Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class 9781474281430, 9781474281478, 9781474281461

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Political Economy and Sociolinguistics

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Also available from Bloomsbury Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap Language as Commodity, edited by Rani Rubdy and Peter Tan Right Wing Populism in Europe, edited by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral Second Language Identities, David Block The Precariat, Guy Standing

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Political Economy and Sociolinguistics Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class

David Block

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK  USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © David Block, 2018 David Block has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4742-​8143-​0 PB: 978-​1-​4742-​8144-​7 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​8146-​1 ePub: 978-​1-​4742-​8145-​4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Olivia D’Cruz Cover images: Man looking up © Shutterstock/Persalius, Business Man © Shutterstock/Adam Hicks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Preface  vi

1 A short history of political economy in sociolinguistics  1 2 Political economy: Background and approach  31 3 Neoliberalism: Historical and conceptual considerations  49 4 Stratification, inequality and social class  75 5 The neoliberal citizen: Conceptualizations and contexts  103 6 Inequality, class and class warfare: Discourse, ideology

and ‘truth’  137 Epilogue  169 Appendix: Transcription conventions  177 Notes  179 References  193 Index  217

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Preface Barcelona is one of the most attractive cities in Europe to create start-​ ups:  there is a large community of entrepreneurs, there is great deal of vitality, [and] even if you are ambitious you don’t get stressed out. Even if you have passion for your work, you devote time to other things, you enjoy life. I organize my own time and work where I like, between 20 and 40 hours a week. I have enough free time to play the violin, go to the gym, hang out with friends . . . Now I’m going to start Spanish classes.1 (Bosch, 2015: 2)

[In  1998] Banco Santander granted her a loan of 6,850,000 pesetas (40,000 euros). Until 2005, she paid about 400 euros per month. Then she remortgaged her flat because she needed money and her monthly payments went up to one thousand euros. She managed to pay until three years ago, when she could no longer do so. The bar business was not going well then, and then after they closed the bridge to do work on a bypass, it is even worse. The fact is that, although it may seem hard to believe, she has ended up paying almost 120,000 euros (three times the initial value of her loan) in installments to the bank and she still owes an additional 100,000 euros. Banco Santander has offered her no options and will repossess her flat.2 (Garcia, 2013: npn)

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hese two quotes have in common that they both come from Spanish newspaper articles. The first quote is taken from a piece about ‘digital nomads’ published in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia in December 2015. It is a description of Barcelona provided by Danielle Karlsson, a young Swedish woman who came to visit the city for a month and then decided to stay for a longer period of time. The second quote is taken from an article published in September 2013 in the Diario de Lanzarote. It describes the events leading up to the home eviction of Cati Villalgonga, a bar owner in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The two individuals at the centre of the two quotes could not be more different and they represent very different figures living in very different locations in twenty-​first-​century Spain. More specifically they represent two very different existential outcomes of the 2007–​2008 economic crisis, which arose on the back of the casino capitalism that so marked Spain from the 1990s onwards.

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In the midst of the crisis and high unemployment, Danielle is a winner, a cosmopolitan northern European who has choices in life. The author of the La Vanguardia article, Rosa M. Bosch, describes her as a member of a group –​ ‘digital nomads’, whose ‘priority . . . is to travel the world, spending a few weeks or longer periods in a destination’, adding that ‘their computer is their primary tool and they connect in coworking centres, in cafes or on picturesque beaches’3 (Bosch, 2015: 1). In the quote above, Danielle’s words are saturated with the kind of optimism that only the winners in neoliberal times, people on the ‘right’ side of history as it were, can both feel and express. She lives in a world of start-​ups and entrepreneurialism at a time when those in power promote both. And her success, and Barcelona (so it seems), have allowed her to create the perfect work/​play balance: she can be ambitious without stress. Interestingly, her mention of work in combination with her leisure activities –​ playing the violin, going to the gym, hanging out with friends and attending Spanish classes –​is reminiscent of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s idealized communist society in which it is possible ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’ (Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998: 53). But these are not communist times in Spain (or just about anywhere else in the world), as Cati’s circumstances so vividly remind us. One might argue that her mortgage was a choice, and a bad one in retrospect, but like so many other people at the turn of the last century, she was seduced by banks eager to lend money to just about anyone during the boom years that ended so abruptly at the end of the noughties. However, as we see in the quote above, events caught up with her: a bridge closing had a negative impact on her bar business, leading to her inability to make her mortgage payments. The subsequent home eviction left her with feelings of extreme frustration, despair and anguish, as she herself explained to Saúl Garcia, the author of the newspaper article chronicling her experience: My future is so uncertain since I don’t have a future. Where am I going to go? Someone either offers me a room or I’ll have to sleep in the street. I  feel against this system, the judges, the politicians and the bank. They don’t have to treat me like rubbish.4 (García, 2013: npn) The events affecting Cati’s life so profoundly took place in the Canary Islands, a long way from where I live, in Barcelona. But such events were occurring all too frequently in Barcelona in 2013 and continue to occur several years later:  indeed, at the time of writing, Catalonia has the dubious honour of having the highest proportion of home evictions in Spain. However, home evictions and other negative effects of the current economic crisis are not confined to Barcelona, or Catalonia, or the Canary Islands, or Spain, or even

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southern Europe, the part of Europe that has been hardest hit by the crisis. Worldwide, hardship is on the rise as a result of the economic policies and practices of the past four decades, call them ‘late capitalism’, ‘the new economy’ or the most common term used by those who are critical of the state of the world political economy, ‘neoliberalism’. And despite much talk of an economic turnaround and recovery, one need only follow the news on a day-​ to-​day basis to wonder if we are not living in an upside-​down world. On the one hand, ongoing technological advances continue to move us towards the possibility of ever-​more comfortable lives, and Danielle exemplifies what such a life might be like. On the other hand, Engels’s haunting depiction of the life conditions of mid-​nineteenth-​century England seems as relevant today as it was then: Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric hangs together. (Engels, [1845] 2009: 69) Ultimately, the two cases depicted above are about inequality, on the rise globally as neoliberal economic policies and practices continue to have their effects. They are also about class differences related to economic wealth, salary, possessions, education, type of occupation, social networks, prestige in society and many other dimensions of existence that index one’s class position in society (see Block, 2014), including, of course, living conditions. With reference to such dimensions, Danielle would tend to score on the high end of the scale, while Cati, currently on a downward trajectory, would score much lower.5 I have written this book as someone immersed in a world of contradiction and complexity, a small glimpse of which I have provided above. It is perhaps the latter characteristic  –​complexity  –​that has led me in recent years to a keen interest in what is going on in sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, politics and, most importantly, political economy. Regarding political economy, I  have been particularly interested in scholars from across the social sciences and humanities who have weighed in, critiquing the current state of the world from a Marxist or quasi-​Marxist perspective (e.g. geographers such as David Harvey and Jamie Peck, sociologists such as Michael Burawoy and Bob Jessop, social theorists such as Wendy Brown and Jodie Dean, and communication theorists such as Christian Fuchs). I have also found of interest the work of economists who

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have been critical of the field of economics (e.g. Philip Mirowski, Thomas Piketty and Gerard Duménil). And this body of scholarship, ever expanding, has made me want to go back in time, to the classic political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, and to the critical political economy of Marx and all who have followed in his wake. I have found inspiration in the work of all the authors I have read and this has affected how I go about my daily business of trying to understand events going on around me. My job title says that I am a sociolinguist, although I have always felt as though I was sociolinguist who is not too strong when it comes to the ‘linguistic’ and more a work-​in-​progress with regard to the ‘socio’. To some extent, my attempts to make up for the latter gap in my knowledge has led me over the years to the afore-​mentioned reading, and, eventually, the writing of this book. And in this book, I incorporate a lot of what may be considered political economy plain and simple, seeing it as an essential background to my considerations of selected language in society issues. Thus, after providing a short history of political economy in sociolinguistics in Chapter  1, I  shift gears considerably, providing the reader with detailed discussions of what I  see as key concepts in need of far more exploration than is normally the case in sociolinguistics: in Chapter 2, political economy as a field of inquiry; in Chapter 3, neoliberalism as the current dominant form of capitalism; and in Chapter 4, stratification, inequality and class as key effects of capitalism. All this theoretical and conceptual background leads me back to sociolinguistic considerations, mainly two key themes that I have been working on in recent years: in Chapter 5, I discuss the neoliberal citizen and in Chapter 6, I discuss discursive class warfare. The main body of the book is thus composed of three chapters that are fundamentally political economy (Chapters 2–​4) and three that are sociolinguistic (Chapter 1, 5 and 6). I end the book with an epilogue containing some final thoughts on political economy in sociolinguistics. As is obvious to anyone who has attended sociolinguistics conferences in recent years, such as the biannual Sociolinguistics Symposium, the field has become an extremely broad church. The past three decades have seen the inclusion of a great deal of sociology, social theory, human geography, anthropology and, most recently, political economy, and a lot less of what is understood as ‘linguistic’. Indeed, so pervasive have the social sciences become in the field that some conference-​organizing committees have begun to reject paper proposals on the grounds that they are ‘not linguistic enough’. I am not sure how I feel about this kind of gatekeeping practice, tending to see the point of view of both the more ‘socio’ people and the more ‘linguistic’ people. But my point in bringing up such developments is that this book needs to come with something of a warning to readers: for some, it will be a case of taking the social science angle to an extreme.

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My reason for taking this tack is fairly simple. Over the years, I  have generally tended not to work from a self-​positioning as a sociolinguist or any other disciplinary label. Or, in any case, this is how I  have seen matters. And to be honest, I  have always found the use (and often, overuse) of such labels tedious and difficult to embrace with respect to what I do, and, indeed, what others do: ‘I’m a language and identity researcher’ is no more satisfying than the more generic ‘I’m an applied linguist’. And I have always been suspicious of people who seem to wear their disciplinary affiliation as a badge, people who open their interventions in conversations and discussions by saying, ‘Well, as I’m a sociolinguist, I think . . .’. This is not to say that I am against disciplines, or that I think that they do not matter, or even that they do not exist. They obviously do matter to many people and as a result they obviously exist, as witnessed by the fact that I am writing about them and I have ‘political economy’ and ‘sociolinguistics’ in the title of this book. When writing more generally, and especially when surveying fields of inquiry, omissions are inevitable and I apologize in advance for not having found, read and cited publications that would have fit comfortably into my narrative and, as a result, not having given credit where it is due. As for my aforementioned explorations of sociolinguistic issues, I face the possible charge that I have been ‘too local’ in my focus, given that most of the examples that I discuss in Chapters 5 and 6 are based very close to home –​ Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain. However, I do not see this as a problem, especially because the issues arising around the key notions undergirding these two chapters are common to many contexts in the world today. My local references allow me to bring these issues alive in a more intensive, and hopefully, powerful way. Further to these preliminary considerations, I feel it is necessary to mention a few editorial matters to avoid confusion and misunderstandings as the reader proceeds through the book. First, I cite a good number of sources from decades ago, and in some cases centuries ago, and this raises issues about the citation years used. Bearing this in mind, when the original publication is distant in time by more than five years my policy is to cite both years. Thus, when I cited Marx and Engels’s German Ideology earlier, I wrote ‘Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998’ to capture that the first edition of the book appeared in German in 1846 and the edition I have consulted was published in 1998. In addition, an effect of citing older sources is the use of generic masculine pronouns (i.e. all-​purpose ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘his’). When citing such work, I leave the quoted section intact, and I do not insert sic as is done by some authors. I hasten to add the obvious point that in such cases, masculine pronouns should be understood to refer to all human beings and not just ‘men’. Finally, I need to explain my policy with regard to the translation into English of texts originally written or spoken in another language (Spanish, Catalan and French, to be

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precise). On the whole, where quotes are of one sentence or longer in length, I provide the English translation in the main text and the original text in a corresponding endnote. I have adopted this approach because I think it makes the main text easier to read. Most of the material appearing in this book has been presented and discussed in papers given at conferences and in universities in recent years and in a long list of publications appearing from 2014 onwards. In particular, I need to mention publications that share long, intact sections with chapters in this book. The review of sociolinguistics literature in Chapter 1 contains intact sections from the following publication: Block, D.  (2017a), ‘Political economy in applied linguistics research’. Language Teaching, 50 (1): 32–​64. I thank Cambridge University Press for granting me permission to use this material. The discussion of home evictions and class warfare in Chapter 6 overlaps with similar discussions of the same topic in the following publications: Block, D. (2016a). ‘Discursos corruptos y el mundo al revés’. La Maleta de Portbou, 19: 19–​24. Block, D. (2017b). ‘Discourses in conflict: Resource inequality, class warfare and home repossessions’. Social Semiotics, 27 (3): 255–264. Block, D. (2018a). ‘Critical discourse analysis and class’. In J. Flowerdew and J. Richardson (eds), Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Block, D. (2018b). ‘The materiality and semiosis of inequality and class struggle and warfare:  The case of home evictions in Spain’. In R.Wodak and B.  Forchtner (eds), Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge. Although this book is single-​authored, a lot of people have contributed to its writing, both directly and indirectly. First, there is Gurdeep Mattu at Bloomsbury, whom I thank for supporting me throughout the entire book-​writing process and for not giving me too hard a time about submitting the manuscript a few months later than was originally planned. Thanks also go to Andrew Wardell, Helen Saunders and Kumar Shyam at Bloomsbury. I am extremely grateful to the people who took the time to read and comment on all the chapters in this book:  Marnie Holborow, John Gray, Benno Herzog, May Sabbagh, Carly Collins and Adrià Block Castillo. I especially thank Marnie and John as they have been a vital source of intellectual inspiration

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and support for some time now, and are always willing to read and critique what I write. Over the years I  have benefited greatly from informal exchanges with a wide range of people, who in some cases would probably not be aware that our conversations were helping me refine my ideas about political economy in sociolinguistics. I  would like to cite here, in no particular order, Santiago Zabala, Pepe Sánchez, Jose Sánchez, Celso Álvarez, Luisa Martin Rojo, Melissa Moyer, Carles Feixa, Pere Enciso, Carme Bellet, John O’Regan, Cathie Wallace, Siân Preece, Maureen Matarese, Hasret Saygi, Miguel Pérez-​Milans, Hartmut Haberland, Adam Jaworski, Crispin Thurlow, Tom Ricento, Guy Cook, Kenneth McGill, Brian Morgan, Christian Chun, Kori Allan, Mike Baynham, May Sabbagh, Carly Collins, Bonny Norton, Ron Darvin, Joseph Park, Hyunjun Shin, Stephen May, Alastair Pennycook, Amado Alarcón, Joan Pujolar, Eva Codó, Luci Nussbaum, Josep Maria Cots, Enric Llurda, Víctor Corona, Lídia Gallego-​Balsà, Maria Sabaté, Victòria Castillo and Adrià Block Castillo. As is always the case with my academic work, I am very grateful to my employer, the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, and my host institution, the Universitat de Lleida, for providing the work conditions that have made possible the writing of this book. Over the past several years I  have also benefited from the kind of academic dialogue that can only emerge when one gives a talk in front of an audience, be this at a conference or as part of a university’s invited lecture programme. In these cases, I am grateful to all my co-​panellists, those who attended these talks and anyone else with whom I discussed the topics of my papers. Especially relevant and helpful have been invited talks and plenaries at the following events:  the ‘Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse’ conference in Berlin in May 2014; the ‘Neoliberalism, Education and Applied Linguistics’ conference in London in June 2014; the ‘Kari Sajavaara Memorial Lecture’ in Jyvaskyla in January 2015; the ‘Identity and Mobility in the Globalized World: Challenges for Education’ seminar in Tokyo in October 2015; the ‘Elite Discourse’ seminar in Bern in April 2016; the ‘Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ conference in Calgary in May 2016; and the ‘International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication’ conference in Barcelona in November 2016. Thanks to the organizers of these events for inviting me and for providing me with the opportunity to present and discuss my ideas. Finally, it is not common to dedicate a book to a city, but this is what I will do here. This book is dedicated to Barcelona, the city to which I  came by accident in the final days of 1978, and the city that I have called home since. Over the past 39 years, I have visited numerous locations around the world, and I lived in London for 16 years. However, over this period of time, Barcelona has remained my single point of reference as my spiritual home, if not always

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my physical home. Thus, while a good number of factors, events and people have contributed to the writing of this book, I cannot imagine ever being in the position to write it without having lived in and felt a part of Barcelona for so many years. David Block Barcelona March 2017

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1 A short history of political economy in sociolinguistics

Introduction I begin this chapter with an examination of the beginnings of political economy in sociolinguistics, going back to programmatic articles on the topic by Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, both published in 1989. I then consider what I see as three key publications linking political economy to issues in sociolinguists in the ensuing years  –​Florian Coulmas’s (1992) Language and economy; James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear’s (1996) The new work order:  Behind the language of the new capitalism; and Marnie Holborow’s (1999) The politics of English. I conclude at this stage that it is really only from the early 2000s onwards that there has been a notable rise in interest among sociolinguists in how to apply political economy in their work, even if one strand of inquiry, what is known as Economics of Language (EL), began in the 1980s (Grin, 2016). EL is one of five strands of research that I discuss in this chapter, along with the English divide, language in the workplace, language and tourism, and Critical Discourse Studies. I  conclude that what while EL pays a lot of attention to mainstream economics (more on this in Chapter 2), not least because its origins are in this field, there is a tendency to marginalize work associated with ethnographic sociology, anthropology and human geography and to avoid political issues. As regards the other four strands, my view is that while they pay lip service to political economy as their inspiration, there is, on the whole, very little engagement with the field and very little detailed consideration of areas of interest, such as neoliberalism, inequality and social class. Indeed, for all the research discussed in this chapter, I see a need for researchers to provide more in-​depth discussions of the political economy they are applying and more expansive explanations of how. My intention in this book is to do just this, and in final part of the chapter I outline what the

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reader can expect to find in the chapters that follow, namely, three substantive, theoretical chapters that provide in-​depth background and two extensive chapters in which I attempt to practise what I preach, writing about issues in sociolinguistics within a clear political economy frame.

Political economy in sociolinguistics Language has . . . roles to play in a political economy. . . . And problematic though the term ‘political economy’ may be in some respects, it may offer clues as to what those roles are. To recognize that the study of economy must include institutions, practices, and values, as well as goods  –​and that the values and interests governing much of its operation necessarily involve political processes and relations, not just the autonomous flow of markets  –​is to begin to move beyond the dichotomy that excludes linguistic phenomena from the economic realm. The allocation of resources, the coordination of production, and the distribution of goods and services, seen (as they must be) in political perspective, involve linguistic forms and verbal practices in many ways. (Irvine, 1989: 249) These words are taken from Judith Irvine’s ‘When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy’, a programmatic article published nearly three decades ago in which the author makes a case for establishing stronger links between sociolinguistics and political economy. Irvine considered obsolete the mutual ignorance that was dominant at the time that she was writing (exceptions such as Michael Halliday, Del Hymes or William Labov notwithstanding) and she suggested three ways in which sociolinguistics might intersect with concerns in political economy. First, there is the way that ‘linguistic signs denote objects, the natural world, and economic skills and activities . . . [and] they label persons and groups . . . and . . . refer to, and make predictions about, the forces of production and the coordination of efforts’ (Irvine, 1989:  250). Here Irvine makes reference to the denotational and representational functions of language, arguing that the ways that these functions are carried out constitute a crucial part of the organization of society at large, and the economic realm in particular. Irvine cites as examples two instances in which the division of labour is realized linguistically as follows: (1) in the workplace, the directives given by managers to subalterns, with the effect of strengthening socioeconomic hierarchies; and (2) in the boardroom, the ways that meetings are organized, whereby participants are positioned through, for example, turn allotments and assigned responsibilities. However, we might also consider extramural linguistic activity that can influence economic developments, and here we

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need only consider the much-​publicized and commented case of Donald Trump, the forty-​fifth president of the United States. Once Trump was elected president in November 2016, and Twitter became the mouthpiece for whatever thoughts crossed his mind (attracting hundreds of millions of followers worldwide), it became clear that with his tweets criticizing, for example, the offshore activities of American companies or anything to do with Mexico, he could affect investment in the alluded-​to companies and damage Mexico’s economy, respectively. Irvine’s second intersection between sociolinguistics and political economy is the indexical nature of language. Irvine starts with the common view in sociolinguistics that linguistic repertoires (and more generally, semiotic repertoires) are associated with and point to membership in social groups. And just as particular linguistic repertoires and language practices are associated with, for example, gendered positions (masculinities and femininities) or ethnicity (in the United States, attributed and inhabited identities such as ‘African American’ and ‘Latino’), they also index class positions and relations in society. Class is, to be sure, a material phenomenon  –​about one’s position in relation to the ownership and control over the means of production  –​but it may also be seen as symbolically realized, communicated into existence in complex and sometimes unexpected ways, through linguistic phenomena such as accent, grammar and lexis. William Labov’s variationist research on speech patterns indexing social class in New York City in the 1960s (Labov, 1966) certainly made this point clear. And more recent research on how semiotic repertoires index social class in the United Kingdom (Rampton, 2006, 2010; Snell, 2014, 2015) has produced similar results. The third and final intersection between the sociolinguistic and the economic moves beyond the denotation and the indexical functions of language, and their relationships to the economic realm, to a consideration of how language and communication may be said to constitute and bring about social differentiation. As Irvine explains: While linguistic phenomena may denote the forces of production, and they may index the relations of production, they may also be among those forces, and they may be objects of economic activity. . . . In this view, verbal skills and performances are among the resources and activities forming a socioeconomic system, and the relevant knowledge, talents, and use-​ rights are not randomly, or fortuitously distributed in a community. . . . The fact of uneven distribution is itself economically relevant. (Irvine, 1989: 255) Irvine cites as support for this view Pierre Bourdieu’s work on linguist markets, linguistic capital and how the unequal distribution of symbolic resources

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is intermeshed with the unequal distribution of economic resources in society (Bourdieu, 1977a, 1977b). She also discusses legitimate (and legitimized) and less legitimate (and less legitimized) linguistic repertoires and practices in different contexts, although she does not make explicit reference to Bourdieu’s notion of distinction. However, what is striking is the third way that Irvine situates language as an integral part of economic activity: What the verbal goods and services are, and where they enter an overall economy will vary from one sociocultural system to another. Presumably, any aspect of a speech act might, separately or in combination with other aspects, be the source of its economic value in a particular system. In any given case, we might ask: What aspects of the verbal performance bear the value? Who holds rights in them? Who benefits? Who pays and in what coin? (Irvine, 1989: 258) The section in which this quote appears is titled ‘Utterances as commodities exchangeable for material goods’. Here, I  would argue, Irvine anticipated the current interest in sociolinguistics in issues such as the value of languages and multilingualism with regard to employment-​related issues such as salary, work conditions and employment (Gazzola and Wickström, 2016; Grin, 1996), and language commodification, or the idea that languages can be considered valued skills and exchangeable goods in markets (Heller, 2010a, 2010b; Urciuoli and LaDousa, 2013). I have more to say about these research strands below. Also published in 1989 was another article calling for greater links between sociolinguistics and political economy, Susan Gal’s (1989) ‘Language and political economy’. In the introduction to this paper, Gal stated that her aim was ‘to point to a set of themes in current anthropological and linguistic research that can be read as investigations of the links among language structure, language use, and political economy’ (Gal, 1989: 346). She further noted that this research was either ‘explicitly inspired by an array of (neo) Marxist concepts’, or was grounded in Del Hymes’s ‘socially constituted linguistics’ (Hymes, 1974) and interpretative ethnographic research that aimed to provide fine-​grained descriptions and analyses of ‘local linguistic practices’ (Gal, 1989:  346). Gal went on to focus on research that, at the time, had brought together language and society issues and political economic concerns such as inequality, social class and ideology, as she very effectively weaved into her narrative the work of scholars such as Hymes (1974), Bourdieu (1982), Labov (1966), and Basil Bernstein (1971), all of whom were instrumental in the rise of sociolinguistics as a field of inquiry. In their respective papers, both Irvine and Gal were calling for the kind of synthesis of the material and the symbolic that has gathered some steam in

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recent years, even if some two decades later, Paul Bruthiaux (2008) would lament that matters had not moved on as much as they might have: ‘The reluctance of many applied linguists to consider the economic dimension of globalization and the tendency for discussions of that dimension to be cursory and one-​sided severely limit the contribution the field might make to key contemporary debate’ adding that this reluctance ‘undermines the credibility of applied linguists and makes it unlikely they will play a significant role in solving the social injustices they so rightly deplore’. (Bruthiaux, 2008: 20) Meanwhile, more recently, and with specific reference to language policy researchers, Tom Ricento is equally harsh in his criticism, writing of a ‘lack of sophistication in political economy’ among them and how this ‘impacts their ability to critically address the effects of neoliberal economic policies on the status and utility of both global languages such as English, and non-​global languages that could play an important role in local economic and social development in low-​income countries’ (Ricento, 2015: 27). In my own work over the years (Block, 2014; Block, Gray and Holborow, 2012), I have written similarly about the seeming unwillingness of far too many researchers to situate political economy in general and social class in particular as central to their efforts. Nevertheless, it is certainly not the case that no one has moved in the direction proposed by Irvine and Gal in their seminal papers. Florian Coulmas’s (1992) Language and economy is a noteworthy early effort to think about language in economic terms. In this book, Coulmas introduces a series of issues, some of which have been taken up in distinct research strands in recent years, and some of which have not. In the latter category, there is his discussion of a language and money homology, where he suggests that while ‘words do not derive their meaning from their material substance –​a sequence of sounds for ­example –​but from the purposes they serve in transmitting nonmaterial content, . . . likewise the value of money is not based on its material embodiment, but on the function, it fulfils as a common means for the exchange of goods’ (Coulmas, 1992:  4). It is not entirely clear to me where one can go with this, unless, of course, it is a prelude to a somewhat different homology involving language use and labour, whereby both are seen as transformers of the material –​words in the case of language; physical matter in the case of labour –​into products. Coulmas is more overtly prescient in his discussion of two other issues, both of which were floated by Irvine (1989), as I  noted above. Thus, when he discusses language as an ‘asset’, he would appear to be breaking new ground, while establishing some theoretical undergirding for later work on ‘language commodification’. However, when he actually turns to the specific

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notion of ‘language as a commodity’, he seems to be working according to a neoclassical economic definition of commodity as simply anything that can be bought and sold (a language course, a translation) but not as congealed labour in the production of commodity, as would be the case in a Marxist interpretation. In any case, Coulmas does make an interesting point when he writes: Languages behave much like other commodities on the market, since growing demand results in increased sales and/​or a rise in market price. Like other intangible goods, the commodity language has the peculiar property that by selling it the sellers do not diminish their own stock, since, obviously, the language teacher does not lose what the student acquires. (Coulmas, 1992: 79) Indeed, he goes on to suggest that the buyer is not exactly buying the language but a service (teaching, translation), which produces products (a lesson, a translated document). Language teaching, as such a service, is obviously not the language being taught, but it can and does impact the actual acquisition of that language by the buyer (in the private education market) in his/​ her role as student. Indeed, the actual labour that is expended in the acquisition of a language is spread across many individuals, the buyer/​student him/​ herself being both one of the hardest workers and the maximum beneficiary. Coulmas also deals with another topic that Irvine advanced, namely, the cost and value of languages in multilingual settings. Here he considers two situations: (1) what a government has to spend to maintain more than one language as the mediator of institutional communication and social cohesion and harmony, and (2) what companies need to bear in mind as regards the relationship between the multilingual competences of workers and employment-​ related issues, such as salary, work conditions and employment. Two other books published in the 1990s, Gee et al.’s (1996) The new work order:  Behind the language of the new capitalism and Marnie Holborow’s (1999) The politics of English, also brought political economy to the fore. Gee et al. (1996) discuss how the new information/​digital age, in evidence worldwide by the early 1990s, was proving to be much different from what more romantic observers had prognosticated. At this time, there was much talk of how technological developments (and here we could cite the personal computer and the internet, both of which became pervasive from the mid-​1990s onwards), would lead to greater democratization, with cross-​cultural, global communication triumphing over traditional modes of oppression both within and across nation-​state borders. However, by the time Gee et al. published their book, the new technologies being introduced in the workplace were already recognizable as merely the new means through which the same old capitalism, characterized by the twin evils of alienation and exploitation, could

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survive. And, as creeping managerialism became ever more pervasive, the promise of freedom and liberty was being subverted –​for example, new technologies meant more and more efficient surveillance and governance in the workplace. In addition, while the rise of the knowledge economy brought the creation of many new jobs in the services sector, most new jobs were, in fact, low-​skill service jobs (e.g. cleaners and childcarers for the new information/​digital workers), a trend that has endured to this day. In this sense, Robert Reich’s (1991) prescient assessment of the changing class system in the United States has gained relevance over the years. Reich described a US society dominated by a minority of wealthy elites he called ‘symbols analysts’ (highly educated professionals, such as managers, doctors and lawyers), increasingly separated in political, economic, social and cultural terms from the traditional middle and working classes. The latter, in turn, were becoming two general classes –​the ‘in-​person servers’ whose work is carried out in the presence of those consuming the products of their labour (e.g. sales staff, administrators, hairdressers, bus drivers, teachers), and the ‘routine producers’, whose work is not carried out in the presence of others (e.g. factory workers, call centre workers, office-​based information workers). Meanwhile, in her book, Holborow (1999) examines the global spread of English, language and sexism, and standard English from a Marxist perspective, relating these phenomena to global capitalism, ideology and colonialism. She writes of the global spread of English, already a hot topic at the end of the last century, as ‘the continuation of a process started in the earliest days of capitalism, deepened by the expansion of the British Empire and given further impetus by the commanding position of American capitalism in this century’ (Holborow, 1999: 56–​57). With regard to language and gender, she argues that ‘the material roots of the inequality that women experience’ were missing from the language and gender literature of the 1980s and 1990s, which had ‘set women’s language apart from men’s’. This literature focused on surface-​level phenomena such as the different communication strategies purportedly employed by men and women in different contexts, or communication breakdowns occurring when men and women interact, all of which served to ‘underplay the relationships between language and history and also women’s role in history’ (ibid.:  145). Finally, she notes the ‘class origins’ of the notion and use of standard English, which ‘claimed to speak on behalf of all . . . [and] claimed to be merely a question of correct language usage which transcended social divisions, but in reality . . . was the dialect of a narrow social layer’ (ibid.: 169). Holborow’s book was important because it was the first overt and completely Marxist account and critique of sociolinguistics concerns. The fact that it did not lead to a wholesale, let alone minimal, shift to Marxist political economy as a framework for sociolinguistic research means that almost two decades after its publication, it stands out in its uniqueness.1

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Still, one could say that there are examples of embedded political economy in some of the classic ethnographic work being carried out in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Thus, as I explain elsewhere (Block, 2014), issues around economic inequality and social class in North America are clearly part and parcel of Labov’s aforementioned research on social class from the 1960s onwards (e.g. Labov, 1966). However, such issues also come through, albeit indirectly at times, in Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) exploration of literacy practices in a mill town in the southern United States, Penny Eckert’s (1989) study of linguistic variation and change in an American high school in Michigan; and Monica Heller’s (1999) discussion of bilingual policies and practices in a bilingual French immersion school in Anglophone Canada (more on this below). Meanwhile, Douglas Foley’s (1990) Learning Capitalist Culture:  Deep in the Heart of Tejas, an account of Anglo-​Latino relations and sociocultural/​linguistic practices in a small-​town Texas high school, is more overtly about inequality and class within a political economy framework than is normally the case in sociolinguistics research. Notwithstanding these studies (and others I am sure I have missed), it is not really until the beginning of the twenty-​first century that we see a more explicit turn to political economy in sociolinguistics. Or, in any case, it is at this time that we begin to see more overt references to ‘political economy’ (the term is sometimes used; normally it is implicit in the discussion), along with research carried out in the spirit of Irvine’s call for more links between political economy and sociolinguistics. I see this trend in five areas of sociolinguistic inquiry: (1) the English divide; (2) language in the workplace; (3) economics of language; (4) language and tourism; and (5) Critical Discourse Studies ([CDS]; Critical Discourse Analysis [CDA]). In the sections that follow, I provide summaries of what this research is about, before providing critique that then leads me to outline what I aim to do in the remainder of the book. It should be noted that sorting research into these categories is somewhat artificial and, indeed, the first two are convenient creations for my purposes here as opposed to recognizable labels for distinct areas of inquiry within sociolinguistics. The categories, then, are simply a tool that allows me to discuss what I see as sociolinguistics literature that incorporates a political economy angle.

The ‘English divide’ According to Takunori Terasawa, the term ‘English divide’ refers to the situation that exists in just about every country in the world today (north, south, east and west; developed and developing; ex-​colonial; and so on), whereby ‘elite-​class citizens, who make up only a small fraction of the population, have exclusive access to acquiring English language fluency, which, in turn, helps to

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legitimize their status’ (Terasawa, 2016: 2). This divide develops once a certain chain of events is set in motion, beginning with the increasingly instrumental conceptions of the ideal citizen that characterize the neoliberal era in different countries around the world (more on this in Chapters 2 and 5). Terasawa developed the ideas of the English divide with reference to Japan. However, what he writes is relevant in Japan’s neighbour, South Korea. In recent years, a good number of researchers (e.g. Block, 2012a; Park, 2009, 2011, 2015; Park and Lo, 2012; Park and Wee, 2012; Piller and Cho, 2013; Shin, 2012, 2014) have focused on the role of English in the lives of Koreans living both in South Korea and abroad (e.g. in countries such as Canada). These researchers have documented how middle-​and upper-​class Koreans draw on their economic and sociocultural resources to finance and organize a range of behaviours. These include paying for extra tuition in South Korea and even splitting families, as one partner (almost always the female partner) and children move to an English-​speaking country in the hope that this will guarantee that the latter acquire highly proficient English. Motivating such behaviour is the widely held belief that in an employment market in which English is a highly valued skill and communicative resource, individuals must have as high a level of competence in it as possible in order to be able to compete for jobs and be considered successful, ‘cosmopolitan’ citizens. In such an environment, there has emerged what has been termed an ‘English frenzy’ (Park, 2009). And this obsession with English is alive and well not only in South Korea, but also in other parts of East Asia, including (as we saw above) Japan (Kanno, 2008; Kanno and Vandrick, 2014; Kubota, 2011, 2013, 2016; Terasawa, 2016), Taiwan (Price, 2014), Hong Kong (Lin and Man, 2010) and China (Butler, 2013; Gao, 2014; Pan, 2015). In the last country, we see the extremely rapid rise of inequality that has come with the introduction of neoliberal policies, as members of the emergent middle and upper classes have moved away from the masses of people at the lower end of the class scale. All this has meant major changes in a range of institutions, with education being one of the more important ones (Shi Li, Sato and Sicular, 2014). Fuhui Tong and Qing Shi (2012: 168) make the point that ‘for developed metropolitan cities in mainland China, including Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, bilingual education becomes a form of elite education which is associated with family income, hence, privileged to higher social classes’. Thus, as Yuko Butler (2013) has noted, we are beginning to see a correlation between class position and access to and success in English-​language learning. Elsewhere, in his research on middle-​class and wealthy Chinese nationals studying in the United Kingdom, Andy Gao focuses on how these individuals seem to maintain their class positions in a new context, while increasing their relative class consciousness. As he explains, their ‘senses of . . . middle-​class or upper class identities were reinforced during their English language journeys in Britain’

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(Gao, 2014: 76). This was achieved because ‘when they perceived new behaviour and attitudes associated with middle class or upper class in Britain, they tended to adjust themselves socioculturally’ (ibid.). Gao’s work is important as it not only uncovers a degree of class consciousness and a sense of empowerment among his informants, but also taps into the issue of how individuals maintain (or not) their home class positions when they move across social, cultural and geographical borders. It also resonates with Stephanie Vandrick’s (2011) discussion, based on her teaching of English and literacy skills at an American university, of what she has variably called ‘privileged international students’ (Vandrick, 1995) and ‘students of the new global elite’ (Vandrick, 2011). Whichever term is used, we are in the realm of young adults who ‘are comfortable with privilege and know they will return to their countries and step into positions of power, wealth, and influence’ (Vandrick, 1995:  375). However, the use of ‘new’ in Vandrick’s more recent work seems to be an attempt to capture how privileged students have become that much more privileged in recent years. And beyond being more cosmopolitan than the majority of their fellow students (privileged international students always have been), they are now extremely more cosmopolitan. Thus they have lived, studied, and vacationed in various places throughout the world; they may carry passports or permanent visas from more than one country; their parents may have homes and businesses in more than one country; they may speak several languages; they have often been educated at Western high schools  –​frequently boarding schools  –​and colleges. (Vandrick, 2011: 160) Ultimately, these students will take their places as full-​fledged members of what scholars such as Leslie Sklair (2001) and William Carroll (2010; Carroll and Sapinski, 2016) have called the ‘transnational capitalist classes’, that is, the movers and shakers of twenty-​first-​century capitalism. Their sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and multilingualism, which inevitably includes high competence in English, make this a certainty. Meanwhile, moving back to Japan, Ryuko Kubota shows how cosmopolitanism does not always sit comfortably alongside English-​language teaching and learning, as mediating forces may be at work. Thus, while she finds that Japanese nationals learning English to communicate with people from other countries no longer do so for high-​minded cosmopolitan ideals, but for instrumental business-​related proposes (Kubota 2011, 2013, 2016), she adds a further element. In Kubota (2016), she notes how Japanese workers learning English manifest and even strengthen their nationalistic and xenophobic attitudes towards their Chinese and Korean interlocutors. In this sense, the diversity management policies in Japanese companies, which link the learning

