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State Power, the Politics of Debt and Confronting Neoliberal Authoritarianism

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Abstract

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of the connection between Carl Schmitt and central intellectual figures behind the establishment of the Mont Pelerin Society see Dean (2014, pp. 154–155).

  2. For discussions of the crucial role that an acceptance of authoritarianism has played in the development of neoliberal thought, see: Peck (2010a, chapter 1); Mirowski (2009, p. 441); Bonefeld (2010a, b, 2017); Dean (2014); Cristi (1984, p. 199); Scheuerman (1997); Hayek (1960, p. 217, 1966).

  3. I am indebted to Daniel McLoughlin for pointing out the extent to which Lazzarato over-extends his critique of Foucault in this regard: McLoughlin (2017).

  4. Lazzarato also invokes Duchamp’s radical politics of creativity (which rejects the idea of art as a professional specialisation) in his study of the French intermittents (casualised cultural workers) in their struggles against neoliberal austerity measures restricting their access to unemployment insurance: see Lazzarato (2017).

  5. In a brief footnote, Poulantzas acknowledges some commonalities between his position and Henri Lefebvre’s account of the ‘state mode of production’ (Poulantzas 2000, p. 50). Lefebvre argues that the state plays an active role in simultaneously fragmenting, homogenising and hierarchically ordering socio-spatial relations; a process he describes as the production of ‘abstract space’ (Lefebvre 1977, 2001, 2003; Butler 2012, pp. 98–99). While it is not possible to pursue the links between these thinkers in any further detail here, see the discussion in Brenner (2001).

  6. Boukalas suggests that authoritarian statism provides a more nuanced way of understanding such developments than Giorgio Agamben’s depiction of a permanent state of exception.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to dedicate this article to my father, Adrian Butler, who died in July 2018. He had personal experience of the introduction of ‘new public management’ techniques in the Queensland Public Service during the 1980s, and gave me my first insights into the role of the state in promoting and reinforcing neoliberalism. His critical perspective on politics and his wry humour will be sorely missed.

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    Chris Butler

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Butler, C. State Power, the Politics of Debt and Confronting Neoliberal Authoritarianism. Law Critique 29, 311–331 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-018-9233-z

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