The racial constitution of neoliberalism

Abstract

Prevailing scholarship on neoliberalism fails to recognise that it generates its own distinctive forms of racial domination. Influential analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey and Wendy Brown assume or argue that racism exists today because neoliberalism’s defeat of racial legacies is incomplete. This ignores how racism is reconfigured in ways that are specific to the historical moment of neoliberalism and dependent on a distinctive and substantial intellectual and political hinterland. A consideration of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution reveals a contradiction in neoliberal thought between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its dependence on particularist ideas of western cultural pre-eminence. This ideological contradiction correlates with the fact that globalisation produces masses of surplus populations which are of no market value. A racial idea of culture is the means by which neoliberalism manages and works through its own limitations. Above all, ‘race’ provides a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and ‘unexploitable’, bearers of entitlements and bare life.

Trade unions negotiating the Swedish model: racial capitalism, whiteness and the invisibility of race

“…Race, according to this author, provides the means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour, hence: 'Race is a material feature of the division of labour that neoliberalism produces'. 21 Thus, research, he argues, often 'excludes the possibility of neoliberalism itself constituting distinctive new structures of racism which are not comprehensible in terms of weakened legacies of the past'. 22 The emphasis on racism as a form of resentment and nostalgia tends to focus on racism expressed in terms of loss, and while we do not argue that this is not an existing form of racism -the articulation of racism expressed as nostalgia, linking the lost, for instance, in Sweden to the concept of the nation as the People's Home, the Swedish model, and the welfare state -we argue, inspired by Kundnani, for the need to explore forms of racism, articulated and mobilised in other emotional and discursive terms.…”

“…21 Thus, research, he argues, often 'excludes the possibility of neoliberalism itself constituting distinctive new structures of racism which are not comprehensible in terms of weakened legacies of the past'. 22 The emphasis on racism as a form of resentment and nostalgia tends to focus on racism expressed in terms of loss, and while we do not argue that this is not an existing form of racism -the articulation of racism expressed as nostalgia, linking the lost, for instance, in Sweden to the concept of the nation as the People's Home, the Swedish model, and the welfare state -we argue, inspired by Kundnani, for the need to explore forms of racism, articulated and mobilised in other emotional and discursive terms. This would facilitate a more open understanding of both if and how racism permeates society, in stories of the past, in living the present and in imaginaries of the future.…”

Carceral islands: the rise of the Danish deportation archipelago

“…As Arun Kundnani argues, 'race' is an organising logic of neoliberal regimes: 'a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and "unexploitable" bearers of the title of bare life'. 48 Carceral infrastructures, he argues, are necessary technologies for managing these boundaries and produced in the contradictions of an ostensibly colourblind market competition, alongside the neoliberal state's maintenance of a racial ordering of labouring and 'surplus populations'.…”

Immigration Raids and Racist State Violence

“…Regardless of the forms of intelligence, raids are largely ineffective, with just around one in six out of some 44,224 raids on people's homes between 2014 and 2019 leading to removals, according to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) (Taylor 2021). But as Kundnani (2021) argues, the underlying rationale is not just removing (or not), but reproducing the disposability of those who are or who may at some point be vulnerable to it. Speaking of the "infrastructure build-up" on the US-Mexico border, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore (2008: 148) have emphasized that the goal of the wall, above all else, was always to "create fear and legitimate the state that built it."…”