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of English to broadening horizons, may be in conflict with enduring localized thinking (the recalcitrant nationalism and xenophobia cited above). Shifting ground geographically, we see how in recent years, English-​ language immersion programmes have become popular across Europe and South America. And once again, there is a correlation between middle-​and upper-​class positions in society and greater access to and success in learning English. This is as much the case with bilingual English-​Spanish schools in Spain (Martin Rojo, 2010, 2013; Relaño, 2015), as it is with English-​medium schools in Colombia (de Mejia, 2005) or English-​language instruction in mainstream schools in Mexico (López-​ Gopar and Sughrua, 2014). A  common thread in such research is the way in which middle-​class and wealthy parents can guarantee early exposure to environments for learning English (be these in-​country or abroad), and how this early exposure facilitates admission into bilingual and English-​medium programmes in primary, middle, and secondary schools. Studying in such programmes serves to develop further students’ English-​language competence to the point that by the time they finish secondary school, they may be fully competent in English, with all the advantages that this affords them as they move to university studies. In countries with a postcolonial relationship with English, issues around inequality and class, intermeshed with idealizations of the neoliberal citizen, are also important factors in students’ relative access to and the eventual acquisition of English. In such contexts, English mediates class divisions, and its introduction as a medium of instruction serves to deepen existing inequalities. For example, with reference to Indonesia, Lauren Zentz (2016) describes the global-​local tensions in evidence as discourses about English, globalization, cosmopolitanism and economic advancement sit uncomfortably next to nationalistic discourses and practices imbued with local interests. In addition, as has been the case in the previously cited contexts, English in Indonesia is intertwined with inequality in Indonesian society. In this sense, Zentz notes how English ‘primarily indexes a limited access commodity and secondarily indexes wealth, prestige, and access to education’ (Zentz, 2016:  448). Elsewhere, with regard to India, scholars such as E. Annanmalai (2013), Chaise LaDousa (2014), Vaidei Ramanathan (2005, 2015) and Selma Sonntag (2016) have noted how a lack of economic, political, social and cultural resources leads to class divisions along linguistic lines, as access to English, and to a good command of English, have a direct impact on citizens’ life chances. Moreover, those occupying the lower end of the class spectrum are those who benefit least from the push for English as the medium of instruction. A similar point is made with reference to Bangladesh (Dovchin, Sultana and Pennycook, 2016;), and in research carried out in sub-​Saharan African contexts such as Lesotho, Swaziland and Tanzania, we see how local governments pay lip service to the promotion of local languages (Sesotho in Lesoto, Siswati in

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Swaziland and Kiswahili in Tanzania), while practices on the ground tell a different story. Thus, as Nkonko Kamwangamalu (2013) explains with regard to these contexts, ‘government officials as well as most members of the ruling elite prefer to send their own children to schools where English is the sole medium of instruction’ (Kamwangamalu, 2013:  164). This is an example of what Carol Myers-​Scotton has termed ‘elite closure’, a process in which local elites ‘successfully employ official language policies and their own nonformalized language usage patterns to limit access of nonelite groups to political position and socioeconomic advancement’ (Meyers-​Scotton, 1993: 149). To summarize, the positioning and valuing of English-​language competence, as a must-​have, marketable skill, is a worldwide phenomenon, as we see in the studies cited above and in volumes such as Peter Tan and Rani Rubdy (2008), James Coleman (2011), and Ruanni Tupas (2015), even if it is also a variegated phenomenon, that is, it plays out in different ways in different locations given the very different historical, political, social, cultural and geographical characteristics of these locations. English, along with other valued competences and skills, becomes the mediator of increasing inequality in job markets and societies at large, as we see the emergence of what is, in effect, an ‘English divide’. This divide is, of course, an effect of the more general way that education has always been a key element in the reproduction of class hierarchies in capitalist societies, as noted by a long list of scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-​Claude Passeron ([1970] 1977) and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1977). Before moving to the next section, it is worthwhile to mention, as a kind of postscript to this one, an alternative take on the notion of the English divide. Above I mentioned the work of Labov and here an additional mention is justified. Labov, along with fellow early sociolinguists, such as Peter Trudgill and Basil Bernstein, long ago made the general point that in English-​speaking societies, class matters, and that in these societies, a different kind of English divide is at work. In short, class divisions are both mediated and indexed by the way that people speak English. Thus, Labov (1966) wrote about how individuals’ relative positions in the social class stratification of 1960s’ New York were mediated by the production of particular speech features and patterns in English, Trudgill (1974) charted the English spoken by the working-​class residents of Norwich in the United Kingdom, and Bernstein (1971) explored the interrelationship between social class and language in terms of social structures in society and language socialization in home and school settings in the United Kingdom. However, as we moved through the 1980s and 1990s and into the current century, interest in class as a key construct began to fade, a trend that has only been reversed over the past decade and half. In this period, there has been something of a mini-​revival, as first Ben Rampton

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(2006, 2010) and Jim Collins (2006, 2009), and then other researchers, have focused on class as part of their general turn to ‘repertoire’, as the way to capture how individuals possess and deploy a range of semiotic resources in communication, ‘tailoring linguistic styles in ongoing and lifelong projects of self-​construction and differentiation’ (Eckert, 2012: 97–​98). The research of Julia Snell (2010, 2013, 2014, 2015) and Emma Moore (2012) is exemplary in this regard, as they have combined their interest in linguistic variation, multimodal repertoires and style with an interest in social class. Snell and Moore have focused on adolescent speech patterns and forms in Teesside, in the northeast of England, and Bolton, in the northwest of England, respectively. Their research is important because it continues the tradition established by Labov, Trudgill and Bernstein of showing how class divisions are mediated and indexed by how English is spoken. An additional point I would add to the discussion of the English divide is that English, of course, is not the only language in the world that mediates divisions in societies. Over the years, Monica Heller (1999, 2006, 2011) has documented the evolution of the role of French in Canada, focusing on how changes in the economy have shaped changes in the fortunes of French (and French speakers). Among other things, she describes a class conflict that arose when the French immersion school that she studied in Ontario was founded: Anglophone middle-​class parents saw French as extra cultural capital for their children, while Francophone working-​class parents not only wanted to conserve French but also wanted their children to become competent users of English. Meanwhile, in the United States, two-​way English-​Spanish immersion programmes have also come to be class battlegrounds, as they are ‘viewed as enrichment education by many middle-​to upper-​class English monolingual parents’ (Kleyn and Adelman Reyes, 2011: 215). Examining activities in such a school in California, Deborah Palmer (2009) notes how middle-​ class children are able to monopolize their teachers’ attention because of their more developed knowledge of how to use emerging learning opportunities in the classroom to their advantage. In addition, in bi/​multilingual societies, in which two or more languages or two or more varieties of the same language are in regular use, class divisions also arise around language choice and language use. For example, in Catalonia, there is a constant tension around Spanish and Catalan and the social class positions of both Spanish-​ and Catalan-​preferent speakers: Spanish is and always has been the preferred language among some elites in Barcelona, although it is more generally identified as the language of the working class (and, in recent years, of immigrants). Meanwhile, Catalan is, on the whole, the middle-​class language par excellence (Codó and Patiño-​Santos, 2014; Frekko, 2013; Pujolar, 2001; Woolard, 1989, 2016).

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Language in the workplace There is by now a great deal of research examining how in many contexts today, languages are no longer only positioned as a means of communication or as markers of identity, but also as valued skills in job markets (Gunnarsson, 2013). This transformation in how languages are perceived is generally called ‘language commodification’. Here there are clear links to Irvine (1989), who wrote that ‘it is evident that linguistic skills can be economic resources, and even if some skills are merely status markers their acquisition may be the focus of economic activity’ (Irvine, 1989: 256), adding that utterances may be ‘commodities exchangeable for material goods’ (ibid.: 258). In recent years, the term ‘commodification’ has entered the sociolinguistic lexicon with great force to capture the aforementioned situation whereby languages become key skills in job markets, with Heller perhaps being the scholar most associated with this line of research (Heller, 2002, 2003, 2010a, 2010b). In their use of the term, Heller and other researchers seem to draw on a baseline understanding of commodification as a process via which objects that were, in a previous time frame, exclusively for personal use, and therefore unsellable, become objects of exchange in economic and symbolic markets and therefore are sellable. This is seen as a recent phenomenon and is part and parcel of the transformation of language and identity over the past forty years in many parts of the world. There is little doubt that during this period of time neoliberalism has shaped all kinds of political, social and cultural changes, language being just one of them. And there is little doubt that language is now treated as a skill that, in effect, can be bought and sold in job markets. However, despite all this, authors such as Block (2014, 2018c), Holborow (2015) and Kenneth McGill (2013) have manifested a degree of scepticism with regard to the claim that language has, as a result of such developments, become ‘commodified’. Unless, that is, we are using ‘commodification’ in the more prosaic sense of a simple process by which an object is situated in a market relation of some kind and exchanged for money, and not in the Marxist sense of a product embodying the congealed labour of workers that, when sold, produces surplus value for capitalists who control the means of production. Quite another matter is to see the commodification of language use in the workplace in parallel with the use of other skills, all of which together constitute labour, which as Marx argued, can be commodified. In this sense, it seems perfectly licit to say that as a skill, used in work settings, language has been commodified as part of the broader commodification of the entire deployed skill set of a worker. In line with such thinking, Josianne Boutet (2001, 2008, 2012) has focused on what she calls ‘the language part of work (la part langagière du travail) labour’, that is, ‘the implementation of the linguistic capacities needed to do a job’ (Boutet, 2012: 208).

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The favoured site for researchers focusing on ‘the language part of work’ has been call centres. This, no doubt, is because of the very obvious importance of language in the labour power of workers in such contexts. For Boutet, as well as scholars such as Cameron (2000, 2005) and Heller and Boutet (2006), work in call centres is controlled by new variants of Taylorism, the factory organization, and management procedures for mass production outlined by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early part of the twentieth century in the United States (Taylor, [1911] 1998). In Taylorism, every action forming part of a task is broken down into a series of segments (sometimes lasting just a fraction of a second). The aim is to control time and movement with a view to increasing calculability, efficiency, predictability and, ultimately, productivity. On this basis, there have been publications on English-​language call centres in India (Cowie, 2010; Morgan and Ramanathan, 2009; Sonntag, 2009)  and Pakistan (Rahman, 2009), Francophone centres in Tunisia (Boutet, 2008) and Anglophone Canada (Roy, 2003), and bilingual Spanish/​English centres on the US-​Mexico border (Alarcón and Heyman, 2013), to name just a few examples. In this body of literature, there are a range of issues that are political economic in nature. First, there is a general concern, shared by communication theorists such as Christian Fuchs (2014a, 2014b, 2015), who has examined call centres in some detail, with the twin processes of alienation and exploitation. On the one hand, call centre workers feel estranged, and as Marx would have argued, physically ‘mortified’ and mentally ‘ruined’ (Marx, [1859] 1904: 74), as a result of the rigid work regimes to which they are subjected. On the other hand, they are exploited in that surplus value or profit is extracted from them after overheads (including rent and interest payments), taxes and depreciation of the means of production have been factored in. Of course, these two processes are possible because, as I explain in Chapter 3, one of the key parameters of neoliberalism is the off-​shorization of production, in this case, the provision of information services to businesses in the home country from extraterritorial locations, which in most cases are some distance from the target populations being served (Urry, 2014). A slightly different angle on work contexts is research focusing on the discursive and material construction of new workers for neoliberal times and the extreme pressure that workers around the world are currently subjected to when they enter job markets. For example, Beatriz Lorente (2010) describes how Filipino domestic workers in Singapore are trained to adopt what she calls ‘the script of servitude’, whereby the ‘frequent use of politeness formulae . . . and of very formal address terms . . . index the domestic worker’s consistent deference to her employer’ (Lorente, 2010: 52; see also Lorente, 2013). English in this context comes to be conflated with other desirable qualities, such as intelligence, competence and modernness, a tendency that Manel Herat and Linda McCloughlin (2010) found in their research on

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recruitment in the Sri Lankan job market. Here, young Sri Lankans who do not have a good command of English are deemed to be less qualified when it comes to other skills and therefore find themselves marginalized in hiring processes. Another example of conflation of language with other qualities and skills can be found in Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi’s (2013) account of how a low-​cost Japanese airline requires female attendants to be all things to all people: speaking not only Japanese but also English, showing initiative but being demure, being flexible with regard to timetables, and so on. And in the context of China, Quing Zhang (2008) examines how new cosmopolitan professional identities, in effect, the Chinese version of the neoliberal citizen, are inseparable from the new cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin that has emerged in recent years. Finally, Kori Allan (2013) notes how the ‘Enhanced Language Training Initiative’, set up in Canada in the 2000s with the ostensive aim of helping new arrivals to Canada learn English and enter the job market, has evolved into a somewhat more sinister personality-​makeover project, whereby language learning has come to be conflated with attitudes and an overall disposition consistent with the notion of the neoliberal citizen. Urciuoli and Chaise LaDousa (2013) make a similar point in their survey of research on language labour and language management. Elsewhere, there has been research focusing on migration and language in neoliberal times and the nature of migrants’ encounters with the institutions and bureaucracies that mediate and intersect this migration. For example, Eva Codó (2008, 2013) has examined how by the early twenty-​first century, the Spanish government had outsourced legal services for migrants to trade unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). She sees this as part of the ‘neoliberal off-​loading of public services to civil society organisations’ (Codó, 2013: 50), and notes how it puts these organizations in a difficult position: on the one hand, they act as buffers of the state and the legal establishment; on the other hand, they may on occasion advise migrants to engage in illegal activity (e.g. working without a work permit) simply because it is more expedient and in their interest. Also, in the Spanish context, Maria Sabaté (2013, 2015) focuses on the effects of the liberalization of the Spanish telecommunications industry from the 1990s onwards on the lives of working-​class and poor immigrants. Specifically, she shows how immigrant-​owned-​and-​operated shops providing internet and telephone services (locutorios in Spanish) have come to be effective sites of resistance to Spanish telecommunications firms and their attempts to monopolize and extract as much profit as possible from their immigrant customers Before concluding this section, it is worth noting that most studies of language in the workplace are based on the idea that the ability to use English, or indeed any other language, is usually essential to carrying out the duties associated with a particular job, and may even form part of the job specifications

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published by the employer. However, there is evidence that this is not always the case. For example, in their research on Filipino immigrant workers in a meat packing plant in Australia, Piller and Loy Lising (2014) observed that in general no language was necessary as ‘verbal communication plays a limited role on . . . conveyor belts’ (Piller and Lising, 2014: 49). And when the use of a language was necessary, that language was Tagalog and not English. This latter finding resonates with what Tara Goldstein (1996) found in her ethnography of a textile factory in Toronto in the early 1990s, namely, that Portuguese, not English, was the effective working language. This was due to the fact that for the vast majority of the workers, first-​generation female immigrants from the Azores, Portuguese had ‘social value as a symbol of distinctness and as a symbol of a speaker’s identification with others in the Portuguese manufacturing “family”/​community’ (Goldstein, 1996: 144).

Economics of language Elsewhere, economists interested in language issues, in particular language policy, have eschewed the ethnographic and discourse-​analytic approaches driving the research discussed in the previous two sections. Instead, they have explored a wide range of contexts, such as the workplace and public administration, from an economic and quantitative perspective known as EL. The main focus of EL research is to explore how economics and language interrelate: The economics of language rests on the paradigm of mainstream economics and uses the concepts and tools of economics in the study of relationships featuring linguistic variables. It focuses principally, but not exclusively, on those relationships in which economic variables also play a part. (Grin et al., 2010: 28) EL is based on a classic notion found in definitions of Economics as a field of inquiry: ‘optimal resource allocation’. The study of optimal resource allocation necessitates ‘a tool for weighing the advantages and drawbacks of competing options, in order to identify the “optimal” one –​namely, that which promises to deliver the best use of scarce resources’ (Grin, 2015: 121), and this tool (or indeed, these tools) can be found in Economics. As François Grin (perhaps EL’s best-​known scholar) notes in a recent survey (Grin, 2016), EL perhaps goes as far back as fifty years ago, although it is really since the 1990s that it has taken off as a worldwide field of inquiry (see Callaghan and Gándara, 2014; Chiswick and Miller, 2007; Gazzola et al., 2015; Gazzola and Wickström, 2016; Ginsburgh and Weber, 2016; Grin, 1990, 1997, 1999, 2010; Grin et al., 2010).

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Over the years, EL researchers have explored links between economic variables such as salary, productivity, costs, sales, profit and market share (and the more global concept of ‘economic efficiency’), and language-​related variables. In this sense, there have been studies in contexts such as Quebec and Switzerland showing how multilingual workers in general command higher salaries than their monolingual colleagues. These higher salaries may be linked to the results of other studies showing that when the use of additional languages in the carrying out of work tasks is isolated from other skills being deployed simultaneously, one can see how language use adds value to the labour power deployed by workers. One noteworthy aspect of EL research is its rejection of the notion, mentioned previously, that English is somehow the only linguistic show in town (or in any case, the language at the centre of research). Instead, EL takes seriously the notion of linguistic diversity, which includes all languages in the world (and which is on the rise in countries around the world), and how this development has very real economic consequences. For example, the aforementioned Swiss research shows how languages such as French, German and Italian have different levels of value in multilingual Swiss workplaces, independent of English. However, the research also links these languages to English, and thus contributes to ongoing debates about the English divide discussed above from an EL perspective. In this sense, Grin (1999) found that in mid-​1990s’ Switzerland, the economic value of a good command of English (as measured in salaries paid to employees) was greater in German-​language-​ dominant workplaces than in French-​language-​dominant workplaces:  in the former a moderate to good level of English meant a salary increase of 18.1 per cent and in the latter it meant 10.2 per cent. One explanation for this difference might be the more international character of German-​language companies (more international contacts means more English-​language communication), but for the purposes of this discussion, the importance of EL research along these lines is that it shows how linguistic diversity has very real economic consequences. Elsewhere, in a wide range of contexts worldwide, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber (2016) quantify and calculate the effects of three interconnected phenomena. First, there is ethnolinguistic factionalization, that is, ethnolinguistic diversity that may lead to greater peace but it also may contribute to societal ills such as inefficiency, wastefulness and corruption in public institutions. Second, there is standardization, or the policies leading to a reduction in the number of languages in a given context  –​often meaning just one  –​ and the subsequent uniform codification and regimented promotion of this or these languages. Third, and finally, there is disenfranchisement, which is the denial of linguistic rights to certain groups, which arises when standardization is imposed in ethnolinguistically diverse contexts. Addressing the view that

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higher degrees of diversity correlate with prosperity (e.g. in North America), the authors are wary of such a generalization, as in less developed countries, ethnolinguistic diversity occurs next to widespread poverty and other societal ills. Thus, after reviewing events in countries as varied as France, India, Nigeria, Russia, China and Sri Lanka, Ginsburgh and Weber can only offer a relatively inconclusive response to the key question –​‘Is there an optimal level of diversity?’: To mitigate the negative impact of linguistic factionalization, societies have often chosen to standardize by reducing the number of official languages and deny or restrict the usage of others. However, standardization breeds disenfranchisement. Balancing the effects of standardization and disenfranchisement is a delicate task to preserve [the] unity of a diverse society that often represents a necessary condition for sustaining its progress. (Ginsburgh and Weber, 2016: 129) EL research has produced interesting and varied results over the years, with a high degree of sophistication and nuance, even if the use of terminology such as ‘the total stock of language competences’ (Grin et al., 2010: 107) and ‘language related price indexes’ (ibid.: 109), along with the relatively uncritical embrace of theoretical frameworks such as human capital and game theory, are a far cry from what is found in most sociolinguistics research with political economy leanings. As we have observed in the previous two sections, in the latter research, there is little concern with the details of quantitative economics, so important in EL research. Indeed, very few sociolinguists who have incorporated political economy in their work actually cite and/​or engage with the work of Grin and his associates (Ricento, 2015, is an exception). Meanwhile, EL scholars such as Grin have been unapologetic about their lack of engagement with popular strands of research in ‘critical sociolinguistics’, such as the current widespread interest in multilingual (and multi-​ semiotic) repertoires and translanguaging, which has come with a rejection of the notions that languages exist as freestanding entities. Grin acknowledges the complexity of languages in society, but justifies the fact that EL researchers focus on languages as freestanding entities, writing that ‘simplification is a legitimate part of any scientific endeavour’. And, quoting Albert Einstein, he adds that ‘‘the secret is to “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” ’ (Grin, 2016: 34). This call for parsimony is, of course, not uncommon in the sciences, and as Grin sees EL as a scientific endeavour, it is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that on the way to positioning EL as a distinct way of treating language in society, he takes on another popular line of thinking in sociolinguistics: the wholesale embrace of Bourdieusian symbolic capitals and linguistic markets and the framing of language in terms of ‘pride’

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(languages as identity markers) and ‘profit’ (languages as having economic exchange value) (Duchêne and Heller, 2013). Here, he laments that ‘despite the repeated use of terms such as “markets” and “profits”, this line of work completely ignores the language economics literature’ (Grin, 2016: 40). Finally, Grin writes that despite claims made by many sociolinguists that they are taking on important issues related to the interrelationship of language and economics in an increasingly globalized world, one finds no evidence to suggest that changes such as the ‘frequency of use of a minority language, or the meaning that agents assign to the use of their native language as opposed to the use of another language . . . actually proceed from changes in economic variables (since none is identified) or reflect economic processes (since none is explicitly spelled out)’ (ibid.; italics in the original). In a sense, what we have here is a situation that may be described as ‘two ships passing in the night’, with sociolinguistics and EL scholars taking very different ontological and epistemological stances with regard to language in society. This division is not surprising as it parallels a similar current division between mainstream, quantitative economics and much of the literature that currently falls under the heading of political economy, a topic I discuss in Chapter 2. However, it is unfortunate, as sociolinguistic ethnographers who do workplace-​based research would surely benefit from an association with EL researchers who are economists first and foremost, and often employment specialists. Similarly, the more quantitative EL research would be improved by the inclusion of an ethnographic angle. In their recent edited collection, Michele Gazzola and Bengt-​ArneWickström (2016) lean in this direction, as they include several chapters that are notably ethnographic in their orientation to EL issues. However, as I note elsewhere (Block, 2017c), said inclusion is done in an add-​on manner, and there is no real attempt to integrate different perspectives on research. In my view, more needs to be done in this sense, as there is a growing interest among bi/​multilingualism researchers in economic issues, such as the employment conditions of migrants. A good example is Elise DuBord’s (2014) account of how Mexican transnational migrants are positioned in the US-​Mexico border region labour market in accordance with their relative commands of English and Spanish.

Language and tourism Another real-​world phenomenon in which political economy and language figure centrally is tourism studies, as an increasing number of researchers turn their attention to how aspects of local and global economies are linked to language policies and practices in the tourist industry (e.g. Jaworski and

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Pritchard, 2005; Jaworski, Thurlow and Heller, 2014; Jaworski, Thurlow, Ylänne-​ McEwen and Lawson, 2009; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012). These researchers find inspiration in ongoing work in anthropology on the ‘commodification of culture’ as a more general construct (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009; Lury, 2011). Foundational to this line of research is the idea that in ‘the new globalized economy, and with the new types of job opportunities it brings (for example in tourism) and the market value it creates for locality, the value, function and experiences of multilingualism and particular languages . . . are also renegotiated and reinvented’ (Pietikäinen and Kelly-​ Holmes, 2011: 327). In more general terms, Heller (e.g. 2011) has argued for a shift in thinking about bi/​multilingualism worldwide, embedding her discussions of evolving policies and practices in the political economic sphere within what she calls ‘postnationalism’. Heller’s take on postnationalism does not include an argument that nation-​states no longer matter; rather, she suggests that we are at a point in history when the nation-​state ceases to be the origin and focal point of all forms of polity, as this role is, in many cases, taken over by supranational or global entities. A special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics, edited by Monica Heller, Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow and published in 2014, provides an interesting snapshot of this type of inquiry. The contributions to this special issue focus on how locations and practices that have symbolic and use values, as representations of a local culture and as ways of making friendship networks (or, even more broadly, social cohesion), respectively, come to be sold to tourists as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, consumable cultural nuggets. Indeed, tourism perhaps always has been thus, but in recent years it has certainly become what Heller, Jaworski and Thurlow (2014) refer to as ‘a symbolic market place’. On the one hand, ‘material goods have acquired cultural values that index, or communicate, meaning beyond their use value, e.g. status, group membership, sophistication, rebelliousness, and so on’ (Heller et  al., 2014:  433). On the other hand, ‘cultural goods that were not originally associated with economic exchange, e.g. linguistic codes and varieties, have come to be produced, distributed and used in accordance with the principles of economic markets’ (ibid.). Another strand of language and tourism research that draws on political economy to some extent, is Thurlow and Jaworski’s research on global elites and mobility (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2009; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017). Focusing on prestige and elitism at the high end of the global tourist market, Thurlow and Jaworski bring together a good number of conceptual strands. They thus draw on Marx, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Bourdieu and Gunther Kress, all with a view to understanding how class, space, discourse, distinction and semiotics, respectively, come together in

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the analysis of mobile elite tourist experiences. Their position is encapsulated in the following quote: Class distinctions and social inequalities hinge on and arise through enculturated symbolic economies as much as they do on material or political ones. Furthermore, the ability to use and shape ‘symbolic goods, especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence, constitutes one of the key markers of ‘‘class’’ and also the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984, 66). Communication is thus always ideological in that it not only (1) constitutes identities and relationships of power, and (2) reproduces dominant systems of belief (or ‘good taste’), but also because it (3) maintains structures of inequality and privilege. (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2012: 490–​491) Given the Marxist position that I  take with regard to class and inequality, I would have to differ strongly with Thurlow and Jaworski regarding the first claim in this quote, namely, that ‘enculturated symbolic economies’ are as much a basis of class and inequality as ‘material or political ones’. I say this because it is hard for me to imagine how discourse and other symbolic activity could actually cause material inequalities, given the bases of these inequalities in the practices and human relations that constitute material economic activity. On the other hand, I can accept that discourses and symbolic activity are a part of social realities, in that they do mediate and can be said contribute to the constitution of these realities. In any case, I did not include this quote in this section in order to pursue this line of argument; rather, I am interested in the authors’ examination of four cases of ‘luxury travel’, and how semiotic resources simultaneously index and constitute elite status. These cases are what they call ‘global elite’ (an examination of Emirates Airlines and the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai), ‘retro-​elite’ (an examination of the Simplon Orient Express, which travels from Venice to London), ‘egalitarian elite’ (the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas) and ‘imperial elite’ (formation of the Phinda private game reserve in South Africa). Each case is about a particular positioning of global elites:  as members of a class apart, able to afford what few can afford (global elite); as members of the cultured class that respects tradition (retro-​elite); as members of a transversal, vague community of gamblers, albeit members able to gamble far harder and far longer than the majority (egalitarian elite); and as members of a class with a historical sensitivity anchored in the nineteenth century (imperial elite). And across these and other sites of global elitism are several common elements. First, there are constant discursively constructed reminders to members of the mobile global elite that they are privileged, special, distinct and so on. In addition, in all four of the examined sites of global elitism, an (over-​) abundance of

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space is available, even if this is space is, on the whole, underpopulated and underutilized. A  third common element in global elite sites is the constant provision of service, but often in such a way that the people serving are, in effect, ‘invisible’ and unobtrusive. Finally, being a global elite is about what Thurlow and Jaworski call ‘performing plenty’, which involves the ability to consume abundantly and ‘conclusively’, but with good taste and manners, a phenomenon identified long ago by Thorsten Veblen ([1899] 2007) and more recently by Bourdieu (1984). My general view of the two strands of language and tourism research briefly discussed in this section is that while publications deal in an interesting way with how economic factors intersect with sociocultural factors, they also tend to manifest what I see as a certain slippage, away from the economic towards the sociocultural in the course of their development. In publications based on the general notion of cultural commodification, I  find that issues around nationalism (post or otherwise) and ethnolinguistic identity tend to skirt around economically grounded inequality, understood in terms of class. In effect, class either remains underdeveloped as a construct or recedes into the background to a great extent. The same applies, and perhaps even more, to publications on mobile elite tourism. Here, despite the interesting combination of theoretical frameworks, there is ultimately a tendency for researchers to become far more involved with issues around semiotics and communication than with economic phenomena.

Critical Discourse Studies (Critical Discourse Analysis) A final area of inquiry where political economy has made inroads is what has traditionally been called CDA, but which has more recently been renamed CDS. Except where I quote authors who have used CDA, here I will use CDS as a cover term. I have opted for CDS instead of CDA because it seems to be more all-​compassing in outlook, seeking interfaces between CDA and ethnography. In this regard, Michal Krzyzanowski (2011) writes of a move from CDA to CDS, explaining that ‘while still drawing on some of the CDA’s original ideas (e.g. on the interplay of language/​discourse and ideology as well as of their constitutive force in social relations), [CDS] clearly reaches beyond the traditional “schools” or “trends” of the movement . . . towards more contextually oriented and actor-​related types of analysis’ (Krzyzanowski, 2011: 231). It is worth noting that what Krzyzanowski writes about CDS is consistent with Heller’s (2011) calls for a ‘critical ethnographic’ approach to the study of language and society issues.

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Elsewhere, Johann Unger (2016) sees CDS as ‘a reaction against the sometimes staid and rigid disciplinary boundaries of linguistics and other disciplines’, highlighting its theoretical, methodological and conceptual interdisciplinarity: Theoretically, CDS draws not just on linguistics but on critical theory, sociology, politics, psychology and cognitive science, among others. The different methodologies used by scholars, while not fixed or prescriptive, have typically been drawn from traditions such as text linguistics, social psychology, ethnography, corpus linguistics and many others. In terms of application, CDS has widely been applied to different social, political and cultural phenomena that are not necessarily only to do with language, and indeed this has also been seen as an indispensable orientation when analysing complex social problems. (Unger, 2016: 2) Whatever the term we use, the research carried out in the vein described by Krzyzanowski and Unger casts a critical eye on semiosis, understood as the processes through which multiple semiotic modes are deployed or simply emerge in ‘the inter-​subjective making of meaning’ (Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer, [2002] 2010: 220). And given its critical roots, it is perhaps where one would expect to find strong roots in political economy. After all, Norman Fairclough’s (1992) early work on the creeping marketization of institutional discourses was clearly linked to economic globalization, and CDS, on the whole, has always sought not only to analyse discourse, but also to challenge dominant ideologies and propose changes in power relations in societies (Zotzmann and O’Regan, 2016). However, with notable exceptions (see contributions to the special issues of Critical Discourse Studies edited by Machin and Richardson, 2008, and Phelan and Dahlberg, 2014), over the years many CDS researchers seem to have abandoned explicit links to Marxism as more Foucauldian notions of power and ideology have taken over. This can be seen in much of the current work focusing on nationalism, racism, xenophobia, gender bias, homophobia and environmentalism being published in monographs (e.g. Van Dijk, 2010; Wodak, 2015) and journals such as Critical Discourses Studies and Language and Politics). This research takes on issues related to inequality, but does so in terms of membership in social groups, and not in terms of economic inequality and social class. In this sense, the focus seems to be more on oppression and marginalization than exploitation (John Gray, personal communication). In addition, such work tends to conflate discourse and material realities, and this has led to much criticism from scholars such as Holborow, who for some years now has been challenging CDS on this point. For example, in her 1999 book discussed earlier, Holborow writes of her concern about an emergent general view in sociolinguistics based on ‘postmodernist commentaries which see language as the producer of inequality and

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counter-​discourses as social change’ (Holborow, 1999:  194). This ‘postmodernist’ approach, in her view, ignores the material bases of inequality and how ‘language is of a different order to historical events’ (ibid.). Some years later, Holborow’s opinion of CDS does not seem to have changed much, as she laments that in the field ‘wider social questions of political economy, of class, or of the role of higher education in capitalism, while sometimes formally noted, do not form a critical component of the analysis’ (Holborow, 2015: 118). In the light of criticism of this type, or perhaps simply due to a change of heart, Fairclough (2014) has recently felt compelled to restate the case for a ‘radical view of CDA’, in a sense reminding both researchers and readers of the links to Marxism and the notion of class struggle on which his CDA was originally based: A radical view of CDA . . . emphasises the power behind discourse rather than just the power in discourse (how people with power shape the ‘order of discourse’ as well as the social order in general, versus how people with power control what happens in specific interactions such as interviews). It correspondingly emphasises ideology rather than (just) persuasion and manipulation. It views discourse as a stake in social struggle as well as a site of social struggle, and views social struggle as including class struggle. It sets as an objective for CDA raising people’s consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, as a step towards social emancipation. (Fairclough, 2014: 2) If heeded, Fairclough’s call may serve to forestall critiques of the field such those developed by Holborow, who suggests that much recent CDS research seems be more ‘discourse –​internal’ than political economic in nature. She cites as an example Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) book focusing in great detail on the structure of argumentation in political discourse (Holborow, personal communication). Still, I would not want to leave the impression that CDS has been bereft of any well-​developed political economy perspectives. For example, as I noted above, it is in Fairclough’s early CDA publications that one finds the first references to the rise of ‘enterprise’ culture and the ‘marketization’ of institutional discourses (Fairclough, 1992, 1995). Fairclough captured very well how from the late 1970s onwards, more and more domains of activity were being discursively constructed in terms of the market metaphor (Kelly-​Holmes and Mautner, 2010; Mautner, 2010). Following this line of inquiry, Joseph Park (2013) has recently examined how ‘diversity management’ in Singaporean workplaces has been co-​opted by neoliberal management discourses in such a way that it ‘not only benefits the company by enhancing its public image, but also allows corporations to maximally utilize their employees’ potential by

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harnessing the wide-​ranging skills, knowledge, and experience represented by their varying cultural and social backgrounds’ (Park, 2013: 559). Brit-​Louise Gunnarsson (2010) makes a similar point examining how, via their web pages, Swedish companies celebrate difference and diversity in the workplace. And further to this kind of discursive colonization, at the more concrete level of actual practices, there is the encroachment of business and jobs on areas of individuals’ personal lives, which were previously considered separate from the world of work. These areas are increasingly incorporated into extensions of the workday beyond the physical and psychological borders that existed previously, an example being organized drinking fests and the glorification of the worker who is available 24/​7 (Fleming, 2015). Meanwhile, Holborow (2012, 2013, 2015) has taken a slightly different tack in terms of methodology. Following Raymond Williams’s (1985) influential work on ‘keywords’, she has examined the rise to prominence in education and society at large of ‘neoliberal keywords,’ such as ‘the market’, ‘human capital’, ‘the entrepreneur’ and ‘austerity’. She shows how these and other constructs become agents of ideology as they help form and shape our ways of understanding the world around us and events in it. In effect, they ‘are so much a part of the dominant ideology that they pass unnoticed [even if] their meanings are in flux and disputed’ (Holborow, 2015: 72). Equally interested in the language of neoliberalism, Christian Chun (2017) examines the ways that academics, politicians, the media and lay people represent the economy in the wake of the 2007–2008 economic crisis. Chun adopts a clearly Marxist-​based discourse analytic framework as he focuses on the kinds of common-​sense understandings of the economy that lay people construct; media representations of the economy and how it works; how hegemonic and counter-​hegemonic discourses interrelate and stand in open conflict with each other; and how despite the recurrence of economic crises, so endemic to capitalism, members of the general public never seem to lose their faith in capitalism as the only viable economic system.

Where this is leading In the preceding sections, I  have cited a good number of publications that contain some element of political economy. I have attempted to be comprehensive, while realizing that no survey can ever include every single relevant publication ever produced. In this sense, what has been discussed here amounts to a sample of what is out there and one that is partial in both senses of the word (i.e. incomplete and reflecting the view of the author). But the important issue to my mind is not whether or not my coverage has been complete; rather, it is what these publications reveal about how sociolinguists

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have engaged with political economy. In my view, several problems arise, which I now briefly outline. First, it is worth noting how in many of the cited publications, the term ‘political economy’ does not appear, and where it does, it is generally not defined or problematized. Exceptions, of course, exist, such as some of the contributions to Ricento (2015) and Shin and Park (2016a). But the general tonic is a passing mention of political economy, with little or no consideration of what the term might mean or what kind of political economy researchers are actually doing. The same applies to neoliberalism, inequality and social class, phenomena that are often flagged as important but without any clarity about what they mean. In my view, this lack of attention to the theoretical foundations in research that aims to work in an interdisciplinary manner, taking a political economic angle on the interpretation and analysis of sociolinguistics issues, is problematic to say the least. It is simply not enough to cite the handful of sources that it seems everyone cites, such as David Harvey’s (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism, or Michel Foucault’s (2008) The birth of biopolitics, and then apply them in a very loose way. Instead, I think it is important to have an understanding of the past and present of political economy, and above all what a political economy–​inspired analysis entails. This requires an at-​least partial immersion in the larger number of publications currently being produced, in addition to reading older sources, from the foundational work in classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill), to Marx’s critique, and then moving through the twentieth century and the work of scholars such as John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. In the three chapters that follow, I aim to remedy this situation by taking terminology and concepts seriously. I provide in-​depth discussions of, in order, political economy, neoliberalism and stratification, inequality, and social class. In Chapter  2, I  engage in a discussion of political economy, beginning with some historical background as I  consider its provenance and nature. I  then move to a somewhat detailed discussion of Marx and Engels’s critical political economy, focusing in particular on humanism, alienation and the human condition. I also discuss the relationship between the field known as ‘Economics’ and the field known as ‘Political Economy’. I  note key differences between these two fields, before exploring different currents of thought within political economy. Here I consider the fields most appropriate to the study of sociolinguistic issues in neoliberal times, Global Political Economy and International Political Economy. I end this chapter positioning myself within a critical Marxist global political economy. In Chapter  3, I  provide an in-​depth discussion of neoliberalism, situating it as the focus of much of the political economy literature coming out currently. I begin with some thoughts on the ubiquity of neoliberalism in current

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debates and in the social sciences, before moving to provide a history of the term and the economic realities that it represents. I  then discuss some of the main features of neoliberalism in practice. This discussion of neoliberalism sets up Chapter 4, in which I discuss phenomena often associated with the neoliberal era, focusing on the increasing stratification of societies, the inequality that is integral to that stratification, and class as specific type of inequality. As is the case in Chapters 2 and 3, this chapter is highly theoretical. However, the aim of the three chapters together is to address the point made earlier, about the need for a stronger theoretical background in political economy for sociolinguistics. Another issue arising from my discussion is how political economy and concepts derived thereof are applied in sociolinguistics research. On the whole, I do not have a problem with the content and analysis of the studies cited, except to say that in most cases a more explicit link could be made between the political economy background and the research being carried out. It is not my intention in this book to say to readers: ‘This is how you do it’. However, in Chapters 5 and 6, I take the reader on a journey through some of my recent applications of political economy to language in society issues, doing so with two purposes in mind. First, I  wish to show how political economy is applicable to a necessarily selective range of events and phenomena that fall under the general heading of sociolinguistics (i.e. those that I have examined). Second, I aim to provide more political economy background in my discussion than has generally been the case in previous sociolinguistic research. In this sense, I aim to achieve what Irvine and Gal perhaps had in mind when they wrote about applying political economy to issues in sociolinguistics. In Chapter 5, my main focus is on how neoliberal subjectivity is now so pervasive as to be the model of citizenship in contemporary societies. Expanding on the discussion in Chapter 3 of how neoliberalism has a great impact on how we live our lives, I  begin with a consideration of what I  mean by the neoliberal citizen, before embarking on a lengthy discussion of key constructs that have contributed to my understanding of this figure. In order, I consider notions such as ‘market civilization (Gill, 2016), ‘neoliberal rationality’ (Dardot and Level, 2013), ‘neoliberal normativity’ (Brown, 2005), ‘biopolitics’ and homo oeconomicus (Foucault, 2008), ‘rational choice theory’ (Elster, 1989) and ‘human capital’ (Becker, 1964). I then go on to consider ‘entrepreneurship’, the new fashionable term for politicians and policy makers, and ‘self-​branding’, as the new-​age quest for a distinct identity and as what makes it possible for individuals to compete successfully in markets of all kinds. From this theoretical background, I move to discuss in detail four specific cases that reflect my research interests in recent years, but also work as ways to illuminate our understanding of the neoliberal citizen and show how the figure is alive and well in contemporary societies. The first case draws

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on my recent work with John Gray on language teaching materials, analysed critically from a political economy perspective (Block and Gray, 2018; Gray and Block, 2014). Specifically, I examine French-​language textbooks as an example of how French-​language learners are positioned as particular types of people, namely, individualistic, entrepreneurial, neoliberal citizens. The second case, of a very different nature, is a recent law passed by the Spanish Parliament to promote entrepreneurship. At issue here is how the law in question defines ideal citizenship, and how, according to its internal logic, entrepreneurs as ideal citizens are expected to pull Spain out of the current economic crisis, which has seen record high unemployment and a marked increase in inequality in Spanish society. The third case, once again, is very different from the previous two cases, as I show how the European Commission’s (EC) Horizon 2020 framework, through the topics proposed for research and the language used to describe what research is required, aligns itself with the same neoliberal discourses of competiveness and entrepreneurial values integral to the previous two cases. The fourth case moves away from the text analysis approach central to the previous three cases, focusing on Josef Ajram, a celebrity broker in Spain. Drawing on how Ajram self-​presents in his books and on television, I show how he embodies all the key characteristics of the neoliberal citizen  –​entrepreneurial, individualistic, competitive and so on  –​ and how he manages successfully to combine these characteristics with his self-​positioning as young and cool. I close the chapter by tying the different contexts examined together, reiterating my main argument that neoliberalism –​as an ideology, as a set of practices, as a rationality –​has penetrated deeply into the souls of citizens in contemporary societies. In Chapter  6, I  return to the topic of inequality and class developed in Chapter  4, focusing more specifically on class struggle and class warfare. Class struggle, the inevitable conflict emerging from divergent class interests and the competition for material resources, becomes class warfare when economic policies in practice constitute a veritable attack on the well-​being of the popular classes. I begin with the specific instance of home evictions in Spain, on the rise since the 2007–​2008 economic crisis began. Home evictions are material events, but here I  am more concerned with how they are fought about in the discursive, symbolic realm. In particular, I follow an ongoing battle around the discursive construction of home evictions that has arisen in recent years between the governing Partido Popular (hereafter, PP –​the Spanish conservative party, in power from late 2011 up to the time of writing) and a grass-​ roots organization, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (hereafter, PAH –​Platform for those Affected by Mortgages), which advocates on behalf of home evictees. Ultimately, this battle over the nature and meaning of home evictions is not just about these events; rather, it is part of a broader class conflict and a higher-​level ideological struggle in Spain over the type of society

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that would best serve the interests of the population. It is also a struggle over ‘truth’ and I am concerned with how what I discuss here connects with the current interest in ‘post-​truth’ as well as the notion of ‘corrupt discourses’ (Block, 2016a, in prepration). With this in mind I consider acts of corruption committed by members of the PP that have been subjected to political and media scrutiny in recent years. These scandals involve real, material actions, such as embezzlement and kickbacks, but they also involve public explanations of these actions. Here we see the corruption of governance morphing into the corruption of the communicative means employed to talk about it, as prominent members of the PP attempt to explain the unexplainable and defend the undefendable in press conferences. All this occurs as the PP remains in power in Spain and exercises a great deal of control over public institutions, such as the judiciary, while making use of its well-​established access to the media. I end with some thoughts on the usefulness of CDS as a field able to make contributions to ongoing critical political economy discussions of stratification, inequality, class and class struggle in contemporary societies. I close the book with the epilogue, in which I briefly summarize the book’s contents before offering a few thoughts regarding the nature and purpose of sociolinguistic research from a political economic perspective.

