The Neoliberal Conspiracy

In his touchstone Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey offers a succinct, but detailed, account of how neoliberal ideas about markets and governance came to be hegemonic in much of the world. With some verve, he describes neoliberal policies as an exended effort to regain class power on the part of the top 10% of wealth-holders, a group that had lost some ground under the progressive taxation and union-corporate cooperation of the period Harvey reterms as "embedded liberalism." (I say "reterms" because he seems to be describing the same historical period that he earlier called "Fordism," for reasons that he doesn't really spell out, except that presumably "Fordism" has too narrow a focus.) During the time period 1973-2004 (Harvey's book is published in 2005), elite interests began to act as a class to dismantle much of the gains made by working-class organizations, municipal governments, and other institutions resistant to the relentless accumulation of wealth under late capitalism. Not much there that doesn't appear in the NY Times regularly: privatization, urban renewal, the Right's focus on markets, and the new gilded age have all received much press in recent years. Nevertheless, the will Harvey attributes to moneyed interests--the deliberate power-grab at work in, for example, Citibank's chair's forced restructuring of NYC debt in the seventies in order to cripple municipal unions and disable social programs--is shocking, and leaves one rushing to check the publication press to make sure Harvey hasn't lost it (it's Oxford, and hell no, he hasn't). Harvey asserts that the high rate of returns historically enjoyed by such elites weren't enough, and that the restructuring of the tax code, deregulation of financial markets, and defeat of unions all form part of a class war in which elites work to grab more money (and man, has it worked, with the share accorded the top 1% growing with no apparent end in sight). All of this means, really, that some amount of conspiracy theory is exactly right, at least if one trusts Harvey and his sources: there are moneyed interests working to manipulate the public to further their narrow ends. And yet while I see many strands of Left thought participating in conspiracy theory, I'm unwilling to brand Harvey as such, because his evidence is too compelling. The concentration of power and capital at the top during the past forty years--the time period of my study--means that conspiracy theorists, even those as wacky as Glenn Beck, are on to something when they figure themselves as little pawns among great chess masters. But just because they're right in some ways doesn't mean they're not paranoid, I suppose.

In scrutinizing conspiracy theories, I seek new models for the articulation of gender identities under neoliberal governance, or, at least, a way to examine how nostalgic versions of the relation masculinity/state are deployed in the context of destabilized flows of labor and capital. If neoliberalism presents a social landscape in which the "stabilities" of state/workplace/father" have been shakily disrupted, some conspiracy theories offer a way to restore, in the space of the imagination, such gender stability. Jameson and others have described conspiracy theory as a means for the subject to grapple with the vastness of global networks; I'd add that the central tropes of conspiracy theory, while they emerge out of a Cold War context of relative state stability, are refigured as a consolidating movement around gender in the post-Cold War moment.