51 conglomerates are producing a new world culture that is in fact a rather shallow
reflection of the American Way of Life”. How contemporary UK and US young people engage with, reject, or are
influenced by this neoliberal consumer media-culture at the micro subjective and socio-cognitive level will be theorized, explored, and discussed in the subsequent
chapters of this thesis. For now, it is sufficient to argue that at the macro-level, neoliberalism, in addition to the economic, welfare, and education institutions,
urban landscapes, and civil society institutions thus far discussed, has also, and to a significant extent, inflected the major cultural institutions and cultural and
political-philosophical discourses which they disseminate, and which UK and US young people are largely surrounded by.
1.7 Summary
In sum, I have briefly reviewed some of the intellectual history of neoliberalism, and described how neoliberal theories and ideology have inflected
some of the major societal structures, institutions, and discourses of the UK and the US, creating a plethora of hegemonic constellations that converge to a
significant extent to legitimate and promote neoliberal discourses and practices. The contemporary world that UK and US young people inhabit is underpinned by
a rather disconcerting and astonishingly pervasive political-economic and socio- cultural structure that values unrestrained capital accumulation and self-interest
above all else, and which jealously pushes away alternative modes of thinking Patel, 2010. Hence, despite the current global crisis in neoliberal capitalism, the
reports of the demise of neoliberalism have been greatly exaggerated Braedley Luxton, 2010. Neoliberal intellectuals, international business leaders, and the
other components of the hegemonic constellations described, have, at least for now, won the wars of position and movement Hall, 2011. However, it is not my
intention to argue that the disparate institutions that I have discussed, and the people that manage or work for them, or even the everyday people that they
subject, have completely and without contestation adopted neoliberal ideology. As Gramsci 1971 argues, society is marked by a constant dynamism of competing
forces. Indeed, many factions and individuals operating within the political, economic, education, and media-cultural spheres, disagree with the neoliberal
paradigm, and actively work against it. Examples of this can include: nationalist
52 elites who push forward protectionist economic policies that fly in the face of the
free-market globalization paradigm, conservative educationalists who believe education should emphasize the classic humanities instead of a narrow
economistic pedagogy, and left-leaning artists who navigate through the corporate controlled culture-industries to spread counter-hegemonic messages.
However, while neoliberal hegemony is being constantly contested by both internal and external social forces, it is still the dominant paradigm of
contemporary UK and US society, which is puzzling given that the benefits of neoliberal policies have gone mostly to the wealthy sectors. To be certain, the last
thirty years of neoliberal policies are strongly correlated to increasing levels of global and domestic social inequality where the highest UK and US earners
continue to make record incomes, while those on low incomes continue to see their wages fall and their benefits cut. For instance, in the UK, Elliot and Curtis
2009, p. 1 report that: Overall, the poorest 20 saw real income fall by 2.6 in the three
years to 2007-08, while those in the top fifth of the income distribution enjoyed a rise of 3.3. As a result, income inequality at the end of
Labours 11th year in power was higher than at any time during Margaret Thatchers premiership.
And in the US, a study by economist Emanuel Saez 2009, p. 2 reports that, “the
top decile share in 2007 is equal to 49.7 percent, a level higher than any other year since 1917, and even surpasses 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the
‘roaring’ 1920s”. Congruently, union membership in both the UK and US continues to dramatically decline Blanchflower Bryson, 2008; Greenhouse,
2011, and unions have lost much of their historic bargaining power and hard won benefits as the majority of industrial jobs continue to be outsourced to developing
countries. In the US for example, a study by Bronfenbrenner 2009 reports that US employers have been emboldened by the current economic recession to take
more aggressive and punitive actions against workers attempting to organize.
