Adapted from Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).

Overview

We are living in a dangerous and uncertain time. A breakdown in multilateral cooperation in global politics, accompanying the revival of an overtly violent assertion of U.S. imperial power in the Middle East, puts the fate of millions in the hands of a few. At the same time, inequality among nations and within the United States continues to grow at a dizzying pace. And in response to the continuing economic downturn inaugurated when the dot-com bubble burst in the late 1990s, the executive branch of government in the United States advocates cuts in the budget for social services and public welfare, yet proposes more increases in military and security spending. The twenty-first century is off to a frightening start.

And yet, this dangerous and tragic start also presents opportunities for a renewed politics of equality and democracy within the United States and around the world. Neoliberal dominance, seemingly invincible from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 through the 1990s, is under attack as never before. Economic and financial crises - in Mexico in 1994, in Asia in 1997 - ignited long simmering conflicts between wealthy Western creditor nations and the debtor nations of the poorer, developing world. The staggering crash of technology/dot-com stocks listed on the U.S. NASDAQ index punctured the confidence of investors and gutted the bank accounts of a significant proportion of the American middle class. Resulting public fury helped propel the exposure of corrupt financial practices and widespread corporate greed. And the use of military force in the Middle East exposed the coercive underbelly of purportedly benign U.S. foreign relations and trade policies.

But such disillusionments and exposures will produce opportunities for progressive left politics only if we are prepared to seize them. This moment of violent rupture in the smooth operations of neoliberal policies might be repaired through the construction of a reformed neoliberal hegemony, rebuilt through brutality, and poised to extract yet more of the earth's surplus for the benefit of the wealthiest one percent of the world's population. Or opposition and resistance to violence and inequality around the world might coalesce into a new social movement strong enough to change our historical course.

Encouragement for the Hopeful

There is much encouragement for the hopeful. Highly visible demonstrations against neoliberal globalization beginning in the late 1990s, followed by the rapid assembly of a global peace movement in the early twenty-first century, show that visions of a more peaceful, equitable, and democratic world are widely shared. Even some neoliberal "insiders" have begun to see the danger that, to quote the New York Times, "capitalists could actually bring down capitalism." Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, recently excoriated the "Washington Consensus" for undemocratically and sometimes disastrously imposing "global governance without global government" during the 1980s and 1990s. Republican populist Kevin Phillips listed the costs of the neoliberal "reigning theology" of domestic and global markets über Alles to ordinary Americans: reduced income and stagnant wages, long work hours, diminished community and commonweal, fewer private and government services, poor physical and mental health care, competitive consumption, and the spread of money culture values.[1]

Neoliberal insiders wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, but their alarmist jeremiads provide ample reason for replacing rather than merely reforming the institutions and policies that have created the conditions they describe. And so the opportunities for proposing alternate visions, for organizing, and for building something different open up before the progressive left. But it will not be possible to seize these opportunities without a broad understanding of the neoliberal project - and this understanding will be blocked as long as leftists and campaigners for economic justice dismiss cultural and identity politics as marginal, trivial, or divisive. Neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics, and it cannot be undone by a movement without constituencies and analyses that respond directly to that fact. Nor will it be possible to build a new social movement that might be strong, creative, and diverse enough to engage the work of reinventing global politics for the new millennium as long as cultural and identity issues are separated, analytically and organizationally, from the political economy in which they are embedded.

Global feminism - a diverse, cantankerous movement composed of a motley assortment of organizations, issues, and constituencies - is poised to become a central site for the critique and dismantling of neoliberal dominance in the twenty-first century. Women's movements around the globe combine economic and cultural issues, organize both to reform and transcend the nation-state, and creatively reinvent the very definition of "politics" in ways that enable imaginative reinventions of organizational forms.

What progressive feminists must understand is this: Neoliberalism organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms. This abstract claim requires some explanation and illustration, and a historical detour.

