LITMIR.BIZ

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signifies an economic order wherein markets are deregulated, trade is liberalized, industries and services are privatized, and market rationality is imposed upon all facets of social life. Whereas in classical liberalism the state is thought to confer legitimacy upon the market, in the neoliberal order this relationship is reversed: the market legitimates the state. And whereas in classical liberalism the social and the economic are imagined as separate spheres, each conforming to its own rationality, under neoliberal governance the distinction between the social and the economic, society and the market, is blurred or dissolved completely. American neoliberalism in particular, Foucault observed, “involves . . . the generalization of the economic form of the market . . . throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system.”¹²

      Friedrich Hayek, one of neoliberalism’s intellectual founders, argued—in Foucault’s paraphrasing—that “the general form taken by the institutional framework in a renewed capitalism should be a game of enterprises regulated internally by a juridical-institutional framework guaranteed by the state.”¹³ The mechanism of competition between individuals or between (personified) enterprises, which founds the state and is guaranteed by it, and which is “regulated internally” by the formal dictums of the rule of law, is the economic rationality formulated by the original neoliberals, and their argument for the possibility of capitalist renewal. The juridical foundation that allows for and secures free enterprise was affectionately described, by Hayek, as the “science of liberty.”¹⁴ This is not a condition of laissez-faire, but of a pure market space deliberately created through government intervention (though as Karl Polanyi noted, laissez-faire itself was planned). Free enterprise, in other words, is imagined in neoliberal thinking as the one true purpose of government. Any curtailment of the free exercise of market competition is a violation of the most essential and highest human liberty. The introduction of this fundamentalist ideology into the Cold War milieu, at a time of economic crisis—when the discovery of new sources of surplus value was an urgent imperative of both class and state—provided the intellectual impetus for new assertations of U.S. imperialist power. It also provided a policy prescription and structural framework for the re-catalyzing of capitalist accumulation. The forcing open of markets; the privatization of everything, including social services and public welfare programs; the deliberate devaluation of assets and labor (so as to enable their later seizure by currently idle, over-accumulated capital)—these latter-day methods of dispossession are sanctioned by the institutional mechanisms of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), and enforced by both national militaries and private security forces.¹⁵

      If starkly opposed in certain respects, New Deal liberalism and neoliberalism both belong to the modern security project. “Securitization,” as the term is used herein, signifies the transformation of an issue, concept, asset, or geography into a security concern. Though the New Deal names the largest expansion of public assistance programs in the nation’s history, one of its consequences was the securitization of the social, the implication of social welfare within the process and logic of capitalist accumulation. Paradoxically, then, the New Deal moment—the private insurance industries that emerged therein, and the appropriation by corporate entities of Social Security rhetoric—prefigured one defining aspect of neoliberal order: the subjection of the social sphere to market rationality, market calculation. In the late twentieth century, new mechanisms of securitization arose, most notably within private financial institutions in New York and London, and in the context of a dramatic increase in the importance of financial speculation to the engine of accumulation. In the latter instance, the now more explicit invocation of “securitization” refers to the amalgamation and packaging of financial assets, shares of which are then sold as securities. The avowed intention is to distribute risk amongst a wider pool of investors. In practice, though, the engineering and proliferation of ever more opaque securities—particularly those backed with sub-prime mortgages—contributed to the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

      But the larger point is this: “securitization” is a euphemism for the occupation—or fabrication, in the most recent case—of previously non-capitalized space. It is a euphemism, that is, for the continuance of primitive accumulation—the same processes of capital generation the modern security project was conceived to protect.

       Securitizing the Homeland

      In the nascent stages of the War on Terror, the Bush administration set out to accelerate the privatization of government. Beginning with the onset of neoliberal policy prescriptions in the 1970s and with increasing intensity in the decades since, governmental bodies in the United States—at the federal, state, and municipal levels—have sought to outsource many of their traditional responsibilities. The partial or complete privatization of prisons, airports, hospitals, waste removal, public utilities, war, etc., has proceeded apace under the guise of “public-private partnerships,” a term that names a new culture of governance wherein corporations exert an ever-greater influence over policy decisions. The Bush administration’s commitment to extending these transformations was symbolized most readily by the advent in 2002 of the Depart­ment of Homeland Security (DHS), a major reorganization of the federal government—one enabled most immediately by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the heightened culture of counterterrorism they provoked, but one that brought into relief already existing currents of public retrenchment.

      “Homeland security state,” Naomi Klein observes, quickly became synonymous with “homeland security industry”—today a booming $200 billion (per annum) global economic sector.¹⁶ Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has occasioned the expansion of government bureaucracy, the tax dollars allocated to DHS are just as likely to end up in the coffers of private entities. Between September 11, 2001, and 2006, Klein notes, DHS spent $130 billion on private contractors.¹⁷ The outsourcing of government operations has been undertaken with diligence abroad as well, as private companies have received untold billions in public money to construct, secure, and carry out the war apparatus in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ever-more privatized military, meanwhile, is fighting not merely for “democracy,” but for neoliberal revolution. Upon the U.S. takeover of Iraq in 2003, Klein details, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), L. Paul Bremer, declared the privatization of over 200 state-owned companies, fired over 500,000 state employees, and lowered the corporate tax rate from 40 to 15 percent.¹⁸

       Managing the Crisis?

      The “homeland security” moment is defined by myriad contradictions—between imperial expansion and imperial decline; between the willful performance of state failure (Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria) and spectacular performance of state power (the “shock and awe” conquest of Iraq); between the labor imperatives of business and anti-immigrant nativism; between the hyper-modern weapons of info-war and atavistic methods of (neo)colonial expropriation; between the universal aspirations of capital and territorial exigencies of the nation-state.¹⁹ Perhaps one contradiction connects all the others; property and the state, if always allied, have never been identical. Potentially, the privatization of public space and of government itself will have the effect of rendering the capitalist security project unstable, less able to withstand—or capitalize on—the crises that naturally befall it. Marx observed in the nineteenth century that capital, left to its own devices, is sometimes its own worst enemy, prone to destroy the very mechanisms that exist for its self-protection. The historical role of the state in the modern security project is not only to protect property from its outside and its other, but to protect property from itself.

      Following the economic crisis inaugurated by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008, the most powerful national and supranational entities within the advanced capitalist world—for example, the United States, Germany, the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF—demonstrated little sign that they were capable of 1) regulating financial capital in a way that would obviate future cataclysms and 2) buttressing public infrastructure in a way that would prevent or temper widespread and recurring social protest. At the highpoint of the postwar social-democratic moment, the capitalist state provided its citizens a measure of social and economic security in exchange for mass participation in processes of expanded reproduction (production and consumption). In the neoliberal moment, the state is ever less capable of upholding its side of the social contract,

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