Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched – the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces, and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live.

To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised by elites in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple ‘state phobia’ and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went together with new forms of power imposed from above: a ‘strong state’ for a ‘free economy’ became the new magic formula.

Published in 2018, The Ungovernable Society, a genealogy of authoritarian liberalism tries to reconstitute the discussions, debates and tactics implemented by the time by the ruling class to counter this crisis of governability. By doing so, he exposes brilliantly the contradictions faced by capitalists and their reactions, and thus how ideological transformations always respond to material necessities. Because these mechanisms of control rule our lives, we think that writing about it can be interesting.

This text has two goals. First, it aims to give a review of the book, emphasizing on points that seem important to us. Then, we will draw a few lessons from the book, as well as political hypotheses that can help in our fight against capitalism. We tried to make it as simple as possible, which also means that this text will not be as argumentative and developed as we would like to do. Lastly, the idea is also to open a space for discussion and debate, aiming to strengthen the revolutionary camp.

I/ A New Paradigm of Governmentality

Social insecurity

"The generations born after 1973, those who grew up in the era of perpetual crisis, have internalized, one after another, the idea that each would live generally worse than the previous one. They have relearned to be afraid" (...) "A mass re-education to ’tolerance of frustration’."

The crisis of governability of the 60s had spread within the firm. Workers refuse to go to work, sabotage, go on strike, skip a day of work, let their hair grow and advocate for rights, democracy and increasing wages. The ruling class was fearing a catastrophe, looking for a solution. They were facing a contradiction: either they reinforce the disciplinary government within the firm to stop the movement, risking deepening the crisis, or they give more autonomy to the workers within the firm to pacify it, strengthening workers’ power and affecting the legitimacy of bosses, encouraging further struggles. To escape this contradiction, the bourgeoisie escapes the firm.

Indeed, the solution did not come from a change within the company but within society. It was about creating conditions of fear around downward mobility. Three barriers: Keynesian commitment to maintaining full employment, social welfare mechanisms, power of trade unions. The responses will be an increase in unemployment, an artificial crisis, precariousness, social insecurity, repression. This is the current situation we need to deal with.

Dialogue

"What causes the crisis of democratic government is nothing other than the intensity of democratic life." - Jacques Rancière

The traditional strategy of public relations was to manufacture consent by frontally responding to opposition (adds, attacks against critical persons and so on). However, people have become sceptical in the 60s, and these methods don’t work anymore. The new response is that of dialogue. Thus, attacks against the firm became critics, a way to embraces the movement, and by doing so a way to disarm it. The ruling class develop strategies to control opposition through dialogue.

Dialogue, as a power strategy, has six functions:

• Function of Intelligence: Understanding the objectives of the opposing group.
• Function of Containment: Limiting the opposition to the private sphere.
• Function of Co-optation: Incorporating the most "realistic" groups to align with the agenda.
• Function of Disqualification: Managing inclusion/exclusion processes to control who is part of the conversation
• Function of Legitimation: Shifting from mere dialogue to establishing a partnership, legitimizing the process as mutually beneficial.

The concept of dialogue is not simply a tool for communication, but a strategy for power, subtly shaping the dynamics of inclusion, control, and legitimacy within political and social interactions. It is a way of managing opposition and maintaining control while appearing to engage in open, inclusive conversations. These new tools to fight attacks on private firms comes along with a broad ideologic offensive within universities and media. Loyal to their idealist conception of the world, the ruling class considers leftist thinkers and elites as the crisis’s cause, with universities as GQ and media as a mean to spread their ideas. The 70s are thus a decade of massive investments in universities to shift studies in a liberal direction, and of increasing control on medias.

Creating categories

"The act of depoliticization is politically intense."

To respond to the crisis, corporate counter-activism highlights two types of antagonism: internal company conflict and market competition, with a third front in political conflict. It outlines a strategy mixing political party, market, and military tactics, with four key approaches to stop the anti-capitalist movement: cooperate with realists, convert idealists, isolate radicals, and absorb opportunists. This involves a three-way interaction between firms, activists, and the state, the aim being at the end to prioritize capitalist interests. Strategies include proactive neutralization and reshaping reality and ideas (the politics of truth), aiming to manage the social environment to make it receptive to corporate influence. This approach introduces paradoxical concepts, such as using depoliticized categories for politics and demilitarized categories for warfare.

