The Neoliberal Social Contract Pt.1
And Why the Pandemic Upturned Everything I Thought I Knew About It
PART 1: BEFORE THE PANDEMICLate for work. Fast walk through the city centre to the café. Weather's freezing, could feel it once I woke up. Landlord skimped on insulation. The traffic stops and starts, and like my own frustration I can sense the same from every other person consigned to the rat race, all gritting our teeth in stressed-out symphony. Narrowly miss being hit by a banker on a bike. Chap glares at me through his bifocals, and then continues on to build his fortune.
Arrive at the café. Sorry I'm late. Don't worry man, you want a coffee? I like my team, even if I have a difficult time communicating with them fully. They are all foreign-born and most share apartments (if not bedrooms) at scalp-rate rents with others from Spain, Poland, Brazil, Argentina. We sling coffees out for the office caste, and for that it has been decided that we all receive €10 an hour. A cheap house costs roughly €300,000 – you do the maths. But at least we can eat all the pastries we want. Although the lousy weather makes me wonder, why do they stay here at all? Something nags at me, that it isn't simply the grá for Éire herself that persuades them to stay. In any case, there is a certain sense of solidarity and even satisfaction in our labours. Work is fun. Getting paid minimum wage is not.
Once my shift is over, I take refuge on a bench outside and eat my overpriced sambo. Something is wrong with all this, but I cannot say exactly how. My brother is living with my grandparents, and moving out is becoming less and less possible by the day. My grandparents owned a house and had three children by the time they were thirty, with my grandmother not working all the while, and my grandfather only had his Leaving. I sit there and wonder, how much of my tax goes to paying the interest of a loan which the Irish Government signed off on when I was just twelve years old?
Will it ever end? We are holding onto the balloon, and we keep ascending. If we keep holding on, we are surely doomed. And if we let go?
In a 1987 interview with Women's Own magazine, Margaret Thatcher stated "there is no such thing as society". The potency of this utterance is not to be understated. From this seemingly brief declaration, one can extrapolate many of the characteristics Neoliberalism would eventually take on in the present day. Whether meant prescriptively or descriptively, her post-societal pronouncement would become axiomatic in the development of a new economic world from the 1980s to the present day.
But this is not a Thatcher piece. This is a piece about Ireland, and more specifically, about Dublin at this particular time. However, the Ireland and Dublin of today can only be conceived of in the shadow of Thatcher's words. The response of world governments to the Covid-19 pandemic would vindicate those words, while simultaneously falsifying them. In so far as her pronouncement is both correct and incorrect, it tells us something about our current predicament. Let us then begin at the beginning.
"My answer, is that limit does not exist.” —Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, in relation to what the Irish public can achieve, quoting Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls (2004).
Neoliberalism is, among many other phenomena, a force, a vector, a horizon.
It is a regime, a state of affairs, a set of laws, customs, realities, norms, and values. Its amorphousness resists dissent. It is both a moving shadow and a static point in history. It claims God's title in being both everywhere and nowhere. It should like to usurp God. It is a wind that blows and a palace that stands. We pit ourselves with it or against it, but it nonetheless always surrounds us. Suffice it to say, Neoliberalism contains multitudes.
One of those multitudes is a very specific social contract. What Neoliberalism wants from you is to implicitly accept and internalise the following conditions:
1. The continual commodification, privatisation, and commercialisation of all spheres of public life.
2. The widening of whom might be deemed ‘working class’ to include those within ever higher income brackets.
3. The stagnation and depression of the median wage against the rising cost of living, price of property, and total wealth.
4. The exponential concentration of wealth in the upper echelons.
In exchange for accepting these conditions certain allowances are offered. Crumbs from the table include a two-day weekend for what remains of the middle class, affordable everyday commodities, tariff-free trading, the negation of consumptive taboos, free love, loveless sex, extra-marital cohabitation, abortion, cheap air travel, a common currency area, etc. All of this can be encapsulated in the notion:
5. The individual's desire is to be further satiated.
This final principle is implicit in the initial conditions (1–4.). It is itself a condition in need of acknowledgement. To agree to this privilege is to accept the mortal condition it produces.
What the individual receives from accepting the initial conditions, is collective sanction to satiate personal desire. A no-questions-asked type of attitude. Neoliberalism believes that the collective good is the maximisation of each individual’s capacity to self-gratify. And to do so specifically within its marketplace.
