Looters versus Losers
On Smash and Grab kleptocracy
The classical liberal doctrine of labor contractualism and at-will employment has never flourished without the simultaneous imposition of a poor-law regime of unfree labor, today exemplified by the expansion of both feminized workfare and prison labor.1
Greetings everyone.
Yesterday was devoted almost entirely to questions of thinking-through austerity and its connection to neoliberalism. Here are some brief points for your consideration.
The Melinda Cooper quote above is correct precisely because of the continued success of a political/rhetorical net of discourse about eternal austerity, an ineluctable, undeniable and natural iron law of scarcity that continues to structure precarity. We settle for the current order not because we believe in our immiseration, but because our leaders until recently imposed a “politics of the surround” that hemmed-in any effort at vocal or practical dissent. What strikes me is the difficulty of becoming disentangled and free in a practical sense, not just engaging in critique, but actually undermining and inverting the decades-old assumption that improvements in life are just impossible. I think we have reached a point where people are sick of the rhetoric, and they are starting to see through its foundations and premises in the protection of privilege. But at the same time there’s no sustainable means of tearing the old structure down in way that also builds-up even more robust protections for the most vulnerable. So far the most successful transgressors of this will-to-denial have used that critique only as a way of intensifying the ideology. They have successfully articulated a counter-discourse of exception, but only for those who already have privilege. So: more of the same, only worse.
This is a strange and awful state of affairs, and yet (dialectically) it provides a kind of opportunity. We saw merely three years ago that austerity could end overnight. We saw that the state could in fact provide us with basic income, unemployment insurance could be exponentially increased, child poverty could be ended by a simple tax credit. We saw for a brief moment what life was like for members of the investor class, where every state of exception is one that favors more wealth not less. Since that time, the Democratic party became associated with the reimposition of the old grid, the reassertion of normal time, the rolling-back of these exceptional conditions. And — unfortunately for them — they lost an election on those principles only to be replaced by a smash-and-grab MAGA movement. It’s now the looters versus the losers. The Democrats tried to win (?) by arguing that a better life is impossible. It’s not hard to see how ordinary people celebrate the overthrow of this idea, even as it harms them. The advantage of pure MAGA kleptocracy is that everyone knows that law is a sham. Those who are open about their plunder, who have a sardonic attitude about their own criminal privilege, are respected more than those who preach to others about the necessity of self-denial as they grow rich from donations.
Melinda Cooper, Family Values (Zone Books, 2017), pg. 103.