I’ve been kicking around few ideas on neoliberal systems of economized control. Here are my notes:
Perhaps the most potent tool of neoliberal social control comes from debt and credit schema. The rise of credit in the US coincides with the end of the gold standard, the inception of neoliberalism, and the degradation of the post-WWII Keynesian welfare state. Unsurprisingly, these events also coincide with the rise of religious fundamentalism vis-à-vis the US political right and the rise of new forms of social oppression, such as the US war on drugs and the mass incarceration of minorities (and particularly Black men).
To take any of these elements as a singular thread reduces the ability to see the total political project that emerged with neoliberalism in the mid-1970s. Even before what economists cite as the beginning of neoliberalism, the US political landscape begins to manifest the particulars of the genealogical threads, which would all coalesce into the rationale for a debt-based system of life and government in the US as the next political epoch. This essay will examine three significant macro elements of neoliberal reality – space, time, and value.
This brief essay aims to highlight how modern society in the US has two main features that the neoliberal organization of society produce. First, I would propose that the concept of material value in a financialized system is primarily ethereal, digital, imaginary, and detached in many cases even from use value in any real sense of the terms (think about digital subscriptions of consumable content where digital access rather than actual commodities are exchanged). The second proposition is that in the absence of material value, time becomes the main currency of exchange.
This means that when material value is diffused into the symbolic and digital, time becomes the next level of concrete value. Without cash, the clock becomes the currency. This can be seen most explicitly in a debt-based economy where debt becomes the chief means of both exchange and governance of the population (Lazzarato, 2013).
As time and space can be framed as a medium of exchange, one must consider exactly what type of time is the most valuable. In Capital Volume 1, Marx highlights how the elongation of the working day produces surplus value for the capitalist. This central tenant remains in place under neoliberalism but takes on a specifying or differentiating effect.
Future productive labor time (FPLT) becomes the most valuable medium of exchange in a debt-based economy. Future productive labor time relies entirely on leveraging future earning potential in the present to unlock value that can be used immediately. In effect, one leases their future productivity to a bank or lender so as to have resources in the present. Not only that, but they do so for an additional interest fee – with interest being the primary surplus value-generating effect. In other words, the interest that arise from FPLT are specifically time-related.
The longer it takes to work off debt in the future, the higher the surplus yielding in interest. Thus, there is always an incentive to lend for a more extended period.
Think about how car loans have vastly increased in terms of length, which has also radically increased the cost of the automobile overall, such that much like a house, the note is seldom paid in full before one sells the vehicle and obtains another one – never becoming free of the monthly cost of a car payment. Instead of a few years of scrimping to pay for a car, the consumer pays a monthly fee, in perpetuity, for most of their lives to have a car of some kind. Thus, they never truly own a vehicle, nor are they free of generating surplus value in the form of interest to the lenders.
This value generation and exchange is different (but related) from Marx’s elongation of laboring hours and separate from the infusion of labor into the space of social reproduction.
Thus, for example, neoliberal creditors are most interested in increasing their holdings of FPLT. At the same time, secondarily, the economization of everyday life (EEL) across all life spheres (Brown, 2015) becomes the next most valuable medium through the subsumption of non-labor time. EEL often operates as a space or time market induction (e.g., the cost of extra legroom on an airplane as a market product) – To illustrate, think of an individual wanting to engage in a non-productive and purposely expense-free activity like going to the library to read a few books on the couch at the library. The market enters into this activity between the individual’s non-productive goal and the means to engage in the non-productive activity by using space and time to extract a fee by inserting a market object like a parking meter.
Thus, not only does one take on the expense of traveling to the library, but to do so requires a fee for using time, space, or both. Transportation, as a good, relies wholly on the maximization of fee-based use of time and space movement. One must pay a fee to get from point A to point B. If one owns their transportation, they pay the fee of transportation incurred in ownership, along with fees for the use of a parking space for some allotted time as an additional rent.
The result of this is a form of economized control that is inseparable from the exchange of value since, in either FPLT or EEL, the individual is still ensnared in either a dimension of time or space value medium, which incurs a fee.
This means that time and space as mediums of exchange also function simultaneously as means of control. This is the dark genius of neoliberal social organization. Profit and control working simultaneously regardless of the boundary between labor and non labor time, and free from the productive impetus of commodity exchange, and therefore free from material mediums of value exchange.
What happens is that over any given day, the average person is entrapped in a million spatial and temporal forms of control, assessment, and a fee that, when combined, controls virtually all of their activities.
Taken another way, the reader of this article will go to work on monday because they owe money, and by owing money, their future time is already under the control of the creditor.
However, even if that were not enough – no matter where one goes, what one desires, and how one might move about in the world – all of it is subject to market interference and rent-seeking. Consider for a second that to sit in a room by oneself requires that one have paid for access to that space and has enough access to allow them to sit there doing nothing for some time. Next to charging for air, marshaling time and space is one of the most rapacious (yet often overlooked and taken for granted) mechanisms of control under neoliberal capitalism.
In conclusion, it is time for a more critical understanding of the economization of value generation and exchange outside of currency and commodities. However, I do not want to suggest there is not a solid set of scholarship in this arena, only that it may be time for political economists to mainstream the concepts of time and space as central mediums of exchange under the ethereal conditions of value under neoliberalism. In short, perhaps the discourse of materialism should frame time and space more similarly as value, currency, labor, and material resources, adding three additional dimensions to political economic modeling which can hold the diffuse and unseen manipulations of time and space under neoliberalism accountable and make them visible to the average citizen.
Further Reading:
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. MIT Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2015). Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan. South Pasadena: Semiotext (e).
Marx, K. (2004). Capital: volume I (Vol. 1). Penguin UK.
Social Science & Our Critical Times 