Spectrum Journal of Global Studies Vol.7, Issue 1
Neoliberal Nightmares Japhy Wilson
Abstract Neoliberalism died in the financial crisis of 2008. But it has risen from the grave. This uncanny persistence has coincided with an increased interest in gothic themes in the realms of popular culture and critical political economy. This paper presents a psychoanalytic diagnosis of this unsettling scenario. Gothic monsters are identified as symptoms of the Real of Capital as an abstract form of domination. Neoliberalism is then theorised as a form of obsessional neurosis, which evolves through its failed attempts to conceal the traumatic dimensions of the Real of Capital. This argument is illustrated through the strange case of the celebrity development economist Jeffrey Sachs, and his peculiar transformation from Dr Shock into Mr Aid. I conclude with some reflections on the nightmarish phenomenon of zombie neoliberalism.
Key Words: Neoliberal ideology, Spectres of Capital, Economics of Anxiety, Washington consensus, Financial Crisis of 2008
Introduction: Tales of the Neoliberal Undead Neoliberalism remains the dominant economic ideology of our times. For over three decades, economic reforms have adhered to the neoliberal principles of privatization, deregulation, and the dismantling of the welfare state, on the assumption that free competition would ensure the best of all possible worlds. In contrast to this utopian vision, the outcome has been persistent poverty, economic oligarchy, and a whirlwind of financial crises that spiralled around the world before finally entering the heartlands of global capitalism with the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing ‘Great Recession’. Yet in the aftermath of this unprecedented annihilation of its material and ideological foundations, neoliberalism has risen diabolically from the grave and now staggers forward once again, as the only symbolic framework through which Western capitalism appears capable of articulating its increasingly spasmodic and dysfunctional reproduction. In the absence of a rational explanation for this uncanny persistence, critics have resorted to gothic representations of the undead. Colin Crouch has noted ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’ (Crouch 2011); Mitchell Dean has observed that ‘neoliberal regimes persist in an ‘undead’ form’ (Dean 2014); and Neil Smith has described neoliberalism as ‘dead but dominant’ (Smith 2008). Among these morbid metaphors, the figure of the zombie has acquired peculiar prominence. Ben Fine (2008) claims that ‘the current phase of neoliberalism is zombie-like’, in the sense that it is ‘both dead and alive at the same time’; Mark Fisher (2013) observes that ‘Neoliberalism now shambles on as a zombie’, noting that ‘it is sometimes harder to kill a zombie than a living person’; and Jamie Peck suggests that neoliberalism has ‘entered its zombie phase. The brain has apparently long since stopped functioning, but the limbs are still moving… The living dead of the free-market revolution continue to walk the earth, though with each resurrection their decidedly uncoordinated gait becomes even more erratic’ (Peck 2010a: 109). 78