Neoliberalism abolishes classes, the individual, and Lockean property in one move

Evidence

First off, the timeworn conventional complaint that economics is too pigheadedly methodologically individualist does not begin to scratch the neoliberal program. “Individuals” are merely evanescent projects from a neoliberal perspective. Neoliberalism has consequently become a scale-free Theory of Everything: something as small as a gene or as large as a nation-state is equally engaged in entrepreneurial strategic pursuit of advantage, since the “individual” is no longer a privileged ontological platform. Second, there are no more “classes” in the sense of an older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; in the limit, every man should be his own business firm or corporation; this has proven a powerful tool for disarming whole swathes of older left discourse. It also appropriates an obscure historical development in American legal history—that the corporation is tantamount to personhood—and blows it up to an ontological principle. Conversely, it denies personhood to government: “Government has no economic responsibility. Only people have responsibility, and government is not a person.” Third, since property is no longer rooted in labor, as in the Lockean tradition, consequently property rights can be readily reengineered and changed to achieve specific political objectives; one observes this in the area of “intellectual property,” or in a development germane to the crisis, ownership of the algorithms that define and trade obscure complex derivatives, and better, to reduce the formal infrastructure of the marketplace itself to a commodity. Indeed, the recent transformation of stock exchanges into profit-seeking IPOs was a critical neoliberal innovation leading up to the crisis. Classical liberals treated “property” as a sacrosanct bulwark against the state; neoliberals do not. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 164

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that corporatized ‘personhood’ is blown into an ontological principle connects to the reader’s interest in legal-personhood debates and Citizens United-era discourse. — connects to: Locke’s minimalist state foundation structurally generates the austerity dilemma — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 283; Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332; Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162 (+18 more)
• SEED: A piece could explore ‘scale-free’ neoliberalism as a theory of everything — how both genes and nation-states get recast as entrepreneurs, collapsing levels of analysis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The image of the ‘manager of You’ as new ghost in the machine plus scale-free personhood is dense enough to sit with — a full recasting of political ontology across all scales.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation #expands (0.88) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332
• Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162
• Neo-liberalism collapses labor into capital and frames the individual as an enterprise #expands (0.82) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1218
• Neoliberalism’s ultimate ideal self is the autonomous self-made individual #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 430
• Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175
• Claims about European identity rest on a Lockean theory of property and cultivation. #expands (0.72) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 811
• Racial occupation morphed from Lockean enclosure to neoliberal democracy promotion #expands (0.72)
• Neoliberalism exists to reverse modernity’s claims to self-determination #complicates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 116