From biopower to necroeconomies: Neoliberalism, biopower and death economies

Abstract

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings of labor, value and politics, forcing a revaluation of biopower and of extant understandings of the global economic and political order. Death as a source of value marks an entirely new space in capital that exceeds its former limits. This process can be seen in examples of genocidal warfare, ethnic cleansing, environmental “disasters” and globalized poverty that function as industries of death, mining the accumulated stored value of life, as death, and as an activity itself, instead of the old extractive exploitation of living labor.

Science needs more external evaluation, not less

“…If the intent is to convince the reader that science will automatically have positive societal impacts, it has the opposite effect. It reminds us that modern science has always been at the service of wealth accumulation for Europe and North America, with or without neo-liberal quantified performance metrics (Haskaj, 2018). The role of science in colonial and capitalist wealth accumulation is a powerful argument in favor of increased external evaluation of science.…”

Analysing power and control in work organizations: Assimilating a critical socio-psychodynamic perspective

“…The combined use of appeals of freedom, activating optimistic hopes and desires, and threats to controllability, evoking negative expectations, uncertainty, and fear of constrained autonomy, would trigger subjects to assume responsibility and engage in identifying, persistent pursuit of predetermined organizational goals to restore their sense of control (Pyysiäinen, Halpin and Guilfoyle, 2017). Diagnosing a new quality of self-control, Foucault's conceptualizations of biopower and biopolitics elaborate on such shifts from coercive power toward self-disciplinary colonial regimes, pervading and shaping the most intimate domains of modern life by the dominating politicaleconomic interests of the state and capital (e.g., Aslan and Özeren, 2018;Berman, 2010;Haskaj, 2018;Moisander, Groß and Eräranta, 2018). Accordingly, biopolitics focus on vital aspects of human beings, providing intervention strategies to control groups and individuals through self-discipline regimes.…”

Purge, Exile, and Resistance:Rethinking the Conflict of the Faculties through the Case of Academics for Peace in Turkey

“…43 Humanitarian aid organizations have developed rapidly in these last three decades in parallel with neoliberal globalization and the rise of necropolitics, in such a way that they constitute a field, where the law of the market works (Carbonnier 2015;Haskaj 2018;Weiss 2013). Tom Weiss stresses three transformative trends of humanitarian activities following the post-Cold War period as militarization, politicization, and marketization (Weiss 2013: 54).…”