Liberalism

Tracing their descent through capital-L Liberalism, as it has developed in Anglo-Europe since the seventeenth century, the architects of contemporary neoliberalism drew on classical liberalism's utopianism of benevolent "free" markets and minimal governments. These earlier ideas provided a set of rationales, moral justifications, and politically inflected descriptions of the institutions of developing capitalism. Such institutions and their associated economic practices and social relations changed over time and varied across space; capitalism has never been a single coherent "system." Liberalism has therefore morphed many times as well and has contained proliferating contradictions in indirect relationship to the historical contradictions of capitalism. In the United States during the twentieth century, the entire spectrum of mainstream electoral politics from "conservatism" to domestic "liberalism" has varied largely within the parameters of Liberalism. Only the far right and the left have provided illiberal or antiliberal alternatives to the overwhelming dominance of differing and conflicting forms of Liberalism in U.S. politics.[2]

From the 1930s to the 1960s, a very limited form of welfare-state liberalism, or social democracy, shaped the U.S. nation-state and the political culture supporting it. The New Deal coalition defeated or marginalized antistatist conservatives (who were also Liberals in the classical sense) and absorbed or marginalized socialists and other progressive left critics of its limited version of equality within capitalism. During the 1950s and 1960s, criticism of the U.S. welfare state from both the right and the left intensified. Conservative antistatist attacks on New Deal social-welfare programs mounted as the new social movements pressed from the left for more equitable distribution of many kinds of resources. Then, during the 1970s, the social movements encountered a new pro-business activism that ultimately seized the primary institutions of the state over the next two decades.

Neoliberalism

This pro-business activism, the foundation for late twentieth-century neoliberalism, was built out of earlier "conservative" activism. Neoliberalism developed over many decades as a mode of polemic aimed at dismantling the limited U.S. welfare state in order to enhance corporate profit rates. The elevation of profit rates required that money be diverted from other social uses with overall economic inequality increasing as a consequence. And such diversions required a supporting political culture, compliant constituencies, and amenable social relations. Thus, pro-business activism in the 1970s was built on and further developed a wide-ranging political and cultural project: the reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism in ways supportive of upward redistribution of a range of resources and tolerant of widening inequalities of many kinds.[3]

Neoliberalism developed primarily in the United States, and secondarily in Europe, in response to global changes that challenged the dominance of Western institutions. Within the United States specifically, one might divide the construction of neoliberal hegemony into five phases:

(1) attacks on the New Deal coalition, on progressive unionism, and on popular-front political culture and progressive redistributive internationalism during the 1950s and 1960s;

(2) attacks on downwardly redistributive social movements, especially the civil rights and black power movements, but including feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, and countercultural mobilizations during the 1960s and 1970s;

(3) pro-business activism during the 1970s, as U.S.-based corporations faced global competition and falling profit rates, previously conflicting big and small business interests increasingly converged, and business groups organized to redistribute resources upward;

(4) domestically focused "culture war" attacks on public institutions and spaces for democratic public life, in alliances with religious moralists and racial nationalists, during the 1980s and 1990s;

(5) emergent "multicultural," neoliberal "equality" politics - a stripped down nonredistributive form of "equality" designed for global consumption during the twenty-first century and compatible with continued upward redistribution of resources.

During every phase, the construction of neoliberal politics and policy in the United States has relied on identity and cultural politics. The politics of race, both overt and covert, have been particularly central to the entire project. But the politics of gender and sexuality have intersected with race and class politics at each stage as well.

Though built over several decades beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, neoliberalism per se is generally associated with the set of policy imperatives for international government and business operations called the "Washington Consensus" of the 1980s and 1990s. Generated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury and also implemented through the World Trade Organization, neoliberal policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, market liberalization, and governmental stabilization are pro-corporate capitalist guarantors of private property relations. They were designed to recreate the globe in the interests of the unimpeded operation of capitalist "free" markets and to cut back public, noncommercial powers and resources that might impede or drain potential profit making. Nominally pro-democratic, the neoliberal financial institutions have operated autocratically themselves, primarily through financial coercion. They have also consistently supported autocratic governments and plutocratic elites around the world to promote one kind of stability, a stability designed to facilitate business investment. The effects of neoliberal policy implementation have consistently included many kinds of instability, however, including unrest associated with dramatically increasing inequality, and political fragility resulting from reduced sovereignty for national governments.

