Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

 

“Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.”

― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

Welfare System Designed to Keep the Poor Poorer http://therealnews.com/

Bio

Sanford Schram is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Institute of Public Policy at Hunter College, CUNY. His published books include Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty (1995) and Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (2011)--co-authored with Joe Soss and Richard Fording. Both books won the Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association. (Schram is the only person to author more than one book that has won Harrington Award.) More recently he published Becoming a Footnote: An Activist-Scholar Finds His Voice, Learns to Write, and Survives Academia (2013). Soon to be published is The Return to Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (Oxford University Press). Schram is the 2012 recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science.

Transcript

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

Governor of Kansas Sam Brownback has signed a new bill into state law that places restrictions on what welfare recipients can purchase with cash assistance, including movie tickets, liquor, and tattoos. Advocates of the bill say it will provide more accountability for taxpayer money, but will it actually improve the conditions of the poor? Now joining us to discuss this from New York is Sanford Schram. Sanford is professor of political science at Hunter College, CUNY. He is an award-winning author of many books, including Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism.

Thank you so much for joining us.

SANFORD SCHRAM, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, HUNTER COLLEGE: My pleasure.

PERIES: Let's begin with what this bill will do, and how bills like this throughout the country is affecting the employment and well-being of welfare recipients.

SCHRAM: Yeah, the Kansas law is just one of another spate of laws that have been passed lately. The country seems to have a habit whenever things start to go bad or the economy's not doing well to fall into a pit of invoking stereotypes, often racist and sexist stereotypes about the poor as deviants who aren't adhering to white, middle-class rules of work and family. And amazingly, we've seen this happen again in the last few years post the great recession, and state after state has passed these kinds of restrictions which really don't make a lot of sense. A popular one is drug testing of recipients, though people on welfare are on average less likely to use illegal drugs than the population in general. And states lose money, they spend more on testing than they get back from dropping people from the rolls for that.

But we see these other kinds of restrictions coming in like the ones in Kansas, limiting how much money you can withdraw from your Electronic Benefit Transfer card each day, $25 in Kansas, and limiting what you can spend the money on. In many cases, about things that low-income people would never even contemplate buying or can afford to buy.

So it's really more about marking the poor as deviant, and sort of creating a kind of policy feedback that feeds back into the society. The policy sort of calls out the poor as deviant and manufacturers their otherness in order to reinforce or buttress anti-welfare antipathy.

PERIES: Now Sanford, what is there to be gained by marginalizing the poor more than they already are in our society? Particularly given that we are in economic crisis, it is well-established fact that unemployment and the economy is in a very slow growth period. What's the point in marginalizing the poor any more than they already are? What's in these heads of these people who passed this legislation in Kansas?

SCHRAM: Well I think there are multiple dimensions to it, but most concretely, materially, it's about not having to spend money, to avoid having to raise taxes. Since the welfare system was changed dramatically in 1996, where they instituted time limits, work requirements--

PERIES: This is important. This is not even under Reagan, this is under President Clinton, and at that time with the assistance of Hillary Clinton, who's now running for president.

SCHRAM: Yeah, there's been commentary lately that allegedly Hillary was very much in support of Bill's signing of the law. In many ways the Republicans, I think, backed Clinton into a corner and made him deliver on his promise when he had run for the presidency the first time, to end welfare as we know it. He ended up having to sign the law in part perhaps because he knew he was politically vulnerable with scandal hanging over him. He wasn't entirely happy with it, though in his autobiography he said he considered it his greatest achievement as president.

So it is bipartisan that we need to change the welfare system, make it more restrictive, to put more of the responsibility on the poor to be self-sufficient so they're not a burden on everyone else. And what's happened over time is so many people are not receiving public assistance that are eligible, we've gone back to the bad old days before the '60s and the welfare rights movement and the civil rights movement, when people were able to start to exercise their rights to assistance.