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2 Political economy: Background and approach

Introduction The overarching frame of this book is political economy, and in the sections that follow I take the reader on a journey through what I see as key issues in a broad and ever-​evolving field. I begin with some general, initial thoughts on the provenance and nature of political economy before entering into a more detailed discussion of Marx and Engels’s version of the field, focusing in particular on humanism, alienation and the human condition. In somewhat of a sideways move, I then develop a discussion of the relationship between the field known as ‘Economics’ and political economy, before moving to the variants of political economy that are most relevant to the examination of sociolinguistic issues in the current neoliberal era: Global Political Economy (GPE) and International Political Economy (IPE). I end the latter section by positioning myself within a critical Marxist GPE. From here I consider issues around ontology and epistemology, taking a critical realist stance, a position I believe is part and parcel of a political economy approach to social realities, including those falling inside the realm of sociolinguistics. I close the chapter with some concluding comments.

Why political economy? Political economy is generally understood as an area of enquiry with roots in the eighteenth century or much earlier. In his history of German political economy Tomas Riha (1985) has suggested that it existed as far back in time as the fifteenth century, before moving on to cite a long list of scholars who arguably were doing political economy from the seventeenth century

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onwards. Elsewhere, Benjamin Franklin, American renaissance man of the eighteenth century, is also positioned by some as an early political economist (Dobson, 2009). Franklin was an avid follower of his contemporaries in France, François Quesnay and Anne-​Robert Jacques Turgot, who were key figures in what came to be known as the physiocratic school of economics. In response to mercantilist economics, which focused on wealth creation through trade and the accumulation of gold, the physiocrats supported the view that the land and its agricultural exploitation are the sources of wealth in a society, and that agricultural labour is the primary source of value. This pre-​industrial take on wealth no doubt appealed to Franklin, given his activism in both colonial (pre-​1776) and postcolonial (after 1776) America. However, not surprisingly, it was severely critiqued a century later by Marx, a scholar very much situated in times of industrial revolutions, and therefore not likely to embrace a view of economics so rooted in agriculture.1 Indeed, Marx ([1867] 1990: 174) suggests that the classical political economy that he critiqued in the three volumes of Capital and other works began with William Petty ([1662] 2011), who wrote of labour, mediated by nature, as the ‘father of material wealth’ (Marx, [1867] 1990:  134). Still, it is Adam Smith ([1776] 2012), Jean Baptiste Say (1803), David Ricardo ([1817] 2004) and John Stuart Mill ([1848–​65] 2004), who are positioned by Marx as the key figures in the rise of political economy as an area of inquiry. Friedrich Engels, who accompanied Marx on his intellectual journey through philosophy, history, politics and economics, provides the following definition of political economy in the midst of his attempt to explain Marxist thinking to a wide audience: Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange –​being necessarily an exchange of products –​cannot occur without production. Each of these two social functions is subject to the action of external influences which to a great extent are peculiar to it and for this reason each has, also to a great extent, its own special laws. But on the other hand, they constantly determine and influence each other to such an extent that they might be termed the abscissa and ordinate of the economic curve. The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country, and within each country again from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and for all historical epochs. . . . Anyone who attempted to bring the political economy of Tierra del Fuego under the same laws as are operative in present-​day England would obviously produce nothing but the most banal commonplaces.

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Political economy is therefore essentially a historical science. (Engels, [1878] 1976: 187–​188) This definition would appear to be, for the most part, very technical, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between production and exchange and subsistence. However, in Marxist scholarship these two processes are not just technical; rather, they are about human relations and a range of ancillary political, social and cultural phenomena, as well as the human condition (hence Engels’s reference to ‘the action of external influences’ to which production and exchange processes are subject). To make this point more clearly, we need only consider Marx’s continuous references to political and legal goings-​on in England and Europe at large: his comments on the life conditions of the proletariat, as in his account of the working day in Capital 1; his conceptualizations of exploitation and alienation; and finally, his political activism. In addition, Engels highlights here the historical situatedness of economic activity across geographical locations, an idea that has more recently been captured in discussions of ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and ‘variegated neoliberalism’ (Peck and Tickel, 2002). In short, Marxist political economy as a critique of capitalism was neither narrowly technical nor economist in nature; rather, it was about societies writ large. It was, in addition, humanist if not in the moral or ethical terms associated with classical humanism, certainly in sense that it was centred on the human condition. It was about how the working class, as a historical subject, lived and made sense of their lives, and the prospects that this same working class might change society for the better through their actions (where the latter are shaped by larger socioeconomic structures). I insert humanism into my discussion of Marxist thought, knowing full well that taking such a position is controversial across a range of disciplines. However, my aim is to counter-​rest a tendency, alive and well, to frame Marxist thought as economistic with no human soul.

The human dimension In a general discussion of humanism, Andrew Copson (2015:  6)  highlights three key elements that characterize it. First, humanism may be seen as an approach to life, which is ‘democratic and ethical’, based on the principle that ‘human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives’. Second, humanism is about the ‘building of a more humane society’. This is achieved via the application of an ethics based on ‘human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry’. Third and finally, humanism is seen as a secular current of thought and in this sense it is neither theistic nor based on supernatural views of any kind. In my view, Marxist

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thought is compatible with this definition, although not everyone would agree with this assessment. For example, in a book titled Humanism:  The wreck of western culture, John Carroll is venomous in his portrayal of Marx as a ‘wrecker’ of humanism, writing the following: Marx was the chief mocker. Three aspects of his character combined to make him ideal for the role: an instinct for where the enemy’s strength lay, an intelligence that in its learned incisiveness made him tower over other radicals, and an unscrupulously violent and malicious temperament. . . . He was driven by his own extraordinarily aggressive disposition to imagine the total destruction of western culture. His true pleasure and goal was in annihilation for its own sake. (Carroll, 1993: 138) Carrol goes on to accuse Marx of being anti-​Semitic (another all-​too-​common charge made against him) and guilty of other crimes against Western civilization, including, of course, his purported anti-​humanism. However, a more serious assessment of Marx’s humanism recognizes that one of his chief concerns was the human condition of the proletariat in industrializing societies of the nineteenth century, and his agreement with notions such as ‘human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives’ and the need to ‘build . . . a more humane society’ (Copson, 2015: 6). Such notions are captured in the following, more recent assessment of Marxist political economy: The whole of Marx’s political economy is grounded in the opening premise that the capitalist system can only be a dynamic entity when the needs of that system are forcibly prioritized over the rights of individuals to live as autonomous human beings. The production of the capitalist system overrides that autonomy by turning individuals into a functional part of the system. (Watson, 2012: 41) This comment, taken on its own, leaves out of Marxist political economy an explicit reference to class and class struggle, a defining element in capitalism, according to Marx. It also perhaps gives the impression that a single Marxist political economy exists, a position that must be treated with a degree of caution as it is not always easy to know for sure how to describe Marxist thought. Indeed, much time and effort have been invested in discussions of whether or not Marx was a stable, one-​track thinker during his lifetime or one who experienced a major paradigm shift in the late 1840s, still relatively early in an academic career, which was to go on until his death in 1883. Louis Althusser famously wrote about (and, indeed, invented) the idea that there was an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s intellectual trajectory, one that occurred in the

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1840s, when ‘Marx simultaneously broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectal materialism)’ (Althusser, 1969:  33). Thus in works such as Economic and philosophic manuscripts (Marx, [1844] 1988) and The poverty of philosophy (Marx, [1847] 2005), Marx is said to have shifted his attention from his early Herderian and Feuerbachian influences to take up a decidedly less idealistic position, grounded in society and not consciousness, on the way to his so-​called scientific political economy. This view of Marx’s intellectual development is not shared by all, as we see in E. P. Thompson’s scathing rebuttal to Althusser, The poverty of theory (Thompson, 1995). I am neither particularly interested in, nor qualified to engage in the ‘two Marx’s’ debate. However, I  am interested in how in his intellectual development and evolution over time, Marx followed events around him (the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848 may be cited here) and of course his reading –​his well-​documented immersion in political and economic transcripts and published works from the late 1840s onwards. I see certain never-​abandoned humanist threads of thought running through his work over decades. One such thread is the essential notion of alienation of labour, which Marx defined as follows: First, . . . labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. . . . his labor is . . . not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. (Marx, [1844] 1988: 74) Alienation from labour unfolds in four interrelated dimensions. First, the worker comes to feel alienated from the product of his2 labour, because through the division of labour, the thing that he makes becomes ‘an alien object exercising power over him’ (ibid.: 75). The worker also feels alienated from the process of labour, the act of production, living it ‘as an alien activity not belonging to him’ as he tires of ‘suffering strength as weakness . . . [and] begetting as emasculating’ (ibid.: 75). Third, the worker feels alienated from himself as a human being as ‘estranged labor turns . . . man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual property, into a being alien to him’ (ibid.: 77). In other words, alienation from labour takes away that which distinguishes human beings from animals, the capacity not only to eat, sleep and procreate, but also the ability to create and to reflect and to ‘make . . . life activity the object of . . . [one’s] will and of . . . [one’s] consciousness’ (ibid.: 76). Ultimately, this estrangement from one’s

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self as a human being becomes the fourth dimension of the alienation from labour, what Marx calls ‘estrangement of man from man’ (ibid.: 78). In his description of the feelings of alienation experienced by workers in mid-​nineteenth-​century England, Engels may be credited with having influenced Marx. According to Tristram Hunt (2009), Engels’s The condition of the working class in England (published in 1845) had a profound effect on Marx when he first read it. Indeed, in Capital 1, Marx writes of ‘how well Engels understood the spirit of the capitalist mode of production . . . and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances [of workers] in detail’ ([1867] 1990: 349). In the book, Engels charts large-​scale population growth and movement to industrializing cities during the period 1780–​1840, adopting at times an almost celebratory tone as regards England’s status as the most industrialized society on earth at this time in history. The book is, in part, directed at ‘the English middle class, especially the manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by the poverty of the workers’ (Engels, [1845] 2009: 63) in these emerging industrial centres. For Engels, it was the bourgeoisie who ignored the misery that was growing around them as industrialization, integral to the rise of capitalism, continued inexorably. Engels goes into great detail about the life conditions of factory and mining workers, describing how they lived in filthy and overcrowded spaces, which led to a long list of health problems, including malnutrition, consumption, lockjaw and different types of lung disease (e.g. pneumonia), to say nothing of the numerous existential injustices experienced inside and outside the workplace. Regarding children, the situation is presented as particularly serious, as entry into the workplace at too young an age led to or was associated with the same long list of ills affecting adults. In broader terms, Engels also discusses in detail the cities in which the proletariat were forced to live (ibid.: 68–​110) and, indeed, he provides a definition of class. Demonstrating how political economy is not just about economics (a point I explore in depth in the next section), he frames class as a phenomenon rooted not only in wealth, property and one’s relationship to the means of production, but also in terms of various social factors, such as nutrition, shelter and clothing, all considered today to be key indexicals of class position (see Chapter 4). This view of class comes across in the following quote, in which he summarizes the content of his chapter about cities: Every working man . . . is therefore constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in this way. The dwellings of the workers are everywhere badly planned, badly built, and kept in the worst condition, badly ventilated, damp, and unwholesome. The inhabitants are confined to the smallest possible space, and at least one family usually sleeps in each room. The interior arrangements of the dwellings is poverty-​ stricken in various degrees, down to the utter absence of even the most

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necessary furniture. The clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty, and that of great multitudes is in rags. The food is, in general, bad, often almost unfit for use, and in many cases, death by starvation results. (ibid.: 108) Notwithstanding so much talk about the shift to services-​based economies, the conditions described in this quote, and throughout The condition of the working class in England, are very much in existence today in many parts of the world, in particular in offshored industrial sites. As David Harvey has noted, ‘the labour conditions in the clothing factories of Bangladesh, the electronics factories in southern China, the maquiula factories strung along the Mexican border [with the United States] or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are much closer to those which Marx was so familiar’ (Harvey, 2014: 129) than what one would expect to find in the twenty-​first century. Elsewhere, Erik Loomis (2015) describes how in far too many offshored contexts, outright greed and a lack of concern for human life (or, in any case, the work conditions of factory workers) have combined to produce disasters such as the collapse of a clothing factory in Dhaka in 2013, which killed over 1,000 workers.

Marxist political economy and the field of economics The kind of political economy that Marx and Engels were developing in the mid-​nineteenth century was significant in at least two ways with regard to the discussion here. On the one hand, it continued a tradition seen in Adam Smith’s work, whereby economic affairs are embedded in political and social activities, culture and geography, or, in any case, they are inextricably linked to these spheres and are necessarily intersected by them. On the other hand, Marx and Engels were developing a way of looking at economic matters that was divergent from the neoclassical economics that was to arise from the 1870s onwards and was based on the principles of positivism and scientism.3 This relatively narrow version of economics continues to this day, and it is often critiqued by contemporary economists (e.g. Mirowski, 2013; Piketty, 2014). However, it was also critiqued nearer to its beginnings when prominent scholars of the latter part of the nineteenth century, such as Emile Durkheim and Thorsten Veblen, weighed in to make their views known: Political economy thus lost all the benefits of its beginnings. It remained an abstract and deductive science, concerned not with the observation of reality but with the construction of a more or less desirable ideal; for this man in general, this systematic egoist of which it speaks is only a being

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of reason. Real man, whom we know and who we are, is far more complex:  he is of a time and of a country, he has a family, a city, a country, religious and political faith, and all these resorts, and many others, mingle, combine in a thousand ways, intersect and intertwine their influence without it being possible to say, at first glance, where one begins and the other ends.4 (Durkheim, 1888: 7–​8) The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area but leave him intact . . . He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-​poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down on him, whereupon he follows the line of the resultant (Veblen, [1899] 2007: 389–​390). These two quotes, published just a decade apart and aimed at very different audiences, share a very similar disdain for the mainstream study of economics of the time. Durkheim was a French sociologist and Veblen an American economist, but their respective assessments of the field of economics lean in the same direction: both criticize what they see as excessive concern among economists of the period with rational individuals acting in calculable and predictable ways, and they frame this emphasis as oversimplifying, reductionist and ultimately unrealistic, given the complexity of societies and the individuals and their actions constituting them. In this sense, and to varying degrees and in different ways, their words are consistent with Marx and Engels’s view of political economy outlined above. Both views are remarkably similar to calls made a century later for a more political, social and cultural approach to the study of economic phenomena, for example, the kind made in Pierre Bourdieu’s (2005) The social structures of society, where the author proposes an ‘economic anthropology’. In one of his last book-​length efforts, Bourdieu develops a sustained anthropologically based critique of late-​nineteenth-​century economics, exemplifying his main theoretical points through a close examination of the intricacies of the housing market as a field of social activity. One key argument that he develops is that economists need to focus as much on the ‘logic of things’ as they do on ‘things of logic’. This means abandoning a scholastic worldview that finds one of its most perfect expressions in the myth of homo oeconomicus and in ‘rational action theory’, the paradigmatic form of the scholastic illusion, which leads the scholar to project his thinking into the minds of the active agents and to see as underlying their

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practice (that is, as informing their awareness) his own spontaneous or elaborated representations or, worse, the models he has had to construct to account for their practices. (Bourdieu, 2005: 7) It is noteworthy that Bourdieu makes reference to ‘homo oeconomicus’, a concept developed in detail by Foucault some years earlier and to which we will return in Chapter 5. He also identifies ‘rational action theory’ (also known as ‘rational choice theory’) as an essential part of the problem in economics (also more on this in Chapter 5). However, the big issue here is one that Bourdieu develops elsewhere in his work, namely, the ‘scholastic fallacy’, whereby researchers mistake their research informants for embodiments of their idealized models of human behaviour. Thus, they project ‘theoretical thinking into the heads of acting agents’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 51), as they construct the world as they conceptualize it (or ‘think it’, in Bourdieu’s words). They never entertain the notion that their informants have neither the time nor the inclination to step outside their worlds (and themselves) to contemplate, describe and analyse them in ways similar to those of social scientists.5 Within sociolinguistics, political economy has been framed as a field of inquiry that focuses on and analyses the relationship between the individual and the society and between the market and the state, which seeks to understand how social institutions, their activities and capitalism are interrelated (Block et al., 2012; Shin and Park, 2016b). It is an increasingly interdisciplinary field, and, in this sense, over the past two decades there has been a marked rise in the number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have weighed in with regard to the effects of neoliberal economic policies and practices. Looking at my own personal library, I  can see books by philosophers (Callinicos, 2010; Zizek, 2009), communication specialists (Fuchs, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016; Mosco, 2009), geographers (Harvey, 2010, 2014; Peck, 2010), sociologists (Cox and Nilsen, 2014; Jessop, 2016;), political/​social theorists (Brown, 2005; Dean, 2012), educationalists (Anyon, 2011; Giroux, 2014) and anthropologists (Betéille, 2007; Han, 2012). This trend is, of course, not completely new as there is a long tradition among sociologists of such disciplinary crossovers, from Michael Burawoy’s (1979) factory-​based ethnography, to Scott Lash and John Urry’s (1994) prescient analysis of the ‘the new economy’ of the late twentieth century, to Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie’s (1997) prescient discussion of the neoliberal takeover of higher education.

An alternative to neoclassical economics Nevertheless, given the privileged position of economists within the social sciences, it is not clear that those who self-​define as such actually pay a lot

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of attention to the kind of political economy that undergirds this book. As to why this is the case, we might consider what Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan (2014) have written about the field of economics. The authors argue that economists occupy a privileged position in the social sciences, noting how in the United States they are paid better than their colleagues in geography, sociology and anthropology, and they have better opportunities with regard to funded research and consultancy. On the whole, they enjoy more prestige, resembling physical scientists more than social scientists, and they see themselves capable of not only interpreting real-​world problems but also solving them. All these factors have led to what Fourcade et al. (2014) term the ‘superiority of economists’, which is the linking of their superior (higher prestige) positioning within the social sciences with their feeling of superiority (their snobbishness) towards their fellow social scientists. Fourcade et al. (2014) describe the insularity that comes with this superiority as follows: The intellectual trajectories of the social-​science disciplines diverged substantially over the course of the twentieth century. Economics has left behind the historical emphasis of its continental youth in an effort to emulate paradigmatic natural sciences, such as physics. . . . Unlike their more literary forerunners, modern-​ day economists attribute their intellectual standing and autonomy to their reliance on precisely specified and parsimonious models and measures. They see the field’s high technical costs of entry and its members’ endeavors to capture complex social processes through equations or clear-​cut causality as evidence of its superior scientific commitment, vindicating the distance from and the lack of engagement with the more discursive social sciences. (Fourcade et al., 2014: 3–​4) Fourcade et al. develop this critique of economics from within the field, and what they write may be added to other self-​reflections, both mild (e.g. Piketty, 2014) and harsh (Mirowski, 2013). However, it is instructive to move outside the field to examine other contexts in which the economics-​as-​science/​ economics-​as-​social dichotomy plays out. For example, in mainstream Marxist thought, we have the following hard critique: Economics is more and more about mathematical modelling that abstracts from human relations and behaviour and reduces it to graphs and charts. It is not used as a scientific tool but as propaganda to ‘talk up’ the national or international economy. Most economists’ incomes are tied to constant and rapid growth in stock markets –​so it is no surprise that their predictions err on the side of optimism. In fact all that economists generally do is look at the last 6 months of statistics and project the same trends forward. The kind of economics they teach in university barely equips people for any kind

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of critical thinking about the world around us and how it works. (League for the Fifth International, 2006: npn) This excerpt is taken from the Marxist web page:  the League for the Fifth International. It is not actually very different in content from what non-​ Marxists, such as Durkheim and Veblen, had to say about economics a century and half ago. In this sense, the excerpt portrays the field as more about mathematical modelling than human relations; as more interested and compromised rather than scientific; as superficial and presentist rather than historically grounded; and, finally, as completely uncritical. As regards the lack of criticality, we may in addition say that the League for the Fifth International is, in effect, calling the field of economics ‘vulgar’, a term famously used by Marx to disqualify those he most criticized in his work. In Capital 1 he writes of ‘the vulgar economists who . . . confine themselves to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one’ (Marx, [1867] 1990: 175). These economists never look backstage to see what is generating the surface phenomena that they focus on. Given its Marxist roots, the League for the Fifth International’s critical description of the field of economics is not at all surprising, and I imagine that more than a few readers of this book subscribe to their view, if not fully, at least partially. However, the view is far from mainstream among those who call themselves economists and it is instructive therefore to examine how such individuals position the field of enquiry in which they work. The following rather lengthy definition is taken from the American Economics Association web page: Economics can . . . be defined a few different ways: it’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources, or the study of decision-​making. Economics often involves topics like wealth, finance, recessions, and banking, leading to the misconception that economics is all about money and the stock market. Actually, it’s a much broader discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today’s headlines, and make predictions for coming decades. One of the central tenets of economics is that people want certain things and will change their behavior to get those things –​in other words, people will respond to incentives. A good school district provides an incentive for parents to try to move to a neighborhood if they want to ensure their kids get a good education. Lower wages in another country provide an incentive for a factory to relocate overseas to cut down on costs. High taxes provide an incentive for people to look for ways to hide their income because they want to keep more of their money. Economic study ranges from the very small to the very large. The study of

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choices by individuals (like how someone decides to budget their paycheck each month) is called microeconomics. Researchers have used the tools of microeconomics to measure the link between health and economic well-​ being, study the impact of microloans in poor countries, and understand why people never seem to save as much for retirement as they would like. The study of governments, industries, central banking, and the boom and bust of the business cycle is called macroeconomics. Macroeconomics can help us answer some of the biggest questions about how and why recessions occur, how surges in immigration or gas prices will affect the economy, or what the aging of the Baby Boomer generation could do to the national debt. Important public policy debates revolve around questions of economics. Governments the world over employ economists to help understand how government health programs will affect the incentives of doctors, whether farm subsidies will raise or lower prices at the grocery store, and the best ways to fight poverty. Much of economics involves using data gathered by governments, businesses, or in the laboratory to test hypotheses about whether a certain program, event, or incentive will have the expected effect. Another branch of economics focuses on using economic theory to make predictions about how people and markets will behave. (American Economics Association, n.d.: npn; bold in the original) This definition contains a lot of what the League for the Fifth International web page condemns. It portrays economics as a field that is clearly technical in nature, in which the professed interest in flesh-​and-​blood people is channelled into the investigation of aggregate patterns of human behaviour. Understanding these aggregate patterns, in turn, is essential to the broader and more ambitious goal of modelling economic activity and making predictions about how economies, big (global) and small (regional or nation-​state level), will evolve. However, the definition also contains numerous references to real-​world issues and problems related to institutions, such as education, health and finance, all of which involve social interaction. In this sense, it transcends to some extent the image of a field solely concerned with quantification, control and prediction, and extends outwards to a more encompassing approach to all things economic in contemporary societies and the world at large. In doing so, it connects with the overlapping fields of GPE and IPE, to which I now turn.

The international dimension GPE and IPE emerged as loosely organized fields of inquiry at the confluence of economics and developmental studies from the 1970s onwards. This

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occurred at a time when many economists, political scientists, sociologists, and political and social theorists were beginning to turn their attention to the new phenomenon on the world stage: globalization. As Robert O’Brien and Marc Williams (2013) explain, GPE is often used interchangeably with IPE, although it is possible (and preferable for these authors) to make a temporal distinction with regard to both: whereas IPE is understood to be about phenomena taking place across nation-​state borders up until the last quarter of the twentieth century, GPE refers specifically to goings-​on from the 1970s onwards in what is known as ‘the era of globalization or the global era’. For a more exact definition of GPE, we may turn to a fairly recent collection edited by John Ravenhill (2014a) in which the editor writes the following: Global political economy is a field of enquiry . . . whose central focus is the interrelationship between public and private power in the allocation of scarce resources. It is not a specific approach or set of approaches to studying this subject matter [:]‌. . . the full range of the theoretical and methodological approaches from international and comparative politics has been applied to the study of international political economy . . . Like other branches of the discipline, GPE seeks to answer the classic questions . . .: who gets what, when and how? This definition explicitly identifies questions of distribution as being central to the study of politics. It also points implicitly to the importance of power . . . [which] takes various forms:  in terms of relationships . . . [and as] exercised in the capacity of actors to set agendas. (Ravenhill, 2014b: 18) Meanwhile, O’Brien and Williams (2013) argue that there have been three general approaches to GPE: the economic nationalist, the liberal and the critical. The economic nationalist perspective dates back to the fifteenth century, when nation-​states began to form in Europe. It subscribes to what is known as methodological nationalism (Beck, 2000), situating the state as the sole and central agent and rational actor, and it explores the ways that states aggressively defend their individual interests. The liberal perspective is said to have originated in the nineteenth century and is associated with a long list of scholars, from Immanuel Kant to Smith to Hayek. In a de facto manner, it rejects the methodological nationalism of the first perspective. Indeed, it takes a clearly internationalist or global perspective in which the central individual actors are not only nation-​states but also globalized entities (e.g. banks, transnational corporations, NGOs and so on) and above all, individuals as rational actors. The latter are positioned as the veritable motors of economic activity, transcending nation-​state borders in search of optimal conditions for development and self-​fulfilment.

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As Alan Cafruny, Gonzalo Pozo Martin and Leila Simona Talani(2016) have suggested, the third perspective, the critical, challenges the chief assumptions and ideas undergirding the previous two general approaches, rejecting the idea that economic phenomena can be studied in a vacuum, ahistorically and asocially. With roots in Marxism, feminism, anti-​racism, environmentalism and other epistemological traditions concerned with social justice, it examines relations of power, especially how phenomena such as inequality, domination and exploitation emerge in financial and industrial sectors, acting in collusion with governments. The latter are viewed as defenders of the interests of the ruling classes in detriment to the popular classes. They are also seen to maintain patriarchal social structures and adopt short-​term policies that pose long-​term threats to the environment. Just as Marx did in his critique of classic political economy, critical researchers of all kinds are centred on the demystification of power and the workings of capitalist economies, challenging, for example, the long-​standing notion that the latter are somehow the outgrowth of human nature. Crucially, in parallel with Marx’s mid-​nineteenth-​century observation that while ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, [1845] 1972:  109), critical theorists aim not only to interpret and analyse societies and the world at large, but also to propose ways to make societies and the world at large better (see contributions to Cafruny, Talani and Pozo Martin, 2016). The critical approach is the driving force behind the disciplinary crossover literature cited above, that is, the social scientists and humanities scholars such as Harvey, Alex Callinicos, Burawoy and many others who have either turned their attention to economic issues or infused their areas of interest with economic issues. This approach is Marxist-​based, in that discussions of contemporary realities are grounded in foundational concepts that Marx and Engels developed over a century and half ago, such as capital accumulation, exploitation and alienation. And it is the inspiration for the discussion of a political economic sociolinguistics, which I aim to develop in this book. Nevertheless, before proceeding, a caveat is in order.

An ontological and epistemological consideration Working from political economy to sociolinguistics necessarily entails a reconsideration of how we position ourselves with regard to ontology and epistemology, where the former refers to what we consider to be the nature of being and existence, our ‘actual reality’ and what it is we are studying, researching

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and writing about; and the latter refers to what we consider to be the origin, nature and limits of human knowledge, and how we come to ‘know it’. The kind of political economy that I  have discussed in this chapter, and which will guide this book, is based on realist philosophies, especially that of Roy Bhaskar (1975), which are in conflict with post-​structuralist approaches that have become common, if not dominant, in the social sciences and humanities in recent years. Exact definitions of post​structuralism vary across fields and publications, but when it serves as a frame for research, certain common elements emerge. These were identified some years ago by Bhaskar (2002), and elsewhere I sum them up as follows: Postructuralism is an epistemological approach to the study of reality which, among other things primes difference, relativity, and pluralism and in general celebrates diversity; views life as a pastiche, a collection of experiences, as opposed to a coherent whole; defines the object of research (its ontology) as discursively constructed, eschewing the idea that there is a material reality out there to be taken on board; shows skepticism about, and even a denial of, the necessity to make reference to the ‘real’ world; and often involves judgmental relativism, according to which it is impossible to provide a rationale for adopting one belief or action or practice over another. (Block, 2015a: 26) Poststructuralism is usually positioned as being in direct opposition to positivism, which is about the opposite of what is listed in the previous quote, and, above all, is based on the control of variables in research with a view to making predictions about future events. In a description of his critical realist approach to the social sciences, Bhaskar takes on part of the post-​structuralist agenda when he writes that the social sciences are about ‘the direct study of phenomena that only ever manifest themselves in open systems [in which] invariant empirical regularities do not obtain’ (Bhaskar, 1998: 45) and that are ‘characterised by both a plurality and multiplicity of causes’ (ibid.:  87). His critical realist approach thus eschews accurate prediction as a goal, not least because social phenomena, as ‘open systems’, cannot be accessed at the level at which they are generated, in isolation from the effects that they cause, as is the case with some physical phenomena. However, embedded in what Bhaskar writes is the notion that deep down causal mechanisms are at work in the social world, which exist independent of our ability to know and understand them. He posits the existence of three domains or levels of social reality: (1) the real, that is, the causal mechanisms and structures that produce events and phenomena; (2) the actual, that is, the events and phenomena that happen, as generated by the real; and (3) the empirical, that is, that part of the actual that is experienced or observed by subjects (Bhaskar, 1989).

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Ultimately, Bhaskar criticizes post-​structuralists for committing what he calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’, which takes social constructivism to the extreme of conflating representations of social reality, as socially constructed or discursively constructed, with social reality itself, thereby reducing ontology to epistemology. As Bhaskar (1989: 17–​18) puts it, ‘Statements about being cannot be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge . . . [and] ontological questions cannot always be transposed into epistemological terms.’ The way forward, according to Bhaskar, is to adopt his critical realist perspective, according to which one can be on the one hand, an ‘ontological realist’, which means ‘believing that there is a real world which consists in structures, generative mechanisms, all sorts of complex things and totalities which exist and act independently of the scientist’, and on the other hand, an ‘epistemological relativist’, which means believing that ‘knowledge is itself socially produced; it is a geo-​historically specific social process, so it is continually in transformation’ (Bhaskar, 2002: 211). Historically, political economy scholars, particular those working within a Marxist framework, have tended to take a view of the world that is consistent with Bhaskar’s critical realism, and in this sense, they may be considered, at a minimum, default critical realists. I think it is important to make this point at this juncture in the book because the general approach to ontological and epistemological issues adopted in ensuing chapters will be critical realist in spirit, even if I do not remind the reader of this point as I proceed.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have taken the reader through some of the key basic ideas and developments shaping the political economic approach that I  aim to develop and apply in this book. In the chapters to come, I bear in mind the classic political economy of Adam Smith and others, but it is Marxist political economy that guides my discussions. This Marxist approach provides me with the necessary tools to carry out what I see as a real and effective critique of the underlying structures generating inequality and other forms of injustice in society. In this sense, it serves as an alternative to (and I  believe a superior alternative to) the more mainstream post-​structuralist culturalist analyses and critiques carried out by so many in the social sciences and humanities, including, of course, sociolinguistics. In my view, one does not take a water pistol to combat a house fire and so one cannot take on the kind of predatory capitalism, organized around an exaggerated faith in markets, competition and individualism, with actions that are merely palliative. While ameliorating the most direct and surface-​level aspects of

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social ills, these actions do not take on the underlying structures generating these social ills. We therefore need to work through a Marxist political economic approach to understanding issues in sociolinguistics because the aforementioned predatory capitalism has come to global dominance. This type of capitalism is generally known as ‘neoliberalism’ and is the focus of the next chapter.

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3 Neoliberalism: Historical and conceptual considerations

Introduction In the previous chapter my intention was to explore what we mean by political economy and to set up subsequent discussions of more specific points that will be dealt with throughout this book. In this chapter my aim is to discuss in depth the key term neoliberalism, which has become the focus of much of the literature being published under the general umbrella of political economy in recent years (see a recent handbook edited by Springer, Birch and McLeavey, 2016). This has been the case in particular as regards scholars from across the social sciences who have turned their attention to political economy and framed their disciplines in Marxist terms. The geographer David Harvey is perhaps the best example of such a crossover, with a long series of books, including Social justice and the city (Harvey, 1973), Limits to capital (Harvey, 1982), A brief history of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005), Spaces of global capitalism (Harvey, 2006), The enigma of capital (Harvey, 2010) and Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism (Harvey, 2014). Harvey has written about the more technical aspects of political economy, analysing capital both as a concept and as a material reality in some detail, but he has also done a great deal to politically economize areas of interest in human geography, such as the study of gentrification as the economically driven and class-​based transformation of urban landscapes in cities around the world. Elsewhere, following earlier work by scholars such as Vincent Mosco (2009), the media and communication specialist Christian Fuchs has embedded his research interests in Marxist political economy with the publication of Social media: A critical introduction (Fuchs, 2014a), Digital labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs, 2014b), Culture and economy in the age of social media (Fuchs, 2015) and Reading Marx in the information age:  A  media and communication studies perspective on Capital Volume 1,

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(Fuchs, 2016). Fuchs has situated the use of communicative tools ‘at the heart of neoliberalism’s stress on performance, individualism and personal responsibility for success, failures and downfall’ (Fuchs, 2014b: 70). Meanwhile, in sociolinguistics, I  have been involved in one book-​length attempt to situate neoliberalism as the centre of focus  –​Neoliberalism and applied linguistics (2012; co-​authored with John Gray and Marnie Holborow), and my subsequent book Social class in applied linguistics (2014) was written in the same spirit. Marnie Holborow’s Language and neoliberalism (2015) and Christian Chun’s The discourses of capitalism: Everyday economists and the production of public discourses (2017) are two additional books effecting a Harvey-​like political economy crossover in sociolinguistics. With so much attention to neoliberalism in the social sciences, it is inevitable that issues will arise regarding its ontological and epistemological integrity –​does it actually exist and how does it work as a heuristic for understanding events in the world? This chapter cannot hope to resolve these questions completely, but it is an attempt to clarify what I mean by neoliberalism in the context of this book. With this intention in mind, I  begin with some thoughts on the ubiquity of neoliberalism in current debates and in the social sciences, before moving to provide a history of the term and the economic realities that it represents. I then discuss some of the main concepts associated with neoliberalism. I end by situating this chapter in the overall structure of this book, in particular how it links Chapter 2, as a general introduction to political economy, to Chapter 4, as a more specific discussion of the effects of capitalism: stratification, inequality and social class.