23
23
According to Bronfenbrenner 2009, more than 70 of employers hold one-on-one closed-door meetings with employees during a unionization drive. 54 of employers threaten workers in such
meetings, while 57 threaten to close the worksite. Moreover, 34 of employers fire workers
53 Incidentally, both the UK and the US currently rank amongst the lowest in
measures for socio-economic mobility in the developed world, where young people in particular are finding it difficult to climb the social ladder as compared
to populations from other developed countries that have implemented less extreme neoliberal reforms Elliott, 2010; Harvey, 2005.
Thus, as mentioned in the preface to this thesis, this begs the question, why is it that the majority of the UK and US population have not mobilized to seriously
challenge the neoliberal order, even though significantly high proportions of those populations continue to be disadvantaged by neoliberal policies and practices? In
the following chapter, I outline a series of theories that can be used to explain how neoliberalism came to be supported, or at least not significantly contested, by a
majority population, and lay out a theoretical framework that is designed to comprehensively investigate the reproduction of neoliberal discourses and
practices.
during a union campaign, 47 of employers threaten to cut wages and benefits, and 75 of employers bring in outside anti-union consultants.
54
Chapter Two Towards A Theory of
Neoliberal Social Reproduction
“
Our task, surely, is to examine how consciousness, sentiment, and attachment are constituted under prevailing conditions; why class has become a less plausible
basis for self-recognition and action when growing disparities of wealth and power would point to the inverse
”. Comaroff Comaroff, 2000, p. 300 “
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it
”. -George Eliot, Middlemarch In the previous chapter, I briefly described some of the broad and converging
dimensions of neoliberalism that help to explain its hegemony at the macro- structural and institutional levels. However, this provides an account of only one
side of the hegemonic coin. To understand how hegemonic political-economic forms endure and reproduce themselves, it is important to understand how it is that
everyday people, particularly those of non-elite backgrounds and those who are not situated within the upper-income brackets of society, consciously and
unconsciously recreate social discourses and practices that maintain, support, and ultimately reproduce specific forms of political-economic organization. In other
words, we need a theory of social reproduction that can help to describe and explain how the current neoliberal conjuncture has been accepted, or at least not
significantly contested at the micro-subjective level, by the majority of the UK and US population.
To this end, this chapter will chronologically review, critique, and assess some of the key arguments from some of the more prominent theoretical
frameworks of the last seventy years of Western social theory. These can be used to describe, explain, and research the phenomenon o
f capitalist ‘social reproduction’, where social reproduction is defined as, “all the mechanisms,
processes, and practices by which multiple social hierarchies, divisions and relations of wealth, power, and influence are sustained and re-
created over time” Gewirtz Cribb, 2009, p. 86. The theoretical frameworks under review in this
chapter can be loosely categorized as following three broad approaches. First, the political-economy approach, represented here by the classic Frankfurt School, is
concerned to explore the dynamics between the state, the economy, and dominant cultural institutions and their socializing effects on individual subjects. Second,
55 the culturalist approach, represented here by the classic Birmingham School of
Cultural Studies, is concerned with a micro analysis of how individuals produce, decode, use, and interpret media culture. The third, is what Kenway Bullen
2000, p. 28, refer to as a, “bothand approach, which is sensitive to the vertical dimensions of power and ideology and to the horizontal dimensions of contexts
and everyday life”, represented here by Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu. These three overarching approaches can be used to explain and describe different
aspects of how the current neoliberal conjuncture came to be supported and reproduced by majority populations, and can be used to investigate the micro level
effects of neoliberalism on contemporary UK and US young people. By drawing on all three approaches, this chapter will propose a reformulated ‘bothand’
approach that utilizes and synthesizes lessons, arguments, and theoretical concepts from each approach, and couples them with specific socio-cognitive and political
philosophical insights and concepts that are often overlooked, yet I would suggest crucial to a more comprehensive understanding of neoliberal social reproduction.
This reformulated approach will serve as the theoretical guide for the rest of this thesis, and will inform the research methodologies and data analysis discussed in
Chapter 4.
2.1 False Consciousness and the Frankfurt School: The Relevance of Dead Germans
