Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self

Evidence

Classical liberalism identified “labor” as the critical original human infusion that both created and justified private property. Foucault correctly identifies the concept of “human capital” as the signal neoliberal departure—initially identified with the MPS member Gary Becker—that undermines centuries of political thought that parlayed humanism into stories of natural rights. Not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts. “Government of the self” becomes the taproot of all social order, even though the identity of the self evanesces under the pressure of continual prosthetic tinkering; this is one possible way to understand the concept of “biopower.” Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. The manager of You becomes the new ghost in the machine. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162

I will suggest that with the ascendency of neoliberalism, interest has ceased to anchor or characterize homo oeconomicus and also that Foucault ignores homo politicus in modern thought and practice. Homo politicus, I will argue in the next chapter, is not captured by the subject of right or by homo legalis. Yet it has persisted through most of modernity and has only recently been displaced by the specifically neoliberal formulation of homo oeconomicus as human capital, a creature for whom interest is no longer the proper designation. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 155

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopower lectures and Becker’s human-capital theory; also resonates with the reader’s prior work on surveillance/self-governance literature. — connects to: Neoliberalism abolishes classes, the individual, and Lockean property in one move — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 164; Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134; Neo-liberalism collapses labor into capital and frames the individual as an enterprise — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1218 (+23 more)
• DEFINE: Defines ‘human capital’ as the core neoliberal conceptual departure and ‘biopower’ as self-government as origin of social order.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 155

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. #expands (1.00) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134
• Neo-liberalism collapses labor into capital and frames the individual as an enterprise #corroborates (0.95) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1218
• Neoliberal self-entrepreneurship destabilizes the fixed boundaries of personhood #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 418
• Neoliberalism replaces natural self-interest with governed self-investment tied to macroeconomic growth. #expands (0.90) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 167
• Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 302
• Neoliberalism swallows humanity through its form of valuation itself #corroborates (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 75
• Neoliberal reason legitimates casting off labor that fails to aid macroeconomic growth. #expands (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 167
• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421