Neoliberalism as the focus of attention in contemporary political economy It would be a gross understatement to say that neoliberalism –​understood in general terms as the latest incarnation of capitalism,1 but this time by more efficient means in more intensively and extensively globalized and technologically advanced circumstances –​has become a (if not the) key term in critical political economy in recent years (Block, 2017a). Arnaud Brennetot (2014), for example, cites J-​STOR statistics showing that the number of articles and books with titles containing the root term ‘neoliberal’ had increased markedly in the period 1990–​2010, and there is little doubt that this upward trend has continued unabated in the years since 2010. Indeed, so popular has the term become that some scholars have been tempted to question its ontological integrity or even if it is necessary to have yet another term to refer to what is, in essence, capitalism pure and simple. And as some authors have

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noted (Boas and Gans-​Morse, 2009; Flew, 2014), the term ‘neoliberalism’ is in danger of becoming trivialized. First, there is the way that it is often used in academic circles as a default epithet for all things that are despised as unjust. It is also a term used not by those who might be deemed to be neoliberals (such as many government leaders) but by those who are critics of neoliberalism. Thus, one very rarely (if ever) hears a prominent politician or an economist saying that he/​she is a card-​carrying ‘neoliberal’. What one does hear is an adherence to the ‘free-​market economy’ and ‘free-​trade’ and perhaps the claim that one is ‘a liberal’, although in the United States this term is used to describe those considered to be on the political left. However, if one scratches a little, one sees how little thought often goes into the playing of the neoliberal card. To exemplify this point, I  could cite a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a fellow sociolinguist, in which my interlocutor referred to his country’s examination system as ‘so neoliberal’. When I asked him what it was about the system that made it ‘so neoliberal’, he responded that it had a rigid, highly selective examination system. My response was to say that the Soviet Union also had a rigid, highly selective examination system (as did many countries in the world in the twentieth century) and that it could hardly have been considered a neoliberal regime. The point is that while neoliberal governance might well lead to such an examination system (as it no doubt has in the United Kingdom over the past thirty odd years), the existence of such a system is not, in and of itself, a clear indexical of neoliberalism. An additional problem with neoliberalism as a concept is that it is sometimes invoked as if it were a uniform phenomenon, that is, as if neoliberalism in one context is the same as neoliberalism in another context. It is far more accurate to say that neoliberalism is, above all, a variegated phenomenon, playing itself out in different ways in different contexts, as local historical, political, social, cultural and geographical characteristics come together to constitute local varieties of capitalism (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010). The case of China, often under the spotlight in current discussions of capitalism in the world, is an especially interesting case. In his oft-​cited introduction to neoliberalism, Harvey (2005) discusses ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’, which echoes and owes much to Marx’s ([1867] 1990) far earlier discussion of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in Capital 1. For Harvey, Chinese neoliberalism is ‘the construction of [a]‌particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized power’ (Harvey, 2005: 120). More recently, Jun Zhang and Jamie Peck (2016: 54) have discussed the particularities of Chinese capitalism, and how ‘the internal heterogeneity, cultural complexity and sheer size of the Chinese economy have . . . long confounded “imported” theories, lending credence to what has been an equally long tradition of sui generis accounts of this ostensibly peerless model.’

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Over the past two decades many scholars (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010; Peck, 2010; Peck and Tickel, 2002) have written about the relative stability of neoliberalism  –​as a coherent (or not) concept, as a set of policies and practices, or as a taxonomy of characteristics. The processual approach to the topic that they propose means seeing neoliberalism as a mix of ideas that have coalesced to form what many people now see as a coherent set of ideas, but that seems more the result of a loose and ever-​evolving constellation of features coming together. And this assessment applies in both diachronic and synchronic terms. Thus, while neoliberalism may be seen as a variety of economic liberalism that draws its inspiration from Adam Smith’s writings on economy and society in the eighteenth century (in particular, Smith’s masterpiece The wealth of nations, first published in 1776), this inspiration has never meant anything but a selective reading of Smith or indeed a distortion of his intellectual legacy. We should not forget that Smith was something of a progressive of his time and that if we were to apply the well-​ worn trope –​‘What would he say if he were here today?’ –​it is not too difficult to imagine that he would not likely be on board with the kind of capitalism that dominates the world today, nor with what has happened in the world economy in recent years. To make this point further, Giovanni Arrighi (2007) suggests that Smith is one of those scholars who are often cited but seldom read, and whose work is pillaged for certain key terms, such as the ‘invisible hand’ (not as central in Smith’s writing as is often thought) and ‘laissez-​faire’ (more disparaged than embraced by Smith). Arrighi identifies what he calls ‘three myths’ surrounding Smith’s legacy: That he was a theorist and advocate of ‘self-​regulating’ markets; that he was a theorist and advocate of capitalism as an engine of ‘endless’ economic expansion; and that he was a theorist and advocate of the kind of division of labour that occurred in the pin factory described in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations. In reality, he was none of the above. (Arrighi, 2007: 42)2 Elsewhere, Daniel Stedman-​Jones (2012) critiques self-​declared Smith fans for their misunderstanding of his views on the role of government, making the point that ‘Smith’s mental universe makes it impossible to interpret him as conceiving of markets as separate from government actions, and any view of Smith must be accompanied by an appreciation of his complex view of human morality’ (Stedman-​Jones, 2012: 103). Stedman-​Jones also discusses Smith’s three functions of government: (1) protection from invasion (the control over violence); (2)  the fair administration of justice, defence and security; and (3) establishing and maintaining public works and some public administrations

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that are, in effect, unprofitable (ibid.: 111). Carrying out these functions hardly makes government ‘small’ or non-​interfering in day-​to-​day polity. All this leads scholars such as Peck (2010) to define neoliberalism as more of an ill-​defined amalgam of ideas in motion (which are, nonetheless, highly ideological) than a tidy, coherent package. As he puts it, neoliberalism is ‘a contradictory process of market-​like rule’ (Peck, 2010: 20), organized around a vague notion of laissez-​faire and an opposition to all policies and practices associated with Keynesian economics. The latter approach to the economy, which became post-​depression era orthodoxy in many parts of the world, was based on John Maynard Keynes’s (1936) distinct view of how capitalist economies might best function. Keynes argued that it was possible to overcome recessions brought about by boom-​and-​bust business cycles if governments tightly controlled fiscal policies and invested in large-​scale projects. Other tools of government included deficit spending and tax cuts, both of which would increase consumer spending and raise the demand for labour. The goal was a more prosperous society with full employment (Stedman-​Jones, 2012). Equally important in any attempt to understand neoliberalism is an analysis of the prefix ‘neo’. On the one hand, it can refer to chronological positioning: after previous time frames of first, classical liberalism, and then, embedded liberalism, we now live in the neoliberal age. Of course, such a claim presumes that there is something different about the current dominant model of capitalism that clearly demarcates it from previous models. In this sense ‘neo’ is about renewal as well as continued renewal. Peck writes about ‘the repeated (necessity for) renewal and reinvention of a project that could never be fixed as a stable formula, and which has lurched through moments [of] innovation, overreach, correction, and crisis’ (Peck, 2010: 20). Also, with regard to the chronological, some scholars have suggested that there have been two stages of neoliberalism. The first stage, termed the ‘roll-​back’ stage, has been about ‘the active destruction and discreditation of Keynesian-​welfarist and social-​collectivist institutions’ (Peck and Tickel, 2002: 384), in other words, the restructuring processes that meant the near-​ total dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state, in which redistribution policies existed as a check on the more savage tendencies and effects of capitalism. In practice, roll-​back has meant ‘the dismantling of alien institutions, disorganizing alternate centers of power, deregulating zones of bureaucratic control and disciplining potentially unruly (collective) subjects’ (Peck, 2010: 22). The key terms for this stage are ‘deregulation’, ‘devolution’ and ‘democratization’, with the latter two implying, on the one hand, the giving back of rights to citizens, and on the other hand, an increase in their participation in political processes. However, in practice, roll-​back has meant very little in the way of democracy or the devolution of rights to citizens, and very much in the way of deregulation, leading to the loss of rights. Thus, it has consisted of measures aimed at

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reducing, or even eliminating completely, government finance for public services, from the by-​now well-​known ‘cutbacks’ in spending on infrastructure, education, healthcare, transportation and housing, to the partial or total privatization of public services, such as rubbish collection and public building maintenance, and the privatization of utility provisions –​water, gas and electricity. In addition, when hospitals and schools have to be built, or when roads have to be repaired, states now set up public-​private financing, and, in some cases, they turn over responsibility for these projects entirely to private companies (in the past, only the state would have been responsible for such construction). The end result of all these processes is not the reduction of the role of governments as much as a readjustment of priorities: there has been a move from the Keynesian economic model, whereby the government provided a safety net for its citizens, to the neoliberal model, whereby the state abdicates such responsibility but protects the interests of those who take them over. Meanwhile, the second stage of neoliberalism, which has emerged seamlessly from the first stage, has been called ‘roll-​out’ neoliberalism. This stage is about ‘the purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations’ (Peck and Tickel, 2002: 384). It has been typified by various types of regulation, such as ‘the selective empowerment of community organizations and NGOs as (flexible, low-​cost, non-​state) service providers, through management by audit and developed governance to the embrace of public-​private partnerships’ (Peck, 2010: 23). If the roll-​back stage was in broad terms about cutting back, this second stage may be seen as one in which strategies are deployed to make up for the gaps and fissures resulting from the first stage. In other words, roll-​out neoliberalism is a logical outgrowth of the failures of the deregulation and the supposed ‘devolution’ and ‘democratization’ of roll-​back neoliberalism. And contrary to many public statements about the reduced state in neoliberal times, it leads to an increasing reliance on, or return to, institutions, bureaucracies and deliberate policies. This has been the case because labour market flexibilization and the deregulation of the economy in general during the roll-​back stage have led to widespread unemployment and poorly paid employment. And this has meant the necessity for roll-​out palliatives such as skills development programmes, for those without work, and family subsidies. However, it should be noted that in neoliberalism such palliatives will, where possible, be private initiatives and NGO-operated, thus further removing the responsibility of the state from the equation. In addition, where governments pass legislation, which they claim is designed to resolve problems such as unemployment, this legislation either amounts to very little (there is little or no perceptible effect) or makes matters worse. A good example of this has been the labour reform law of 2012 in Spain. Among other things, the law has liberalized hiring and firing practices,

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the theory being that this would lead to more employment. Since 2014, unemployment in Spain has been falling; however, a very high percentage of these jobs (perhaps 90 per cent) are precarious and short term, and salaries paid in 2017 are far lower than what they were before the economic crisis hit.

The rise of neoliberal thought In recent years, several authors (e.g. Burguin, 2012; Dardot and Laval, 2013; Mirowski, 2013; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2010; Stedman-​Jones, 2012) have written or edited book-​length accounts of how ideas and actions have coalesced over several decades to constitute what is today understood as neoliberalism. Cleary taking a more radical position than most scholars, Philip Mirowski (2013) has written of a ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (NTC), which he sees as a loosely structured grouping of individuals and groups worldwide. For Mirowski, these individuals and groups have successfully managed to integrate academic and political activities since the late 1930s. All this on the way to effecting changes not only in how economies function, but also in how societies (and the people composing them) function. Many readers of Mirowski have found the very notion of a NTC too conspirational in tone, not least Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2013), who have argued: In truth, there was no large-​scale conspiracy, nor even a ready-​fashioned doctrine cynically and resolutely implemented by politicians to meet the expectations of their powerful friends in the world of business. The normative logic that ended up being imposed was constituted through battles that were initially uncertain and policies that were frequently wrong. The neo-​liberal society we live in today is the fruit of a historical process that was not fully programmed by its pioneers. (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 9) The first response to this critique is that neither Mirowski, nor any other economist I have read has argued that the spread of neoliberalism has been directed by a relatively small number of influential economists worldwide exercising an influence of superhuman proportions on innocent populations. In this sense Dardot and Laval do not acknowledge how Mirowski indeed allows for a degree of serendipity and luck in the rise of neoliberalism to prominence in the world –​ not all key events occurring in recent decades could have been ‘programmed’ by economists. He also historically situates the processes he describes, and discusses the normative nature of neoliberalism, in particular how in its ideological manifestations it has become embedded in the governance of people’s lives in contemporary societies. But the main point here, and it is what I take from Mirowski and indeed other historians of neoliberalism, is that when

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confronted with political and economic crisis, elites (those aligned with multinational corporations, monopoly capital and financial institutions) have shown a great deal of class consciousness as they have pushed the neoliberal agenda worldwide, doing so with great success. And for these global elites, along with the proponents and cheerleaders of neoliberalism, it has always been the case that ‘the good society will triumph only if it . . . [is] constructed, and will not come about “naturally” in the absence of concerted political effort and organization’ (Mirowski, 2013: 53), an idea that Foucault (2008) also conveyed in his earlier analysis. In sum, Mirowski’s arguments –​that neoliberalism actually exists and that its rise to dominance has been the result, at least in part, of intentional, interested and concerted efforts on the part of global elites –​are to my mind convincing. Nevertheless, as Marnie Holborow (personal communication) reminds me, this does not mean that the rise of neoliberalism was merely a matter of changing people’s minds; rather, the ideological regime change, which amounted to an upgrade of capitalism and not an economic revolution, was, as always, inextricably linked to real (tangible, material) economic and political changes taking place worldwide, in combination with the ongoing logic of capitalism (the drive for profit and capital accumulation). Mirowski also explains how well-​known economists in the United States, who have a great deal of influence in business schools both in their country and around the world, have reached a point where they do not bother very much with the classical economics of centuries past, nor with Keynesian economics, as they effectively cut to the chase in the presentation of economics, as it is, in an unquestioning and uncritical manner. However, academics are never enough when it comes to changing policy and so a second key element in the spread of neoliberalism is worthy of attention  –​the political class in countries around the world. Over the past four decades, prominent politicians, first in classically liberal and conservative parties around the world (with the United States and the United Kingdom leading the way3) and later in social democratic parties (again, with the United States and the United Kingdom leading the way), have adopted the creed of TINA (there is no alternative). In this way, they have joined the neoliberal cause while eschewing the Keynesian consensus that had been dominant in the three-​plus decades after the Second World War. Finally, there is the media, and of course in recent times the power of websites, YouTube, blogs and other means of disseminating information, which have provided key support for the spread of neoliberalism as the default, common-​sense economic doctrine and set of practices. The aforementioned historians of neoliberalism see its beginnings as an organized group of thinkers –​or a school of thought –​in the Colloque Walter Lippmann, which took place in Paris in 1938. This event was organized as a forum for debate about the concept of the free society and it was based on Lippmann’s eponymous book, The good society, which had come out the

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previous year. It was attended by twenty-​five mostly European scholars, including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi and Wilhelm Ropke. During the meeting the term ‘neoliberalism’ was used for perhaps the first time in a public forum of this type to mark a shift in thinking. This shift meant the reclamation and defence of aspects of classical liberalism and, above all, key notions such as freedom and individualism, seen to be under attack by German National Socialism (embodied in Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party) and Soviet Union communism (embodied in Stalinism). However, the Second World War interrupted this emergent line of thought and it would not be until April 1947, when the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) took place in Vevey, Switzerland, that we begin to see the definitive formation of a movement and the rise of Mirowski’s ‘NTC’. The key force behind this meeting was Friedrich Hayek, who had been inspired by the discussions taking place during and after the Colloque Walter Lippmann, and, by all counts, it was a great success in that in its wake there arose a transatlantic neoliberal network in favour of key concepts, such as freedom, the individual, the voluntary group and laissez-​faire economics. According to Stedman-​ Jones (2012), five major groups constituted the MPS:  academics at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester; Austrian exiles in the United States; a French group that emerged in the wake of the Walter Lippmann colloquium; intellectuals who had remained in Germany during and after the Nazi regime; and business departments in several prominent universities, the University of Chicago being the best known. From such collectives, or pockets of thought, there emerged from the late 1930s onwards a large number of think tanks, with the United States and Britain being forerunners in this regard. The American Enterprise Association and the Heritage Foundation were both founded in Washington, DC, in 1938 and 1973, respectively. The Cato Institute was founded in San Francisco in 1977. Meanwhile, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute were all founded in London in 1955, 1974 and 1977, respectively. This new liberal (neoliberal) movement found its intellectual inspiration in well-​ known scholars, such as Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Karl Popper, who published landmark books at almost the same time (in 1944 and 1945). It is worthwhile to examine what each of these scholars contributed to the rising tide of neoliberal thought.

The influencers: von Mises, Hayek and Popper von Mises, an Austrian economist, was a strong critic of the state interventionism of socialism, which he contrasted with the libertarian benevolence

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of capitalism. In his 1944 book, Bureaucracy, he introduced several ideas that today would be seen as economic orthodoxy and even common sense among the more extreme supporters of neoliberal economic policy. And, it might be added, he did so in very plain and simple language, which to some extent explains his success as a key referent for neoliberal thinkers from the mid-​t wentieth century onwards. The bureaucracy of the book title is that of crony management and the lack of a profit motive, which leads to a quiet conformity and ultimately the submission of individuals to mediocrity and the inability to act with initiative. Here there are shades of Ayn Rand’s (1957) dystopic novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which the main character, Dagny Taggart, continuously laments the rise of antitrust and other legislation regulating markets, which she feels are stifling free enterprise. Taggart is dismayed at what she sees as the lack of initiative shown by her fellow citizens in the face of the increasing bureaucratization that she is convinced is hindering the forward march of the American economy and society (and, indeed, destroying the nation!). Jörg Guido Hülsmann (2007) explains that von Mises not only read Atlas Shrugged, but also wrote a ‘fan letter’ to Rand to say that he found her novelistic account of the threats to liberal democracy, fictitious though it was, to be on target and a valuable way to convey the neoliberal message to a more general public.4 Throughout Bureaucracy, von Mises argued against socialism and in favour of capitalism in a very black-​and-​white manner that excluded the prospect of finding middle ground. He stated in the latter part of the book that ‘the great historical conflict concerning the problem of society’s economic organization cannot be dealt with like a quarrel between two businessmen concerning an amount of money; it cannot be solved by splitting the difference’ (von Mises, 1944: 118). Taking such a position, von Mises revealed himself as the most fundamentalist of the founding members of the MPS. Indeed, so extreme were his views that one can easily believe the story told by Milton Friedman and others about how von Mises stormed out of a discussion about income distribution that took place during the 1947 meeting, shouting that those participating –​Friedman, Hayek and a long list of celebrated liberals of the time –​ were ‘all a bunch of socialists’. In the following quote, we get a glimpse of von Mises’s extremism, in particular the free-​market fundamentalism that undergirds his words. Under an unhampered market economy the appraisal of each individual’s effort is detached from any personal considerations and can therefore be free both from bias and dislike. The market passes judgment on the products, not on the producers. The appraisal of the producer results automatically from the appraisal of his product. Each co-​operator is valued according to the value of his contribution to the process of production of goods and

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services. Salaries and wages do not depend on arbitrary decisions. On the labor market every quantity and quality of work is prized to the amount the consumers are ready to pay for the products. It is not a favor on the part of the employer to pay wages and salaries, it is a business transaction, the purchase of a factor of production. The price of labor is a market phenomenon determined by the consumers’ demands for goods and services. Virtually every employer is always in search of cheaper labor and every employee in search of a job with higher remuneration. (von Mises, 1944: 38) It is worthwhile to read von Mises because the ideas that he expressed so many years ago about the omniscient, objective market may be heard in the second decade of the twenty-​first century coming from the mouths of most mainstream politicians in Europe, North America and elsewhere in the world. Thus, we see here a call for a market freed from control in an objective universe where the economic value of labour and products is determined not by the arbitrariness that comes with collectivism, but by the impersonal –​though just and natural –​functioning of business transactions that come to constitute the market. Meanwhile, the market is anthropomorphized, as an agent that organizes consumers and their activity and ‘passes judgment on the products, not on the producers’. The latter are rational beings, as ‘every employer is always in search of cheaper labour and every employee in search of a job with higher remuneration’. Bearing these words in mind, we see that von Mises was, as Stedman-​Jones puts it, a ‘free market libertarian’, and as such, he was, in contrast to Popper (and in part to Hayek as well) the real deal. Aligned with the rhetoric of self-​proclaimed liberals in Europe today, he believed in the reduced state to the point that ‘the rule of law must govern the free market and a small constitutionally defined arena of public service, but this framework must not include loose powers for agencies, public authorities, and their leaders that are not carefully proscribed by legislation’ (Stedman-​ Jones, 2012: 55). The market was seen not only as a free space for the exercise of individual initiative, but also as the arbiter of the deserving, regarding those who are worthy of reward and pushing to the side those who are not. The market was dynamic, renewing and ultimately democratic, and it was all these things equally for all citizens. Radically liberal in intent and deed, but relatively tame when read in parallel with von Mises’s Bureaucracy, was Hayek’s The road to serfdom. Described by Stedman-​Jones as a ‘political book’, it was written in haste and was meant to be ready for the post-​war period as a warning to politicians and citizens who saw a centrally planned economy as the way forward (obviously, communists, but also social democrats). In the book, the Judaeo-​Christian tradition is linked to individualism and seen as part of human nature. And when Hayek

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wrote that ‘the idea that redistribution and greater equality were not simply disincentives to initiative but actually morally debilitating’ (Hayek, 1944: 64), he conveyed a view of the world and a way of thinking that was to become embedded in American thought –​intellectual, political and mainstream –​from the 1950s onwards. Indeed, to this day, and despite the current economic crisis, it remains integral to how most economists, most politicians and most people in the Anglophone world and parts of Europe see the world. Hayek’s putative opponent in The road to serfdom was post–​Second World War socialism and its illegitimate claims to foster freedom and democracy. With the Soviet Union and newly transformed Eastern European states in his sights, he painted a bleak picture of the seemingly inevitable result of the success of socialist utopianism: We must regain the conviction on which the rule of liberty in the Anglo-​ Saxon countries has been based and which Benjamin Franklin expressed in a phrase applicable to us in our lives as individuals no less as nations: ‘those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. (Hayek, 1944: 33) The concern with liberty is a key element in the scholarship of Popper (e.g. Popper, [1945] 2003a, [1945] 2003b). He was more a progressive liberal and humanitarian than a neoliberal and was in favour of government intervention in education and as a guarantor of free play in the market. He certainly did not believe in the idolization of the market, as did other MPS members, in particular von Mises. However, Popper was a staunch believer in liberal democracy and positioned himself among liberals, progressives and even socialists, as opposed to conservatives, fascists and, notably, Marxists.5 The key element in Popper’s political philosophy was his rejection of political regimes that he considered to be totalitarian and his belief that only in democracy can human beings truly be free. It is worth noting that Popper was both horrified and traumatized by the rise of Nazi Germany and Stalinism in Russia, and in the post–​Second World War period his opposition to communism was embraced by those who came to be aligned with the kind of economics that von Mises, Hayek and others were proposing. However, Popper’s more inclusive approach to intellectual debate ultimately proved to be a source of conflict in the early years of the MPS, as the desire to involve social scientists of all political stripes did not go down well with many of the other founding members. In effect, the latter individuals took an altogether more combative position towards those with different views. Thus, while Hayek would have been at least in partial agreement with Popper’s more open approach, more fundamentalist thinkers such as von Mises were against any acts of such goodwill. As a result, the entire history

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of neoliberalism begins to read more like the formation of a sect that goes to great lengths to exclude and ‘excommunicate’ (as Mirowski puts it) those who are not with the programme. The end result has been an ‘orthodoxy, so violently quarantined and demarcated from outside pretenders, . . . [that it] harbors a vacuum within its perimeter’ (Mirowski, 2013: 25). Nevertheless, to mark a point of contrast, it is worth noting that one other renowned political economist wrote a landmark book at the same time as von Mises, Hayek and Popper, although he was neither part of the MPS nor writing with the MPS agenda as a driving force. I refer here to Karl Polanyi’s The great transformation, published in 1944. Among other things, Polanyi’s book is a warning about the potentially negative effects of subordinating politics and social relations to the market as opposed to inverting the order of these elements (i.e. subordinating the markets to politics and social relations). He wrote of ‘fictitious commodities’ as entities such as land, labour and money, which come to be treated as commodities even if in principle they do not exist for exchange in markets. As he explained: To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through voice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill. (Polanyi, [1944] 2001: 76–​77) In this rather long quote, Polanyi puts matters in their proper place, denouncing how the exploitation of labour power and concomitant mistreatment of those who provide that labour power (wages as low as possible, health and

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safety provision as scarce as possible) is a necessary outcome of the commodification of labour. As regards land, he effectively denounces the ‘original sin’ of private property (more on this in Chapter 6), as land in private hands means the uncontrolled exploitation of that land to the depletion of its nature-​ given features. And as we have seen over the past decades, land traded as a commodity leads to great profits for non-​labour and ultimately the division of society into those who have property and those who do not. Finally, what Polanyi has to say about the trading of money for profit seems especially relevant in the light of how financialization (and the rise of money as a ‘fictitious commodity’) has been a key underlying cause of the current economic crisis. Indeed, when it is more profitable to trade in money than in manufactured goods, the ‘liquidat[ion of] business enterprise’ seems inevitable. The prescience of Polanyi’s description of what unfettered markets might bring has led to a renewed interest in his work in recent years (e.g. Dale, 2016). However, Polanyi was not networked into the circuits of power in the mainstream economics of his time, and he was swimming against the tide of the MPS. His views, therefore, remained neither heard nor heeded for the most part.

The rise to power of the MPS spirit As stated above, from 1947 onwards a transatlantic movement took form as there developed ‘an institutional infrastructure that injected neoliberalism into the political bloodstream of both the United States and Britain’ (Stedman-​ Jones, 2012: 85), with the aforementioned think tanks leading the way. The movement was reactive to developments at the time in the United States and Britain. In the United States, the onset of the cold war led to certain paranoia about the supposed threat of communism (the McCarthy era was just around the corner). There was also an offensive by the growing number of neoliberal economists against the kind of mild social democratic policies that resulted from President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. The neoliberalism of von Mises and Hayek, and other scholars such as Simons and Freidman, drew on a selective and partial interpretation of Smith, David Hume and other members of what Stedman-​Jones calls the ‘Anglo/​Scottish/​American enlightenment’. The Chicago School was at the centre of these developments. Friedman deserves special attention here as he was probably the most central figure in the rise of the Chicago school to world esteem. In particular, it is worth focusing momentarily on the views he expressed in his classic, best-​selling book Capitalism and freedom (1962). Written when neoliberalism had yet to gain much traction in the United States, the book offers a prescient blueprint for what was to come from the late 1970s onwards. In this sense, Friedman provides a list of activities that the US federal, state and local

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governments were involved in during the early 1960s, but that they would not be involved in were the United States a truly liberal (and democratic and free) society. With regard to government spending and revenue collection policies and practices, he manifested his opposition to a long list of items, including graduated, redistributive tax regimes (Friedman famously advocated a flat tax rate for all) inheritance taxes agricultural subsidies tariffs and other restrictions on imports and exports; control of any kind over output (such as Texas state authorities controlling oil output, which led to guaranteed profits) rent control (an obvious anomaly in a free market economy) a state-​determined minimum wage or a maximum price for a given product the regulation of sectors such as banking old-​age retirement programmes funded through taxed income paid licencing of professions which do not require it (which Friedman saw as a way of forcibly collecting tax revenue) any provision of housing by the government a state monopoly on all mail carrying publicly operated ‘national’ parks government owned and operated toll roads (based on Friedman, 2002: 35–​36 and other sections of the book). On the social side, Friedman’s liberalism meant that he declared in Capitalism and freedom his opposition to any form of censorship, which he saw as part and parcel of government attempts to regulate the radio and television. He was also opposed to forced conscription to the armed forces, a big issue in the Vietnam era in the United States. And, although the topic is not dealt with in detail in Capitalism and freedom, Friedman elsewhere and in later years declared his opposition to any kind of discrimination based on race, gender or sexuality, on the grounds that it was bad for business: on the one hand, discrimination would mean turning away some paying customers; on the other hand, it would mean excluding qualified people from employment. Finally, he was in favour of the legalization of all drugs, considering their use to be an individual matter. If Friedman was nothing else, he was consistent in his secularism and libertarianism.6 Nevertheless, Friedman’s social libertarianism is less of interest to me than the kind of governance and economy that he envisioned. And what I find especially noteworthy is how so many of the policy ideas discussed in Capitalism and freedom have come to be realities once official and institutionalized governance in different contexts in North America, Western Europe, Oceania and

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elsewhere was neoliberalized. Indeed, as we will see later, just about all the activities listed above as not the responsibility of the government have come to be replaced by corrective policies. Thus the negative attitude towards progressive taxation and inheritance tax has led many countries to adopt more regressive tax regimes with flat tax rates and massive legal tax avoidance (or, perhaps better said, evasion) by those on the highest incomes. And the opposition to any kind of government regulation of economic activity led to the deregulation of the banking sector worldwide, arguably the single most important neoliberal policy to be implemented over the past forty years. Following a path distinct from that followed in the Anglophone countries, German economists developed what was called ‘Ordoliberalism’ (the ‘ordo’ signifying ‘order’7). Following notes on Foucault’s lectures on ‘biopolitics’ given at the Collège de France in 1979 (eventually published in English in 2008 –​see Chapter 5 for a further discussion), Michael Lemke offers the following definition of what was to become economic orthodoxy in West Germany after the Second World War: The Ordo-​liberals’ starting point was their idea of a ‘social market economy’, in other words they started from a notion of a market that was constantly supported by political regulations and had to be flanked by social intervention (housing policy, support for the unemployed, healthcare, etc.). This conception of social policy was always based on a difference between the economic and social domains, with the concept of enterprise functioning as the intermediary between them. The coding of social existence as an enterprise was at the same time a politics of rendering the social domain economic and a ‘vital policy’, which is intended to offset the negative impact of economic exchange by taking political measures. The ‘entrepreneurial’ society of the Ordo-​liberals is characterized by a core ‘ambiguity’, which the work of the US neo-​liberals sets out to tackle. (Lemke, 2001: 197) What we have here is an approach to economic policy or an economic regime (in Foucauldian terms), which is, as Dardot and Laval (2013: 75) explain, ‘the realization and defence of an economic order capable of mastering the multiple aspects of the crisis of modern existence  –​i.e. the order of competition’. It is driven by the belief that the free market, in which free individuals compete with one another, is the most expedient and efficient way to overcome the scarcity of goods and to increase prosperity. However, after the disastrous experience of monopoly formation in the period between the First and Second World Wars, and the concurrent destruction of small businesses, ordoliberals were wary of granting too much freedom to unfettered market forces. Positioning themselves in opposition to classical liberalism,

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laissez-​faire extremism and the night-​watchman state, they established the ‘social market economy’, defined as ‘definitely “free”, as compared with a directed and planned economy, but which is subjected to controls, preferably in legal form, designed to prevent the concentration of economic power, whether through cartels, trusts, or giant enterprise’ (Friedrich, 1955: 511; cited in Stedman-​Jones, 2012: 122). If neoliberalism proved to be such a powerful force in the United States, Germany and elsewhere, it is, in part, because it presented a theory of the market, along with a theory of society as a whole and the individual as the key moral and social actor. It was, as some might say, a good and plausible narrative for the times in which it arose. It was an especially powerful force in the United States because of the kind of collectivism practised by its intellectual base. Thus, neoliberal economists and other scholars sympathetic to the cause frequently met and exchanged ideas. In addition, they formed groups of disciples around the world, the most famous example being the ‘Chicago boys’, a group of Chilean economists whose policies in the mid-​ 1970s onwards made Chile the first neoliberal testing ground.8 Another factor aiding the rise of neoliberalism has been what might be termed the ‘market turn’ in the awarding of Nobel Prizes in economics, a domain in which neoliberal economics has been gifted prestige as well as scientific pedigree. Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (2016) note how over the past several decades, just one clear social democrat, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal,9 has been awarded the prize, while economists classified as ‘conservative’, or ‘liberal’, effectively those working for the neoliberal cause, have dominated. There is thus the scandalous exclusion of John Kenneth Galbraith (arguably a social democrat) alongside the granting of the 1974 award to Hayek, at the time in clear decline, career-​wise. One key aspect of this favouring of liberal economics over social democracy is the technocratic view embedded in the view of most prize winners. The lack of a social angle in their work, and in many cases what seems to be a lack of a social consciousness, made possible the rise of a generalized ambivalence towards the kind of political regimes in which economic theories would be put into practice. Of course, it is also worth noting that from the early 1980s onwards social democratic parties in Europe began to embrace neoliberalism as their default economic policy, a process that eventually led to the virtual disappearance of real social democracy. And with this development in mind, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which grants the Nobel Prize in economics each year, perhaps at some point came to view social democratic economists as no longer relevant, and above all no longer serious contenders for their coveted prize. Exemplary and paradigmatic is the career of Friedman, who over the course of several decades of activity, came to adopt the aforementioned

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ambivalent attitude towards the connection between the individual and collective freedom of a democratic regime and his neoliberal economic policies. On the one hand, he apparently had no problem working with the aforementioned ‘Chicago boys’ and Augusto Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship in Chile. On the other hand, he was later to show himself critical of the repressive politics of this regime in public declarations. However, all the while, he stood by the ‘success’ of the liberalization of the Chilean economy effected during the 1970s and 1980s.10 Given that neoliberals always assumed (at least officially) the intimate interrelationship between liberal economics and liberal politics, and freedom of the market with freedom of thought, movement and behaviour, it is interesting that with certain regimes this link was separate in their minds. In this sense, we might see public declarations of the likes of Freidman as supreme acts of cynicism in the face of the obvious contradictions between what is said and what is done.

The neoliberal thought collective and beyond As mentioned above, Mirowski has somewhat controversially argued for the existence of what he calls the ‘NTC’. This collective, a loose association of like-​minded economists and politicians worldwide, is organized around certain key principles of what neoliberalism is. Mirowski draws on Ben Fink’s list of what may be seen as the eleven key characteristics of neoliberalism (Fink and Brown, 2014). These are as follows: (1) ‘Free’ markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively

constructed through political organizing. (2) ‘The market’ is an information processor, and the most efficient one

possible –​more efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. (3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable

state of humankind. (4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take

control of it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the market-​friendly culture. (5) There is no contradiction between public/​politics/​citizenship and

private/​market/​entrepreneur and consumerism –​because the latter does and should eclipse the former.

