is part of a larger process of systematic depoliticization, privatization, and militarization. Any semblance of political rights thus becomes suffocated by the weight of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism.”8
Citizens are now reduced to market and surveillance data, consumers, and commodities, and as such inhabit identities in which they increasingly “become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition.”9 Within this political assemblage, not only does ethical blindness and impunity prevail on the part of the financial elite, but the inner worlds of the oppressed are constantly being remade under the force of economic pressures and a culture of anxiety and precariousness. According to João Biehl, as the politics of disposability “comes into sharp visibility, tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes [that] thrive on the ‘energies of the dead,’ who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law.”10
Economists such as Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and Doug Henwood have argued that we are living in a new Gilded Age, one that mimics a time when robber barons and strike-breakers ruled, and the government and economy were controlled by a cabal that was rich, powerful, and ruthless.11 And, of course, communities of color, women, and the working class were told to mind their place in a society controlled by those already enriched. Often missing in these analyses is the fact that what is new in the second Gilded Age is not just the moral sanctioning of greed, the corruption of politics by corporatism, and the ruthlessness of a global capitalist class. What is also unique is the constant reconfiguration of the nation-state in the interests of a market that colonizes collective subjectivity with discourses of risk, insecurity, catastrophe, and inescapable endangerments. The second Gilded Age is then a boom time for elites, but for everyone else it’s what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a “death-saturated age” in which matters of violence, survival, and trauma now infuse everyday life.12
Discarded by the corporate state, dispossessed of social provisions, and deprived of the economic, political, and social conditions that enable viable and critical modes of agency, more and more sectors of civilian society find themselves inhabiting what Biehl calls “zones of total social exclusion” marked by deep inequalities in power, wealth, and income. Such zones are sites of rapid disinvestment, places marked by endless spectacles of violence that materialize the neoliberal logics of containment, commodification, surveillance, militarization, cruelty, criminalization, and punishment.13 These “zones of hardship” constitute a hallmark and intensification of the neoliberal politics of disposability, which is relentless in the material and symbolic violence it wages against society for the benefit of a financial minority.14 What has become clear is that capitalist expropriation, dispossession, and disinvestment have reached a point where life has become completely unbearable for many living in the most prosperous of nations.15 Areas of great affluence can often be found adjacent to, if not surrounded by, zones of great misery inhabited by impoverished immigrants, poor minorities, the homeless, young people living in debt, the long-term unemployed, workers, and the declining middle class, all of whom have been delivered by market forces into criminalized communities of violence, harassment, surveillance, and everyday humiliations and brutality.
Earlier promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom, and political affirmation have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential, and subordinated to a predatory market and a hyper-privatized society. Dispossession and disinvestment have invalidated social enrichment and have turned “progress” into a curse for the marginalized and a blessing for the privileged who constitute the smallest financial minority—the wealthy few. Modernity has thus reneged on its undertaking to fulfill the social contract, however disingenuous or limited, especially with regard to young people. Measuring everything through the metrics of private profit, the ideological and affective spaces of neoliberalism work hard to substitute individual gain for any concern for the public good. The savagery of neoliberalism is also on display in its attempts to fiscally snuff out institutions meant to help families find pathways out of the miseries of impoverishment, undernourishment, underemployment, criminalization, and lack of adequate housing. The social contract and the relations it once embodied are now replaced with unchecked power relations. Long-term social, educational, and ecological planning and the institutional structures that support it are now weakened, if not eliminated, by the urgencies of privatization, deregulation, and the extraction of short-term profits. Social bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and are further subverted by the neoliberal insistence that there are only “individual solutions to socially produced problems.”16 One consequence is that neoliberalism has launched what Robert O. Self calls an assault on “the basic architecture of our collective responsibility to ensure that [we all] share in a decent life.”17 It is also an aggressive counter-force constantly antagonizing the formative cultures and modes of individual and collective agency that engender a connection between the democratic polis and the sustenance of economic, social, and political community.18
Neoliberalism’s industries of disposability relentlessly enforce unchecked notions of the private that both dissolve social bonds and deter conditions of agency from the civilian landscape of responsibility and ethical considerations. Absorbed into privatized orbits of consumption, commodification, and display, inhabitants of neoliberal societies are entertained by the toxic pleasures of spectacles of violence which cannot be divorced from the parasitic presence of the corporate state, the concentration of power and money in the upper 1 percent of the population, the ongoing militarization of all aspects of society, and the relentless, aggressive depoliticization of the citizenry. In its current historical conjuncture, the nation-state is a nodal point of intersection—something that appears akin to a green zoning of the world, protecting and servicing a handful of billionaires.
The Silent Order of Battle
Governments have often openly extended the narrative of war both to provide a sense of urgency and to appeal to a sense of moral certainty when dealing with political problems.19 The very act of securitization itself begins as an imperative to act toward the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. While we have become all too familiar with the age-old discourses of war as applied to a range of issues including drugs, poverty, crime, and terror—the former two in particular being integral to the broadening and deepening of the security agenda in “human” terms—in practice, the focus on unnecessary suffering has all too easily shifted the blame onto the shoulders of the global poor. Indeed, while the expanded and seemingly ubiquitous language of warfare has created conditions that have long since dispensed with familiar orthodox demarcations such as friend and enemy, inside and outside, civilian space and battle space, along with times of peace and times of war, the discourse has become beholden to existing power relationships instead of eliciting critical engagement with complex social issues. The language of warfare as such, when internalized, turns emancipation into colonization, as it remains at the service of those who seek to condemn political differences, instead of those in whose name it is marshalled. What therefore appear to be benevolent wars on behalf of the disadvantaged all too easily turn into wars against the disadvantaged, as power inverts its own systemic failures and invests in carceral industries that profit from policing and criminalizing those it abandons. The United States, in particular, has not only made war one of society’s highest ideals, but has reconstituted almost all public spheres as private zones that legitimate violence and militarization as the ultimate arbiter of social relations and problems. Education in disposable communities now often involves as many police as teachers, for schools that once served as pathways to a better life now act as pipelines to prison. In communities of color such as Ferguson, Missouri, the landscape of everyday life is criminalized as local police forces are deployed to civilian protests with military-grade weapons used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. More and more, everyday behaviors are targeted and criminalized, some as trivial as violating a dress code or panhandling in the streets.20
Neoliberal governance has been transformed into an instrument of social war and internal colonization.
