We write this book with a sense of urgency. Things are moving fast. We are witnessing a significant acceleration in the economic and securitarian processes that are profoundly transforming our societies, as well as the political relations between rulers and ruled. Regardless of whether this change of speed is fuelled by the financial crisis, the debt crisis in Europe, the arrival of Syrian refugees, terrorist attacks, or the electoral rise of the Extreme Right, the main direction is the same. We are dealing with an acceleration in the exit from democracy. It has two complementary aspects: the recharged power of the oligarchic offensive against citizens’ social and economic rights; and the proliferation of security apparatuses targeting their civil and political rights. These two aspects do not pertain to different ‘policies’ – ‘liberal’ and ‘securitarian’, respectively – between which rulers can choose, depending on circumstances and elections. Need we remind readers? The formula trotted out today – ‘security is the foremost freedom’ – featured in the report Réponses à la violence issued by the Committee of Inquiry into Violence, chaired by Alain Peyrefitte – a report that lay behind the February 1981 Security and Liberty law drafted by the same Peyrefitte, who had become justice minister. In the guise of the Giscardian Right, French neoliberalism played a pioneering role in combining ‘advanced liberalism’ with state securitarianism.
Peyrefitte’s formula has the advantage of masking the nature of the combination by identifying security as the number one freedom, without further ado. In reality, it is ‘freedom’ of competition – unremitting, unbridled competition between actors – that requires the reinforcement of ‘security’, or, rather, generates the ‘securitarian’ as a precondition of its operation.1 For we must distinguish between sûreté [safety] and the sécurité promoted by securitarian logic. If sûreté is one of the fundamental rights recognized by the 1789 Declaration, it is because it is a guarantee intended to protect the citizen from arbitrariness – first and foremost, arbitrary conduct on the part of the state. And if Montesquieu and Rousseau can identity ‘political liberty’ with ‘sûreté’,2 it is precisely because they do not make it a freedom, albeit the first. There is therefore nothing neutral about the triumph of the securitarian under neoliberalism: whereas sûreté protects persons from abuses of state power, the securitarian pertains exclusively to the state.3 In fact, this is a basic orientation that has prevailed for more than three decades and is intensifying with the rapid succession of ‘crises’. It derives from a unique form of rationality: neoliberalism. By concentrating real power in the hands of the most powerful economic actors at the expense of the mass of citizens, neoliberal political reason makes people insecure and disciplines them, deactivates democracy, and fragments society.
By ‘neoliberalism’ we therefore understand something very different from the standard sense of the term. We mean not the set of doctrines, tendencies or actors – very diverse and, in some respects, opposed – filed by political and economic history under that overly broad heading, or economic policies deriving from a desire to undermine the state in favour of the market, but instead what we have analysed as a ‘world-reason’ whose main characteristic is that it extends and imposes the logic of capital on the totality of social relations, to the point of making it the very form of our lives.4 The most diverse ideologies adapt perfectly well to this rationality or, rather, actively assist it. The example of the AKP government in Turkey is very revealing in this regard. We are familiar with the re-Islamization of society single-mindedly pursued by Erdoğan over the last few years. But the same leader declared in 2015 that ‘I would like this country to be managed like a large company’;5 put through a law on higher education in the same year that completely reorganized universities on the basis of competition and performance; and restructured the health system, with the largest slice of the cake going to private hospitals. The point is not that neoliberalism is compatible with Islam, or that Islam has consciously reformed its content to adapt to globalization. It is that neoliberalism is capable of enlisting in its logic Islamist conservatism, as well as other ideologies competing with it in the market of ‘cultural identities’. The real power of a global rationality consists in this capacity.