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(6) The most important virtue –​more important than justice, or anything

else –​is freedom, defined ‘negatively’ as ‘freedom to choose’, and most importantly, defined as the freedom of corporations to act as they please. (7) Capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries –​

labor, not so much. (8) Inequality –​of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights –​

is a good thing; it prompts productivity, because people envy the rich and emulate them; people who complain about inequality are either sore losers or old fogies, who need to get hip to the way things work nowadays. (9) Corporations can do no wrong –​by definition. (10) The market, engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts, can

always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place: there’s always ‘an app for that.’ (11) There is no difference between is and should be: ‘free’ markets both

should be (normatively) and are (positively) the most the efficient economic system, and the most just way of doing politics, and the most empirically true description of human behavior, and the most ethical and moral way to live –​which in turn explains, and justifies, why their versions of ‘free’ markets should be, and as neoliberals build more and more power, increasingly are, universal. (Mirowski, 2014: 22) Much of this list comes in the form of a priori assumptions about the way the world is –​how societies work and how the natural law of human nature works (see points 3 and 8). Neoliberals rely on the fundamental notion that inequality is inevitable and that human beings are, by nature, moved to act out of self-​interest and without regard for the needs, wants and desires of others. Or at least this is the case to some extent, as no card-​carrying neoliberal would accept that acting out of self-​interest comes with no limitations. Otherwise, we would not have legal systems to regulate behaviour. Thus, as we observed above, neoliberalism has settled in quite comfortably in non-​ democratic regimes that strictly regulate citizen behaviour, and it has also been a willing fellow traveller with law-​and-​order policies that have been introduced in long-​standing democracies in recent years. Indeed, the celebration of individual agency in combination with a law-​and-​order agenda is part of the double discourse of neoliberalism, which has been highlighted by many

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scholars, including Mirowski, who writes about the ‘double truth doctrine’. So, as noted in point 6 above, there is a ‘yes’ to freedom, but this freedom is circumscribed. It is negative freedom, which is about choice, and it is unequally possessed in society, as corporations and the wealthy have more of it than average citizens. Another aspect of the double discourse is how all confidence is placed in the market (see points 3 and 10), but when matters go wrong, as has happened with the 2007–2008 economic crisis, it is the state that is expected to come to the rescue (see point 4). Such developments are a matter of what some have termed socialism for the capitalists (governments bail out banks, assuming their debt and providing favourable conditions for their ‘recovery’) and neoliberalism for the masses (governments guarantee that the masses remain subjects of the market), yet another double discourse. However, as Harvey (2014) notes, capitalism is, and always has been, riddled with contradictions, and this being the case, the double discourses that have emerged should not really come as a surprise to anyone. In most discussions of the current state of capitalism, neoliberalism has tended to be framed as an ideology and sets of economic policies and practices based on this ideology, where, following Marx and Engels ([1846] 1998), ideology emerges as the ideas of the ruling become the ruling ideas, serving to explain, justify and defend the status quo and those who hold power in society. In this sense, as Holborow (2015) explains, we have ideology as a driving force in society and one that helps to keep the current dominant version of capitalism (neoliberalism) alive, even if ideology is, as Terry Eagleton (1991) has argued, a complex concept and a multi-​tentacled reality. For Eagleton, ideology may be defined in six interrelated ways that proceed from the more general to the more specific. Ideology is thus seen as (1) ‘the general material process of production of ideas, beliefs and values in social life’; (2)  the ‘ideas and beliefs (whether true or false) which symbolize the conditions and life-​experiences of a specific, socially significant group or class’; (3) ‘the promotion and legitimation of the interests of such social groups in the face of opposing interests’; (4)  how this ‘promotion and legitimation’ ultimately ‘is not simply a matter of imposing ideas from above but of securing the complicity of subordinated classes and groups, and so on’; (5) the ‘ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation’; and finally, (6) ‘false or deceptive beliefs . . . arising not from the interests of a dominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole’ (Eagleton, 1991: 28, 29, 29, 30, 30, 30, respectively). Given the discussion earlier in this chapter of the development of neoliberal ideas and how they have been disseminated in counterparty societies, it is easy to see Eagleton’s six takes on ideology coming to life. Thus, arising from the material conditions of life, we have ideas and beliefs that symbolize these material conditions, but we also have the propagation of the ideas and beliefs

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of the dominant classes among the population. This is achieved via the promotion, legitimation and imposition strategies of this dominant class, but material conditions also shape developments. In the end, the generalized (though by no means uniform) acquiescence of the population to the status quo of neoliberalism is achieved as ‘the ideas of the ruling class are . . . [once again] the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998: 67). Taking a slightly different stance, Dardot and Laval (2013) have suggested that while neoliberalism may be seen as an ideology or a set of policies and practices, it might be better to consider it a ‘rationality’ that ‘tends to structure and organize not only the action of rulers, but also the conduct of the ruled’ (p. 4). In other words neoliberalism is a case of economic policies and a juridical-​legal infrastructure developing simultaneously such that it becomes hard to establish which came first or indeed, at times, which is which. In this sense, it is the normativity that is such an important part of neoliberalism, which most interests Dardot and Laval. Drawing directly on the work of Foucault (2008) on ‘biopolitics’, ‘technologies of self’ and the importance of competition in neoliberal thinking, they write the following about how neoliberalism, in effect, both interpellates (Althusser, 1971) and governs new ways of being and belonging in contemporary societies: This [neoliberal] norm enjoins everyone to live in a world of generalized competition; it calls upon wage-​earning classes and populations to engage in economic struggle against one another; it aligns social relations with the model of the market; it promotes the justification of ever greater inequalities; it even transforms the individual, now called on to conceive and conduct him or herself as an enterprise. (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 3) I have more to say about neoliberalism as a form of governance and, indeed, at the heart of a new conceptualization of citizenship (e.g. ‘neoliberal citizenship’) in Chapter  5. Here, however, I  continue with the notion that neoliberalism may be framed as the constitution of a ‘new global rationality’. As Dardot and Laval suggest, this rationality works simultaneously at several levels: (1) politically, as neoliberalism, in effect, comes to power in nation-​states; (2) economically, as the liberation of global financial capitalism; (3) socially, as it engineers (and propagates the idea of) the triumph of individualization over collectivism; and (4) subjectively, as it ultimately means the rise of the ‘neoliberal, self-​governing subject’. In this new rationality, we see something of an updating of Antonio Gramsci’s notions of power and hegemony. Gramsci (1971: 57–​58) conceived of power in terms of hegemony, seeing the latter as operative at the nation-​ state level via two routes:  (1)  ‘domination’, that is, the threat or actual use

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of physical force, what Niccolò Machiavelli ([1532] 1985) would have called ‘coercion’, and (2) ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, the seduction or winning over of potentially antagonistic groups, what Machiavelli would have called ‘consent’. In other words, as Manuel Castells (2012: 5)  suggests, power ‘is exercised by means of coercion (the monopoly of violence, legitimate or not, by the control of the state) and/​or by the construction of meaning in people’s minds, through [the] mechanism of symbolic manipulation’. If the Gramscian view of power is about how ruling class ideology acts as an all-​encompassing knowledge structure serving to establish and maintain power and to shape activity, thought and behaviour on the ground, Foucault added to such thinking that power permeates a wide range of ambits and the activities that constitute them, from the state to institutions to the most localized collectives. Or, put another way, power is distributed across a range of spheres that are material and discursive (‘regimes of truth’), while at the same time it is embodied in individuals as ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977), ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1984) or the ‘singular folds of the social’ (les plis singuliers du social) (Lahire, 2013). Nevertheless, Foucault’s notion of power permeating all behaviour and activity should not be taken to the extreme that we lose sight of the existence of structures that shape our day-​to-​day lives, constituting a kind of big power that is not as easily resisted as power distributed more locally across individuals and groups. Faithful to their Foucauldian roots, Dardot and Laval reject what they see as an orthodox Marxist reading of the rise and resistance of neoliberalism. They take Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (e.g. 2004) to task for adopting economic-​centric stances, which for the most part ignore the social and psychological aspects of neoliberalism. Harvey (2005) is also critiqued, specifically his much-​cited writing on neoliberalism as class warfare via new forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ by the capitalist class, in particular how the housing meltdown ultimately meant that those at the lower end of class hierarchies ended up paying the proportionately largest price (more on this in Chapter 6). For Dardot and Laval, these authors, and many others who either self-​identify or are positioned as Marxist in outlook, are too beholding to notions such as the bourgeoisie as the permanent historical agent or the ‘logic of capitalism’ as a set of the historically inalterable processes such as capital accumulation and commodification. In my view, Dardot and Laval fall into caricature when critiquing the work of Marxist scholars, even if the points that they make in and around this critique are valid and convincing. Thus, their insistence on the unbreakable intersectionality of the political, economic, social and subjective makes perfect sense, but I do not see how Duménil and Lévy, or Harvey, or indeed Marx himself, can be said to have fully ignored such confluences. As regards the view of neoliberalism as policies and practices, we see how the ideas emerging in the work of Hayek, von Mises and Friedman have

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come to fruition in the past forty years. As noted above, neoliberalism has meant cutbacks in government spending on vital services, such as education, medical care, transportation and housing; the partial or total privatization of many of these public services; and the establishment or maintenance of regressive income tax regimes, which in relative terms put the tax burden far more on working-​and middle-​class incomes than on upper-​class incomes. These tax policies have marked a definitive move away from the notion of redistributive tax policy, as tax regimes are ‘simplified’ in such a way that particularly in the wealthier countries of the world the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population today pays less than they did, for example, forty years ago. As a result, inequality, to be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, has risen dramatically (Piketty, 2014). In addition, as Benno Herzog (personal communication) has pointed out to me, adopting a primarily materialist Marxist position in my analysis of neoliberalism means making sure that I do not lose sight of three key elements: capitalism as an historically situated general mode of social reproduction, including the reproduction of injustices and contradictions; neoliberalism as the current phenomenological description of capitalism; and neoliberal capitalism as a mode of reproduction that takes into account specific, new ways of production and governance that are distinguishable from past ways. With the regard to the last element mentioned by Herzog, the implantation of what is known as neoliberalism in different contexts around the world over the past four decades has led to very real changes in the organization and management of production, as well as the continuance of old ways of organizing and managing production. Thus, while new information services industries often adopt more democratic, horizontally structured ways of organizing work, in the factories of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and other countries, harder realties, in the form of conditions more typical of the nineteenth century than the twenty-​first century, are alive and well. Neoliberalism is also associated with the partial or total deregulation of the financial markets, leading to a ‘footloose’ or ‘casino’ variety of capitalism in which the big players (e.g. traders, lenders, brokers) know no territorial limits, nor show any responsibility to national states, communities or individuals. This brand of capitalism, far more than the previously mentioned policies, has become the main focus of government and media attention since the current economic crisis began in 2007–​2008, and there has emerged a discourse defending it. The argument has been that the problem was not that the markets were operating too freely; rather, that a few bad apples exploited the market to their benefit, and in the process brought the system down. Indeed, examining neoliberal apologists’ responses to the crisis over the past several years, one would be forgiven for thinking that the invocation of the bad apples argument is motivated at least in part by the desire to protect the practices

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that made the apples bad. Thus, there is a need to sell the idea that in order to move forward, and crucially out of the crisis, all that is needed is just a little more (but not too much more) vigilance of markets and individuals. In other words, what is needed is some control, but without meddling with the main elements of neoliberalism.11 With regard to this line of reasoning, Žižek summed up matters well when he wrote: In old-​fashioned Marxist terms –​that the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of financial institutions, and so on). (Žižek, 2009: 19) In practice, all the smoke screens and cordons sanitaires that have been erected to protect the banking sector, publically chastised but allowed to continue to engage in antisocial behaviour, has led to what Colin Crouch (2011) has called ‘the strange non-​death of neoliberalism’. In this non-​death, nothing important changes, so that business can be conducted as usual. In a sense, the solution to the problems engendered by neoliberal practices and measures seems to be simply more neoliberal practices. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or perhaps not, as it seems that nothing has, in fact, changed. As Dardot and Laval (2013) have noted, while there may have been a crisis of confidence and even conscience among those responsible for economic policy, and while this may have led to much hand-​wringing, the normative machinery of neoliberalism has remained firmly intact.12 Running parallel to the financial deregulation of neoliberalism has been territorial deregulation, as first ‘outsourcing’ and then ‘off-​shorization’ (Urry, 2014) have become more and more common. Outsourcing refers to ‘the transfer of activities once performed by an entity to a business (or businesses) in exchange for money’ (Ritzer, 2010: 226). This may happen within a single locality or it may involve putting considerable physical distance between the home company and the activity being outsourced. This is what happened in the United Kingdom when call centres were first opened in Scotland and the north of England, despite the fact that most of the companies being serviced were located in the south of England. Meanwhile, offshoring ‘involves sending work to companies in other countries’ (Ritzer, 2010:  226). This is what occurred when the above-​cited companies in the United Kingdom no longer hired the services of call centres in Scotland and the north of England, preferring cheaper ones in India and other parts of the world. Together, outsourcing and off-​shorization have become the most common means through which corporations reduce costs. In particular, in off-​shorization, large corporations save themselves a great deal of money in three ways. First, they save on

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salary payments because they have moved production processes to parts of the world where labour costs are lower. Second, they save on insurance outlays, because in offshore work environments there is normally less state and institutional support for workers’ rights and protection. Third and finally, they are spared the cost of environmentally friendly operations given that their host governments are not likely to impose environmental regulations. Finally, as has been noted by just about all the scholars cited in this chapter, neoliberalism has meant the adoption of the market metaphor as the dominant way to frame all manner of day-​to-​day activity. The notion of the market has been around for some time in political economy. For Smith, it was the on-​the-​whole self-​regulating site where ‘by treaty, by barter, and by purchase . . . we obtain from one another the greater part of those mutual good offices which we stand in need of’ (Smith, [1776] 2012: 19–​20). Meanwhile, for Marx ([1867] 1990), the market was the site or social space (indeed, an uneven playing field) that compelled individuals (the proletariat) to enter into the processes of buying and selling commodities to satisfy their basic needs and wants. Those who incorporate the market metaphor in discussions of the economy tend to adopt an oversimplification of Smith’s version. First, they promote the idea that markets are fair and open spaces of activity, in which participants are equal and free to act (and indeed to prosper). Second, they seem to embrace the notion that markets act as efficient and intelligent information processors as more than just a metaphor. Anyone who has paid even a minimal amount of attention to the developments and events occurring before and during the current economic crisis can attest to how markets are neither fair and open nor efficient and intelligent. One important effect of the adoption of the market metaphor has been that domains of social activity, previously organized according to criteria that had to do with community and institution (in addition to economic imperatives), have come to be framed in terms of economic exchange and market interests above all else. Education is perhaps the best example of such processes in action, as it has been thoroughly neoliberalized in most parts of the world. This has meant that in some contexts, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, universities, secondary schools and even primary schools and nurseries now compete for students (reframed as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’), as well as resources. Parents compete with parents to get their children into the right schools, and of course students compete with one another for places in top schools at all levels of education. Schools and universities are run as if they were businesses, which has meant greater surveillance of teachers and students, more systems of accountability, more rigid evaluation systems and so on. Meanwhile, the purpose of education from the neoliberal perspective is to service the economy through the production of citizens with the right skill sets and dispositions to compete both inside the nation-​state border and

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globally. One could argue that this has always been the case, or at least that it was the case before people began to talk about neoliberalism. Thus, we have Michael Young’s classic text, The rise of the meritocracy (1958) as a very early denunciation of rising inequality in British education, and then, some years later, Bowles and Gintis’s (1977) Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life, in which the authors invoke the ‘correspondence principle’ in reference to how in the United States the educational system reflects the interests, norms and values of capitalism. However, today the links between private business and education are far more extensive and profound than in previous epochs.

Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed neoliberalism, examining its history and its main characteristics critically. If one thing is clear from my discussion it is that neoliberalism is many things –​an economic regime, a ruling ideology, a rationality, a way of life, a way of self-​governance and so on. It is thus simultaneously economic, political, social, geographical and cultural. And as I observed in in my review of the landscape of political economy in sociolinguistics in Chapter 1, and as I exemplify in later chapters in this book, neoliberalism intersects with language and communication practices, such that following Irvine (1989; see Chapter 1), such practices may denote or represent neoliberalism, or be the means through which neoliberalism is indexed, or even be fused with the material in the constitution of neoliberalism. I ended the previous chapter with the argument that I needed to provide a thorough coverage of neoliberalism in this chapter because it has become the focal point of a great deal of what is published under the umbrella of political economy today. As I  noted earlier, it is a term/​concept that has burst onto the scene across the social sciences and humanities in the past few years. Now, as I conclude this chapter, I see the need to make the case for a thorough discussion of some of the key terms/​concepts that have been discussed under the umbrella of neoliberalism. Thus, in Chapter  4, I provide the reader with an in-​depth discussion of three key elements in any discussion of how neoliberalism impacts people’s lives:  stratification, inequality and social class. Chapter 4 is the third and last of the theoretical chapters that I  announced in Chapter  1, and, as has been the case with Chapters  2 and 3, it provides conceptual frameworks to be drawn on in Chapters  5 and 6, where I  deal with specific cases of political economy applied to sociolinguistic issues.

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4 Stratification, inequality and social class

Introduction In Chapter 2, I discussed political economy as a general framework for understanding events in the world. Then, in Chapter  3, I  discussed neoliberalism as the specific focus of much political economic literature in recent years, in particular that literature that is critical Marxist in orientation and produced by researchers and scholars working in social sciences disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, geography and communications. In this literature, we see how in the neoliberal era there has been an increase in inequality and the rate at which inequality has increased, all of which has led to some questioning of neoliberalism as an ideology and as a socioeconomic reality. In this chapter I aim to pick up this theme as I focus on the increasing stratification of societies, the inequality that is integral to that stratification and social class as a specific type of inequality. These issues have been widely treated in recent times, both in the social sciences and in the media; however, there has not been much in-​depth treatment of them in sociolinguistics. Indeed, the norm in sociolinguistics has been for these issues to be name-​checked but then neither defined nor explained. Often, the reason is ‘due to a lack of space’, although in some cases, authors may have doubts about the usefulness of higher-​level theorizing or reviewing a lot of literature that is not, strictly speaking, sociolinguistics. I harbour no such doubts and as I have here the space for such conceptual development and I  feel it necessary to provide it, I  do just this. In this sense, I continue along the same lines as in Chapters 2 and 3, as I set up and carry on a theoretical discussion of stratification, inequality and class.

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Stratification In her monograph titled Stratification:  Social Vision and Inequality, Wendy Bottero (2005) defines social stratification as follows: Social stratification is concerned with the patterning of inequality and its enduring consequences on the lives of those who experience it All of us live within pre-​existing relations of unequal power, status or economic resources; and these unequal relations surround and constrain us, providing the context of our interactions, inevitably affecting the choices we make in life, opening some channels of opportunity, and closing off others. This is a condition of social life (individual choice is always limited by the choices of those around us), but stratification is concerned with how some have more freedom and choice than others. . . . The point of stratification analysis is to see how such inequalities persist and endure –​over lifetimes and between generations. (Bottero, 2005: 3) Important here is Bottero’s position that the study of stratification is about how social division and inequality exist in long-​term form, although their continuous reproduction is the here and now in the form of activities taking place ‘at any given point in time’. In parallel to this temporal dimension there is the fact that stratification is, in effect, a ‘big structure’, which shapes local and surface-​ level activity without being reducible to it, from an analytical perspective. Elsewhere, David Grusky and Manwai Ku (2008) address the issue of why in recent years there has been an increase in the amount of attention to stratification, usually via a focus on inequality, both in academia and in the media. First, there is the persistent presence of –​and in some cases, increase in –​ inequality resulting from racism, gender bias, religious discrimination and so on. This increase has occurred despite efforts by governments, groups and individuals to eradicate discrimination and segregation along these lines over the past several decades. With regard to persistent racism, one need only look at the United States to see an example of how superficial analyses pointing to the end of racism (yet another ill-​advised term beginning with ‘post’ –​ post-​racism –​ came into general use roundabout the time that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008) have proven to be naive at best and cynical in the worst of all cases.1 In addition, there has been a rise in Islamophobia in North America, Europe and other parts of the world as many people seem to find it difficult to separate Islam from acts of terrorism carried out in the name of an interpretation of Islam. And finally, there has been a worldwide rise in acts of misogyny and violence against girls and women of all ages in recent years, which makes any talk about post-​feminism seem out of place, at least

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if one imagines that this term means that existential and physical discrimination against women has ended or is no longer significant. In sum, a survey of social events in contemporary societies reveals that stratification in terms of race, religion, gender and other social differentiators (e.g. age, sexuality, disability, nationality) continues to be a reality, and one that is much studied and commented on in the media and day-​to-​day communication (Payne, 2013). A second reason why there has been an increase in the amount of attention to stratification is the current general trend towards greater economic inequality in those parts of the world where the previous three decades had seen a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. As economists such as Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2011, 2014)  and Thomas Piketty (2014) have noted, from roughly the late 1940s to the mid-​1970s, the economies of the wealthy countries of Western Europe, North America and elsewhere operated according to a dominant Keynesian social democratic consensus (de facto or conscious) and during this period inequality was reduced. However, as we observed in Chapter 3, from the mid-​1970s onwards, this consensus began to be questioned and discredited. It was effectively dismantled, first in the United States and the United Kingdom, and later elsewhere when neoliberal economic policies and practices came to prominence, albeit in very different ways, across different geographical locations (Peck, 2010). These policies and practices have generated social and political changes that have brought with them greater differences between the rich and the poor and the weakening of the traditional middle class in many parts of the world (Atkinson, 2015; Bosc, 2011; Bourguignon, 2012; Dorling, 2011; Harvey, 2005, 2010; Milanovic, 2011, 2016; Piketty, 2014). In addition, as global political economists such as François Bourguignon (2012) and Branco Milanovic (2011, 2016) have noted, what applies intranationally also applies internationally, as the gap between the relatively rich and the relatively poor countries of the world has increased. Thus, notwithstanding the rise of China as the number one economy in the world in terms of absolute wealth and production, and the growing importance on the world stage of China’s fellow BRICS members, Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa, there are many countries around the world, particularly in Africa, which are falling further and further behind the wealthier nations of the world. Importantly, intranational inequality has been increasing substantially in just about every nation in the world, from the United States to China, and the pace at which it is increasing has itself increased since the first signs of the current economic crisis emerged in 2007–​2008. Rising inequality has not just been documented by some, and lived by many; it has also led to a growing consciousness among members of societies that its persistence and growth are accompanied by a long list of collateral negative effects, such as rising ill-​health, less political participation by

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citizens, rising criminal activity and so on (Dorling, 2011). And all these circumstances lead to political and social ecologies that are unsustainable and in need of a great deal of redirection if not outright eradication. This realization has been accompanied by a rise in indignation among those sectors of the population most affected by the rise of inequality, as witnessed by the wide variety of alternative social and political movements arising in different contexts around the world (Burawoy, 2015; Castells, 2012; Castells, Caraça and Cardosa, 2012; Cox and Nilsen, 2014; Feixa and Nofre, 2012; Ruiz, 2014). And while the issues that have prompted the formation of these social and political movements may be dealt with superficially, via palliatives, there is an increasing realization that it is necessary to seek transformative rather than affirmative solutions (Fraser, 1995, 2008) by going to the root causes, the capitalist system of the twenty-​first century. There are obviously very big differences between the sociopolitical uprisings known as the ‘Arab spring’, which took place in north African countries from the spring of 2011 onwards, and the rising support for nontraditional political movements across Europe, both from the left (SYRIZA in Greece or Podemos in Spain) and from the reactionary right (the increased vote share for neo-​fascist parties across Europe). But surely the single most identifiable force driving these movements, different though they are, is one form or another of ‘inequality’, a term, like so many others, in need of definition.2

Inequality References to inequality can be found as far back as the fourth century BC, when Plato discussed both its inevitability and the danger that it entailed, respectively. In book IV of The Republic, he wrote that a state ‘always contains at least two states, the rich and the poor, at enmity with each other’ (Plato, [380 BC] 2007:  124), and in Book V of The Laws, he wrote that ‘in a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues . . . there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil’ (Plato, [360 BC] 2014: npn). Writing about the formation of societies before societies had formed in most parts of the world, Plato identified inequality as a potential or real ill, to be avoided or combatted, respectively. The early philosophy of Plato is alive and well in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s oft-​cited essay Discourse on the origin of inequality, first published some twenty centuries after Plato (Rousseau, [1754] 2004). Rousseau’s starting point is the existence of what he called ‘two species of inequality’. On the one hand, there is physical inequality, or the natural differences

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among individuals in terms of body, mind and health. This is a deterministic, biological-​inheritance version of inequality. On the other hand, there is moral or political inequality, which is based on convention, that is, it is established, accepted and authorized by society. This is a deterministic socialization version of inequality, albeit one that allows for variation across different configurations of social conditions. Both species of inequality lead to differences in wealth and power in society. In a controversial move for the times in which he lived, Rousseau developed the idea that existing stratification in society is not just about the natural abilities and propensities of individuals; rather, there are the aforementioned social conditions, human-​made to be sure, which create, strengthen and maintain existing political, economic, social and cultural orders, and which will be different across a range of contexts. In addition, Rousseau includes an historical perspective in his discussion, writing about the before and after of the development of private property as the wellspring of inequality. Rousseau states his position as follows: The first man who after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditch should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this impostor; you are lost, if you forget that that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody! (Rousseau, [1754] 2004: 27) Marx would sometime later write about inequality as the ‘original sin’ of political economy in Capital 1, and we can see how he may well have been inspired in such thinking by Rousseau, even if he would have seen it in material (and political economic) terms rather than in moral ones. Meanwhile, Marx’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, also weighed in with regard to inequality in society. Mill famously warned of the potential for injustices to be committed when social inequalities are deemed to be ‘expedient’, that is, as useful, according to ‘the principle of utility’ or ‘the greatest-​happiness principle’: All persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment, except when some recognised social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated . . . (Mill, [1863] 1991: 200)

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In the twentieth century, the kind of moral and political philosophy developed by scholars such as Mill and Jeremy Bentham continued (e.g. John Rawls’s work spanning the latter half of the twentieth century). Meanwhile, in the emergent field of sociology, scholars began to focus on inequality as a crucial topic in any understanding of how societies function. For example, functionalists such as Talcott Parsons (1951), who eschewed moral philosophizing in an attempt to be scientific, framed inequality in a utilitarian way, as an inevitable part of the balances necessary to the functioning of capitalist societies. Meanwhile, critical sociologists focusing on the matter, particularly those of a Marxist persuasion (e.g. Wright, 1978), were far less benign in their assessment of the origins of effects of inequality. Throughout all this work, there was something of a common view that inequality may be viewed from two general perspectives  –​the distributive and the relational. As André Béteille (1969) notes, the former ‘refers to the ways in which different factors such as income, wealth, occupation, education, power, skill, etc., are distributed in the population’, while the latter ‘refers to the ways in which individuals differentiated by these criteria are related to each other within a system of groups and categories’ (Béteille, 1969: 13). Both views entail numerous sub-​perspectives, which have been brought to the fore in more recent work on the topic. In a fairly recent textbook on inequality, Lisa Keister and Darby Southgate (2012) suggest there are four key dimensions of stratification in modern societies. First, there is economic or financial stratification, which is mainly about differences in income earned by individuals during their lifetimes. Second, there is wealth as a divider, where wealth refers primarily to property, possessions, savings and investments. Prestige, the third dividing factor, is about differences among individuals in terms of their relative status, esteem and perceived value. The fourth and final dimension is power, which captures how the few in society can force the many to bend to their will, not least because of their considerably greater income, wealth and prestige. To a great extent, this model follows Max Weber’s ([1922] 1968)  classic three-​part distinction between class, status and party, even if the authors do not seem to have a strong notion of production processes and labour relations, which Weber subsumed with wealth and income under the heading of class. In addition, missing in Keister and Southgate’s book is a more explicit engagement (or even siding) with interpretations of difference and inequality as necessarily conflictive in nature. In fairness to the authors, their book is a textbook distributed in the United States, and this might explain the adoption of a relatively de-​politicized approach to the topic. Elsewhere, Göran Therborn (2006) is somewhat more forthcoming as regards conflict, as he returns to the Rousseauian notion of inequality as a moral concern, arguing that it is inevitably about qualifying differences between individuals and collectives as good/​right and bad/​wrong. For Therborn, inequality

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itself is based on difference, but it is not just a matter of dissimilarity between and among individuals. First, it is about difference that limits the life possibilities of the disadvantaged: either directly, by concentrating resources among the privileged, or indirectly, via social psychological mechanisms of humiliating signals of superiority and inferiority. Second, as a difference, inequality is too large and harsh to be accepted by a substantial proportion of society, even those who might benefit from it. Third and finally, inequality goes against notions of fairness in society, giving underserved, unfair advantages to people on the basis of power rather than work and sacrifice. Of course, such notions of fairness have not always been in operation, as we see in recent surveys of inequality (Bourguignon, 2012; Milanovic, 2011; Piketty, 2014). Therborn also outlines three general types of inequality. First, there is vital inequality, which is about basic life and death chances and individuals and collectives’ relative exposure to life-​threatening natural phenomena, such as disease, famine, flooding and drought; self-​inflicted human conditions, such as violence, alcoholism, and obesity; and larger man-​made disasters, such as war, pollution and the inability to reach and use vital natural resources. Second, there is existential inequality, which is about systems of oppression that deny individuals and collectives what are understood today to be basic human rights. Social structures such as patriarchy, slavery, caste systems, racism, religious persecution, homophobia and other forms of social ostracism, or attacks on ways of being, fall into this category. Third, there is resource inequality, which refers to the variable access that individuals and collectives have to material and symbolic resources, from property to money to culture; contacts and social networks; and recognized legitimacy and respect (see Bourdieu’s cultural and social capitals). As I have noted previously in Chapter 3 (and earlier in this chapter), from the 1970s onwards, there was a progressive abandonment of the dominant Keynesian social democratic consensus in countries around the world and a turn to neoliberal policies and practices. These policies and practices have led to a considerable increase in Therborn’s resource inequality, with greater differences between the rich and the poor and the weakening and diminishing of the traditional middle class. The latter development has come about not only with regard to economic and material phenomena (stable employment, a good salary relative to the general population, the ownership of property and consumer goods, etc.), but also in terms of the status and legitimacy that accompany these phenomena. In addition, as noted above, this inequality has increased even more rapidly in the years since the first indications of profound economic crisis first began to emerge in 2007–​2008 (Piketty, 2014). In the midst of this situation, it is worthwhile to note how among the populations of those countries most affected by the crisis, such as the southernmost states of the EU, there is a growing realization that the persistence and growth of

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resource inequality leads inevitably to a rise in another of Therborn’s categories. In this sense, there is a concomitant increase in vital inequality, the collateral negative effects that come with society-​wide impoverishment, such as ill-​health (both physical and psychological) and a decrease in the quality of social services and publically available resources (Dorling, 2011, 2014). Of course, in order to study inequality and social stratification or do something about it, it is necessary to elaborate some sort of descriptive framework, which informs both researchers and lay people regarding what it is that they are trying to resist, combat or overturn. Moving in this direction somewhat, Grusky and Ku (2008) have elaborated a typology of eight key ‘assets’ around which groups and individuals may be considered stratified, and hence advantaged and disadvantaged. Assets here are understood as the resources that individuals struggle over in societies, or the social realities according to which they can be classified, and ultimately situated hierarchically. In Table 4.1, I summarize how Grusky and Ku present not only the assets, but also the types, followed by examples of advantaged and disadvantaged groups for each type. Grusky and Ku’s list might be expanded somewhat to include overt reference to race, gender and religion, discussed above as persistent key mediators of inequality and stratification in societies worldwide. In addition, housing and shelter deserve some explicit mention, even if this aspect is perhaps implied in Grusky and Ku’s ‘economic’ category. Indeed, whether we frame housing as an asset generating greater wealth or simply in terms of comfort (it is far better to have a roof over one’s head than not to have one), there is little doubt that it marks divisions in societies. This is particularly the case in those nations and regions where, owing to the belief that ‘the market knows best’ (see Chapter 3), the production and distribution of housing have been left to the whims of investors and speculative activity. The result has been that in cities such as London (Dorling, 2015), the working class and the poor are unable to enter the housing market, while the middle class is now divided into those who already possess housing and those who aspire to do so, but find that they cannot amass the savings necessary to make a down payment. Finally, inheritance is another focal point of inequality in societies: indeed, as Piketty (2014) notes, it is what marks the difference between the haves and the have-​ nots in society in recent decades. This is especially the case with gifts, that is, when parents pass on to their children a large amount of money, a house or a car (just to cite three common examples) while they are still alive. Grusky and Ku are careful to note that their list of assets must always be considered with reference to several additional factors. First, there is the need to examine how assets are often interrelated and tend to co-​occur in individuals, or ‘crystallize’, as Grusky and Ku describe it. For example, in very general

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TABLE 4.1:  Types of assets and examples of advantaged and disadvantaged groups Assets

Examples

Asset group

Examples of types

Advantaged

Disadvantaged

Economic

Wealth Income Ownership

Billionaire Professional Capitalist

Bankrupt worker Laborer Worker (i.e., employed)

Power

Political power Workplace authority Household authority

Prime Minister Manager Head of household

Disenfranchised person Subordinate worker Child

Cultural

Knowledge Digital culture ‘Good’ manners

Intelligentsia Silicon Valley resident Aristocracy

Uneducated persons Residents of other places Commoners

Social

Social clubs Workplace associations Informal networks

Country club member Union member Washington A-​list

Nonmember Nonmember Social unknown

Honorific

Occupational Religious Merit-​based

Judge Saint Nobel prize winner

Garbage collector Excommunicate Nonwinner

Civil

Right to work Due process Franchise

Citizen Citizen Citizen

Illegal immigrant Suspected terrorist Felon

Human

On-​the-​job training General schooling Vocational training

Experienced worker College graduate Law school graduate

Inexperienced worker High school dropout Unskilled worker

Physical

Mortality Physical disease Mental health

Person with long life Healthy person Healthy person

A “premature” death Person with AIDS, asthma Depressed, alienated

Source: Grusky and Ku, 2008: 6.

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terms high wealth and income are often closely related to other upscale assets such as political power and workplace authority, high levels of education and displayable and employable knowledge, belonging to exclusive social clubs and groups, having high status both professionally and in society at large, having good health, and so on. Likewise, and again in very general terms, low wealth and income are closely related to less political power and limited workplace authority, low levels of education, belonging to lower-​prestige social clubs and groupings, having relatively low status both professionally and in society at large, having relatively poor health, and so on. A simple way to illustrate how such distinctions work is to compare two very different life trajectories, that of former British prime minster David Cameron and that of a Londoner of the same age as Cameron working in a low-​level, poorly paid service job such as cleaning. Cameron ticks all the right boxes with regard to the assets listed in Table 4.1, while the cleaner presents a negative scenario for most, if not all, of these assets. A second factor to consider is that crystallizations may occur in strata that are very different in size. Thus, there is a difference between a crystallization of assets around the top 1 per cent (or even 10 per cent), the elites in terms of wealth and income in a given nation-​state, and a crystallization of assets among those who represent ‘the rest’. The latter category is very broad and includes those who are gainfully employed with upper-​middle, medium and lower incomes, as well as those more categorized as the ‘precariat’  –​ the growing number of citizens of the advanced economies who lack any income or employment security with little or no prospect of the kind of self-​ improvement that might lead to such security (Savage et al., 2013; Standing, 2011) –​or the ‘working poor’ –​those who despite long hours still cannot make ends meet (e.g. Andres and Lohmann, 2008; Blank, Danziger and Schoeni, 2006; Munger, 2002). I have more to say about employment and class below. Third and finally, there is the question of how permanent and rigid stratified societies are, that is, how much social mobility occurs. The issue in this case is the extent to which one’s lot is established at birth or there is some degree of movement into and out of strata in a given society (here, inheritance plays a key role). In his much-​cited tour de force on the history of inequality, Piketty (2014) is somewhat pessimistic about its continuance in countries around the world, in both the short term and the long term, arguing that we appear to be returning to levels of inequality not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century. In publications about social mobility (Dorling, 2014; Payne, 2017), we see how the class system has seemingly frozen in countries such as the United Kingdom, as it is far harder to move from lower and working-​class positions to middle-​and upper-​middle-​class positions than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. In this sense, one might contrast the period 1918–​1978, when ‘British culture admitted more and more people from normal backgrounds to

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the highest levels of society’ with the present, when ‘the idea of progressive improvement generation after generation is now a distant memory’ (Dorling, 2014: 52).

Social class: Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Veblen3 Grusky and Ku’s assets listed earlier also articulate in some cases with what many have come to understand social class to be about. The economic base of class is associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s writings (e.g. Marx, [1867] 1990), although as has been noted on numerous occasions by several authors (e.g. Giddens, 1973, 1984; Wright, 1985), Marx never actually provided a clear-​cut definition of class, dying in 1883 just as he appeared to be about to do so in the unfinished c­ hapter 52 of Capital III, promisingly titled ‘Classes’. Marx began this chapter powerfully, writing that there were ‘three great classes’ in industrialized capitalist societies: ‘The owners of mere labor-​ power, the owners of capital, and the landlords, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-​rent, in other words, wage laborers, capitalists and landlords’ (Marx, [1894] 1994: 1025). Then, after noting (not for the first time!) ‘the constant tendency . . . of the capitalist mode of production to divorce the means of production ever more from labour’ (ibid.: 1025), he finally posed the key questions: ‘What makes a class?’ and ‘What makes wage-​labourers, capitalists and landlords the formative elements of the three great social classes?’ (ibid.: 1025–​1026). And, after stating that the three listed classes depend for their existence on wages, profit and ground-​rent, respectively, Marx seemed about to embark on one of his characteristically elaborate problematizing sections, taking on how each of the broad class categories could be broken down into subcategories, given that there are degrees of both uniformity and difference in the work conditions and income sources of, for example, ‘doctors’ and ‘government officials’. But the chapter ends abruptly at this point with Engels’s comment:  ‘At this point the manuscript breaks off’ (ibid.: 1026). I have three comments to make about this oft-​cited end to Marx’s writing career. First, Marx appeared about to do what has since become a constant in discussions of and research on class over the past century and a half. I refer here to attempts to classify, in as much detail as possible, individuals and collectives according to their putative class positions in whatever society is being studied. I have more to say about this tendency below. My second comment about the end of Capital III is that it perhaps does not matter that Marx never defined class clearly, concisely and unequivocally in his work. I say this

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because intermeshed in the different levels of analysis comprising his critique of capitalism, there is a constant concern with individuals, families and collectives’ relationships to the means of production and their differentiated forms of life vis-​à-​vis other class members and classes. And this is perhaps enough. In any case, and this is my third comment, Marx’s most direct predecessors have managed to put together clear, concise and unequivocal definitions of class in a Marxist vein. A good example is Vladimir Lenin. Embedded in the realities of early-​twentieth-​century Russia, he captured the spirit of Marx’s views on class well in the following definition: Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. (Lenin, [1919] 1996: npn) Lenin here highlights several points about class that to this day are valid. First, he presents class as a dynamic phenomenon and a social relation –​it is only possible to understand one class position with regard to others. Class, therefore, cannot be understood as just a constellation of characteristics assigned to an individual with a view to categorizing him/​her as a particular type of person in society. Finally, and crucially, Lenin includes here Marx’s key argument that an understanding of class can only come about through an understanding of how wealth, property, the means and processes of production, and the distribution of goods and services are controlled in society. Writing nearly a century later, Eric Olin Wright (2005: 20–​21) has identified five elements of a Marxist class analysis. These elements are (1) class interests, or the material interests of people derived from class-​based positions in society, such as their standard of living and work conditions; (2) class consciousness, or the subjective awareness people have of their class positions and interests, and the conditions for advancing them; (3) class practices, or the activities engaged in by individuals, acting alone or with others, which construct their class interests; (4) class formations, or the collectives people form in order to defend class interests, such as trade unions, political parties and employers’ associations; and finally (5) class struggle, or the conflicts between people (e.g. capitalists and proletarians) pursuing opposing class interests. These may be seen as separable elements in an attempt to understand class, given that class interests and class practices may exist independently of any sense of class consciousness, as has been documented by many sociologists

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over the past several decades. However, it is perhaps better to see these elements of class as interrelated, operating as something of a cascade. Thus, class interests and class practices, as objective, material, lived realities, may lead to (or not lead to) class consciousness, as a subjective awareness of the said objective realities. Class formations may result from this confluence of objective and subjective realities and class struggle is the emergent reality that results from the combination of the previous four elements. Meanwhile, non-​Marxist scholars have emphasized that any conceptualization of social class must be consistent with the increasing complexification of societies since Marx’s death some 130 years ago. Writing in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Durkheim ([1893] 1984) saw class in terms of specialized occupations leading to specialized cultures (and, indeed, communities), which were separated, one from the other, by different value systems, world views and behaviour. Durkheim anticipated how organized labour movements would both improve the lot of workers and become institutionalized and therefore cease to be a threat to the survival of capitalism. He also posited that improved standards of living across populations would lead to social mobility and the eventual rise of individualism. Durkheim thus added much that was social to conceptions of class, influencing later scholars as diverse as Maurice Halbwachs (1913) and Basil Bernstein (1971). Durkheim’s undoubted influence and legacy notwithstanding, it is Weber ([1922] 1968) who is generally considered the sociologist who most reconfigured class in the light of changes taking place in industrialized European societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Weber viewed the economic order as a market in which stratification and inequality arose in the exchange of assets by individuals with unequal access to and possession of these assets. For Weber, ‘class situation’ and ‘class’ refer only to the same (or similar) interests which an individual shares with others’, which include ‘the various controls over consumer goods, means of production, assets, resources and skills which constitute a particular class situation’ (ibid.: 302). His view of class was therefore not just about production (see Marx), but also about economic exchange occurring after production (i.e. consumption).4 More recent approaches influenced by Weber, and in particular those attentive to how technologies continually transform the living conditions of human beings and how they make sense of them, have led to the suggestion that class is no longer relevant. On the one hand, there was research beginning in the 1950s showing how in societies such as Britain, affluent workers were beginning to escape the confines of what was considered to be ‘working class’ (Dahrendorf, 1959; Goldthorpe et al., 1969), especially as regards their lifestyles deriving from increased incomes and purchasing power. Operating at a more philosophical level, first Alain Touraine (1971), and later Daniel Bell (1973), wrote of changes to come in a post-​industrial age; and André Gorz,

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some years later, wrote of the demise of class, which in effect was the rise of a ‘non-​class of non-​workers’ (Gorz, 1982:  67)  in societies in which manual labour was progressively automatized. Similar views can be found in the work of social theorists and sociologists trying to capture the zeitgeist of the 1990s, by which time neoliberalism had become something of a global doxa (e.g. Beck, 1992; Castells, 1996; Giddens, 1991; Lash and Urry, 1994; Pakulski and Waters, 1996). Nevertheless, as I note elsewhere (Block, 2014), it would be unwise to reduce class to something akin to a lifestyle option, or worse, to dispense with it altogether as a construct through which one can understand stratification and inequality in society. Indeed, like Mark Twain, with regard to his reported death, class has shown again and again in the history of the social sciences that rumours of its demise or irrelevance are always greatly exaggerated. Apart from their varying degrees of class denial, the aforementioned views may be seen as more culturally sensitive than what one finds in the nineteenth-​century formulations of Marx, although it would be an error to see Marxism as devoid of a social dimension (see Chapter 2). It is also a view of economics that articulates well with a second key construct in Weberian sociology, status, which Weber defines as the effective claim to social esteem in terms of positive or negative privileges . . ., [which] is typically founded on (a) style of life . . ., (b) formal education, which may be . . . empirical training or . . . rational instruction, and the corresponding forms of behavior, . . . and (c) hereditary or occupational prestige. (Weber, [1922] 1968: 305–​306) Weber introduced the notions of status and status situation as a way of making sense of inequality and stratification in industrialized societies, not only in terms of material conditions (economics), but also in terms of more abstract, socially constructed phenomena such as honour, prestige and social practices. The latter include activities such as the consumption of particular goods and engagement in particular pastimes, both related to differentiable lifestyles that are valued unequally in societies in terms of prestige. The notion that consumption patterns (both the what and the how of consumption) come to be inextricably linked with class position and status in capitalist societies was developed brilliantly by Weber’s American contemporary Thorsten Veblen (whom we met in Chapter 2). Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, and much influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Veblen proposed the existence of a ‘predatory’ class in societies, ‘habituated to the infliction of injury by force or stratagem’ (Veblen, [1899] 2007: 11). Where industrial development and the division of labour had taken place, as was the case in Veblen’s late-​nineteenth-​century United States, it was perhaps

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more appropriate to frame matters in more subtle and less physical terms as the ‘predatory aptitudes, habits and traditions’ (ibid.: 19) necessary to triumph in capitalist societies. Ultimately, in Veblen’s thinking, the wealth accrued by the winners in capitalist societies comes to be seen as ‘intrinsically honourable and [it] confers honour on its possessor’ (ibid.: 24). Veblen writes further of canons of ‘reputability’ and ‘taste’ and ‘esteem’ in a similar vein, and his discussion leads to the notion of the ‘conspicuous consumption’ of the leisure class, that is, how the wealthy not only need to accumulate wealth, but also have to know how to flaunt it, not only abstaining from labour, but also making of this abstinence an ostentation. As Veblen explains, ‘in order to gain and hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth and power . . . [; they] must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence’ (ibid.: 29).

