Nationalism, Mania, and Specters of Neoliberalism

Three decades after the publication of Specters of Marx, another death knell is sounding. Three decades after Derrida bemoaned the “manic, jubilatory, and incantatory” neoliberal rhetoric heralding the death of Marx and of communism, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a renewed mania on the left to declare the end of neoliberalism. And yet three decades after Derrida's most public corps-à-corps with Marx, his analysis remains disturbingly timely and hence out-of-joint. Not only does its litany of ways in which “the world goes badly” in the chapter “Usures” still paint a strikingly familiar picture of our own times—of the ravages and global inequality wrought by market liberalism, the protectionist backlash it has sparked, the ills of homelessness, the arms trade, nativist reaction, geopolitical conflict, and oppression of peoples in the Global South through the cruelty of debt. Moreover, the mania with which neoliberalism announces its triumph over the specter of communism finds its echoes today in the repeated, almost feverish assertions by a left—still in a position of weakness and reeling from defeat—that the terrain of struggle on which it has largely failed to assert itself, compared with a resurgent nationalist right, has now passed into the night of history.Are we entering a new era that disrupts or even breaks with the economization of the political and of subjectivity that is the hallmark of neoliberal governmentality? Or do we live among the specters of neoliberalism?Economist James Meadway, who worked in the office of former Shadow Chancellor John McDonell during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the UK Labour Party, has repeatedly declared in opinion pieces (2021a; 2021b) and on Twitter that neoliberalism is dying or dead, finished off by the expansion of state powers during the pandemic in many rich democracies where free markets had previously reigned. Meadway's argument hinges on how one defines neoliberalism: as an intellectual movement (whose boundaries are surely contested) or as the actions of national governments and international financial institutions. No doubt, there are more dimensions to the regime that go under the banner of neoliberalism—not least its character as a mode of subjectivation that generalizes market logic through internalization, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2017; 2019) have argued. Recognizing that neoliberalism is itself not selfsame but composed of heterogeneous, often contradictory elements enables one to dismantle this binary choice between ideas and actions. As economist Adam Tooze has argued (2021a), the pandemic acted as a catalyst for a shift that was beginning to put the economy and general economization in question. When Tooze asks whether the widespread economic experiments of 2020 sounded “the death knell of neoliberalism,” he is more circumspect, suggesting that claim might be advanced more narrowly of neoliberalism “as a coherent ideology of government” (2021a, 13). While neoliberalism as a “body of doctrine” may now be “shot to pieces” and as a practice of government may be eroded (2021c), what remains remarkably resilient for Tooze is a political project consisting of “a series of state interventions in the interests of capital accumulation” that disciplined labor and drove increasing class inequality (2021b).Like a number of scholars, Tooze also recognizes the authoritarian dimensions of neoliberalism (Boffo et al. 2019; Callison and Manfredi 2020; Davies 2021; Slobodian, 2018). One might argue that neoliberalism in its classic Thatcherite incarnation always was an inherently contradictory amalgam of liberalizing market logic and socially conservative illiberalism (Valluvan 2019; Waltham-Smith 2020), or, from a more deconstructive perspective, that liberalism just is always already somewhat illiberal. Its radicalization and generalization over the past 40 years has brought its autoimmune character—its tendency to divide and turn against itself—into sharper relief. What we are perhaps witnessing—both with the rise of so-called “populism” on the right and with the expansion of state powers, interventions, surveillance, and so on—is something like the increasing autonomy of neoliberalism's authoritarian superego.This brings me to the somewhat manic character of the repeated declarations that “neoliberalism is dead,” which might suggest that these death knells are themselves part of neoliberalism's mutant transformation. For Meadway, this death knell serves to dislodge the left from its somewhat complacent fixation with fighting austerity or financialization more narrowly, rather than capitalism as a whole. But in effect Meadway is attached to his thesis precisely because it provides the (arguably false) hope of being able to fight more successfully on new terrain. As such, it may be no less symptomatic of the impossibility of mourning than the repetition compulsions seen elsewhere among the Corbynite left. Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Tooze, who is quick to point out that departures from market-liberal policies have been driven not by class antagonism or by the pressures of right populism but by the internal contradictions of the economic system, dismisses the new direction of travel as “nothing more than escalating plunder” (2021a, 16).This raises the question of whether neoliberalism may in fact exert its greatest influence in the wake of its death—that is, in the guise of a specter of neoliberalism without neoliberal nostrums. 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