What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.
By Pierre Bourdieu
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.
mondediplo.com... 
