy non-market sources of social reproduction #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 354
• Neoliberals conditioned self-government on accepting market discipline #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 297
• Neoliberalism suppresses both liberal and radical-democratic traditions. #corroborates (0.70) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 13