The Washington Consensus was a kind of backroom deal among the financial, business, and political elites based in the United States and Europe. Its policies reinvented practices of economic, political, and cultural imperialism for a supposedly postimperial world. Neoliberalism's avatars have presented its doctrines as universally inevitable and its operations as ultimately beneficial in the long term - even for those who must suffer through poverty and chaos in the short term. In other words, neoliberalism is a kind of secular faith. Its priests were elected by no one and are accountable only to the global elites whose interests are promoted by its policies.

Neoliberal Dominance

But how did pro-business activists manage to deploy the levers of government at the seat of postimperial power, in Washington, DC? How have global politics proceeded, out of range of democratic accountability in the United States as well as in the rest of the world? This has occurred through

(A) the presentation of neoliberal policies as neutral, managerial precepts for good government and efficient business operations, with the underlying capitalist power politics and cultural values obscured;

(B) the opposition between U.S. domestic conservative versus liberal politics, or Republican versus Democratic policies, with the overarching salience of global neoliberalism across this entire spectrum effectively ignored;

(C) the shape-shifting array of alliances and issues through which a neoliberal policy agenda has been promoted in the United States and abroad.

(A) The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture and therefore not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare" while race, gender, or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upward redistribution goals of neoliberalism, its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as the result of performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.

But despite their overt rhetoric of separation between economic policy on the one hand and political and cultural life on the other, neoliberal politicians and policymakers have never actually separated these domains in practice. In the real world, class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, and religious and ethnic boundaries are the channels through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow. The economy cannot be transparently abstracted from the state or the family, from practices of racial apartheid, gender segmentation, or sexual regulation. The illusion that such categories of social life can be practically as well as analytically abstracted one from another descends from the conceptual universe of Anglo-European Liberalism, altered and adapted to the U.S. context during the early nineteenth century. While reasserting this ideology of discrete spheres of social life, in practice, contemporary neoliberal policies have been implemented in and through culture and politics, reinforcing or contesting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. The specific issues, alliances, and policies have shifted over time and across differing locales, but their overall impact has been the upward redistribution of resources and the reproduction of stark patterns of social inequality.

(B) In the United States, specifically, the neoliberal agenda of shrinking public institutions, expanding private profit-making prerogatives, and undercutting democratic practices and noncommercial cultures has changed hands from Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s to New Democrats in the 1990s and back to Compassionate Conservative Republicans in the new millennium. The domestic political language of two party electoral politics, a language that labels figures and initiatives as conservative, moderate, or liberal, has effectively obscured the stakes in policy disputes. If Ronald Reagan was a conservative president, with substantial support from the religious right, and Bill Clinton was a liberal president excoriated by conservatives and the right, then why do their policy initiatives look so much alike? It was Bill Clinton who pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through against organized labor's opposition and who presided over "the end of welfare as we know it." The continuities from Presidents Reagan to Bush I, Clinton to Bush II - the continuities of neoliberal policy promotion - are rendered relatively invisible by the dominant political system and language. Global neoliberalism, based in but not reducible to U.S. corporate dominance, embraces a broad spectrum of U.S. domestic politics. Conflicts between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats have been shaped largely within the terms of neoliberalism even as nonliberal and even antiliberal forces (from the protofascist nationalism of Pat Buchanan to the socialist radicalism of Cornel West) have been engaged or appropriated through alliance politics as well.

(C) If neoliberalism has been the continuing foundation for pro-business activism in the United States since the 1970s, that activism has also engaged a shifting array of political/cultural issues and constituencies in order to gain power and legitimacy. Because (as I have argued) the economy and the interests of business can be abstracted neither from race and gender relations nor from sexuality or other cleavages in the body politic, neoliberalism has assembled its projects and interests from the field of issues saturated with race, with gender, with sex, with religion, with ethnicity and nationality. The alliances and issues have changed over time and have differed from place to place both within the United States and abroad. In order to facilitate the flow of money up the economic hierarchy, neoliberal politicians have constructed complex and shifting alliances, issue by issue and location by location, always in contexts shaped by the meanings and effects of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of difference. These alliances are not simply opportunistic nor are the issues merely epiphenomenal or secondary to the underlying reality of the more solid and real economic goals. Rather, the economic goals have been (must be) formulated in terms of the range of political and cultural meanings that shape the social body in a particular time and place.