Authoritarian liberalism

In the traditionally established concepts used to structure political debates and struggles, democracy is often opposed to dictatorship, with democracy being the ultimate political goal, but frequently remains an empty, undefined concept. Similarly, there is a tendency to oppose liberalism and authoritarianism. In his book, Chamayou, on the contrary, demonstrates that neoliberalism applies different logics and methods of action depending on the context and the sector involved. For instance, liberalism can be intertwined with totalitarian elements, as seen in Hayek’s influence in Chile, where the emphasis is placed on individual freedom but within a system that limits democratic processes.

When facing a crisis, it is completely thinkable for liberals to limit the scope of democratic processes while strengthening state actions in certain domains. It can be described as a "dictatorship of the market” with private property as its supreme value.

• Political decisions are thus made to force people accepting reductions in public spendings.

• Legal frameworks and constitutional tools are used to constrain state action, with a focus on balancing budgets, an economic chimera turned into a political technique to reduce state expenditures.

• The market becomes a political tool, not just an economic entity, controlling the flow of power and neutralizing political opposition.

• Privatization is considered not a deregulation but a reregulation, and economic rules shape individual behaviour, values, and decision-making processes.

• The central question becomes how to make people act against their own interests, which is achieved through division—dividing social classes and decision-making processes. Neoliberalism is not just an ideology but a political technology, radically altering how people think and act, shaping the environment in which they operate.

Authoritarian economic liberalism is a system emphasizing free-market principles while maintaining strict social control. In this context, the main enemy in the 60s was not the welfare state but self-management alternatives where communities govern themselves without relying on central authority. After all, the welfare state implemented in the 30s in the US was nothing more than another way for the ruling class to control the population and to develop the industry through mass consumption, a way to deal with an economic global crisis (fascism being another way to respond to it). The reaction against self-management was an attack of any form of collective autonomy that could undermine capitalist, state-controlled order. Thus, authoritarian economic liberalism positions itself as a response to the potential disruption of social and economic order by decentralized, self-managed alternatives.

II/ Lessons for the present time

Acting revolutionary today implies an understanding of the defeat of the historical left, and its critique. In this regard, one can be made from the book. Indeed, the demands and strategies of the traditional left (including European Communist parties) that call for more state intervention are a double mistake. First, because neoliberalism is not characterized by a phobia of the state, but rather by its use as an organ for strategic orientation. Second, because the welfare state corresponded to a very specific moment, that of the 1930s and Keynesianism, which was historically situated and a determined class compromise—one that was also possible because of colonization and the primary accumulation of the capital, as demonstrated by Rosa Luxemburg. After the neoliberal and neoconservative revolution, this demand is backward-looking, disconnected. We must accept that there will be no return of the welfare state in this form and criticize leftist parties not in the abstract but concretely. Even if it was possible, do we wish to have a state in charge of ruling our lives?

Tactically, we need to engage more with actions that don’t fall into a sort of democratic cultural battle but rather aim to create a Machtverhältnis with the ruling class. It also means articulating small direct victories with revolutionary goals, the firsts strengthening our capacity to act. If the movement of the 60s teaches us something, it is that we don’t need to wait for a hypothetical future movement to start the offensive in our everyday life! The power exercise itself concretely, it has physical places, people working for it, procedures. It must be attacked at this scale at first. This material way of action is also a way to build a working-class movement instead of a middle class, intellectual movement unable to engage with radical practices. To do so, we need to reflect on the abstract concepts we use routinely such as democracy, human right, claims, negotiation; concepts that have been historically built and use to pacify society. Looking for small victories does not mean leveling down our struggle and being reformist.

To conclude, this book shows in an accessible way how capitalism always responds to the crises it undergoes through strategic restructuring. As it is currently experiencing one, we must analyze it in depth how it operates if we want to intervene effectively. And the other hand, while capitalists often manage to overcome the contradictions of their economic system, these contradictions and restructurings always provoke resistances where we can act and slip through. To do so, we need to remove our militant veil and ideological dogma, to break with militant scene’s logics. It is about seeing the fight fronts of the ongoing war, even in its more mundane manifestations. It is only within this perspective that we will be able to build a truly revolutionary struggle!

Find the book online: https://z-lib.io/book/13796332 (EN)

https://www.pdfdrive.to/filedownload/die-unregierbare-gesellschaft-eine-genealogie-des-autoritaren-liberalismus (GE)