”Prioritizing the marketplace over democracy is a recurring pattern in neoliberal ideology and practice.”

 

おもしろいね。

I proceed from a pragmatic definition. I understand neoliberalism as the ideological product of processes in which self-identified liberals, from the interwar period onwards, have attempted to renew liberalism as an ideology that claims to promote societal orders based on free markets and individual freedom. In other words, neoliberalism refers to efforts to construct new liberalisms.

The positive notion of the state — and other political institutions — as the guarantor of a competitive order is crucial to the way in which these neoliberals sought to distinguish their project from the political economy of so-called classical liberalism.

Finally, its proponents referred to the figure of the sovereign consumer as a tool to salvage and renew liberal ideology. Let me stress that I do not understand the sovereign consumer as a real individual or as a fixed concept but as an analytical umbrella term for a range of ideas asserting that free consumer choice is the defining feature of the market economy. 

自由市場と個人の自由によって社会を形成 するというのがネオリベの主張で、競争を保証するというのが、国家の役割と考えていると。

In this process, neoliberals have obviously contested (and some have outright rejected) traditional meanings of democracy that emphasize public deliberation and majority voting as the primary sources of legitimacy in political decision-making.

ネオリベにとって、熟議というのが民主主義の本質ではないんだ、と。

ーーーこの記事には書いてないけど、民主主義を自由市場に例えることがある。国民は消費者、候補者は売り手で、政党や候補者は政策パッケージを売り、国民が投票することによって自分の選好にあった政策を買う、というわけだ。

I do think the idea that people have to learn to be a market liberal is widely shared among neoliberal ideologists. Of course, nobody has described this idea better than Michel Foucault. To create a market society, you need to construct, first, a market order, and, second, to teach (or force) people to behave according to the desired principles of this order. Foucault’s cases were German ordoliberalism and Chicago neoliberalism.

ライシュなんかも言ってたが、フーコーの論点でもあるのかーーー市場社会というのは、市場的秩序を構築し、この秩序に望ましいい原理に従って行動するように人々に教え込まなくてはいけない、と。

The rhetoric of choice is often deceptive in neoliberal discourse. While it is virtually impossible to be against the idea of free choice for everyone, in reality most people have very little money to spend and few goods to choose between in an economy dominated by widespread inequality and monopolistic big business. And once we buy into this rhetoric, it erodes our ability to make collective demands for social rights.

「自由に消費者が選択できる」 というのがネオリベのセールスポイントなんだけど、ネオリベ社会では格差が拡大して国民の大半が経済的に疲弊して国民の選択肢がどんどんなくなっていくーーー非正規なんか、ライフスタイルを選べるとかいうの売り言葉だったが、非正規労働者は金がないから、ライフスタイルもへったくれも、食料品もなにも、選択肢はどんどん狭まっていったわけですね。

There is no doubt that the neoliberal sovereign consumer was invented as an attack on socialist thought, and that an attempt to answer the socialist notion of economic democracy was crucial in this endeavor.

ネオリベってのはそもそも、社会主義を叩くためにも構築された思想なわけですね・・・いまでも相性が悪い。本記事が引用している他の記事には

Neoliberalism Is a Political Project

AN INTERVIEW WITH

DAVID HARVEY

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

ネオリベってのは共産主義革命とか、労働組合の隆盛に危機感を感じた企業資本家階級によって構築されんだ、と。 それはともかく、もとにもどると、

They began to argue that the individual’s capacity to shape her or his own life and contemporary society was much better fulfilled by market forces than by protections offered by state institutions.

 国家の保護のもとにあるよりも、開かれた市場のほうが自分のライフスタイルは選べる、というのネオリベの魅力の一つだったんですね。ーーソ連とかより、アメリカのほうが選択肢多そうにみえたでしょうしねええ。

One striking example here is consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who was famous for his work in favor of increased regulation of the market. However, in the 1970s, he arrived at a position that was close to that of Milton Friedman. He began to argue that it was necessary to scale back inefficient and self-interested federal agencies and to restore economic efficiency by deregulating the market and liberating the individual as consumer.

　もとも市場規制に肯定的だった ラルフ・ネーダーが、非能率的、利己的な官庁によりも規制緩和して経済能率をあげたほうが消費者のためになるみたいな具合にして、左派もネオリベに取り込まれていったのだ、と。

ーーーーただ、やっぱ、官僚というか官庁が、傲慢、利己的、無責任、非能率的な側面があるのも事実だし、特定の分野では競争があったほうが能率的で生産的、創造的にもなるというのも事実じゃなかろうかね？

ここらへんのバランスは大事だね。

因みに、

Your account gives us a fascinating understanding of why so many neoliberal economists, like Mises or Milton Friedman, supported at different moments in their career authoritarian or even fascist regimes. Preserving the marketplace was more important than preserving democracy, right?

Yes

Generally, I think it’s fair to say that prioritizing the marketplace over democracy is a recurring pattern in neoliberal ideology and practice.

ネオリベにとって 市場が至高の価値であって、民主主義は二の次。ミーゼスやフリードマンも、市場実現のために独裁者やファシストまで支持したわけだね。