A Blindness Among the Left

The Achilles heel in progressive left politics, especially since the 1980s, has been both a general blindness to the connections and interrelations of the economic, the political, and the cultural and a failure to grasp the shifting dimensions of the alliance politics underlying neoliberal success. As neoliberals have formed and reformed their constituencies and produced issues and languages that connect their economic goals with politics and culture in politically effective ways, progressives and leftists have tended more and more to fall into opposing camps that caricature each other while failing to clearly perceive the chameleon that eludes them.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation and expansion of progressive left critiques and social movements constituted a fertile ground for connections as well as for conflict and confusion. Identifying the most significant sites of inequality and injustice and discovering the best means for attacking them was always a contentious project. But the range of social movements - antiracist and anti-imperialist, feminist, lesbian and gay, radical labor, and environmentalist - did not generally or easily fall into camps with economics emphasized on one side and culture on the other. Gay liberation newspapers included anti-imperialist manifestos and analyses of the racist legal and prison system. Black feminists set out to track the interrelations of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. There were bitter fights among contingents of activists who prioritized one or another "vector of oppression" and dismissed others. The economics/culture split, however, did not appear as a major and sustained divide in U.S. progressive left politics until the 1980s.

The progressive left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s might be conceptualized as overlapping, interrelated (if conflicted) cultures of downward redistribution. The differing sectors were joined by languages and concepts, by practices and policies, as well as by movement institutions that combined cultural and material resources. Such cultures were mixed, neither pure nor consistently critical of all forms of inequality and injustice or unfreedom. But in their hybrid, mongrel mixtures the overall emphasis that connected the progressive left social movements was the pressure to level hierarchies and redistribute down - redistribute money, political power, cultural capital, pleasure, and freedom. They were met, from the early 1970s forward, with a pro-business counter movement intent on building a culture of upward (re)distribution. Business and financial interests were no more unified or consistent than the social movements, but their activities forged languages and concepts, practices and policies, and founded new institutions to promote mechanisms that either shored up or established inequalities of power, rank, wealth, or cultural status.

During the 1980s, as standards of living dropped in the United States and global inequalities expanded, social movements responded to multiple constraints and pressures, in part by fragmenting and in part by accommodating the narrowing horizons of fundraising imperatives, legal constraints, and the vice grip of electoral politics. Identity politics, in the contemporary sense of the rights-claiming focus of balkanized groups organized to pressure the legal and electoral systems for inclusion and redress, appeared out of the field of disintegrating social movements.[4] Single-group or single-issue organizations dedicated to lobbying, litigation, legislation, or public and media education had existed earlier as only one part of larger, shaping social movements. As the practical wings of broad-based mobilizations, ranging from reformist to radical on a motley collection of connected issues, such organizations usually remained intimately connected to movement cultures. But during the 1980s, such organizations - known collectively as the "civil rights lobby" - began to appear as the parts that replaced the wholes. The reproductive freedom movement receded, but the National Abortion Rights Action League remained; the civil rights and black power movements disintegrated, but the NAACP persisted. Focused narrowly on U.S. domestic politics and even more narrowly on courtroom litigation, legislative battles, or electoral campaigns, large portions of the organized efforts of social movements succumbed to liberalism's paltry promise: engage the language and institutional games of established liberal contests and achieve equality.

Many if not most of those engaged in the civil rights lobbies or with the protest and pressure politics aimed at the media and marketplace understood the limits and false promises of the "equality" on offer through liberal reform: equality disarticulated from material life and class politics, to be won by definable "minority" groups, one at a time. They engaged a politics of the possible, often with the hope of using liberalism's own languages and rules to force change beyond the boundaries of liberal equality. Like the motley, radical union movements of earlier decades that collapsed largely into the co-opting embrace of New Deal corporatism in the post-World War II era, the social movements disintegrated, leaving their liberal reformist wings as their most visible traces. Meanwhile, the more radical and transformative segments of social movements nonetheless survived in a range of new as well as continuing organizations and campaigns and in a growing library of progressive left intellectual and scholarly projects and publications. Occasionally, it all came together as it had in earlier times: the movement born to fight AIDS and HIV infection linked identity and civil rights politics with an encompassing vision of material and cultural equality and drew on the resources of activists, theorists, artists, and scientists to construct an imaginative range of political interventions during the 1980s.[5] Overall, the remnants of the 1960s' and 1970s' social movements, together with the identity-based organizations and civil rights establishment of the 1980s, remained cultures of downward distribution - even if in a less generally radical sense during the 1980s.

