New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Neoliberal Biopolitical Two-Step: Of Patents and Banking Arbitration

By Gordon Hull

It has seemed to me for a long time that one helpful theoretical lens through which to look at neoliberalism is to understand it as a phase (or perhaps a dispositive) of biopower. This is because neoliberalism does not generally rely on juridical rules (or tried to colonize the judiciary), it pushes for the marketization of everything, and involves an elaborate state apparatus to support that marketization. It also functions as an engine of subjectification, actively attempting to turn everyone into instantiations of homo economicus, whether directly by state action, or by way of empowering private actors. Even school students are quietly taught the ropes. The incessant demands for privatization have put enormous pressure on the public sector, both in the starvation of funding cuts and the efforts to privatize it. That, in turn, has led to such monstrosities as private prisons.

That said, today’s neoliberal biopolitics obviously needs to be distinguished from the biopolitics that came before, which was, as Foucault discussed, centered at the population level, concerned with birth rates, longevity, and so on (hence the distinction is readily apparent in health policy). One of the hallmarks of the emergence of biopolitics is the rise of the administrative state; as the state comes increasingly to try to optimize the population, an elaborate administrative apparatus – a large state bureaucracy – emerges to fill these functions. This does not mean that there are no more laws. Indeed, Foucault emphasizes that the biopolitical era involves multiple sites of power, both inside and outside the state:

C-M-C, M-C-M’ and Marx’s understanding of Power

By Gordon Hull

Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant has a nice post on how Marx’s distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M’ helps to explain an otherwise puzzling ideological construction. Marx’s distinction, arrived at in chapter 4 of Capital, is about how commodities circulate. In the C-M-C formula, we consider someone who starts with a commodity, sells it, and uses the proceeds to buy another one. For example, I start with a shirt, sell it, and use the money to buy some bread. In this formula, a couple of things become apparent: use value is both the beginning and end of the process insofar as the individual offers up something she doesn’t have a use for (or has less of a use for), and essentially trades it for something she has a greater use for. In contemporary economic-speak, the market is efficiently helping individuals satisfy their preferences, by moving goods to whoever values them the most. This is the perspective of the worker, who sells his labor for money.

The M-C-M’ relation is one that the capitalist uses. Here, the capitalist has money, sells it to get a commodity, and then sells the commodity for more money than he paid for it. As a result, he has more money at the end of the day than before. Marx emphasizes the M-C-M’ relation because it helps to get him to labor as the source of value: whatever commodity occupies the middle place in the M-C-M’ relation has to be one the use of which increases its value. The answer, of course, is labor.