From Bourdieu to the constellation of dimensions model The positions that Weber and Veblen took with regard to status, prestige, esteem and other social indexicals articulate well with the sociology/​anthropology of Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote on many occasions about class and class-​ rated issues and phenomena in France from the 1960s onwards, Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) being his most significant work on the topic. Like Weber and Veblen, Bourdieu saw class not only as materially based (see his ‘economic capital’), but also as emergent in sociocultural activity. He thus posited the existence of two additional ‘capitals’:  (1)  cultural capital, as the possession of legitimized knowledge and know-​how, which might be transformed creatively and generatively into sub-​capitals or derived capitals such ‘educational capital’, ‘linguistic capital’, ‘artistic capital’ and so on; and (2)  social capital, as the development of social relations on the back of one’s cultural and economic capital. For Bourdieu, capitals can be quantified or spoken of in terms of degrees and even ‘volumes’. In his work, Bourdieu managed to capture how relative power is distributed differentially across individuals engaging in practices in a variety of what he called fields, understood succinctly as domains of social activity and practices constituted and shaped by particular ways of thinking and acting and what is considered tasteful and distinctive. Examples of fields that he wrote about in detail during his career include the world of art (Bourdieu, 1993), education and academia (Bourdieu, 1996) and the housing market (Bourdieu, 2005). It is important to understand that fields are not completely stable social configurations; rather they are always evolving and in a constant state of flux. Illustrative

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of their characteristic instability is the way in which what is deemed to mark taste and distinction can change over time. This occurs in the field of art, when far too many people have come to understand and appreciate an art form. It happens in the field of education, when too many people have acquired particular academic credentials. And it happens in the field of housing, when too many people have inhabited (and presumably ruined it with their presence) the latest trendy neighbourhood in a major city. Distinction, lost to be sure in these examples, is the key construct here, as it captures how the aesthetic judgements that people make (the clothes they choose to wear, what is art, what is bad taste); what they consume (the quality of beef that they eat, what wine they drink, eating organic or inorganic food); and how they behave (their pastimes, their manners) are framed according to the at-​a-​given-​point-​in-​time canons of bourgeois taste, which serve to situate individuals in relatively stable class hierarchies. Bourdieu’s analyses of French society and the numerous adaptations of his theories to societies elsewhere (e.g. Bennett et al., 2009 on the United Kingdom; Romero Laullón and Tirado Sánchez, 2016, on Spain) make a lot of sense. However, Bourdieu’s uses of ‘capital’, in various forms, are not without problems. For example, David Harvey has written of his ‘profound objections to Bourdieu’s characterisation of personal endowments . . . as a form of capital’ (Harvey, 2014: 186). Harvey argues that while ‘capital undoubtedly uses . . . signs of distinction in its sales practices and pitches, . . . that does not mean that distinction is a form of capital’ (ibid.: 187). Rather, as he suggests, distinction is about the symbolic orders emerging from and intertwined with the ongoing development of capitalism and the economic inequalities which come with this development. It therefore need not bear the label of ‘capital’, even if it is obviously part and parcel of the sociocultural construction of class and inequality in contemporary societies. As I  noted in Chapter  2, Callinicos (1999) has taken Bourdieu to task for seeming to have a rather limited grasp of economics, and by extension, political economy. More specifically, with regard to his multiple uses of ‘capital’, Callinicos argues that while ‘Bourdieu famously develops a general “economy of practices” in which the resources available to agents are classified as different kinds of capital (notably economic, cultural, and symbolic), the economy itself tends simply to be taken for granted and left unanalyzed in his work’ (Callinicos, 1999: 89–​90). Bourdieu’s economic capital, as a resource, is thus underdeveloped in his critique of modern society, and social and cultural capital are revealed as where his true interests lie. In this sense, Bourdieu is guilty of making questionable use of ‘capital’ and the various derived terms he has created, while at the same time demonstrating a distinct lack of interest in economic matters. What we are left with is what Holborow (2015: 59) sees

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as ‘Bourdieu’s intention . . . to reassert the force of the cultural and symbolic, including language, over and beyond the economic’. Notwithstanding these and other reservations about aspects of Bourdieu’s work (see Holborow, 2015, for further critique), his conceptualization of class has become central to any discussion of the phenomenon. In effect, it seems that no one discusses class today without some reference to Bourdieu’s work. In my own explorations of class in recent years, I have developed an understanding of class that is aligned with much of what Bourdieu has written on the topic. However, I am careful to maintain a Marxist analysis as my base before adding elements that derive in the first instance from Weber, but that many would associate with Bourdieu and a long list of contemporary scholars, including Will Atkinson (2015), Mike Savage (2015) and Erik Olin Wright (2015). What I have come to call a constellation of interrelated dimensions of class aims to capture a long list of factors that may be seen to index class, bearing in mind that such indexing occurs in different ways in different contexts, cultures and societies. This model consists of five general categories that are then subdivided into dimensions as laid out in Table 4.2. Putting such a presentation of class down on paper is not without risks and over the past several years I have, on occasion, been accused of various crimes against social epistemology for daring to ‘put class into little compartments’, as one critic once told me. Nothing could be further from my intentions, which necessitates inserting several caveats into the discussion. First of all, it is worth noting that the model is more a heuristic, something that helps me think about class, as opposed to something that represents class, and as such it is constantly being revised. This is in no small measure due to the fact that my reading about class in different contexts across time is ongoing and it leads me to add, delete and reorder the various dimensions listed under the five headings (it goes without saying that the five headings are themselves subject to revision as well). I am also aware that the conceptual slippage that characterizes Bourdieu’s work is present here. As I  noted above, over the years, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, such as Harvey (2014), Callinicos (1999) and Holborow (2015), have criticized Bourdieu for conflating material aspects with more status-​oriented ones, and this raises the issue of the relative acceptability of combining what in effect are Marxist and Weberian perspectives. This issue of Marx/​Weber commensurability versus incommensurability has been the subject of a great deal of discussion for some time (e.g. Giddens, 1973; Wright, 1985), although space does not allow a thorough treatment of this debate here (see Block, 2014, for a discussion). Suffice it to say that it reminds us of the complexity of class as something of a moving target that evolves as societies themselves evolve.

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TABLE 4.2:  Class as a constellation of interrelated dimensions General category

Dimensions

Material life conditions

Relations of individuals and collectives to the means of production: The circumstances of the provision of labour power to (and the exploitation of individuals and collectives by) those who own and control the means of production

Economic resources

Property: land and housing Property: other material possessions, such as electronic goods, clothing, books, art, etc. Income: salary and wages Accumulated wealth: savings and investments

Sociocultural resources

Occupation: manual labour, unskilled service jobs, low-​ level information-​based jobs, professional labour, etc. Education: level of formal education attained and the corresponding cultural capital acquired Technological knowhow: familiarity and ability to use evolving technologies Social contacts and networking: people regularly associated with as friends and acquaintances in class terms (the extent to which middle class people tend to socialize with middle class people, working class people with working class people, etc.) Societal and community status and prestige: embodied, achieved and ascribed

Behaviour

Consumption patterns: choice of shops, buying brands or not, ecological/​organic consumption, etc. Symbolic behaviour: how one moves one’s body, the clothes one wears, the way one speaks, how one eats, etc. Pastimes: golf, skiing, cockfighting, use of social media

Sociopolitical life conditions

Political life: one’s relative position in hierarchies of power in society Quality of life: in terms of physical comfort, psychological wellbeing and health Type of neighbourhood: a working-​class neighbourhood, a middle-​class neighbourhood, an area in the process of gentrification, etc.

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General category

Dimensions

Spatial conditions

Mobility: physical movement, from highly local to global Proximity to other people during a range of day-​to-​day activities Dimensions and size of space occupied: layout of dwelling or place of work, size of bedroom; size of office, etc. Type of dwelling: trailer, house (detached/​ semidetached), flat (studio, small, large), etc.

A third caveat concerns the ontological status of these dimensions, all of which could be seen as ‘individual attributes’ (Wright, 2015). This may be the case in part but I would hasten to add that they are also inter-​individually distributed and relational, as is class as a whole, in that they are constituted in and emerge from social activity involving social actors who are (self-​and other-​) positioned in relation to one another. One cannot understand dimensions in the category ‘material life conditions’ without some consideration of the dimensions in the other categories –​sociocultural resources, behaviour, sociopolitical life conditions and spatial conditions. As noted above with regard to Grusky and Ku’s model of stratification, the different dimensions indexing class crystallize and group together. For example, owning land, a house and a lot of material goods, and having a high income and a large amount of accumulated wealth, tend to cluster together. Similarly, with regard to the intersectionality of material conditions and sociocultural resources, it is not surprising that a well-​off individual is more likely than someone poorer to attain a high level of education, including technological prowess; obtain stable and satisfactory employment; know the ‘right’ people and be ‘networked’; and enjoy a good deal of societal and community status and prestige. This type of intersectionality across different domains of the social world leads to a final caveat, and that is how class is embedded in life experiences and the meaning-​making activities that accompany them, which means we can talk about class as cultural. In effect, class is about being in the world –​ about who we are –​which means we can also talk about class as part of our identity. However, it is worth bearing in mind the distinction that Nancy Fraser (1995, 2003, 2008) makes between aspects of being based in the realm of distribution and those based in the realm of recognition. In the former case, we are talking about the material bases of the life experiences, of ‘collective subjects of injustice [who] are classes or class-​like collectives, which are defined

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economically by a distinctive relation to the market or the means of production’ (Fraser, 2003: 14). Meanwhile, with regard to recognition, we are talking about respect for others and ‘an ideal reciprocal relationship between subjects in which each sees the other as an equal and also separate from it’ (ibid.: 10). Lamenting how ‘the discourse of social justice, once centred on distribution, is now increasingly divided between claims for distribution, on the one hand, and claims for recognition, on the other’ (ibid.: 7–​8), Fraser proposes a way beyond such either/​or thinking. What is needed is research and activism that is transformative, that is, ‘aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework’ (Fraser, 2008:  28)  in terms of both recognition and redistribution, while developing effective understandings of how recognition and redistribution interrelate. For our purposes, here, the main point is that social class is unlike dimensions of identity like gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and religion in that it is first and foremost about the distribution and redistribution of material resources. This is not to say that these dimensions are not about the distribution of material resources as well; they certainly are, especially with regard to race and gender. However, drawing on Fraser’s argumentation, my point is that these dimensions have roots in the Weberian social realms of status and prestige, and even if these realms are intermeshed with the material, the dynamics around their existence is still very different from that of class. Among other things, class divisions in society cannot be remedied by recognition and respect for difference: for the haves to respect the have-​nots does nothing to eliminate class divisions, and it might even be seen to exacerbate them. A more detailed treatment of these issues can be found in Block (2014).

Class as lived experience The view that class is about being in the world and that it is, therefore, embedded in culture, in recent times can be traced back to the seminal work of British scholars such as Richard Hoggart, E.  P. Thomson and Raymond Williams. Hoggart (1957) was part of a group of scholars who wrote about the life conditions of working-​class communities in post–​Second World War Britain (see also Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, 1956; Young and Wilmott, 1957). These books were based on relatively unstructured ethnographies, but they contained powerful accounts of working-​class people’s lives, which articulated well with E. P. Thompson’s views on class developed in his oft-​cited The history of the English working class. Early in this book, Thompson writes of his understanding of class as ‘a historical phenomenon’ and not ‘a “structure”, nor even . . . a “category”, but something which in fact happens (and can be shown

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to have happened) in human relationships’ (Thompson, [1963] 1980:  8). He further adds that class happens ‘when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves’, adding that their ‘class-​consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms; embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas, and institutional forms’. (Thompson, [1963] 1980: 8–​9) Thompson’s words are important as they point to an affective version of class, which Williams was to develop in his work. He coined the term ‘structures of feeling’ to capture the ‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically, affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ (Williams, 1977: 132). Such feelings of impulse, restraint and tone, growing out of class experiences, were captured in the aforementioned books on the British working class, but they also came to life vividly in the classic interview-​based study carried out by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972), which resulted in the classic text, The hidden injuries of class. Sennett and Cobb’s informants were white working-​class males in late 1960s’ America, on the eve of the decade that would see major transformations in the way that capitalist economies were organized and functioned (Lash and Urry, 1994), as well as the social and cultural effects of these economic changes. The authors document in their informants’ stories the feeling that being working class is a ‘burden’, which arises in ‘the feeling of not getting anywhere despite one’s efforts, the feeling of vulnerability in contrasting oneself to others at a higher social level, the buried sense of inadequacy that one resents oneself for feeling’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: 58). A generation later, Jennifer Silva (2012, 2013) interviewed American men and women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds who were between the ages of 24 and 34. The interviews took place between October 2008 and February 2010, at a time when the economic crisis was taking hold in the United States, but more importantly, they took place after a major transformation had taken place in the American economy due to the application of the neoliberal policies outlined in Chapter 3. Silva found feelings of doubt among her informants and how many had the ‘feeling of not getting anywhere despite one’s efforts’, both key features in Sennett and Cobb’s research. However, the United States, one decade into the twenty-​first century, was a very different place from what it had been forty years earlier and Silva identified in her informants’ descriptions and evaluations of their lives an overarching discourse that was highly individualistic and therapeutic. Silva calls this discourse the ‘mood economy’, which is about how ‘legitimacy and self-​worth are purchased, not with traditional currencies such as work or marriage or class solidarity, but

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instead through the ability to organise their emotions into a narrative of self-​ transformation’ (Silva, 2013: 18). Consistent with the times in which they have lived, Silva’s informants are on board with regard to the notion that they, as individuals, must take control over their lives and make of their circumstance what they can. And as Silva explains, this individualism leads many of them to ‘draw unforgiving boundaries against their family members and friends who cannot transform their selves –​overcome addictions, save money, heal troubled relationships –​through sheer determination alone’ (ibid.: 21). I have more to say about this new way of conceptualizing who we are under the heading ‘Neoliberal citizenship’ in Chapter 5.

Quantifying and categorizing social class Examinations of class as lived experience do not enter the terrain of classification systems, which as we observed above, have been around since Marx and Engels produced their long list of occupations in the Communist Manifesto, and Marx organized his critique of capitalism around the putative general class positions of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Thus, over the years, attempts to classify groups in society by class position have tended to be the domain of quantitative sociology. A  classic example can be found in Loyd Warner, Marchia Meeker and Kenneth Eells’s (1949) Social class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status. In this book, the authors survey previous studies that focused on class in different regions of the United States, such as New England, the Far West, the Midwest and the Deep South, before embarking on the elaboration of their own theory of social class. This discussion, in turn, leads them answer two key questions that they pose at the beginning of the book, the first being about ‘how to identify any class level’ and the second, ‘how to find the class level of any individual’ (Warner et al., 1949: v). Early in the book, the authors despatch a Marxist view of class, first by rejecting the fundamental idea that all societies are class societies and that all class societies are inherently conflictive (although no counterexample is offered by the authors), and then by ridiculing the notion of a proletarian revolution in an industrialized society. However, this Marx-​bashing aside, the authors provide much food for thought with regard to class as they discuss many of the markers of differentiation that I  discussed above as part of the constellation of dimensions model. For example, they suggest that how institutional memberships (family, church, associations and social cliques) are lived and experienced indexes class positions in societies, while also highlighting how these same institutional membership experiences are shaped by already existing class

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positions. In addition, the authors distinguish different sources of wealth –​ rent, salary and wages, inheritance, and so on  –​and they discuss emic categories such as ‘old rich’ and ‘new rich’ and how they relate to relative status and prestige in society. Status and prestige, in turn, are linked to a range of class-​related factors, such as education, occupation, type of dwelling, type of neighbourhood and the consumption patterns of goods and culture. Finally, Warner et  al. are sensitive to the intersectionality of class with race and ethnicity, providing a discussion of how the experiences of African Americans and the descendants of European immigrants are marked by class as well as by race and ethnicity, respectively. Ultimately, bearing all these dimensions in mind, the authors propose five general categories, each subdivided into higher and lower grades: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle and lower. Over three decades after the publication of Warner et al. (1949), British researchers carried out a series of survey-​based studies that posited multiple class categories based on occupation, not only for the United Kingdom but also for other European countries. The Oxford Social Mobility Study of England and Wales, which was carried out in 1972, was among the first (see Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne, 1980). It led to the Comparative Study of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations, which involved twelve European countries and three non-​European nations (see Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992). The latter survey classified questionnaire respondents into a complicated list of twelve categories with ‘higher-​grade professionals’ at the top, ‘small proprietors and artisans’ and ‘farmers and smallholders’ in the middle, and ‘agricultural and other workers in primary production’ at the bottom. In 2001, the British National Statistics Socio-​economic Classification conducted the first of a series of class surveys in Britain and the 2010 version of their questionnaire had no fewer than seventeen categories, fourteen with direct links to employment and three, called ‘residual’, that included groups such as students. If these studies were of technical interest to those working in sociology of employment or other areas in which employment was an issue, they certainly had little appeal to the general public. However, in January 2011, the issue of class in the United Kingdom was thrust into the media spotlight when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) launched the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) on its website. The survey, based on the ongoing research by Mike Savage and his collaborators (see Savage et  al., 2013), captured the attention of the public in the United Kingdom and the final number of participants, after several months, was over 160,000. As noted, the GBCS came in the wake of earlier class surveys in Britain but it also emerged from the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey, which was carried out several years earlier and which led to the monograph Culture, class, distinction

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(Bennett et  al., 2009). The GBCS reversed the trend towards an increasing number of class categories, while taking on board the Bourdieusian version of class mentioned above. Thus, there were just seven categories based on a long list of economic, social and cultural dimensions: Elite, Established middle class, Technical middle class, New affluent workers, Traditional working class, Emergent service works and the Precariat. The results of the survey could not be said to be very reliable as the sample was self-​selected: in effect, it was dominated by the kind of people who would bother to complete a BBC survey on class (i.e. middle class, well-​educated and used to having their voice heard). Thus 75 per cent of the respondents ended up being situated in the upper part of the class scale. An additional survey was carried out by a professional survey company called GfK, drawing on a far smaller sample of 1,026 respondents. This survey produced results that were probably more reflective of the state of class relations in the United Kingdom, even if some critics were not convinced: Mills calls the survey ‘a flimsy source upon which to build . . . [an] inductive edifice’ (Mills, 2014: 439). Glosses of the seven GBCS categories, along with the results of the two surveys carried out, are reproduced in Table 4.3. Not surprisingly, many have identified problems with the Savage et al. survey. There is, of course, the traditional problem with questionnaires, that they can capture generalities but cannot begin to delve into the lived experiences of class discussed above, or its relational nature or how it intersects with a long list of identity dimensions such as race and gender. However, the biggest issue I  have with this study is the much-​publicized ‘new class’ that appears in the survey –​the ‘precariat’. If this term has come to be the focus of much discussion in many academic circles, this is, to a great extent, because of Guy Standing (2011, 2014), who in recent years has been its prime promoter in the Anglophone world, and by default internationally. However, while Savage et al. cite and align themselves with Standing, they define the precariat in very simple terms as a sector of society ‘marked by the lack of any significant amount of economic, cultural, or social capital’ (Savage et al., 2013: 245). This contrasts with Standing’s more expansive treatment of the term, meant to capture those who work (sometimes), but are neither ‘working class’ nor ‘proletariat’, given that for the most part they do not have certain guarantees that working people had to varying degrees during the Keynesian era in Europe, roughly the whole of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. These guarantees look as follows: Labour market security: Adequate income-​earning opportunities; at the macro-​level Employment security: Protection against arbitrary dismissal, regulations on hiring and firing Job security: Ability and opportunity to retain a niche in employment . . . and opportunities for “upward” mobility

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TABLE 4.3:  The GBCS: Classes, survey results, example occupations and descriptions Class

% GBSC

% GfK

Example occupations (Savage et al., 2013: 231–​232)

Description (Savage et al., 2013: 230)

Elite

22

6

High-​level systems managers (financial, high-​tech, personnel, organizational), lawyers, doctors, dentists . . .

Very high economic capital (especially savings), high social capital, very high highbrow cultural capital

Established middle class

43

25

Electrical engineers, occupational therapists, town planners, special education needs teachers

High economic capital, high status of mean contacts, high highbrow and emerging cultural capital

Technical middle class

10

6

Pilots, pharmacists, higher education teachers, natural and social sciences professionals, physical scientists

High economic capital, very high mean score on social contacts, but relatively few contacts reported, moderate cultural capital

New affluent workers

6

15

Electricians, plumbers, sales and retail assistants, postal workers, kitchen and catering assistants

Moderately good economic capital, moderately poor mean score of social contacts, high range, moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital

Traditional working class

2

14

Secretaries, van drivers, cleaners, care workers

Moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable house price, few social contacts, low highbrow and emerging cultural capital

Emergent service works

17

19

Bar staff, nursing auxiliaries, assemblers and routine operatives, customer service workers

Moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable household income, moderate social contacts, high emerging (but low highbrow) cultural capital

Precariat

˂1

15

Cleaners, van drivers, care workers

Poor economic capital, and the lowest scores on every other criterion

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Work security: Protection against accidents and illness at work, through . . . safety and health regulations, limits on working time, . . . compensation for mishaps Skill reproduction security: Opportunity to gain skills, through apprenticeships, employment training and so on Income security: Assurance of an adequate stable income, protected through . . . minimum wage machinery, wage indexation, comprehensive social security, progressive taxation Representation security: Possessing a collective voice in the labour market . . . independent trade unions, with a right to strike. (Standing, 2011: 10) But independent of whether or not we are guided by Standing’s more elaborate book-​length treatment of the construct or Savage et  al.’s somewhat scrappy definition, I think that it is hard to sustain the notion that the precariat is a new class, or simply a term meant to capture work conditions unique to the times in which we live. As Jan Breman argues in his review of Standing’s 2011 book, there is nothing new about precariousness: Where does the term ‘precariat’ come from? Its etymological origins lie in the Latin precari: beg, pray, entreat; hence, insecure, dependent on the favour of another, unstable, exposed to danger; with uncertain tenure. The precarious situation of labour was recognized in the nineteenth century as a defining condition of proletarianization, in the classic sense: stripped of the means of subsistence on the land, workers could only survive by selling their labour; the precariousness of their livelihood features in the Communist Manifesto. In the Catholic tradition, meanwhile, precarità also referred to an order funded by donations. In France, précarité came to describe the condition of those living hand-​to-​mouth in the 1990s, amid high youth unemployment and ‘McJobs’; the sense of danger intensified by the mass protests of 1995. In Italy, the inevitable neologism il precariato –​combining ‘precarious’ with ‘proletariat’ –​had been coined not long after the 2001 Genoa protests against the G8. It was raised as a slogan by post-​operasi militants in Milan, organizing casual workers in an alternative May Day protest in 2004  –​but as one of them put it in a recent YouTube interview: ‘The precariat: is it a social subject, a social stratum, a class, a category, a cohort, a generational concept –​who cares!’ (Breman, 2013: 134) In addition, Breman notes how precariousness has for some time characterized the work regimes of a good proportion of the populations of poor and ‘developing’ countries, particularly in Africa, South America and South Asia.

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Once again we are in the realm of a phenomenon being presented as new when in fact it is only new to the wealthier parts of the world. A final important point I  would make about the precariat is that I  cannot see how it is on equal footing with Savage et al.’s other six categories. I say this because the very notion and reality of precariousness clearly cuts across at least three of the other class positions in the framework. Thus, sales and retail assistants (new affluent workers), secretaries (traditional working class) and bar and restaurant staff (emergent service works) are all subject today to the vicissitudes of the current labour market: retail staff can be hired and laid off depending on the whim of consumers; office administration has progressively become temporary labour, off and on (see the number of ‘temping’ agencies in the United Kingdom); and finally, tourist cycles determine when and how many staff are necessary for the smooth operation of a bar or restaurant. In addition, as some readers of this book know all too well, in recent years many university lecturers, who might be considered to be part of Savage et  al.’s middle class (or even elite), have watched as their professional lives have become increasingly precaritized.5 All this means, among other things, that many people live their lives knowing that they will never have the labour market security, employment security, job security, work security, skill reproduction security, income security or representation security outlined by Standing (2011; see above). In this sense, the precariat is not really a class position; rather it is a condition that is characteristic of an increasing number of work regimes in the world today. And, as it shapes how a growing number of people live their lives, it is a relevant point of reference for any comprehensive discussion of societies as class systems.

Conclusion Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-​first century was published in French in August 2013, and after its initial success in France, where it generated a great deal of debate, Harvard University Press launched an English version in April 2014. From there, versions of the book in a long list of other languages ensued and it became an international bestseller, purportedly selling 1.5 million copies worldwide by January 2015. Overnight, Piketty became something of an academic celebrity and a documentary based on the book and directed by Justin Pemberton was being filmed in mid-​2017. All this is not bad going for a book that was written not as popularized text for the general public, but as a sweeping theoretical and data-​based challenge to contemporary mainstream economics, dominated by neoliberal thinking. Piketty’s main argument is that

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increasing inequality has been a direct result of the neoliberal economic policies and practices that have been dominant over the past four decades, and that these policies and practices represent a threat to social cohesion and ultimately democracy. The book was clearly meant to be a poke in the eye of mainstream economists around the world. And although it was probably not read cover-​to-​cover by most people who bought it (and, indeed, a lot of readers would have abandoned it very early on), the fact that it became a bestseller is significant. Above all, it is testament to how, as I suggested above, there is a growing number of people who are starting to see that capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal variety, only works for the elites in society and the world at large, and that the popular classes, the masses, most people who are not elites, are being pushed down. As I have argued in this chapter, this is happening in resource terms, which in turn leads to losses in existential and vital terms. It is with these thoughts in mind that I have included this chapter in this book. In it, I have provided the reader with an in-​depth discussion of stratification, as a general term meant to capture how societies are based on different forms of differentiation. I have discussed inequality, to capture how differentiation  –​in terms of access to resources, rights, survival prospects and so on –​leads to the injustices that divide the rich and the poor in society. And finally, I have discussed social class, as a specific way of understanding not only inequality, but also how society is structured on economic bases that are intersected by sociocultural dimensions of existence. In the next two chapters of this book, I  return to many of the issues raised in this chapter, as well as in Chapters  2 and 3; I  focus on two key themes that have occupied a good amount of my time in recent years. In Chapter 5, I return to a notion introduced in Chapter 3, that neoliberalism changes not only the economy but also the very way we live our lives, as I  examine how neoliberal citizenship has become a reality in different domains of social activity. In Chapter 6, I expand on the discussion of class in this chapter to include the twin notions of class struggle and class warfare, as I  adopt a CDS approach to make sense of conflicts between the Spanish conservative party and Spanish activist groups. As I  explained in Chapter  1, my overall intention in discussing the cases that are the focal points of these chapters, is to show how we can insert political economy more overtly and explicitly into treatments of issues that may be considered sociolinguistic in one form or another.

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5 The neoliberal citizen: Conceptualizations and contexts

Introduction As I  noted in my discussion of neoliberalism in Chapter  3, it is difficult to talk about the current dominant version of capitalism without taking into consideration its human consequences, in the same way that in more general terms, one cannot discuss economic processes without taking into consideration any number of political, social, cultural and geographical phenomena that intersect them. Unless, of course, one wants to be the kind of economist that Marx called ‘vulgar’, that is, an economist who sees only models, numbers and patterns, and not flesh-​and-​blood people (see Chapter 2). Thus, as I hope to have conveyed in Chapter 3, seeing neoliberalism as (simultaneously) policies, practices, ideology and rationality means understanding it in the real world of day-​to-​day interaction and activity, and as contributing to events arising in different social milieux. Neoliberalism comes to have a heart and soul, as it is embodied in human beings and their practices, even if that human soul may be cold and self-​destructive. Arising from this line of thinking is research in sociolinguistics on the ‘neoliberal subject’, which draws heavily on Foucault’s 1979 biopolitics lectures (Foucault, 2008) and interpreters of these lectures (e.g. Brown, 2005; Lemke, 2001). With reference to this subject, Joseph Park (2013: 559–​560) writes that ‘the ideal neoliberal subject does not begrudgingly participate in work, but displays initiative, responsibility, and flexibility, willingly taking risks and engaging in projects of endless self-​improvement (e.g. by taking up new skills and developing new careers) instead of relying on past achievements, welfare, or solidarity’. As definitions of the neoliberal subject goes, this is a fairly complete one, including as it does key elements such as initiative and flexibility, the drive to self-​improvement (or we could perhaps say ‘self-​care’ as Brown

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[2005] has done) and a rejection of welfare and solidarity (and here we could add collectivism). However, as I hope to show below (and as Park would no doubt concur, judging by his recent publications), there is far more to the matter, as neoliberalism has reached deep, both into the souls of individuals living in contemporary societies and into those very societies as a collective whole. Bearing in mind society, and the nation-​state, as a collective structure, I think it useful to change the terminology slightly, from ‘neoliberal subject’ to ‘neoliberal citizen’. The object of my inquiry does not change in that I am still talking about subjects and subjectivity more broadly. However, I  see some purchase on using ‘citizen’ as a key part of the discussion. As for what I mean by ‘citizen’, I might refer to an earlier publication (Block, 2011), where I drew heavily on Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey’s (2005) three-​dimensions model. The first dimension is ‘citizenship as status’, that is, as how the legal relationship between the individual and polity means that citizens are citizens by virtue of this legal relationship, which entails political and social rights and duties. The second dimension is ‘citizenship as feeling’, that is, how individual citizens have varying degrees of identification and affiliation to (1) the idealized or ‘imagined’ version of the nation-​state, as outlined in official public discourses, and (2) the on-​the-​ground nation-​state, as lived in day-​to-​day activity. The third dimension is ‘citizenship as practice’, that is, how citizenship is about not only rights and duties or feelings, but also exercising citizenship, bringing it to life by participating in activities that foster a sense of belonging, such as voting in an election, participating in national day celebrations or being a member of a sports club, a trade union or a neighbourhood association. The neoliberal version of citizenship means that political and social rights and duties revolve around a conformity with the ‘choices’ that neoliberal regimes offer  –​increasingly precaritized jobs, flexibility imposed from above, being a good consumer to keep the economy growing, voting in elections for marketized candidates and so on. The nation-​state may still be a point of reference for the neoliberal citizen, but progressively, affiliations are stretched to global collectives, where there is participation in activities that may come to be more meaningful for citizens than those that exist firmly circumscribed within nation-​state borders. Finally, neoliberal citizenship as practice may still be about voting in elections, participating in national day celebrations or being a member of an organization, but as Robert Putnam (2000) has noted, the individualization of societies, on the increase since the 1980s, has triggered a series of fundamental changes and new trends that threaten the notion of a unified people living in a well-​defined nation-​state. These changes include a decrease in political participation (understood as engagement with both established political parties and grass-​roots social movements); less participation in civic organizations; a decline in union membership; and a decline in informal social

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connections such as playing cards with friends or bowling. Putnam makes reference to the United States, but what he wrote some two decades ago resonates with events in many parts of the world today. I say this notwithstanding responses to the current economic crisis, in which we see, for example, a rise in participation in politics, especially via social movements. In effect, neoliberalism has meant changes in how society functions and these changes necessarily impact notions of citizenship –​as status, as feeling and in practice –​and in particular how it is discursively constructed, the main focus of this chapter.1 I begin this chapter with a detailed examination of the neoliberal citizen, a topic that I briefly covered in Chapter 3, but did not develop in great detail. The discussion of the neoliberal citizen leads to a discussion of rational choice theory and the notion of human capital. I  then go on to consider entrepreneurship, as the new fashionable policy for politicians who are trying to keep the neoliberal project alive, and the invention of self-​branding as what makes it possible for individuals to compete successfully in markets of all kinds. After this presentation of theoretical frameworks, in the second half of the chapter I focus on specific cases that bring the previously discussed constructs to life. These cases are somewhat eclectic, reflecting my personal research interests in recent years; however, I think they do the job of showing how the neoliberal citizen is alive and well in contemporary societies. I start by drawing on my recent work with John Gray on language teaching materials analysed critically from a political economy perspective (Block and Gray, 2018; Gray and Block, 2014). Specifically, I  examine French-​ language textbooks as an example of how French-​language learners are positioned as particular types of people, namely, individualistic, entrepreneurial, neoliberal citizens. From this analysis, I move to a completely different context, a recent law to promote entrepreneurship in Spain. At issue here is how the law in question defines ideal citizenship, and how this ideal citizenship is meant to contribute to efforts to pull Spain out of the massive unemployment and the impoverishment of the popular classes, which have been two key legacies of the great bank bailout of 2011. Next, I move to a context that researchers based in Europe will identify with, how the EC’s Horizon 2020 framework, through the topics proposed for research and the language used to describe what research is required, aligns itself with the same neoliberal discourses of competiveness and entrepreneurial values driving the previous two contexts. Finally, I move back to Spain, as I focus on a celebrity broker who owes his success to his ability to embody many of the neoliberal features that have arisen in the previous three cases. I  then close the chapter with some comments meant to tie the different contexts examined together.

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The neoliberal citizen One key aspect of neoliberalism that is often marginalized, particularly in discussions that are exclusively about economics, is the way that capitalism in its current dominant form (see the elements outlined in Chapter 3) has had a great and profound impact on individual and collective subjectivities. Over the past two decades, Stephen Gill (1995, 2016) has written about an emergent neoliberal world order and what he calls ‘market civilization’, which he defines as follows: Market civilisation is now the dominant mode of capitalist development –​ one that is possessively individualist, me-​oriented, consumerist, exploitative of human beings and nature [and] unequal, energy-​intensive, wasteful and ecologically myopic. This pattern of development is, by definition, exclusive and can only be available to a minority of the population of the planet. (Gill, 2016: 34) For Gill, the current version of capitalism is a hierarchical structure (as are all models of capitalism), and it is one that divides populations within nation-​ states along several key fault lines, most notably with regard to class, gender and race, but also with regard to the relative access to and use of natural resources. From a Global/​ International Political Economy perspective (see Chapter 2), it also divides the nation-​states of world into the general haves and have-​nots, and whatever condition is deemed to reside in the space in between (the curiously named ‘developing world’). As we observed in Chapter 3, Dardot and Laval (2013) have suggested that it is perhaps best to frame neoliberalism not as an ideology or a set of policies, but as a ‘form of existence’ or ‘rationality’ that, while global in nature, is always inflected with the specific histories, sociologies and cultural assemblages of local contexts. By ‘form of existence’ and ‘rationality’, the authors mean that neoliberalism is as much about a totalizing way of conceptualizing societies, cultures and ways of life, as it is about economic policies undergirded by capitalist ideologies. Meanwhile, Wendy Brown has written about a neoliberal normativity that constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-​care’ –​the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. (Brown, 2005: 42) However, caveats are in order here, as the dominant power structures, from which emanate the dominant discourses of capitalism, have, arguably, always

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been in the business of shaping the individual. For example, if we go back to the classic political economy of Adam Smith that I discussed in Chapter 2, we see how a human subject is embedded in his views on economics, politics and society: In almost every other race of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-​love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-​love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-​citizens. (Smith, [1776] 2012: 19) Smith’s words are very much couched in a discourse of human nature, one that frames human beings as naturally self-​interested. He also sees them as highly agentive, even if they need the support of others (their ‘brethren’) to get through life. This support is not obtained via an appeal to the ‘benevolence’ of the other; rather, it is gained by appealing to the other’s sense of self-​interest, which, in human nature terms, is fundamentally the same as that which drives all individuals. Thus, the only way to convince people to cooperate is not to show one’s need for assistance, but to make clear that said cooperation will benefit those offering it. A curious twist indeed, and one that rules out altruism altogether and therefore cannot explain the selfless actions of some. Fundamentally, Smith describes here a particular prototype for citizenship: the self-​interested individual who contributes to the betterment of society simply by pursuing his/​her self-​interest. Indeed, it is this basic idea that was brought forward into the twentieth century in the writings of von Mises, Hayek and Popper, whose phobia of socialism led them to posit an idealized version of liberal democracy in which individuals pursued their own interests unfettered by the kind of control that socialism necessarily comported. As we observed in Chapter 3, their work served as an essential background to what would eventually become known as neoliberalism, which was perhaps first put forward in a coherent and workable agenda by Milton Friedman (1962)

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in his book Capitalism and freedom, and which was a common theme in the work of essayist and novelist Ayn Rand. As noted in Chapter 3, her expansive novel Atlas Shrugged acquired something of a cult status with none other than von Mises pronouncing on its virtues. In the book, the ambitious and determined protagonist, Dagny Taggart, explains part of her life philosophy as follows: I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle. (Rand, 1957: 842) There is no clear evidence that Margaret Thatcher was a fan of Rand, but she certainly worked in the spirit of Rand’s words in her political career as she too seemed to act according to the single absolute of shaping the world according to her ‘highest values’, never giving up ‘no matter how long or hard the struggle’. Indeed, it was Thatcher who expressed in a succinct manner the way that neoliberalism was never just about economics and that there was the very important matter of changing the hearts and minds of the populace. In a Times newspaper interview in May 1981, just two years after she became prime minister, she eerily laid out her view of society and politics as follows: What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I  set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul. (Butt, 1981: npn) Chilling words indeed, even if they are words that have been cited a great deal in critiques of neoliberalism, in particular those focusing on its human effects. In the midst of such statements by paradigmatic neoliberal leaders such as Thatcher, Brown’s argument that ‘neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life’ makes perfect sense. However, this argument is not completely original as Brown bases her views very heavily on a less-​cited publication, Michael Lemke’s (2001) early discussion of Michel Foucault’s renowned lectures on ‘biopolitics’ at the Collège de France in 1978–​79. These lectures were eventually published in book form in English in 2008, several years after Brown was writing, and in them Foucault shows himself to have been prescient in a way

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that few others have ever been. Nevertheless, as critics such as Peter Fleming (2015), Holborow (2015) and Mirowski (2013) note, he often comes across as ambivalent and not altogether disapproving of the rising neoliberal tide. For example, Fleming sees a great deal of ambivalence in Foucault’s attitude towards neoliberalism, going so far as to argue that he ‘appears almost to be smitten by the neoclassical economics’ and that ‘he ignores the violence that their ideas entail in practice’ (Fleming, 2015: 39). Fleming goes on to quote Gary Becker, who when asked what he thought about Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, responded, ‘I like most of it, and I do not disagree with much and I also cannot tell whether Foucault is disagreeing with me’ (Becker, 2012; Fleming, 2015: 39). Elsewhere, Holborow suggests that Foucault falls short of elaborating a sustained and effective critique of neoliberalism, not only in the biopolitics lectures but also in his work going back to the 1970s. By priming the discursive over the material, he misses a key link with realities on the ground and sets up a scenario in which he can snipe from the discursive heights. However, he does not in fact snipe very much in his discussion of biopolitics and seems content to limit himself to the construction of a detailed archaeology of ideas coming together into a dominant discourse called neoliberalism. As Holborow explains, ‘the privileging of mentalities and technologies has the effect of severing the ideational from the material and excluding any discussion of political economy’ (Holborow, 2015: 88). Holborow also detects a degree of defeatism in this type of discussion: the discourses of neoliberalism are too big and entrenched to be toppled. Indeed, so much does Foucault lean in this direction that Mirowski (2013: 98) argues that he ‘took a wrong turn . . . in too readily swallowing the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans’. Meanwhile, for Fleming, the problem with Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism –​as well that of other scholars, including Mirowski –​is that they impose on historical developments a coherence and integrity that they perhaps do not have. They ignore, as he puts it, ‘the protean miscarriages and false starts that animate neo-​capitalist governance structures’ (Fleming, 2015:  45). Fleming refers to Foucault as ‘historian of systems of thought’ who in a sense came to be consumed by the object of his enquiry, showing himself ‘overly attentive to its internal consistency and inadvertently subtend[ing] its supposed legitimacy’ (ibid.). Despite these criticisms, Foucault can still be credited with having identified shifts in the field of economics taking place over the course of the twentieth century, from a focus on larger social processes to that on individual activity. Economics was therefore ‘no longer the analysis of the historical logic of processes’; rather, it was ‘the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individual activity’ (Foucault, 2008: 223). A big part of

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this shift to ‘the strategic programming of individual activity’ was the rise to prominence among economists of what is variably known as rational action theory or rational choice theory (RCT). I use RCT in this chapter as it appears to be the more widely used term.