From this false conscience one may extrapolate the recent expansion of the litany of ‘social rights’ in Ireland. Rights which permit behaviours and forms of association of all stripes, such as sexual liberation, polyamoury, gay rights, gay marriage, abortion, recreational drug use, etc. Rights whose purpose is to divorce said behaviour from explicit moral outrage or social stigma.
However, Neoliberalism's drive toward a particular form of social openness is not done for the sake of some radical utopian goal. Rather, these spheres of behaviour and communion are opened with one thing in mind: the conversion of such behaviours into objects of the market. This is nothing new, as Marx rightly noted: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." Profaned with the express intent of subsuming every new freedom to "that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade."
The potential of liberation through the sphere of personal activity and association with others, which have traditionally received censure by the moral authorities, now assumes a freedom sanctioned only by their potential for profitability. This is readily observed in the aesthetic of Capitalist Liberation, which sees banks and corporations sponsor floats at Pride Festivals around the world. Something which has been noted by all proper-thinking men and women on both the Left and Right.
It may also help to explain why the markets most closely connected to base desire have seen the prices of certain commodities drop such as food, phones, and entertainment. All the while other, less immediately gratifying but necessary commodities rise, such as housing, fuel, and education.
Moreover, Neoliberalism affects culture through its reduction of natural phenomena to economic dogma, such as its highly loaded notion of the human as simply a market-individual. Such affected vocabulary then seeps into everyday thought. The way in which economic assumptions can find themselves embedded in more diffuse forms within the culture at large has a name. It was coined by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism.
This is the notion that Capitalism infects and colours ordinary life so thoroughly that it ultimately cannot be seen. Rather, it ‘naturalises’ itself, causing normative prescriptions to pass as analytic truth. Think of every time you found yourself speaking to your uncle at Christmas, or to some aul’ fella in the pub about the problems facing Irish youth vis-à-vis housing, jobs, the national debt, etc. Countless times you will be facing the most everyday Capitalist apologist. Someone who thinks that the contingent and relatively new state of affairs where slumlords pack twenty people into a house, where Deliveroo drivers form an essentially separate social caste, where every new construction site is an ‘aparthotel’, are all somehow natural and necessary. “Sure it's just human nature”, the man says. Neoliberal Capitalism's ability to permeate everywhere, yet hide from recognition, attests to its highly protean nature. Its very phenomenology, not always to be understood under the banners of ‘economy’ or ‘politics’, spread out and saturate our very social fabric, into every aspect of whatever it is that we refer to when we utter that word ‘society’.
The main novelty of Neoliberalism is its ability to sublimate, synthesise, commodify, and nullify. Its universalism is totalising, as is its penchant for including all natural life into its fold. Dissent itself is as much capable of being absorbed into the Neoliberal cell-structure, regurgitated and reanimated into a sellable, de-fanged form. Counter-cultural figures, like Che Guevara and Frida Kahlo, are now just symbolic faces to be printed onto market commodities, like t-shirts and pencil cases. As Fisher notes, even Kurt Cobain's music, which was meant to rebel against commercial culture, ended up being commercialised on MTV. That many of the potential anti-Capitalist forces within the West over the last century or so have been thoroughly denatured and integrated into Capitalism itself stands as a testament to its resilience. This will become all the more apparent with Covid-19's eventual onset, where self-avowed Marxists find themselves touting the same pro-lockdown policies (through so-called 'Zero-Covid') as large pharmaceutical companies, to the financial benefit of corporate oligarchs.
Returning to Thatcher, her notion that the family constituted one of the primary units and actors of the social realm can be attributed to the tension and relation between socially conservative and liberal forces in the 1980s. The liberal forces would eventually develop and find their apotheosis within the later Neoliberalism of the post-Bush era. However, only doing so after the counterweight of social conservatism had lost its appeal to the family-oriented middle and working classes. The great tragedy is that it was those sections of society who were to lose out most from the regime which Thatcher was about to usher in. To the extent her statement references not only individuals, but also families is portentous, even in its eventual erroneousness. Indeed, the family's place would be slowly eroded from the Neoliberal era, a marked change from the importance which Western Capitalism had placed upon the role of the family, particularly post-war. In this way, Thatcher's error is not to be simply discarded, but is highly significant. Neoliberal Capitalism renders Marx prophetic again, tearing “away from the family its sentimental veil” and reducing “the family relation to a mere money relation”.