Consequently, we must examine the systemic character of the neoliberal phenomenon in the light of what has occurred since the crisis of 2008. For it renders any policy reorientation difficult, or impossible, even though current policies reproduce the factors underlying the crisis and make the social situation worse. In reality, we are no longer dealing with an open context where different ‘policy options’ might have their place – for example, social-democratic policies in the more traditional sense of the term. We are dealing with a global neoliberal system that no longer tolerates any deviation from implementing a programme of radical transformation of society and individuals. This is certainly not a one-party system, but it is without doubt a one-politicalrationality system. And competition between parties, like alternation between Right and Left, must be aligned with this sole form of reason. This is what we need to begin thinking through if we are to abolish an infernal dynamic and free ourselves from the ‘iron cage’ in which we are imprisoned.
The situation is fraught with danger – and not just in France. There is no longer anything in common between what the majority of people experience, feel and think and what the powerful in their ‘sensory isolation tank’ perceive and understand of the situation – not even the minimum that makes it possible to share experience. And this is the greatest danger. Today, no ‘educational’ communications campaign can restore legitimacy to oligarchic groups. In the absence of any credible alternative response emerging from struggles at the base of society, an enormous fund of resentment is forming and accumulating, which is expressed in the urge to ‘overturn the table’, in apathetic withdrawal or in xenophobia. The electoral success of extreme right-wing parties like the National Front is a direct consequence of the neoliberal consensus ‘on high’ and its rejection ‘down below’. It is perfectly possible that austerity in Europe is leading towards a political catastrophe. The victory of neo-fascism has now become a possibility to be reckoned with. No one can say: ‘We didn’t know.’
The political authorities seem unhinged. Faced with the neoliberal system’s profound impact on society, with the ‘war of identities’ that increasingly divides it, further aggravating the logic of competition, they seem incapable of imagining any response other than the reinforcement of police powers, arbitrary imprisonment or generalized surveillance – in a nutshell, erosion of the Rechtsstaat.6 History has taught them nothing. However, there is grave danger when states describing themselves as ‘democracies’ dust off the judicial arsenal of tyrannies that proclaim themselves such. But what is even more disturbing, if possible, is the ‘nationalist rage’ coursing through Europe and France, contaminating Right and Left alike. The ‘rabies nationalis’ evoked by Nietzsche in July 1888 remains the ‘last malady of European reason’, which resulted in the well-known calamities of the twentieth century.7 However – an aggravating factor – whereas in the 1880s, nationalism meant asserting the sovereignty of young nations following the 1848 insurrections, contemporary nationalism is predominantly motivated by a desire to restore a lost sovereignty, fantasized in nostalgic, reactive fashion.
We know various forms of resistance exist. We have analysed alternative practices. We have identified the operative principle of struggles and experiments holding out the promise of ‘another world’.8 For us there is nothing inevitable about the accelerated neoliberalization of societies. The immediate reasons for it lie in the current disparity in power between a dominant logic and a minority logic. The dominant logic thrives on crises and, in turn, is forever nurturing ‘morbid phenomena’, pitiless, terrifying ‘monsters’ that aim to subject society to ethno-identitarian principles.9 These ‘Monsters’ are all the more alarming in that they grow with social anger and fuel one another with their mutual hatred. On the other side, the minority logic of the commons has yet to find mass expression, institutional frameworks or a political grammar. We are still only in the early stages of a new revolutionary configuration. And this delay is a cause for concern. The so-called ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ Left is flailing and sometimes in retreat. It may even capitulate to enemy forces, like Syriza in Greece in 2015.
In any event, slogans are not enough. A weakness of the critical Left is that it has made do with ready-made formulae, summary denunciations and sterile incantations. ‘Ultra-liberalism’, ‘neoliberal totalitarianism’, and ‘capitalism’ reduced to a single system of production are completely inappropriate concepts for a web of self-reinforcing processes that demand more detailed analysis. The old recipes of nation-statism are inoperative, even when, in a dangerous slippage, they do not resort to the rhetoric of the Right.10 What is needed is to account for neoliberal radicalization in all its complexity and diversity. This involves understanding how the multiform crisis we are experiencing, far from being a check, has become a method of governing. In and through its effects of insecurity and destruction, neoliberalism is continually fuelling and reinforcing itself. Endeavouring to understand how – such is the ambition of this book.