http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu
What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which
may impede the pure market logic.
by Pierre Bourdieu
The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market is made
possible by the politics of financial deregulation. And it is achieved through
the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all of the
political measures (of which the most recent is the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment (MAI), designed to protect foreign corporations and their
investments from national states) that aim to call into question any and all
collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure
market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work
groups, for example through the individualisation of salaries and of careers as
a function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of
workers; collectives for the defence of the rights of workers, unions,
associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its control
over consumption through the constitution of markets by age
groups.
These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to submit to
the test of experimental verification and are led to look down upon the results
of the other historical sciences, in which they do not recognise the purity and
crystalline transparency of their mathematical games, whose true necessity and
profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They participate
and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its
consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist party and give learned
counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it cannot displease
them because, at the risk of a few failures, imputable to what they sometimes
call "speculative bubbles", it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical
utopia (ultra-logical like certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate
their lives.
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