Neoliberalism began its life in the political mainstream at a time when social bonds stemming from religion and locality were strong, and where social order still had its strength in the Church, and in local and national custom. Thus it needed to balance the needs of economic liberalisation (whose tendencies are toward the opening up of markets denied to it by social custom, cultural values, and religious morality) with the demands of a socially conservative base, without whom Neoliberal Capitalism could not set its own wheels in motion. Furthermore, it aimed to spin economic liberalisation with Christian notions of personal responsibility, individual aptitude and self motivation, best typified by the Protestant work ethic.
This starting point of religious sanction to a particular theorisation of economic and social life oiled the initial gears of market-liberalisation. That was all it needed. Soon, Neoliberalism would find its dual form, creating the yin of social liberalism to its yang of social conservatism, all encapsulated in the overall workings of an ever expanding economic horizon marked by outsourcing, privatisation, tariff reductions, increased labour flows, the nascent domination of financial capital over industrial capital, and the gradual yet steady concentration of wealth upward.
The market actor which neoliberal economics takes for granted always had a social expression, and assumed the onset of a particular politics, indeed, a particular society. Social conservatism on the other hand, unknowingly gave consent to a market individualism, despite it being wholly antithetical to Christianity. The work-a-day Christian, enamoured by the notion of earning the sweat of one's brow and working an honest day for honest pay, never brought such a worldview to its logical, anti-Christian, and indeed certainly anti-Catholic conclusion. It was only a matter of biding time, the image of God in which we are made was to be shed, and became made in the image of Neoliberalism —that is, not man, nor woman, but mere individual.
It is endemic to Neoliberalism that that which cannot be exploited for market, due to some antiquated moral precedent, can and will be done away with for the purposes of freedom, equality, and trailing last, almost as an addendum to the first two, fraternity. Religious, cultural, and moral values which are past the point of profitability, and which resist the pull of commodification, are in the end done away with. Such values no longer have any political currency under Neoliberalism, other than on the level of mere identity-product. All values are market values, and each value is simply a price, a market preference.
This is not to say that Neoliberalism is without morality entirely. The exhortations of equality, empathy, and sometimes indeed justice, contain moral weight. However, the terms are invoked in lip-service of their values, and their deployment is to the benefit of market forces. This is morality with an instrumental purpose, whose ends justify the means. A morality whose Good is displaced, and thus no morality worthy of the name.
It is said that in Ireland things differ slightly to the rest of the West in terms of its economic trajectory, but not as much as the economic and cultural historians think. The forces of Neoliberal Capital were already making themselves felt by the earliest years in the first half of the twentieth century. The strength of the Catholic Church still made social liberalism an uphill battle, even if the tide was turning internationally. But the tide did eventually turn. If you want to examine Neoliberalism, only America, and possibly the Netherlands, are more accelerated cases than Ireland. For whatever reasons, every vestige of social conservatism has been done away with in Ireland, forgotten and eventually, despised. The swiftness with which Ireland has traded the certainties of Catholic faith to that of Capitalist dogma is one which points to Ireland’s deference to authority, whether that be Christian, Capitalist, or otherwise.
The Irish acceptance of Neoliberal doctrine could be most easily seen by recent additions of business terminology into our political ontology. ‘Innovation’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘outsourcing’ were extolled and became the lexicon for a whole range of government policies, grants, bodies and institutions, even including the renaming of one Government department. Courses centred around entrepreneurship appeared in all universities in the country. A section of Trinity's Berkeley Library was allotted to the 'Blackstone Launchpad' programme, the philanthropic arm of an American private equity firm. Their ‘charity’ was allotted €2m in taxpayer money for the establishment of such programmes in universities throughout the country.
Pre-pandemic, the ruling government of Fine Gael sought to sing the praises of small to medium business opportunities, with a cultural shift toward the start-up and the self-owned. Of course, this did not come at the expense of the interests of multinationals, which saw their place within the Irish business psyche, and the Irish economy, cemented even further. All of this came with its accompanying social expression in the culture as a new Hiberno-Protestant ethic toward business, commerce and the right to rack-rent at the market price, whether it be to the native Irish or foreign expat. Socially speaking, grabbing coffee replaced attending Mass on Sundays. It became commonplace to invest in property not for the purpose of building a home, but to ‘provide for one's wealth’. Cocaine abuse among the boomer generation skyrocketed in the Celtic Tiger and subsequent Celtic Phoenix era, and continues to do so to this day, a narcissistic drug most fitting for the time.
All of this wished to preclude the possibility of rupture. Yet a rupture was indeed to come.
Read part 2 here.