Rational choice theory (RCT) In a survey and critique of RCT, John Scott notes that it embodies the following three key characteristics: Rational choice theory adopts a methodological individualist position and attempts to explain all social phenomena in terms of the rational calculations made by self-​interested individuals. Rational choice theory sees social interaction as social exchange modelled on economic action. People are motivated by the rewards and costs of actions and by the profits that they can make. Some rational choice theorists have seen rationality as a result of psychological conditioning. Others have adopted the position that it is simply necessary to assume that individuals act as if they were completely rational. (Scott, 2000: 136) Foundational to RCT is a series of key assumptions. First, there is the idea that ‘the elementary unit of social life is the individual human action . . . [and that to] explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the action and interaction of individuals’ (Elster, 1989:  13). A second key idea is that all individual human actions are based on rational and calculated decision making. A third assumption is that mathematical models can capture patterns of behaviour in such a way as to make control and prediction possible. Part and parcel of RCT is Gary Becker’s (1964) human capital theory and the notion of the individual as homo economicus. As Foucault (2008: 225) explains, the homo economicus may be seen as ‘one of two partners in the process of exchange’. In order to understand processes of exchange, the economist must analyse individual behaviour, in particular how the individual manages his/​her life, achieves goals and, in general, gets things done. All this is done with two goals in mind: (1) to understand the kinds of calculations the individual makes in order to take decisions about present and future behaviour, and (2) to measure the utility of an individual with regard to other individuals. In Becker’s view, ‘individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs’ (Becker, 1993: 43). The benefits and costs he mentions here are about

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the ‘cultural and other non-​monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations’ and the ‘foregone value of the time spent on these investments’ (ibid.), respectively. It is also worthwhile to note that embedded in RCT is a view of society that differs greatly from the view that emerged from nineteenth-​century European scholarship. For example, for Marx, society did not ‘consist of individuals, but . . . the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’ (Marx, [1858] 1973:  265). Meanwhile, for Weber ([1922] 1968), society might best be understood as a ‘social system’ consisting of ‘social domains’ (such as economy, status hierarchies, religion, law and family), which emerge from ‘social activity’ (individual and collective) and which are intersected by both consensual and imposed normative rationalizing processes and orders. And finally, Norbert Elias ([1939] 1991: 3) wrote that society ‘only exists because a large number of people exist . . . [and] it only continues to function because many individual people want and do certain things’. Crucially, Elias added that the structure and historical evolution of a society ‘clearly do not depend on the intentions of particular people’ (ibid.). These classic scholars’ views notwithstanding, with the rise of neoliberalism we see a new view of society arising, one consistent with the thinking of Ayn Rand, whereby ‘ “the common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept:  there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men’ (Rand, 1967: 20). In short, we are living in an age in which ‘each person’s biography is removed from given determinations and placed in his or her own hands, open and dependent on [individual] decisions’ (Beck, 1992:  135). In this version of events, an increasing number of life opportunities are less constrained by traditional social structures (e.g. family, organized labour, schools) and are more about individual decision-​making and the ongoing construction of one’s life trajectory or autobiography.2 This move from the collective to the individual, from human beings as social beings to human being as individuals, leads to a pessimistic view of human existence. Human beings are seen not just as consumers and as skills bundles, but as competitors for resources, which, as it happens, are increasingly scarce proportionate to the world population. We thus see the marketization of an increasing number of fields of social activity under the general umbrella of neoliberalism, mixed with the ideal of the competitive individual to produce a dystopic view of contemporary society. As Foucault explained: The society regulated by reference to the market that the neo-​liberals are thinking about is a society in which the regulatory principle should be not so much the exchange of commodities as the mechanisms of competition.

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It is these mechanisms that should have the greatest possible surface and depth and should also occupy the greatest possible volume in society. This means that what is sought is not a society subject to the commodity effect, but a society subject to the dynamic of competition. Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society. The homo economicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production. (Foucault, 2008: 147)

The rise of the entrepreneur and self-​branding In the twenty-​first century, Foucault’s ‘man of enterprise and production’ is the much-​celebrated ‘entrepreneur’, who is the prototype of the neoliberal citizen and the figure most likely to lift crisis-​ridden countries out of recession through his/her clairvoyance (Holborow, 2015). This clairvoyance appears as the product of innate ability, learning from experience and serendipity. As for the origin of interest in this figure, we need to go back in time and a possible first stop is Jean Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique, first published in French in 1841. In this book, Say wrote in glowing terms about the ‘industrial entrepreneur’ as follows: The industrial entrepreneur is the principal agent of production. The other operations are indeed indispensable in the creation of products. But it is the entrepreneur who sets in train, who imparts to them useful impetus, who derives value from them. It is he who assesses needs and, above all, the means to satisfy them, and who compares the end with these means. Thus, his main quality is judgment. (Say, 1941: 82; cited in Dardot and Laval, 2013: 117; translation by Dardot and Laval) Nearly a century later, Joseph Schumpeter ([1934] 1983) wrote in similar terms, embedding his discussion in his rupturist vision of how the capitalist economy evolves. As he explained matters, ‘It is spontaneous and discontinuous change in the channels of the flow, disturbance of equilibrium, which forever alters and displaces the equilibrium state previously existing’ (ibid.: 64).3 This spontaneous change was brought about by what he called ‘new combinations’, which were integral to his notion of innovation as the key agent of the evolving of capitalism. New combinations were said to come in five forms. Paraphrasing Schumpeter (ibid.:  66), these forms were the introduction of a completely new good or an already existing good with new features, the introduction of new and as-​yet-​untested production methods, opening a

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new market, finding or establishing a new source of raw materials for production, and changing the way an entire industry is organized (e.g. establishing a monopoly or breaking up an existing one). Relevant to this discussion, the key figure in the instigation of these new combinations was the entrepreneur, an individual (always a man) whom he invested with seemingly supernatural powers. First, the entrepreneur was said to be someone with ‘intuition . . . [and] the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true’ and someone with ‘a dream and the will to found a private kingdom’ (ibid.: 85). The entrepreneur was also portrayed as someone with ‘the will to conquer [. . . and] the impulse to fight’, someone who aimed ‘to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself’ (ibid.: 93). Finally, he was said to embrace ‘the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising . . . energy and ingenuity’ (ibid.: 93). Ludwig von Mises ([1949] 1998) was later to exalt the figure of the entrepreneur in a similar manner, writing that ‘the driving force of the market process is provided neither by the consumers nor by the owners of the means of productions  –​land, capital goods, and labor  –​but by the promoting and speculating entrepreneurs’ (von Mises, [1949] 1998:  325). And some years later, Israel Kirzner, an ardent follower of von Mises, wrote the seminal work on the topic, Competition and entrepreneurship (Kirzner, 1973). In this book, he portrayed the entrepreneur as the motor of economic development and as a unique being in possession of the right innate characteristics, the ability to learn from experience and a certain fearlessness (when it comes to encounters with the unknown), all mediated by that unpredictable ingredient of history, serendipity. More recently still, Kirzner provided the following view of the entrepreneur: Without knowing what to look for, without deploying any deliberate search technique, the entrepreneur is at all times scanning the horizon, as it were, ready to make discoveries. Each such discovery will be accompanied by a sense of surprise (at one’s earlier unaccountable ignorance). An entrepreneurial attitude is one which is always ready to be surprised, always ready to take the steps needed to profit by such surprises. (Kirzner, 1997: 72) As we see from this brief archaeology of the concept, the entrepreneur is a special type of person, and an essential cog in the capitalist wheel of economic development. And as Dardot and Laval (2013) note, since the 1980s, business gurus have also exalted the figure of the entrepreneur. They cite Peter Drucker’s work on the ‘new management of entrepreneurs’ (Drucker, 1985), an act of devotion to neoliberal values and a call for the injection of the entrepreneurial spirit not only in the private sector, but also in the public sector.

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As is the case with all things related to neoliberalism, promotors of entrepreneurship are articulating new ways of being citizens in contemporary societies that are dominated by markets and the drive to compete. In such societies, there is the constant push to excel, but there is also the exhortation to be different and distinguishable from others. In the business literature, these trends and processes have led to a school of thought –​‘self-​ branding’ –​with Tom Peters at the forefront. Peters famously invented the catchy command ‘brand you!’ in the mid-​1990s and in his oft-​cited article ‘The brand called you’, he wrote the following rather exuberant introduction to the topic: That cross-​trainer you’re wearing –​one look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who’s got you branded. That coffee travel mug you’re carrying –​ah, you’re a Starbucks woman! Your T-​shirt with the distinctive Champion ‘C’ on the sleeve, the blue jeans with the prominent Levi’s rivets, the watch with the hey-​this-​certifies-​I-​made-​it icon on the face, your fountain pen with the maker’s symbol crafted into the end . . . You’re branded, branded, branded, branded. (Peters, 1997: npn) In his discussion of Peters’s work, John Gray (2012: 95) notes that the only way for individuals to advance in the neoliberal era that spawned the likes of Peters is to brand themselves in such a way that they command attention in the marketplace. As for what Peters and his followers mean by branding, we might consult a recent publication by Catharine Slade-​Brooking (2016), in which the author outlines the basic tenets of brand creation and maintenance for products, providing a clear and simple explanation of what branding is about: In its simplest form, the practice of branding is about creating differentiation, making one product or service seem different from competitive products. Brand values are the core beliefs or philosophies that a brand upholds, and which differentiate it from its competitors. (Slade-​Brooking, 2016: 14) Slade-​Brooking goes on to cite Jennifer Aaker’s (1997) earlier work on ‘dimensions of brand personality’, where the latter term is defined as ‘the set of human characteristics associated with a brand’ (Aaker, 1997: 347). Here, Aaker refers to the framing of consumer products in terms of human characteristics. However, since our concern here is with the rise of self-​care, individualization and self-​branding, that is, the grooming of human beings to make them more competitive in the neoliberal age, Aaker’s ‘dimensions of brand personality’ model may be suitably applied. Thus, we may think of individuals as brands in

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terms of how well they convey the following five clusters of positive human characteristics: 1. Sincerity (down-​to-​earth, family-​oriented, small town, honest, sincere,

real, wholesome, cheerful, sentimental, friendly) 2. Excitement (daring, trendy, exciting, spirited, cool, young, imaginative,

unique, up-​to-​date, independent, contemporary) 3. Competence (reliable, hard-​working, secure, intelligent, technical,

corporate, successful, leader, confident) 4. Sophistication (upper-​class, glamourous, good-​looking, charming,

feminine, smooth) 5. Ruggedness (outdoorsy, masculine, Western, tough, rugged)

(Aaker, 1997: 354) Slade-​ Brooking expresses doubt about any one consumer product being framed successfully in terms of all five dimensions, but in a world of makeovers and constant self-​care, it is not difficult to find examples of individuals who, in different facets of their lives, come to embody characteristics in all five categories. A good example of how this works is retired footballer David Beckham, who has embodied in his lifetime (at different times and often simultaneously), characteristics in all five of Aaker’s categories. Thus, in the early part of his career, in the early to mid-​1990s, he was generally seen according to Aaker’s ‘sincerity’ category, as ‘down-​to-​earth’ and ‘wholesome’ (and indeed, simple). However, by the turn of the century, he had forged an image as a ‘metrosexual’, ‘new man’, embodying all the characteristics in Aaker’s ‘excitement’ category  –​from ‘daring’ to ‘contemporary’. Since becoming a father, Beckham has also been seen as a family man, which leads back to his ‘sincere’ image, in particular as ‘family-​oriented’. And, in recent years he has become a businessman, the embodiment of ‘competence’ characteristics, such as ‘reliable’, ‘hard-​working’, ‘successful’ and ‘confident’. His aforementioned metrosexuality, combined with his tendency to be portrayed as an attractive sex symbol, means that he has often been positioned according to Aaker’s ‘sophistication’ category, as ‘glamourous’, ‘charming’ and ‘smooth’. Finally, as a professional footballer, he was, almost by necessity, associated with a series of ‘ruggedness’ characteristics, including ‘outdoorsy’, ‘masculine’ and ‘tough’. Thus far in this chapter, I have discussed in some detail neoliberal citizenship, which has eventually led me to the suggestion that the ideal citizen today is a self-​branded entrepreneur. In the sections that follow, I apply these ideas

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to four cases with a view to showing how the figure of the neoliberal citizen is not only alive and well in diverse contexts, but also how it is far from an innocent project: indeed, it is one that is particularly damaging to society at large and, above all, the individuals who constitute society through their day-​ to-​day activities and practices. My first stop is language teaching, and specifically French-​language teaching, as I focus on textbooks and how they position learners as global cosmopolitan citizens and, in effect, neoliberal citizens.

The neoliberal citizen in French as a foreign language textbook In recent years, John Gray and I have developed a joint interest in how language textbooks are key sites for the situating of language learners, not only as users of the languages they are learning, but also as particular types of people who use those languages, that is, as neoliberal citizens who embody characteristics such as cosmopolitanism, individualism and initiative. In Gray and Block (2014), we focus on English-​language textbooks and how working-​ class characters –​and indeed any practices not associated with middle-​and upper-​class citizens –​have been erased from these books over the past several decades. Basically, English-​language textbooks have flowed with the neoliberal tide, incorporating as idealized speakers of English a range of seemingly classless individuals who spend an inordinate amount of time travelling and shopping. Here I do not focus on English textbooks, preferring instead to draw on our more recent work (Block and Gray, 2018), in which we have examined French-​language textbooks. I think this focus on French-​language textbooks is important given the dual status of French as both a global language (though nothing like the global language that English is) and a language linked very closely to a particular nation-​state (France). The specific concern here is with how French-​language users are positioned as neoliberal citizens who, if not overtly entrepreneurial, are still highly individualistic ‘brand-​me’ embodiments of Aaker’s (1997) dimensions of brand personality:  sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. With this interest in mind, a content analysis of two French textbooks was carried out. This was achieved by reading the materials carefully to see to what extent and how neoliberal citizenship and self-​branding are portrayed. The main focus here is on the ‘representational repertoires’ as ‘the stock of ideas, images and ways of talking which are . . . deployed in the creation of a set of meanings’ (Gray, 2010a: 42). The two books examined are Corina Brillant, Virginie Bazou, Romain Racine and Jean Charles Schenker’s second edition of Édito, Niveau B2, published in

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2010, and the third edition of the same book, published in 2015, and written by Élodie Heu and Jean-​Jacques Mabilat. Both books are directed at adults and late adolescents, and as the title suggests, both provide practice at CEFRL (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) level B2, which is an intermediate level. The choice of these books was motivated by the fact that Édito, Niveau B2 is a book series that is currently used for the teaching of French across Europe. It is also interesting to examine differences between the two books based on their publication dates: the first book was written at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, when the current worldwide crisis was beginning, and the second was written once this crisis had profoundly altered many economic, political and social relations in France and Europe at large. In his analysis of English-​ language textbooks in 1990s, Gray (2010a, 2010b, 2012) showed how these books had become what could be called more ‘socially liberal’ with regard to societal norms, exhibiting gender equality, showing a sensitivity to racial and ethnic diversity, and adopting a more international focus. They had also begun to include activities, if not entire units, on key social issues of our times, such as environmentalism, animal rights, education, new technologies, immigration and culture, and the media. And with each new edition, an increasing number of activities and units was devoted to a range of self-​care issues, organized around topics such as holidays and travel, food and cuisine, shopping and fashion, and physical and psychological health and wellbeing. In this sense, Silva’s (2013) ‘mood economy’, discussed in Chapter 4, is alive and well in contemporary language textbooks. Finally, all books have units on work and the workplace, with the inevitable inclusion of activities about how to write a CV and how to do a job interview. The two editions of Édito, Niveau B2 focused on here contain all these elements. Above all, the 2015 edition includes more photographs and oral and written texts are enlivened by the introduction of ‘real people’ who either are living in France temporarily or are the children of immigrants. These individuals come from a range of countries, including Italy, Brazil, Chile, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, and their presence has the overall effect of making the 2015 edition seem more inclusive and international than the 2010 edition. This socially liberal stance in both books can be seen in texts and activities on gender and racial discrimination in the workplace, a section on adultery in the 2010 edition, and a section on same-​sex marriage in the 2015 edition. Finally, in line with views of foreign-​language learning as foreign-​ language-​and-​culture learning (Gray, 2010a), the two editions of the textbook remain grounded in France as a nation-​state and French history, society and culture (as opposed to a global society and culture), including references to former colonies and present-​day départements.

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What, then, can we say about how the two editions position students as neoliberal citizens, that is, entrepreneurial, individualistic ‘brand-​me’ embodiments of Aaker’s dimensions of brand personality? In the 2010 edition, there is a unit titled Ressources Humaines (Human Resources) in which learners are taken through a series of exercises related to the world of work. Early in the unit (Brillant et al., 2010: 136–​137), there is a reading comprehension exercise based on an article about French nationals who have gone to work in Québec, titled Comprendre les salaries français en 6 leçons (Understanding French employees in 6 lessons). In this article, we learn that French employees (1) do not smile; (2) never appear to be busy, often taking long lunches, even if they do manage to do their work; (3)  are not likely to contradict their superiors; (4) are masters of argumentation; (5) are disinclined to admit that they do not know something; and (6) value ideas over self-​presentation. If one is to judge by so much that is written about how employees should behave in the current era, this text appears to position French workers as ‘bad’, or, in any case, not in line with neoliberal rationalities. Among other things, they are presented as paradigmatically inflexible and uninterested in developing their ‘brand-​me’. However, if we apply Aaker’s categories to the text, a more mixed picture emerges. First, while French workers lack a great deal of Aaker’s ‘sincerity’ and ‘excitement’ (on the one hand, they are not ‘wholesome’, ‘cheerful’, ‘sentimental’, or ‘friendly’; on the other hand, they are not ‘daring’, ‘trendy’, ‘exciting’ or ‘imaginative’), they equally embody some of the characteristics that fall under these categories, in that they are ‘honest’ and ‘sincere’ in their no-​nonsense approach, and they are ‘unique’ and ‘independent’ in the context of Québec. In addition, French workers could be seen to embody much that falls under the category ‘competence’, in that they are, despite appearances, ‘hard-​working’, ‘intelligent’, ‘technical’, ‘corporate’ and ‘confident’. As for ‘sophistication’, they perhaps, by default (being French in Québec), exude an element of ‘glamour’, ‘charm’ and ‘smoothness’. Finally, the category ‘ruggedness’ seems of little relevance here, unless we mean it more abstractly to position French workers as mavericks in the Québecois context, or to capture that they have shown ‘toughness’ in moving far away from their home context. In short, while the presentation of French employees here is not orthodoxly in line with the idealization of the neoliberal citizen, the insistence on the efficiency, preparedness and argumentation skills of these workers –​in effect, their ability to get things done –​overrides their portrayal as ‘very French’ with regard to their interpersonal skills. Elsewhere, in the same unit (Brillant et al., 2010: 147) there is a short questionnaire titled Quell(le) travailleur(-​euse) êtes-​vous? (‘Which worker are you?’), consisting of just seven questions. The questions are about the degree of commitment one has to one’s job and the amount of flexibility and initiative one shows, either as a productive worker or as a defender of one’s own rights and

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interests, in short, as independent-​minded. For example, one question asks what one does if it is five p.m. on a Friday and there is still a job to finish. One answer is to stay to finish the job and even come into the office on Saturday or Sunday if necessary. A second answer is to agree to stay, but only if it means getting time off in the future as compensation. A  third answer is to decline in order to go to a family member’s birthday party. Another question is about what an employee does on being summoned for a meeting with the boss. One answer is that the employee spends a weekend preparing for the meeting. A second answer is that the employee sees the meeting as a formality, but is still a little nervous about it. A third answer is that the employee assumes that the meeting means a pay rise and the response is to put champagne in the fridge. These questions lead to the respondents being put in one of the three following categories, depending, of course, on the responses provided: ●●

A model worker, even zealous, loved by bosses. But be careful not to be swallowed alive by your job.

●●

A ‘lambda’ worker, serious without sacrificing your life for your job. Watch out for the threat of boredom.

●●

An amateur worker. Are you really comfortable in the world of work? Deep down, perhaps you are right.4 (Brillant et al., 2010: 147; NB: slightly reworded)

If we apply Aaker’s model to the self-​presentation that emerges from individual responses to the questions in this activity, we see that it is really only the ‘competence’ category that is relevant. Indeed, as we move from worker type 1 to type 2 to type 3, we see a decrease in competence as the valences for characteristics such as ‘reliable’, ‘hard-​working’, ‘technical’ and ‘corporate’ seemingly descend. Indeed, the contrast between the model worker and the amateur worker is considerable: being industrious and loved by bosses versus not knowing how the world of work functions. The middle ground seems more sensible, perhaps, but it might be considered too unambitious. At the same time, the warnings about being consumed by work and being bored, for types 1 and 2, and the acknowledgement that perhaps being a type 3 amateur is the best route after all, come across as something of a challenge to the neoliberal citizen, as outlined above. In this sense, type 1 may be an ideal, but it may have negative consequences, even if these are not specified (we are not told why it is bad to be consumed by one’s work). The 2010 edition of Édito was written at the very beginning of the current economic crisis, and perhaps for this reason, there is just one reference to it in the form of text on how to afford travel despite ‘the crisis’ (Brillant et al., 2010:  72). In this text, readers are advised to save money by shopping for

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reduced-​price last-​minute reservations, flying with low-​cost airlines and holidaying in France. By contrast, in the 2015 edition, written once the crisis had deepened, there are references to its effects, such as the emigration of young people in search of better job opportunities. In a unit titled Au boulot! (‘At work!’, or perhaps, ‘Let’s get to work’), there is a listening activity on this topic (Heu and Mabilet, 2015: 137, 206), which begins with a journalist stating, ‘plus d’un quart des jeunes diplômés français sont prêts à partir à l’étranger’ (‘more than a quarter of university graduates are ready to go abroad’) (ibid.:  206). There is then an interview with an émigré who makes several interesting observations. First, he makes clear that those who leave France are not necessarily desperate and that resumé building may be the prime motivation. Second, he notes how today it is easy for young Europeans to travel throughout the EU without legal restrictions. And third, he makes a brief comment about immigration into France, but curiously only mentions jobs available to the ‘English in Paris’ and speakers of ‘literary’ Arabic, Hebrew and Russian in the north of France. This last observation is curious to say the least, as it mentions very precise language-​related employment and seemingly ignores the vast number of low-​level service jobs taken by immigrants coming from countries around the world. But more interesting here is the way that the speaker positions himself as the paradigmatic young European: well educated, with initiative and unafraid of leaving France for another country. Also in same unit, we are introduced to Éric Carreel, ‘un serial entrepreneur influent dans le high-​tech français’ (‘an influential serial entrepreneur in the high-​tech sector in France’) (Heu and Mabilet, 2015: 136) and the founder of several start-​ups, who explains why he has stayed in France despite the crisis. Carreel begins by extoling the virtues of doing business in France to explain why he has not moved to the United States: France is what he knows best, there are a lot of qualified people and it is easy to launch a start-​up. However, he believes that the Silicon Valley model of open plan offices and colleagues exchanging ideas over coffee has not taken root in France, although he seems to think that this a matter of time. As he explains, ‘cela bouge vit, on est en train d’élaborer un écosystème favourable à la creation d’entreprise, les mentalités écoluent’ (‘things move fast, we are developing an ecosystem favourable to the creation of companies, mentalities evolve’) (ibid.). Carreel goes on to explain what such developments mean: The caricaturised discourses about bosses, they’re over. There is a benevolence, the French know that the economy is life, that nothing is fixed, that companies have to die and others be born. There is a new dynamism. Many young people are also beginning to understand that entering the venerable big business is no longer synonymous with eternal salvation. This is the advantage of the crisis, it pushes us to dare to do things that

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we refused to do in the past. I am optimistic about business creation in France.5 (ibid.: 137). In this statement, many elements of the neoliberal citizen come together. First, in terms of self-​branding and Aaker’s categories, we see how Carreel essentially defines the brand of worker he would employ. And although he does not actually use Aaker’s terms, we can easily imagine that the young employee he values will manifest characteristics associated with ‘excitement’ (from ‘daring’ to ‘contemporary’) and ‘competence’ (from ‘reliable’ to ‘confident’). In Carreel’s words, we see a rejection of the old –​bosses and hierarchies, as well as companies and jobs for life. There is an embrace of the postmodern notion that ‘nothing is fixed’ and that, in essence, everything is up for grabs and there for the taking, if one has the preparation, initiative and drive necessary. Younger people are framed as the future, as they are the ones ‘beginning to understand’ new developments. Finally, there is the notion of crisis as opportunity (Mirowski, 2013) and self-​acknowledged optimism about the future of business in France. All in all, this is virtual paean to neoliberalism and the kinds of people necessary to make it work. Notably, there is no mention of the specific state of the French economy at the time of the interview in early 2014. And there is no mention of the job losses that come with increasingly frequent waves of technological innovation. The smaller pie is apparently not a problem for those who can compete successfully. The French textbooks analysed in this section exemplify well the reach of the neoliberal rationality into progressively more and more domains of existence. Learning a language, once seen almost exclusively as an intercultural experience, is now another strand in the ongoing project of brand-​me. And being an entrepreneur is the supreme mark of success in this environment, which means that it is not surprising that pushing citizens to be entrepreneurs is not just a pastime of business people such as Éric Carreel; it also has made its way into government policy in a big way, especially, it seems, in countries that have been hardest hit by the economic crisis of 2007–​2008. Holborow (2015) examines the case of Ireland very eloquently; here I would like to discuss Spain.

Entrepreneurs revisited; the 2013 Spanish law supporting entrepreneurs In June 2013, the Spanish government launched with great fanfare a new law supporting entrepreneurs in Spain: the Ley de apoyo a los emprendedores y

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su internacionalización (literally, ‘Law to support entrepreneurs and their internationalization’). The law was eventually passed in parliament in September 2013, and as is the case with all laws, it was published in the Boletín Official del Estado, the official organ for the dissemination of information about government (parliamentary and senate) activity. In the preamble to the main text of the law, there is an explanation for why such a law was necessary in the first place. The first reason cited is the following: One of the most serious problems facing the Spanish economy and society is the high rate of youth unemployment, which in the case of young people under 25 is twice the EU27 average. The causes of this situation must be sought, not only in certain deficiencies that have characterized our model of labour relations, but also in the absence of greater entrepreneurial initiative among the youth population, which might have led, in the face of a lack of employment opportunities, to higher levels of self-​employment, capable, in turn, of generating more employment. To reverse this situation, a change in mentality is necessary towards a society that gives greater value to entrepreneurial activity and the assumption of risks. The cornerstone for this change to take place is undoubtedly the educational system.6 (Boletín Official del Estado, 2013: 78791) In this short section, we see several key rhetorical moves. First, there is the acknowledgement that the Spanish economy at this time was in a critical condition with regard to state debt and collateral effects, such as extremely high unemployment. Curiously enough, this kind of candour has not tended to be in evidence when representatives of the governing Spanish conservative party speak in public. On such occasions, the tendency has been to avoid making negative statements about the state of the Spanish economy, so as not to call into question the party’s economic policy. Second, there is a shift to the causes of high unemployment. The Spanish ‘model of labour relations’ is cited as a cause, but this is done without specifying what it is about these labour relations that is deficient. In any case, the text goes on to cite the second cause, ‘the absence of greater entrepreneurial initiative among the youth population’, which, it is implied, would have led to the creation of more companies and employment in the past. The addition of this cause of unemployment shifts the blame clearly from the structure of the labour market, a systemic problem inextricably linked to how capitalism operates in Spain, to one that is more rooted in the ‘mentality’ of young Spaniards: they are not currently up to the task of generating a healthy economy. The educational system is cited as the social space where such a change in mentality might be effected. The text of the law goes on to cite other deficiencies in the way that Spanish economy works, which make necessary the proposed law. These

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are the bureaucracy that entrepreneurs face when trying to set up a new company; lack of support and infrastructure that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to act on their ideas; difficulties in obtaining finance, from both individual investors and banks; deficient investment in research, development, innovation and new technologies; the failure of many sectors of the economy to keep up with the fast pace of economic globalization; and an immigration policy directed more towards the importation of manual labour than highly qualified labour. The section ends with the claim that other Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development countries have adopted similar legislation and therefore Spain must do the same if the economy and society are to be able to compete. In the second section of the law, concrete measures are outlined, beginning with the chapter titled Apoyo a la iniciativa emprendedora (Support for entrepreneurial initiative), which contains, as is explained, ‘una serie de medidas . . . para incentivar la cultura emprendedora y facilitar el inicio de actividades empresariales’ (‘a series of measures . . . to encourage entrepreneurial culture and facilitate the start of business activities’; Boletín Official del Estado, 2013: 78793). In this chapter of the law, a great deal of space is devoted to the problems listed in the previous paragraph. For example, measures are proposed to make it easier and cheaper to set up a company by eliminating a range of financial and legal impediments. In addition, offices will be opened with staff qualified to advise and counsel those who wish to set up a company, especially those doing so for the first time. Finally, more generous tax breaks and exemptions will be offered to entrepreneurs. However, what is of interest here is the beginning of this section where the text addresses the issue of education in entrepreneurial culture, namely, the introduction of measures to help young people acquire, through the educational system, the competences and skills necessary to become entrepreneurs. The measures would be introduced at all levels of education, from primary school through to undergraduate degree programmes at universities, and they would involve not only students, but also teaching staff. As for what exact form these measures might take, the following section of the law is informative: 1. The curricula of Primary Education, Compulsory Secondary, Baccalaureate and Vocational Training will incorporate objectives, competences, contents and evaluation criteria to training oriented towards the development and strengthening of the entrepreneurial spirit, to the acquisition of competences for the creation and development of the diverse business models and the promotion of equal opportunities and respect for entrepreneurs as well as business ethics. 2. Educational administrations will promote measures for students to participate in activities that allow them to strengthen their entrepreneurial

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spirit and initiative through aptitudes such as creativity, initiative, teamwork, self-​confidence and a critical sense.7 (Boletín Official del Estado, 2013: 78800) Reading this and other sections of the law, I  find myself thinking, ‘So, this is where we have ended up’. However, I  also find myself wondering how the directives outlined in this section would actually be implemented, if, that is, entrepreneurialism is being proposed as a transversal curriculum strand cutting across (and into) all subjects taught. Thus, while it is not difficult to envisage a subject called ‘Business studies’ catering to the content of this law, it is difficult to see how teachers of literature, geography, physics or biology would ‘incorporate objectives, competences, contents and evaluation criteria to training oriented towards the development and strengthening of the entrepreneurial spirit, to the acquisition of competences for the creation and development of the diverse business models’. Unless, of course, we imagine that literature students might study how novels are marketed, or geography students might examine how marketing campaigns are spatially organized, or physics and biology students might learn about how scientific inventions and discoveries are patented. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there seems to be no information about how the law has led to changes in school and university curricula, although several informal consultations with colleagues at Catalan universities and secondary schools indicate that there has been no major sea change with regard to directives about incorporating entrepreneurship as a transversal strand in all teaching. All this leaves me to speculate that apart from a very few general gestures in the direction of incorporating entrepreneurial values and practices into a few select pedagogical activities, not much is likely to change. And this might even be cause for celebration. Nevertheless, the fact that the text was written as it was, and that it was passed into law in parliament together make me see this law as cause for concern. William Davies has written of how in neoliberal regimes, ‘the state … comes to justify its decisions, policies and rules in terms that are commensurable with the logic of the markets’ (Davies, 2017:  8). The sections on education in the Spanish law supporting entrepreneurs is a good example of this, but it is far from unique as an example of creeping neoliberal values. Indeed, without leaving my desk, I can find evidence of another such sinister process at work, and this is one that has had, is having and will have very tangible consequences. I refer here to the current call for research proposals, Horizon 2020, which was launched in 2014 by the EC (the institution responsible for managing all EU business, including research and development).

