Neoliberalism in Action Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution ...

Lazzarato – Neoliberalism in Action 125
entrepreneurs’ and ‘riskophobes’ (those dependent on the welfare state) and
in terms of division between lifestyles. The individualization of social insurance
is one of the means for reinstating the power of ‘private property’ over
‘social property’ and thus redistributes power and incomes in favour of the
former. As evidence of this shift one can refer to the income differential in
the USA where in 2005 the relative distribution had returned to the levels
of 1928.
One final element of the great transformations introduced by contemporary
capitalism that Foucault failed to mention in his analysis of liberalism
is the monetarization of state administration as part of the
financialization of the economy. This financialization is integral to the apparatuses
of the government of conduct because it produced a new ‘alliance’
or ‘integration’ between capital and labour founded not on employment,
redistribution and social protection, but on shareholding and savings. The
birth of neoliberalism sees the monetarist turn in the American administration
and the Federal Reserve that, by multiplying the mechanisms for
harvesting savings, has directed the latter to the financing of enterprise via
the stock market. The ‘silent revolution’ affecting wage-earners’ pension
funds is the essence of the monetarist turn. This mobilization for stock
market investment has one precise goal: that of eliminating the separation
between labour and capital implicit in Fordism, by binding workers’ savings
with capitalist restructuration. The American ‘new alliance’ between fractions
of capital and components of employees’ income is no longer based
on the Fordist sharing of productivity gains or on employment security;
instead it operates through sharing the profit generated by the stock market.
What is interesting in this neoliberal shift is that the ‘revolution’ of
pension funds began with the ‘fiscal crisis’ of the state of New York in
1974–5, that is, a crisis of the social and not simply industrial regulation
of capitalism. The pension funds of public employees were used to finance
the deficit of the state’s welfare apparatus, which means that workers and
trade unions indirectly replaced the traditional investors in public
spending. This made the ‘crisis’ a primarily social one, whilst this investment
of public employees’ savings to offset the deficit of the welfare system
in New York achieved two goals: implicate employees in the regulation of
social expenditures and prevent a possible alliance between those on
benefits and employees of social services. It can be seen therefore that the
deproletarianization that the German ordoliberals hoped for (establishment
of small-scale units of production, help with the ownership of one’s home,
‘working class’ shareownership, etc.) is here realized through a new
management of contract workers’ savings. The aim of neoliberalism
remains the same as that of the ordoliberals who claimed that ‘a wageearner
who is also a capitalist is no longer proletarian’ (Bilger, 1964, cited
in Foucault, 2004a: 267). Such a politics has a powerful effect on the
conduct of earners since it splits each person internally into a ‘schizophrenic’
double, torn by the different, possibly opposite, rationalities
motivating the earner and the saver.
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