But during the 1990s, something new happened. Neoliberals in the ranks of U.S. conservative party politics began slowly and unevenly to shed the "culture wars" alliances with religious moralists, white supremacists, ultranationalists, and other antiliberal forces that had helped guarantee their political successes during the 1980s (phase 4, above). Neoliberal New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, included civil rights/equality politics within a framework that minimized any downwardly redistributing impulses and effects (phase 5). And some organizations within the "civil rights lobby" narrowed their focus and moved dramatically to the right, accommodating rather than opposing the global inequalities generated by neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, activists and intellectuals on the progressive left, operating outside the terms of two-party neoliberalism, fell more deeply into unproductive battles over economic versus cultural politics, identity-based versus left universalist rhetoric, theoretical critiques versus practical organizing campaigns. Most recently, a newly insurgent antiglobalization movement, emerging into active visibility and effectiveness at the beginning of the twenty-first century, offers a space where such divisions might be remade into productive connections, though this remains a possibility and not an achievement.

In general, too few on the left have noticed that as neoliberal policies continued to shrink the spaces for public life, democratic debate, and cultural expression during the 1990s, they were doing this through their own versions of identity politics and cultural policies, inextricably connected to economic goals for upward redistribution of resources.

As long as the progressive left represents and reproduces itself as divided into economic versus cultural, universal versus identity-based, distribution versus recognition-oriented, local or national versus global branches, it will defeat itself. On one side, the identity politics camps are increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism. Some organizations and groups creep into the neoliberal fold, shedding downwardly redistributing goals for a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality. They thus sacrifice the broad goals that might connect a new social movement strong and ambitious enough to take on inequalities that single-issue politics only ever ameliorate, but never reverse. On the other side, critiques of global capitalism and neoliberalism, and left populist or universalist politics within the United States, attack and dismiss cultural and identity politics at their peril. Such attacks strip them of prime sources of political creativity and new analyses and leave them uncomprehending before the cultural and identity politics of the opposition. In addition, they drive constituencies seeking equality away, toward the false promises of superficial neoliberal "multiculturalism." In other words, they help to create what they fearfully or critically imagine.

Counter Visions

Global feminism is positioned to offer counter visions for progressives in general, by imagining solidarities across national borders; by organizing around issues that connect political, economic, and cultural issues; by refusing single-issue or narrow identity frames; and by inventing new organizational and activist forms. Transnational and postcolonial feminists in particular have been at the cutting edge of devising a politics innovative enough to grasp the force of neoliberalism, and unveil the vision of bloodless world domination as the brutal and violent politics of coercion and inequality.[6]

If the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling - if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall. Only an interconnected, analytically diverse, cross-fertilizing, and expansive left - a left centrally shaped by the projects of global feminism - can seize this moment to lead us elsewhere, to newly imagined possibilities for equality in the twenty-first century.

Endnotes

1. Kurt Eichenwald, "The Nation: Clay Feet; Could Capitalists Actually Bring Down Capitalism?" New York Times, June 30, 2002, late edition-final, sec. 4; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002); and Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). [Return to text]

2. My discussion of the history of Liberalism here is necessarily highly truncated. The literature on this topic is vast. For good introductions, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); and Wendy Brown, "Liberalism's Family Values" in her States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135-65. [Return to text]

3. For varying but nonetheless overlapping outlines of the features and agenda of neoliberalism, see Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., "Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism," special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); and David Boaz, ed., Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World (Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 2002). [Return to text]

4. Identity politics in the broadest sense arises from the exclusions of the U.S. nation-state beginning in the early nineteenth century. But identity politics in the narrowest sense defined here first appeared in the 1980s. [Return to text]

5. See any of a long list of publications by Cindy Patton, including Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990); Last Served? Gendering the HIV Pandemic (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1994); and Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). [Return to text]

6. See for example M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). [Return to text]