Pierre Bourdieu est mort

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pierre Bourdieu est mort

Pierre Bourdieu est mort, mercredi, à 23 heures, à l'hôpital
Saint-Antoine de Paris. Atteint d'un cancer, il était âgé de 71 ans.
Internationalement reconnue et discutée, son oeuvre a fondé, d'un point
de vue académique, une école de sociologie critique de la modernité qui
s'est accompagnée, ces dernières années, d'un engagement de plus en plus
prononcé en faveur des mouvements sociaux. Directeur d'études à l'Ecole
des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), élu au Collège de France
en 1981, il réunit autour de lui une école sociologique dont la revue
"Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales", fondée en 1975, sera la
vitrine. Pour ses disciples, sa théorie du monde social constitue une
"révolution symbolique", semblable à celles qu'ont pu connaître d'autres
disciplines.

The essence of neoliberalism

Pierre Bourdieu
Professor at the Collège de France

Le Monde, December 1998
La globalización en La BitBlioteca
La nouvelle vulgate planétaire (dans le Monde diplomatique)

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure
and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable
consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that
it inflicts, either automatically or ? more unusually ? through the
intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing
public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant
discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more
than the implementation of a utopia ? the utopia of neoliberalism ? thus
converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the
economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as
the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it
has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a
narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality,
it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations
and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their
application.

To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the
educational system. Education is never taken account of as such at a
time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and
services as in the production of the producers themselves. From this
sort of original sin, inscribed in the
Walrasian myth (1) of ?pure theory?, flow all of the deficiencies and
faults of the discipline of economics and the fatal obstinacy with which
it attaches itself to the arbitrary opposition which it induces, through
its mere existence, between a properly economic logic, based on
competition and efficiency, and social logic, which is subject to the
rule of fairness.

That said, this ?theory? that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its
roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and
empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one
discourse among many. Rather, it is a ?strong discourse? ? the way
psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman's analysis (2).
It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side
all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it
contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting
the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It
thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. In the
name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political
action, an immense political project is underway, although its status as
such  is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project
aims to create the conditions under which the ?theory? can be realised
and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of
collectives.

The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market
is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation.  And it is
achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive
action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI),  designed to protect foreign
corporations and their investments from national states) that aim to
call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as
an obstacle to the logic of
the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually
decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of
salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with
the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of
the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the
family, which loses part of its control over consumption through the
constitution of markets by age groups.

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and
economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders,
financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic
politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of
laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies
advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms,
they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences.
Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from
social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic
system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of
logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints
regulating economic agents.

The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress of
information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility of capital. It
gives investors concerned with the short-term profitability of their
investments the possibility of permanently comparing the profitability
of the largest corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms?
relative setbacks.  Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations
themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the
markets, under penalty of ?losing the market?s confidence?, as they say,
as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to
obtain short-term profits, are more and more able to impose their will
on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under
which managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring,
employment, and wages.

Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees
being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and
repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself,
competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to
perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to
individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage
relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives,
individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual
salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and
of individual merit; individualised career paths; strategies of
?delegating responsibility? tending to ensure the self-exploitation of
staff who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical
dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their
products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were
independent contractors. This pressure toward ?self-control? extends
workers? ?involvement? according to the techniques of  ?participative
management? considerably beyond management level. All of these are
techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work
(and not only among
management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they
converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3).

In this way, a Darwinian world emerges ? it is the struggle of all
against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support  through
everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of
insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a doubt, the practical
establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely
without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that
produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees
rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations
precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This
reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher
levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this
entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the
structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and
the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the ?harmonious?
functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass
phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.

This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour
contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the ?theory of
contracts?). organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust,
co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when
adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating
all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for
fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising,
employment ?at will? and the
right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction).

Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the
reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself
even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which,
in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful
belief ? the free trade faith ? not only among those who live off it,
such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc.,
but also among those, such as high-level government officials and
politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For
they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency,
which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers
capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual
quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned
into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And
they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of
economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of
any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the
prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of
public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests
of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic
states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which
they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough
specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute
decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the
neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and
social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual
formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and
theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of
logic with the logic of things.

These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to
submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look down
upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not
recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their mathematical
games, whose true necessity
and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They
participate and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change.
Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the
socialist party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the
power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few
failures, imputable to what they sometimes call ?speculative bubbles?,
it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like
certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.

And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the
implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of
an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced
societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, the
progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural
production, such as film, publishing, etc., through the intrusive
imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major
trends. First is the destruction of all the
collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the
infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the
universal values associated with the idea of the public realm.  Second
is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and
the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral
Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher
mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against
all and cynicism as the norm of all action and
behaviour.

Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by
this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the
starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss?
Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox. The obstacles
encountered on the way to
realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today
to be imputable to rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious
intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is
discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the
benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a
site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what
keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing
volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of
those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in
the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the
categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social
solidarity, familial or otherwise.

The transition to ?liberalism? takes place in an imperceptible manner,
like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view. Its most
terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects
themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance to which this
transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the old order
by drawing on the resources it contained, on old solidarities, on
reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present
social order from falling into anomie. This
social capital is fated to wither away ? although not in the short run ?
if it is not renewed and reproduced.

But these same forces of ?conservation?, which it is too easy to treat
as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of
resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become
subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that
forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations
of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these
institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that,
under the appearance of simply defending an
order that has disappeared and its corresponding ?privileges? (which is
what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the
challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order.
One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests
and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for
collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively
arrived at and collectively ratified.

How could we not make a special place among these collectives,
associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or
better yet the supranational state ? a European state on the way toward
a world state ? capable of effectively controlling and taxing the
profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of
counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour
market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising
the elaboration and defence of the public interest.
Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost
of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an
earlier period one would have said of ?shopkeepers?) that the new belief
system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment.



(1) Auguste Walras (1800-66), French economist, author of De la nature
de la richesse et de l'origine de la valeur (?On the Nature of Wealth
and on the Origin of Value?) (1848). He was one of the first to attempt
to apply mathematics to economic inquiry.

(2) Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of
Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

(3) See the two journal issues devoted to ?Nouvelles formes de
domination dans le travail? (?New forms of domination in work?),  Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales, nos. 114, September 1996, and 115,
December 1996, especially the introduction by Gabrielle Balazs and
Michel Pialoux, ?Crise du travail et crise du politique? [Work crisis
and political crisis], no. 114: p.3-4.

Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro La globalización en La BitBlioteca La
nouvelle vulgate planétaire (dans le Monde diplomatique)