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Revising Foucault on Neoliberalism: the Role of Monopolies (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

In rereading Philip Mirowski’s critique of Foucault on neoliberalism (as it’s presented in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, his book on the 2008 financial crisis), I noticed a limit in Foucault’s analysis that I hadn’t really thought about before.  Although Foucault correctly sees that a key (if not they key) feature in the transition from classical liberalism to neoliberalism is the realization that markets are something that the state can create and curate, he does not see that neoliberalism also puts a lot of weight on the neoclassical tolerance for monopolies.  This is a significant reversal from classical liberalism.  I work on intellectual property, which is a legal regime that attempts to create markets in intellectual goods by way of granting monopolies to their creators, which means it’s hard to ignore the tolerance of monopoly.  But the point is worth expanding on more generally.

As Foucault points out (as will be apparent, all of my references will be to Birth of Biopolitics; I’m not aware the topic comes up elsewhere in his work), classical liberalism – the “liberal art of government” (BB 65) – requires anti-monopoly legislation for the “freedom of the internal market to exist” (BB 64).  Competition, if left unchecked, will tend to lead to monopolies.  By the New Deal, and the political opposition is engendered, liberalism faced a “crisis … due to the inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom” (BB 69) such that anti-monopoly legislation could be perceived as part of a “’legislative strait-jacket” (BB 68).  The ordo-liberals thus pick up on the “problem of competition and monopoly” but “do not depart in any way from the historical development of liberal thought” (BB 119).  For early neoliberalism, the “problem will be to demonstrate that monopoly is not in fact part of the economic and historical logic of competition” (BB 134).  Instead, they look at what non-economic policies are supposed to have led to monopolies, and argue that competition and markets do not, without these external distortions, lead to monopolies.  They also reframe the problem with monopolies, which is that they will distort the operation of the price mechanism (BB 136, citing von Mises).  The essential claim is thus that a monopolist will have to charge market prices, or competition will unseat him.  So intervention is not necessary (BB 137).

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Net Neutrality, Bears Ears and Primitive Accumulation

By Gordon Hull

Ajit Pai is the Marie Antoinette of the Trump Administration.  How else can you explain his decision to do a little skit last week, in which he pretends that his chairmanship of the FCC is a part of a plot by his former employer, Verizon, to ensure full regulatory capture of the FCC?  This of course while he was inside a cozy dinner, ignoring people outside protesting his impending vote to end Net Neutrality, and while he claims the support of millions of provably fake comments?  If that moment put the sheer hubris of the Trump administration on display, then surely its naked appeals to the worst kind of partisanship was Pai’s attempt to deflect criticism of his decision by companies like Twitter.  There, his argument was that Twitter, not he, is an enemy of the open internet because it’s (supposedly) too liberal.  As for the millions of provably fake comments, Pai can’t be bothered to investigate, and won’t let anybody else do so either.