And now only about a third of all the people who are eligible for assistance are receiving it. So part of this is about keeping them at bay, and not having to meet our obligations as a society. So as the number of people who are extremely poor or live in deep poverty grows, and as the system doesn't respond, I think there's pressure to maintain the restrictions rather than confront the dire need that's rising all around us.

PERIES: What would you suggest or propose, since you study this area and must have solutions outlined. What are your recommendations in terms of short-term and long-term ways to address this kind of poverty?

SCHRAM: Yeah, it's really hard to overnight just overturn all of this. So I think we have to think more strategically and more incrementally, as taking steps along the way to get to a better place. And so we have a work-based system of social provision now. It's not just public assistance, cash assistance, or food stamps, and so on and so forth. But the earned income tax credit's actually our largest cash transfer program for the poor. And we subsidize people's wages. And in fact, it's getting to the point where states are worried that they're paying so much through cash assistance and food stamps to support low-wage employers, now post-great recession a lot of people are going back to work but they're still having to rely on food stamps and public assistance while they do that.

So one of the main things we could do is raise the minimum wage. And there is a lot of growing support for doing that, for more cities to try and follow Seattle and raise the minimum wage up so that one of the results of that will not only be lifting families out of poverty if we do that enough, but will be reducing their need to rely on public assistance, and it will reduce the extent to which the state will be paying to subsidize employers.

PERIES: Sanford, would that equalize--like at the moment, if your income doesn't reach a certain level, you have access to various tax credits and benefits. Especially if you're having a family. Now, if you raise the minimum wage, will some of those people become ineligible for some of those tax credits?

SCHRAM: Yeah. There are what are called notch effects. And so, and some people may be discouraged from working more because they're worried that their income would get too high and they lose their food stamps, and their earned income tax credit will be incrementally reduced as their earnings go up. But if we raise the minimum wage enough, that'll compensate for that.

When the earned income tax credit started to get expanded years ago, it was--there was a debate about whether it was going to discourage employers from raising wages because they would know that their wages that are being paid to their employees were going to be subsidized by the government. And I think there's more evidence of that now. And so there is a tension between the minimum wage law and the earned income tax credit, and we need to worry about their interaction. But I think the weight of the evidence now is that we should be massively raising the minimum wage, and there are instances where this is happening, now. Seattle being a precedent.

PERIES: And globally, the World Bank just recently declared that even worldwide, unions who were advocating on behalf of a higher wage for workers around the world was doing a good thing and should be included in some of the considerations for loans. So this is not just a U.S. phenomenon in terms of increasing the minimum wage, it appears to be a global trend.

SCHRAM: Right, and it's increasingly a global economy. And a lot of employers are concerned about global competitiveness. So I think it's important that we think about global responses.

PERIES: Thank you so much for joining us today, and giving us your insights into how this particular problem could be solved in our society.

SCHRAM: Thanks for talking to me. I appreciate it.

PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.

If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013 20.30 GMT

The global application of a fraudulent economic theory brought the west to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches

‘The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles

How they must bleed for us. In 2012, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion: just a little less than the entire output of the United Kingdom.

This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.

The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.

Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim – an aim to which every government claims to subscribe – you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neoliberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neoliberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.

The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the 50s, 60s and 70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s depression and the second world war. Their embarrassment gave the other 99% an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.

Neoliberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful – politically. Economically they flopped.

Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neoliberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell, and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.

The neoliberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries – worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades – was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.

As wages stagnated, people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which neoliberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their economies are counter-productive.

The impending reduction of the UK's top rate of income tax (from 50% to 45%) will not boost government revenue or private enterprise, but it will enrich the speculators who tanked the economy. Goldman Sachs and other banks are now thinking of delaying their bonus payments to take advantage of it. The welfare bill approved by parliament last week will not help to clear the deficit or stimulate employment: it will reduce demand, suppressing economic recovery. The same goes for the capping of public sector pay. "Relearning some old lessons about fairness and participation," the UN says, "is the only way to eventually overcome the crisis and pursue a path of sustainable economic development."

As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.