Neoliberal Desires: A response to Mark Fisher
I’m in a book club and we have been reading a book called Post-Capitalist Desire by the late Mark Fisher. It is a critique of capitalism and neoliberalism through a series of recorded and transcribed lectures.
In a recent episode of the Neoliberal Podcast, which was a mailbag episode, I submitted a question to the host to answer on air.
I’m publishing this blog in order to share the answer with my book club buddy. I was going to just send it as text or as a screenshot of text, but the answer is quite long and it was worthwhile to reformat it and make it more readable.
If there was a similar neoliberal desires, what would you do to our calculate the vision for a neoliberal future.
The host’s answer is transcribed below.
This is a really good question and I really like it. Thank you Nick.
What I would say is that neoliberalism is trying to maximize a few things in the world.
I think neoliberalism is trying to maximize the amount of political freedom that exists in the world to be a neoliberal. First and foremost is to be a liberal, a political and philosophical liberal. It means that you are rooted in liberal democracy. And so, the most important thing is that we’ve got to be promoting liberal democracy throughout the world, whether or not that means, like, we should be like aggressively doing that in like a neo-conservative way that’s up for debate.
Maybe not but certainly, it should be a goal that we want liberal democracy to flourish around the world and a vision of the future should include more and more liberal democracies that are healthier and stronger in their democratic principles over time.
So that’s the first thing. Is that a vision of the future would be populated by liberal democracies where everyone is able to have political rights. That’s not the case right now, there’s a lot of people who live in authoritarian countries and who’s political rights are very much not guaranteed and a neoliberal future would just have more of liberalism I guess.
I also think that neoliberalism is trying to max out as much as possible, things like freedom and prosperity. Now freedom can be tricky to define, right? I like the definition of freedom, where freedom is basically defined as the ability to lead the life you want to lead and where anything that stops you from leading, the life that you want to lead is kind of an affront to your freedom.
This means that governments can restrict freedom certainly by telling you, “Oh, you’re not allowed to live this way. You’re not allowed to be this religion, you’re not allowed to speak in a certain way. You’re not allowed to do what you want with your property.”
These are kind of very libertarian concepts where somebody is restricted, you’re freedom.
But in this definition, it also means that being materially poor and being in poverty is a real restriction on your freedom. Libertarians would not necessarily see it that way. Libertarians have a negative conception of freedom, where it is only something that can be taken away by a big government actor or something like that.
But I think that, you know, it is a real restriction on your life. If you are born into poverty, even if nobody in particular, even if no particular actor or government has restricted your freedom. If you are simply born into poverty in libertarian paradise but you are still in poverty.
That is a real restriction on your freedom in a practical sense. You are not free to do the things you want to do and to live the life, you want to live. And so I think a neoliberal society would have people who have political freedom in a politically liberal system and also have a very high standard of living who are flourishing and have a high material wealth and I think that really matters.
Now, how do we get there? How do we get to this land of? Everybody is materially wealthy. Everybody is free and live in a liberal and democratic society. A liberal vision of that future includes a world where people are free to immigrate where they want to immigrate. It includes a world where international trade is not restricted.
These are some of the biggest and best tools. We have to promote material wealth and material well-being. It also helps develop political liberalism, I believe, because what is better for voting against a political system that is unjust than being able to move out of it, vote with your feet, kind of a system?
Ultimately people will get the political system that they deserve, if they’re able to vote with their feet and move.
And, and certainly, that’s, that’s an oversimplification. But a world where people are able to move is going to be both a politically more free world, and a politically more wealthy world. And I think both of those things are good. I think the neoliberal vision of the world also simply includes a lot of technocratic policy making where in a neoliberal future.
You’re simply going to have to work very hard to get the messy details of policy correct. How do we get housing policy correct? Well, we’ve got to build more housing but that will mean a lot of messy technocratic details in terms of switching our zoning systems, switching parking requirements and floor area, ratios and planning commission meetings.
And you know, going through the public hearing process, all of that will need to be kind of fixed in a technocratic way… Environmental review laws... All of this stuff is not necessarily something you can just reason from first principles: what is the amount of environmental review that is required?
There is no principle of that. It’s just, what does the best job? What does the best job striking a balance between letting us build stuff and also making sure we don’t hurt the environment too much? You’ve got to figure that out as you go, and you’re going to need competent and talented technocrats and bureaucrats to help you figure that out.
So I think that’s part of the future as well: is that there’s a small army of dedicated bureaucrats who help us figure out how to implement the policies. We need the civil service. They’re really an important part of this. So I guess I’ll stop there because I don’t want to, you know, try to dictate every single thing that would be happening in a neoliberal future.
But I’ll say that political liberalism in terms of the basic, liberal freedoms and liberal democracy. Those are very important in a neoliberal future. Trade and immigration would be just cornerstones of that as part of kind of free markets and being able to move with your feet and a commitment to being able to get the technocratic details, right?
All of those things, I think would be crucial to a prosperous neoliberal future.