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Horizon 2020 It should be clear by now to the reader that I  aim to show in this chapter how discourses of competiveness and entrepreneurialism have extended into realms where they would likely have not been welcome or accepted in the past. One such realm is research, and in particular, research funding. In fact, the EC has always hedged its calls for proposal in language that would certainly be qualified as ‘practical’ (as in research with clear practical outcomes). However, it is safe to say that for those of us working in the humanities and the social sciences, the most recent research framework, Horizon 2020, has been a great disappointment. I say this for two important reasons. First, far less money seems to be available to researchers in the humanities and social sciences disciplines than there is to those working in medicine, the so-​called hard sciences, and indeed, any academic discipline deemed likely to generate economy. This being the case, it is not too surprising that the word ‘language’ hardly appears anywhere, and when it does, never as the main focus of research. Second, the social sciences strands that are proposed are saturated in neoliberal expressions, which at times run so thick that one wonders if it is not off-​putting even to those researchers inclined to frame research issues and questions in such terms. To make this point we might examine a recent call for proposals, which appeared in October 2016 with the title ‘CO-​CREATION-​01-​2017:  Education and skills:  empowering Europe’s young innovators’ (European Commission, 2016). The call opens with a section titled ‘Specific Challenge’, which might lead more than one reader to ask why ‘challenge’ is used and not a more anodyne term such as ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ or even ‘interest’. In this sense, it is important to note that the strand to which this call belongs is titled ‘Europe in a changing world –​inclusive, innovative and reflective societies’, and that much (though not all) of what falls under this heading highlights the term ‘innovation’ over all else, while framing adversities in society as ‘challenges’. Moving to the actual challenge formulated for ‘Education and skills: empowering Europe’s young innovators’, we read the following information: Creativity, entrepreneurial skills, risk taking adaptability and innovation capacity, problem solving skills, skills related to effective teamwork and sharing information and knowledge, may all be key competitive advantages for Europeans, starting from young children. To make the best of this potential, it is essential that schools and educational institutions, as well as non-​ formal ways of learning, empower Europe’s young innovators with the skills they need from early on in life. Empowering the young through skills for innovation and entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, is

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particularly important to building more inclusive societies giving opportunities to all, including young innovators from less privileged backgrounds or those with disabilities in order to address inequalities. The challenge to be addressed by this topic is to improve learning and teaching in innovation-​ related skills for young boys and girls at the age of primary and secondary education through the design and piloting of new innovative ways of skills education, including technologies, processes and relations. (European Commission, 2016: 9) In the light of my previous discussion of neoliberalism and the neoliberal citizen in Chapter 3 and in the first part of this chapter, this section is particularly eloquent as a manifesto for neoliberal values and practices in twenty-​first-​ century European education. Disconcertingly reminiscent of the Spanish law for entrepreneurs discussed above, it is chock-​full of neoliberal keywords (see Holborow, 2015, for an update of Raymond Williams’s classic term). Indeed, the first sentence is overflowing with terms to describe the ideal employee in the neoliberal age, someone in possession of the ‘key competitive advantages’, which allow him/​her to compete on the global stage: ‘creativity, entrepreneurial skills, risk taking adaptability and innovation capacity, problem solving skills, skills related to effective teamwork and sharing information and knowledge’ (European Commission, 2016: 9). Later in the text, we come to the term ‘social entrepreneurialism’. In business circles, this term has been seen as a useful way to capture the idea that managers have to play to two very different sets of interests: ‘While trying to meet the expectations of their shareholders, customers, and employees, they also often have to address various social causes, such as environmental sustainability, education, and poverty relief’ (Zhang and Zhang, 2015: 50). In this case, the social entrepreneur might be willing to take on the latter issues, but the impression created by the authors is that perhaps he/​she would not do so if social pressure did not make attention to them advisable (e.g. ‘it’s good for business to be environmentally friendly’). Quite a different way of looking at the social entrepreneur can be found in literature that is closer to social activism. Arguing that ‘social entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs with a social mission as opposed to a profit-​seeking motivation’, Veronika Bikse, Baiba Rivza and Inga Riemere (2015:  472)  turn Haixin Zhang and Mengying Zhang’s assertion on its head: rather than seeing the social entrepreneur as a business person who has acquired a social conscience (for whatever reason), they see him/​her as someone who already has a social conscience, but who believes, that in order to tackle the social issues that Zhang and Zhang cite –​ ‘environmental sustainability, education, and poverty relief’  –​he/​she must use entrepreneurial methods. Such behaviour, of course, does not constitute

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revolutionary activity; rather, it accepts the dominant capitalist system, but seeks to use it to do some good. Moreover, as Holborow (2015) argues, such an approach to social activism is full of contradictions. She cites excerpts from an interview with five social entrepreneurs published in The Irish Times in March 2014 (Freyne, 2014) to show how the individuals who self-​position as social entrepreneurs reproduce key neoliberal rationalities via the words and phrases that they use to talk about their activities. Thus, she finds references to problem solving, disembedded from any consideration of the possible sources of problems. She notes how taking such a position easily leads to an acceptance of the notion that the 2007–​2008 economic crisis just happened and was no one’s responsibility, a position that effectively exonerates all the bankers, politicians and other agents whose behaviour and actions either directly or indirectly caused the crisis. Holborow also finds denunciations of the so-​called ‘blame culture’ (see the Thatcher quote earlier), which seem to go hand-​in-​hand with an embrace of the idea that each individual must take responsibility for his/​her life trajectory (bearing in mind the previous point, bankers and politicians are apparently excluded from this principle!). Finally, she finds in the interviewees’ responses considerable use of new-​age, go-​ getter, can-​do business language, an example being a social entrepreneur who, when asked to give advice to young people who want to change society, quoted the famous (and overused) Nike slogan, ‘Just do it’.8 Based not just on this interview, but also on her reading of publications on the topic, Holborow concludes that social entrepreneurship ‘acts as a convenient diversion away from the real forces at work in the creation of inequality . . . [and] as a logical extension of the neoliberal project . . . contributing to the concerted ideological offensive against the public provision of services and social welfare’ (Holborow, 2015: 84). Following the logic of the call, we see that in order for social entrepreneurism to solve problems and effect positive change in society, innovation of some sort must occur. There are no fewer than six variations on this this word in this paragraph, which is not surprising given the aforementioned logic, as well as the title of the call, in addition to the tendency for EC calls to repeat key terms (quite possibly as a reminder to those who write proposals that they should be equally repetitive of key terms). Just as Schumpeter ([1934] 1983; see discussion earlier) saw innovation as the key to the ongoing evolution of capitalism, so the EC commissioners responsible for calls like this one see innovation as the key to the resolution of problems facing European area countries today. Another key term in the text is ‘empowerment’, which is described as ‘particularly important to building more inclusive societies’. Over the past three

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decades, empowerment has become the new buzzword in many professional circles, especially in business and education. It is a term used by activists and academics, with Julian Rappaport, an early proponent, defining it as ‘a process of becoming able or allowed to do something where there is a condition of dominion or authority with regard to that specific thing’ (Rappaport, 1987:129). Specifically, empowerment has been used as a kind of localized policy solution, whereby less advantaged groups acquire the means to defend their interests and organize their affairs. In such contexts, it tends to include doses of self-​help, self-​emancipation and individualism, which goes some way towards explaining why Hannah Cooke (2002) observes that ‘we can . . . link the concept of empowerment to the rise of neo-​liberalism and the particular public sector reforms that arose out of the neo-​liberal project’, adding that in this case ‘empowerment is about shouldering responsibilities conferred on us by those with power’ (Cooke, 2002: 166). The reforms that Cooke refers to owe a great deal to the rise of ‘the new managerialism’, which provides discursive and material support for the introduction of neoliberal policies in an increasing number of domains. And as Fleming (2015: 90) explains, it ‘fanatically holds to the belief that managing people is a transferable skill that can be tradable and cross-​referable regardless of the organizational context that is ostensibly being managed’. Having established the state of play, the Horizon 2020 call moves to consider the scope of the research that it seeks: New approaches for educating skills need to be developed, piloted and scaled up. There is a lack of sufficient collaboration with entrepreneurial stakeholders in teaching and students practice, and a lack of inter-​generational learning. Young people need to be supported with tools, resources and an open environment encouraging experimentation and the development of joint projects including based on interdisciplinary approaches. Effective supporting schemes should guide young people into their entrepreneurial journey. (European Commission, 2016: 10) Once again, we see a barrage of catchy managerial language –​‘developed, piloted and scaled up’, ‘collaboration with entrepreneurial stakeholders’, ‘tools [and] resources’, ‘the development of joint projects’ and ‘entrepreneurial journey’. The focus is on young people, at the centre of Horizon 2020 calls from 2014 onwards, as key players in the future of Europe. However, these young people are positioned as lacking in educational and entrepreneurial skills, and the EC wants researchers to devise research projects that will produce findings leading to the resolution of this problem. These research projects will be developed by consortia, consisting of not only specialized academics, but also (citing from the call) ‘entrepreneurial partners’, ‘partners from

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civil society and the social economy’ and, of course, the young people participating in the project. There is a fairly clear indication regarding the kind of educational resources that projects should incorporate into their research, for example, ‘new approaches’, ‘innovative models for skills education’ and ‘new inter-​active methods’. Novelty is obviously a prized characteristic here, along with the location of all activity in advanced communication technologies, including, above all, the use of social media. In addition, all pedagogical interventions, which the potential applicant is reminded must be ‘innovative’, are to be piloted and once in place and functioning, they are to be evaluated. Meanwhile, students are to be assessed. The call ends with the ‘expected impact’, which is outlined as follows: The action will pave the way for innovating learning and teaching practices, so that innovation skills are part of a person’s education, formal and informal, at schools and interacting communities as well as on-​line. This will boost innovation and entrepreneurship capacity, bringing together many stakeholders including from education, traditional business, the social and service economy and volunteering schemes. It will thereby empower young innovators across Europe, provide for innovative business models and give them tools to engage in society and channel their energies to create opportunities for the future. In the long run the topic contributes to higher youth employment and to creating new markets and new jobs. The knowledge generated as a result of the actions should be disseminated across Europe to benefit the largest numbers of young innovators. (European Commission, 2016: 11) This section serves to highlight still further the content of the previous sections, albeit with the intention of citing desired outcomes: innovative, entrepreneurial neoliberal citizens. It also reveals with greater clarity than the other sections the real underlying reason for the call, namely, to develop educational policies designed to reduce the high youth unemployment that exists across Europe, especially in southern Europe. However, the call as a whole leaves many questions unanswered. It completely buys into the neoliberal discourses that underwrite the current dominant version of capitalism, which arguably is responsible for the inequality and unemployment affecting young Europeans. In addition, although most critical educationalists assume that one can overturn capitalism through the education of young people, one sometimes wonders if this is not a question of the educational tail wagging the economic (neoliberal) dog. Specifically, with regard to what this call demands, a lot of innovative pedagogical activities designed to empower young people do not seem likely to reverse (or even reduce) the inordinate influence of banks on economic policies, or the continuous erosion of worker’s rights, or

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the disintegration of the welfare state, or any other ill engendered by neoliberalism. And, as we observed above, the insertion of social entrepreneurialism into the call, perhaps with the well-​meaning intention of attracting social activists who have in recent years adopted it as their creed, serves little purpose beyond acting as a smoke screen that conceals the real underlying causes of inequality. It also allows, through the back door, the co-​option of activism into neoliberal discourses and practices. Finally, despite all its new-​fangled language, such as social entrepreneurialism, the call is hopelessly embedded in a view of human nature that Milton Friedman would have embraced, but that Karl Marx would surely have rejected, namely, that there is an independent-​ minded, innovative, entrepreneur in everyone, just waiting to be freed. It is just a matter of discovering how to bring it to the surface so that young people can begin, as it says in the call, ‘their entrepreneurial journey’. But can everyone be an entrepreneur? Indeed, can everyone be the ideal neoliberal citizen? Self-​help gurus such as Tom Peters would appear to think so; otherwise, they would not publish so many books telling people how to succeed! And in the different texts we have examined thus far in this ­chapter –​the French-​language textbooks, the entrepreneurs’ law in Spain and the Horizon 2020 call for research proposals –​the answer also seems to be yes. However, if we were to examine specific examples, that is real flesh-​and-​ blood individuals, perhaps the conclusion would be otherwise. We might just see that those who carry the mantle of entrepreneur are so well self-​branded as to be unique, or, in any case, members of a select class, to which access is not easy. In the fourth and final section of this chapter, I move from a concern with how textual artefacts (a textbook, a law, a call for research) construct neoliberal citizens to how a celebrity broker in Spain has over the past decade constructed himself as something of a youth icon, and, above all, as an ideal and model neoliberal citizen.

A neoliberal citizen in the flesh Josef Ajram is a Spanish broker, avid triathlon and iron-​man athlete, and part-​ time life coach, born in Barcelona in 1978. Over the past decade he has developed an intense media presence and is often an invited speaker at business conferences, large and small, and on television and radio talk shows. A good number of his interventions can be found on YouTube, which I have found of immense assistance in the writing of this section. In addition, he is the author of numerous books that reflect his multifaceted activity, including an autobiography, ¿Donde está el limte? (Where is the limit?), published in 2010; La solución. El método Ajram (The Ajram Method), a book that offers solutions to the economic crisis, published in 2011; No sé dónde está el límite, pero sí

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sé dónde no está (I don’t know where the limit is, but I know where it isn’t), a book about the author’s athletic successes, published in 2012; Ganar en bolsa es posible (Winning on the stock market is possible), a how-​to book for potential brokers, published in 2013; and El pequeño libro de la superación personal (A little book on personal improvement), a book meant to help readers become masters of their lives, published in 2016. There is even a book, Cuando tu pareja es tu mejor arma (When your partner is your best weapon), written by his partner Sulaika Fernández in 2013, which imparts advice on how to live with and support an intense athlete who spends a lot of time away from home. As Ajram has explained in his books and media interventions (e.g. Ajram, 20159), he dropped out of his economics studies at university because he was told that ‘the stock market is a game’ and therefore not worthy of study. From this point onwards, he became a student of everything to do with the stock market and being a broker, finding success within a short period of time. Then, as he further explains, he discovered that he needed the outlet of extreme competitive athletics to supplement his devotion to work, and in this way he began to develop a profile as something of a model citizen, one able to do business and play in equal proportions. Ajram, thus, has a compelling narrative to impart to those who are willing to listen. It is also worth noting two other additional factors about Ajram, which are keys to his success, making him something of a legend in business circles in Spain as well as a media star. First, there is his physical appearance: he has an athletic body covered in tattoos and at times adorned with piercings. He usually dresses very informally, jeans, a tee-​shirt and trainers being a typical combination, and on the whole, he projects an image that we might call ‘youth cool’. The second factor that has contributed to his success is his exceptional stage presence, and, indeed, charisma as a speaker. He uses simple but very precise language, complementing his explanations with colloquialisms and the occasional expletive. The overall effect of his physical presence in combination with his speaking skills is something akin to a cross between a young Bruce Springsteen and Milton Friedman. Meanwhile, if we apply Aaker’s (1997) ‘dimensions of brand personality’, as we did with David Beckham earlier, we get a similar result in that Brand-​ Ajram, like Brand-​Beckham, seems to cover a great deal of diverse conceptual terrain. Thus, with regard to Aaker’s first category, sincerity, Ajram appears to be ‘down-​to earth’, ‘honest’, ‘sincere’, ‘real’ and ‘friendly’. With regard to excitement, he tries to convey in word and deed that he is ‘daring’, ‘trendy’, ‘exciting’, ‘spirited’, ‘cool’, ‘young’, ‘imaginative’, ‘unique’, ‘up-​to-​date’, ‘independent’ and ‘contemporary’. As for the third category, competence, Ajram positions himself as ‘reliable’, ‘hard-​working’, ‘secure’, ‘intelligent’, ‘technical’, ‘corporate’, ‘successful’, ‘confident’ and ‘a leader’. Finally, he displays both

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sophistication and ruggedness, Aaker’s fourth and fifth categories:  on the one hand, for many of his fans, he comes across as ‘charming’, ‘smooth’ and ‘physically attractive’; on the other hand, through his athletic exploits, he no doubt fits the bill as ‘outdoorsy’, ‘masculine’ and ‘tough’. Ajram’s basic life philosophy is summed up on the back cover of his bestselling book, the aforementioned autobiography, ¿Donde está el limte?: WHERE IS THE LIMIT? I’m not one of these ex-​brokers who had a bad day at the office and decided to start over, to leave the stock exchange behind and dedicate myself to cycling. No, that’s not who I am. I decided instead to become an ultra-​long distance runner, and to take part in the toughest physical tests in the world, in order to find out the limits of the human body –​the limits of my body –​in the same way that a good stockbroker sniffs around, listens, weighs things up and ultimately takes risks to make the most of an up in the market, and to establish how long to hold on before he sells.10 (Ajram, 2010: back cover) The qualities that Ajram assigns to the ‘good stock broker’ in the last sentence of this text resonate with what Schumpeter, von Mises and Kirzner had in mind when they described the ideal entrepreneur. Indeed, in a television appearance in 2016, Ajram himself offered the following definition of the entrepreneur, which could not be more clearly in line with what these authors wrote on the topic (NB: transcription conventions can be found in the Appendix of this book): For me/​to be an entrepreneur is/​to start an idea/​to work on one’s own/​to be self-​employed/​to be a person who understands that the fourteen payments a year11 and the month of vacation in Spain/​are over/​and to be a person who understands perfectly/​that to be self-​employed/​is no more risky than being on a payroll (.5) from here/​a person who is self-​employed since 2001/​and who in 2002 began to create his first society/​should say that not everyone is up to the task/​to be self-​employed/​to be an entrepreneur/​to present a project/​. . . but I  do believe that there are many more people capable/​ and one of the great evils we have in Spain/​is what will they say if it goes wrong?/​What cannot be/​is that the greatest enemy is our environment/​.12 (Ajram, La Sexta Noche, 14 May 2016; available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=UiAfzGCDCHY) Further to his clear and unequivocal defence of entrepreneurial values and activity, Ajram has also pronounced on Spanish politics. When asked about who he votes for, he positions himself as an unwilling voter of the PP. He

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sees them as the party that best defends the free-​market economy, saying in effect that ‘there is no alternative’. With regard to the rise of Podemos, first as a left-​wing social movement and then as a left-​wing political party from March 2014 onwards, he values the fact that Pablo Iglesias, its leader, has managed to channel into an organized movement much of the frustration, anger and indignation that many Spanish people have felt as a result of the economic crisis. However, he makes clear that he is in total disagreement with what this movement stands for, believing that it would be more productive if this frustration, anger and indignation led people in the direction of self-​employment (entrepreneurship) or even movement to another country in search of work, as his father, a Syrian immigrant, did in the 1960s. In the following excerpt from an interview on Spanish television in November 2014, we gain a clear idea of what Ajram thinks of the left-​wing politics of Podemos: I/​what I see/​is that if Podemos governs/​there is going to be a major flight of foreign capital/​and financially this/​in the short term/​will be devastating for Spain/​he/​Mr Iglesias/​said something stupid/​with all respect/​namely that if J. P. Morgan says something/​he will be a candidate in the next elections/​ thanks to J. P. Morgan/​we are still in the euro today/​because if it had not been for the/​the injection of international capital that Spain has received in recent years/​nobody would collect neither a pension/​and no one would re/​receive anything from the national health service/​.13 (Ajram, La Sexta Noche, 29 November 2014; available online:  https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=maWt9zFrYww) When pushed by the interviewer, who reminds him that J. P. Morgan had, by the year 2014, been condemned in several cases of bad practice, Ajram shifts his ground somewhat, saying: No one is going to defend J.P. Morgan/​and we talk about J.P. Morgan/​as an example of financial markets/​we shouldn’t personalize it/​as [being about] one private bank/​.14 (Ajram, La Sexta Noche, 29 November 2014; available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=maWt9zFrYww) Nevertheless, here and elsewhere in his public declarations, Ajram generally embraces the status quo of neoliberalism. And why not, given that he has become rich using the infrastructure that it affords? Thus, beneath the fashionable quasi-​hipster look that he cultivates  –​via his dress and physical appearance, and the colloquial, down-​to-​earth and straight-​shooting language that he employs –​Ajram is still a broker, a speculator and arguably the kind of person who helped cause the 2007–​2008 economic crisis. The fact that he can so successfully sell himself and what he says and does as

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‘cool’ is perhaps indicative of where we have arrived in twenty-​first-​century societies. Thatcher’s ominous elocution ‘economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’ could not be more apt here. And just as Holborow found in her exploration of social entrepreneurship, I  find in my examination of Ajram’s success –​as an economic expert, as a contemporary icon for entrepreneurship, as an ideal man exuding (simultaneously) hyper-​masculinity and metrosexuality and as a model citizen  –​evidence of how ideology works (pace Marx and Engels, the ideas of the ruling are always the ruling ideas15). Above all, I see the extent to which neoliberalism has penetrated subjectivities,as economic theory, as economic dogma, as ideology, as rationality and as policies and practices. We have seen this in the French textbooks, the Spanish law to promote entrepreneurs and the EC Horizon 2020 call for research proposals. And we see it in the life and times of Josef Ajram. As a postscript to this section, I  should make one thing very clear. It would be inaccurate, and even unfair, to suggest that everyone in Spain has been won over by Josef Ajram’s considerable charms and apparent plausibility. Ajram himself has spoken on different occasions of the hate correspondence that he receives via social media and if one examines the comments that follow recordings of him on YouTube, it soon becomes clear that he has a quite few detractors.16 Having said this, and notwithstanding the considerable amount of criticism that he receives, there can be little doubt as to who is in the more powerful position. It is Ajram who can decide what he communicates, when he does so, where he does so and how he does so. It is Ajram who commands the big stage and has the most (and the most effective) channels of communication through which to get his message across.

Conclusion The predatory phase of culture is attained when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life; when the common-​sense appreciation of men and things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat. (Veblen, [1899] 2007: 18) Here Veblen writes about the state of societies once industrialization has taken place and technical knowledge and use of tools have become the normal mediators of social activity. At this stage in development, cultures become predatory in that exploitation, ‘invidious comparison’ (ibid.:  16), ‘booty . . .

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as prima facie evidence of successful aggression’ (ibid.:  17)  and additional notions such as ‘self-​assertion’, ‘invidious distinction’, ‘honour’ and ‘worthiness’ become the order of the day (ibid.: 17). Much of what Veblen wrote so many years ago about capitalism in the late nineteenth century resonates a little too well with how we live today. The predatory culture he described is alive and well in neoliberal times as the ideal citizen today is a predator far more than he/​she was in the years of dominant Keynesianism, but perhaps as much as, if not more, than he/​she would have been in Veblen’s time. The neoliberal citizen we have examined in this ­chapter –​embodied in French textbooks, in a law written by the Spanish government, in the explanation of what is considered valuable research in Europe and in a Spanish broker/​athlete/​life coach  –​is presented as the pinnacle of human evolution to date. This takes us back to the preface of this book, where we met Danielle, the 21-​year-​old Swedish ‘digital nomad’ living for a period of time in Barcelona. We are constantly told (and then reminded) in a range of domains that we need more Danielles, or even that we need everyone to be a Danielle. But is this the best we can do? Do we think of those who cannot be Danielle, or any of the other figures constructed in the texts examined in this chapter, as ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2004), or even as members of an ‘underclass’, and therefore ‘totally useless [,]‌. . . a nuisance pure and simple . . . [and] something that the rest of the world could do without’ (Bauman, 2007: 124)? Or, do we think that as a result of being human waste, and therefore lacking in means, that those who cannot be Danielle are also ‘failed consumers’, that is, people who are unable ‘to engage in fully-​fledged consumer activity’ (ibid.)? To conclude, and with reference to everything I have discussed in this chapter, are we being guided into submission to an inferior means of organizing society through our exposure to and our uptake of discourses emanating from the dominant ideology of neoliberalism? My current understanding of worldly matters leads me to answer the first three of these four questions with a resounding ‘no’, and the fourth and final question with a ‘perhaps’. As for what can be done about this state of affairs, it is my view that a sociolinguist can only do so much as a sociolinguist. The first step is the one I have taken here, namely, to attempt an analysis of various discursive and symbolic manifestations of the neoliberal citizen. As for what practical purpose these analyses might serve, the key is how widespread their dissemination can be. For the moment, and if I am perfectly honest, publishing a book like this one is not likely to change the world, reaching a mass readership. I am not so self-​deluded or naive as to believe otherwise. However, publishing in more popular media would help, even if the kinds of television and radio programmes where one might put forth the views developed in this chapter (and, indeed, this book as whole) are dominated by the likes of Josef Ajram, not least because such individuals offer a positive message of how to

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work within the current system. This, as opposed to arguing for the necessity of taking revolutionary action to change the entire economic system! To my mind, such revolutionary action is necessary given the current state of the world. As for what action might be carried out, how it might be carried out and what it might mean, I  now move to the next chapter in which, among other things, I examine in detail a conflict in Spain involving three parties: the governing PP, defending the interests of banks; individuals who have lost their homes to repossession due to their inability to pay a mortgage or rent; and a social movement that was organized in defence of the interests of the latter against the former.

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6 Inequality, class and class warfare: Discourse, ideology and ‘truth’

Introduction In Chapter 4, I discussed how inequality has risen markedly since the beginning of the economic crisis of 2007–​2008, drawing on a long list of scholars (e.g. Atkinson, 2015; Bourguignon, 2012; Dorling, 2011; Milanovic, 2011, 2016; Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2016). I also discussed class as a key instance of inequality. This chapter is about inequality and class, but more specifically, about class struggle and class warfare that have come to be the order of the day in many parts of the world. Class struggle was the essential ingredient in Marx’s analysis of capitalism. This comes through in just about everything he wrote from the mid-​1840s onwards, and it is captured in the oft-​cited opening to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’s statement of political intentions: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998: 9). Class warfare, as will be explained in this chapter, is part and parcel of class struggle, the inevitable conflict emerging from divergent class interests and the struggle over material resources in capitalist societies. The specific instance of class warfare that I focus on in the first half of this chapter revolves around home evictions in Spain, which have increased markedly in recent years on the back of the aforementioned economic crisis. Home evictions are material events, but here I  am more concerned with how they are disputed in the discursive, symbolic realm. In particular, I focus on an ongoing a battle around the discursive construction of home evictions, which has arisen in recent years between the governing Partido Popular (PP; the Spanish Conservative Party in government from late 2011 until the time of writing) and the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH; the ‘Platform for those affected

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by Mortgages’), a grass-​roots organization defending the rights of home evictees. As we will see, this battle has not been about just home evictions, evolving as it has into other realms of class conflict; rather, it is part of a broader and higher level ideological struggle in Spain over the type of society that would best serve the interests of citizens. It is also a struggle over ‘truth’ and I am concerned with how what I discuss here connects with the current interest in what has come to be known as ‘post-​truth’ in the media, as well as the notion of ‘corrupt discourses’, which I have introduced elsewhere (Block, 2016a). In a sense, this chapter begins by talking about home evictions and a discursive conflict arising around them, before moving to a discussion of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) as a framework through which to consider the more general issue of how members of the ruling class constantly attempt to impose on the popular classes their versions of events (the latter always framed as the correct and natural ones). As I  adopt a CDS approach to my discussions of what in essence are discourses in conflict, this chapter, like Chapter  5, is an attempt to apply ideas from Chapters  2–​4 to inquiry situated in sociolinguistics. In particular, as I stated above, I draw on Chapter 4, where I discussed stratification, inequality and class; however, Chapter 3 is also extremely relevant, given that neoliberalism is clearly the backdrop to the events described and analysed here. Having discussed the aforementioned events, in particular a series of conflicting discourses, I end the chapter with some thoughts on the usefulness of CDS as a field of inquiry able to make contributions to ongoing critical political economy discussions of stratification, inequality, class and class struggle in neoliberal times.

Inequality, class struggle and class warfare Actually, there has been class warfare for 20  years and my class has won. We’re the ones who have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically. (Warren Buffet, 30 September 2011) This comment, made by the American billionaire Warren Buffet several years into the 2007–​2008 economic crisis, may be seen as a clear case of recidivism. I  say this because in 2005 Buffet had already shocked part of the American public when he acknowledged that class warfare existed. Then he said that the war in question was being won by the elites. Six years later, as we see here, he claimed that the war had already been won. On one level, what we have here is a billionaire speaking with the authority that his elite status affords: Who knows more about what is going on in the economy and winning class warfare than someone who has triumphed? However, there is

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also something of a twist in Buffet’s approach to the way the economy has favoured his class over all others. In effect, Buffet acts as a kind of whistle-​ blowing billionaire as he reminds Americans, and indeed people around the world, how far countries such as the United States have strayed from the Keynesianism that was so dominant in the period of roughly 1945–​1975, and how inequality has grown as it has in no other period of the past century and a half (Piketty, 2014). His candid comments also show that there is now no need for a capitalist to fear class warfare; indeed, one can actually acknowledge its existence in a very open manner! Thus, with the rise of neoliberalism to dominance from the 1980s onwards –​ as an ideology, as an amalgam of economic policies and practices and as a rationality –​the fortunes of individuals such as Buffet have grown. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of people, there has been a considerable increase in Therborn’s resource inequality, which, as we observed in Chapter 4, is about unequal access to and possession of material resources (e.g. property, possessions, wealth) and symbolic resources (e.g. culture, education, prestige, legitimacy, social networks). In addition, and to make matters worse, this resource inequality has increased even more rapidly in the years since the current economic crisis first began to emerge in 2007–​2008 (Piketty, 2014). In the midst of this situation, it is worthwhile to note how among the populations of those countries most affected by the crisis, such as the southernmost states of the EU, there is a growing realization that the persistence and growth of resource inequality lead inevitability to a concomitant increase in vital inequality. In this sense, we see the collateral negative effects that come with society-​wide impoverishment, such as ill-​health (both physical and psychological) and a decrease in the quality of social services and publically available resources (Dorling, 2011, 2014). In this chapter, my starting point for exploring how inequality is constituted in the ongoing flux and flow of social events, activity and communication is the premise that we are living in times of class struggle, understood in more specific terms here as class warfare, where class is understood in terms of a constellation of dimensions model. As we observed in Chapter 4, this model draws on the foundational political economic work of Marx ([1867] 1990) and, later, more sociocultural models of class elaborated, successively, by Durkheim ([1893] 1984), Weber ([1922] 1968) and Bourdieu (1984). It frames class in terms of a long list of factors, including property owned, material possessions (e.g. electronic goods, clothing, books, art, etc.), income, occupation, education, social networking, consumption patterns, symbolic behaviour, pastimes, mobility, neighbourhood and type of dwelling inhabited. These dimensions of class cluster together and index points of contrast between and among individuals in class-​based societies where class struggle and class

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conflict are a part of daily life, albeit in ways that are often subtle and, equally often, go unnoticed. Eric Olin Wright defines class struggle as ‘conflicts between the practices of individuals and collectives in pursuit of opposing class interests . . . rang[ing] from the strategies of individual workers within the labour process to reduce their level of toil, to conflicts between highly organized collectivities of workers and capitalists over the distribution of rights and powers within production’ (Wright, 2005: 20–​21). In recent times, it is easy to see that class struggle, endemic to capitalism, has transformed into class warfare, as the neoliberal policies adopted over the past four decades around the world have constituted not only a point of conflict and struggle in the ‘pursuit of opposing class interests’, but also an actual attack on the well-​being and even survival of the popular classes. Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2011, 2014) have written extensively about what they call la grande bifurcation (the great bifurcation, or parting of paths). Stated briefly, this bifurcation occurred when the highly qualified managerial classes in the advanced economies of North America, Europe and Oceania began a process of separation from the popular classes with which they had been aligned during the Keynesian era, when their jobs were about managing growth and technical change. The entrenchment of neoliberalism, and in particular financialization, from the 1980s onwards, meant that these managers’ jobs were progressively more about stock market income. With this change in orientation came higher salaries, better work conditions and stakeholder/​ownership options, and this constellation of circumstances effectively seduced the managerial classes away from their fellow workers in the lower echelons of corporate and institutional structures and into the arms of the capitalist class. Taking a slightly different approach to the notion of class warfare, David Harvey has argued that where neoliberal policies have been dominant, people ‘have lived through a whole generation of sophisticated strategizing on the part of the ruling elites to restore, enhance, or . . . construct an overwhelming class power (Harvey, 2005:  201). Nowhere has the class power been more in evidence than in the transfer of capital assets from the less wealthy in society to the wealthiest since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007. In an attempt to understand this trend, Harvey (2010, 2014) updates Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, discussing what he calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Primitive accumulation was Marx’s term for the ‘historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (Marx, [1867] 1990: 875), which began with waves of land expropriations going back as far as the late fifteenth century in England. These expropriations, which ranged from the feudal lords being dispossessed of land by the emerging industrial capitalist class to the reformation-​era spoliation of land held by the Catholic Church, had the common effect of divesting the peasant class of access to a

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livelihood as they were driven towards their historical destiny as the industrial proletariat. Moving to more recent times, Harvey sees accumulation by dispossession in the range of activities and practices carried out by governments and financial institutions, which have the function of transferring wealth from the less well-​off to the wealthy. On the one hand, there is the privatization of state-​owned and operated industries and services, which began in earnest some four decades ago. More recently, there is the sale of state-​owned assets (which are public and therefore, in theory, belong to ‘the people’) to private investors, often from other countries and therefore that much further removed from the realities of the local contexts where the purchased assets are physically located. On the other hand, there are the activities of the financial sector such as the ‘Ponzi’ scandal in the United States (Frankel, 2012) or the preferentes scandal in Spain (Serra Ramoneda, 2016). In the latter case, individuals on modest incomes or pensions turned over their life savings to financial advisors who told them that their money would be invested for profit and that they would be treated preferentially as prized clients. When the current financial crisis arrived, and their banks failed and had to be rescued, these individuals lost most or all of their invested money. Finally, and most relevant to this chapter, there is the increase in home repossessions that has come with the crisis. In this case, the executors are banks, aided and abetted by governments serving the interests of capital over citizens at large, an alignment of interests denounced long ago by Marx ([1858] 1973, [1867] 1990; see also Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998). Given the discussion above, in which we have moved from inequality to class struggle and class warfare fairly rapidly, there is the key issue of how one operationalizes these constructs in empirical research. Or perhaps better said, there is the need to examine how one documents how these phenomena are constituted in, and indeed how they emerge from, the social world of events, activity and communication. I turn to this issue in the next section.

Critical Discourse Studies As we observed in Chapter  1, CDS is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry with theoretical roots in critical theory and the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, geography and political economy), which employs a range of methodological approaches (from text linguistics to ethnography) in the examination of events, phenomena and ways of being in different contexts, which are, simultaneously, economic, political, social and cultural. Central to any approach to CDS is Norman Fairclough’s notion of semiosis, or the making of meaning via the use of semiotic resources (speech, written script, visuals,

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body movement, gaze and so on) as a way of understanding how power relationship are symbolically established and reproduced in society. Fairclough defines discourse as ‘a complex set of relations including relations of communication between people who talk, write and in other ways communicate with each other, but also, for example, describe relations between concrete communicative events (conversations, newspaper articles, etc.) and more abstract and enduring complex discourses and genres’ (Fairclough, 2010: 3). Crucially, he sees ‘relations between discourse and other . . . complex “objects” . . . in the physical world, persons, power relations and institutions, which are interconnected elements in social activity’ (ibid). It is also worth noting that discourses, as defined above, are always ‘positioned’ and ‘interested’ ways of presenting social practices and the world and life in general, which means that they are not casual, but always come from somewhere. For example, political parties and political organizations often produce and reproduce particular discourses about events and phenomena that are deemed important by society in general: a preferred discourse of education where there is public debate about declining standards or a preferred discourse produced by representatives of a government keen to convince the public that the economy is going well. In addition, discourses about social events and phenomena do not normally exist in isolation; indeed, the norm, as Chris Weedon (1997) notes, is for there to be multiple discourses around the same social reality and for these to be contested and in conflict with each other, as we see below. Ruth Wodak’s discourse-​ historical approach (Wodak, Cillias, Reisigl and Liebhart, 1999; Wodak and Meyer, 2016) includes a final very important point about discourses, namely, that they are historically situated artefacts. And this historical situatedness means that they are a potential resource for communication in the present. In different ways, both Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and Julia Kristeva (1986) capture this general notion in their respective work on ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘intertextuality’. With reference to the former, Bakhtin captures the historically situated and socially enduring multivocality of the ‘living utterance’, which ‘having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads [alien words, value judgments and accents], woven by socio-​ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 276). Meanwhile, for Kristeva intertextuality captures how ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations’ and ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva, 1986: 66). For his part, Fairclough (1992) is influenced by both scholars as he discusses ‘the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contradict, ironically echo, and so forth’ (Fairclough, 1992: 84), calling the property ‘interdiscursivity’. Of interest here are cases of interdiscursivity (or

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heteroglossia or intertextuality), in which elements from texts produced in the past are constituents of those in the present. This can mean, for example, a mixing of genres (e.g. personalizing a formal speech with anecdotes), or the adoption of a variety of recognizable social voices in the telling of story (often the choice of voices tells us a great deal about the person producing them), or the use of simplified versions of material and discursive realities from the past (as we shall see below, all too often, references to Hitler and the Nazis are used as a quick and easy way to discredit an interlocutor or a political opponent).

CDS and class warfare As I observed in Chapter 1, very little CDS research has focused on class from a political economy-​informed position, which I argued was somewhat surprising, given the field’s critical roots and its widespread interest in ideology and inequality. Specifically, with reference to class struggle and class warfare, my chief interest here, there has been very little research indeed, an exception being Claudia Ortu (2008), who focuses on public discourses in the United Kingdom that have positioned class as irrelevant and trade unions as a negative force in society. In this section I  discuss two recent lines of research that touch on how public policy talk and the media (specifically reality shows) construct class, class relations and class warfare. My discussion of these two lines of research serves a double function:  on the one hand, it shows how some CDS research has explored class warfare and how it has done so; on the other hand, the two areas covered resonate with the case of class warfare that I examine later in this chapter. Briana Turgeon, Tiffany Taylor and Laura Niehaus (2014) provide a good example of how public policy talk can construct class and class relations, and in doing so be seen as discursive class warfare. The authors examine and analyse how welfare-​to-​work programme managers in the United States engage in ‘classtalk’ when referring to welfare recipients. One distinction that managers make is between ‘situational’ and ‘generational’ poverty. The former refers to individuals who are in and out of employment, going from one poorly paid job to another. Meanwhile, ‘generational’ poverty refers to people who were born in a ‘culture of poverty’ and raised by parents who themselves were welfare recipients. In most cases, these individuals are deemed not to have acquired the basic skills necessary to obtain and maintain a job. For Turgeon et  al., using this terminology constitutes ‘classtalk’, which is an ideological position that ‘ignores structural conditions and causes of poverty’ (Turgeon et al., 2014: 669). In other words, it is talk that positions individuals in terms of vague and superficial folk theories, focusing on the surface-​level appearance

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of the class as opposed to the how and the why of its existence. As the authors explain, classtalk ‘is reflective of US meritocracy and neoliberalism . . . [and] reflects broader welfare discourses of difference, dependency, personal responsibility, and the ‘culture of poverty’’ (ibid.). In their research Turgeon et al. have found that classtalk is realized via the use of six general discourse strategies adopted by the managers. These are (1) ‘contrasts’, as when a manager ‘focuses on the differences between

two groups’, producing and contributing to ‘discourses of difference’; (2) ‘explanations’, as when a manager attempts ‘to excuse or validate a

speaker’s stance on a potentially delicate topic’; (3) ‘examples’ as when a manager ‘offer[s]‌narratives or specific instances

in order to illustrate the validity of the speaker’s stance’; (4) ‘generalizations’, as when a manager ‘applies an experience/​story/​

example to an entire group’ with the intention of suggesting that the instance is ‘typical of all group members’; (5) ‘apparent concessions’, as when a manager ‘makes a positive or

neutral acknowledgment about a group or group member’; and (6) ‘mitigation’, as when a manager seeks to ‘reduce the negativity of

what they just said, or were trying to say’ (ibid.: 659). The consequences of framing the poor as responsible for their poverty and therefore as ‘underserving’ (Katz, 2013) through these strategies are not clear given that there is no discussion of a link between use of classtalk and actions taken by managers that directly affect welfare claimants. Still, the authors do a good job of showing how, against the backdrop of a society inundated with neoliberal discourses of being and behaviour, class and class relations are made visible, especially with regard to the sociocultural and symbolic resources of welfare claimants. The latter are positioned at the lower end of society in terms of education, technological know-​how, social contacts and status, all of which would help them to obtain employment. And this would, in turn, lift them out of poverty and allow them to consume more and better, live in a nicer home in a nicer neighbourhood and overall have a better quality of life. Elsewhere, Göran Eriksson (2015) shows how the Swedish media also engage in their own version of classtalk as class warfare, as through the programmes that they broadcast, they construct class and class relations. He examines how Ullared, a Swedish reality show that focuses on working-​class shoppers at a low-​budget outlet store, demonizes and ridicules the less successful in society. This kind of class-​biased discourse is not often associated

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with Sweden and other Nordic countries, which have ways been presented as paradigms of social democratic values, such as egalitarianism and the general fight against inequality, far more than most of their European neighbours. However, it seems that things are changing, as the aforementioned classtalk and notions such as the ‘undeserving poor’ (Katz, 2013) have come into circulation and now hold a place in the public imaginary in ways similar to what has long been the case in countries such as the United Kingdom (Bennett, 2013; Jones, 2011; Skeggs, 2004; Wood and Skeggs, 2011). It is worth noting that this discursive shift has occurred in parallel with the adoption of neoliberal policies in Sweden’s economy over the past decade, as the introduction of a more regressive tax regime and cuts to funding for public services have resulted in an unprecedented rise in inequality. Eriksson uses two key constructs to help him understand how Ullared manages to position working-​class people as unworthy. First, there is Beverley Skegg’s notion of ‘inscription’, as ‘the way value is transferred onto bodies and read off them, and the mechanisms by which it is retained, accumulated, lost or appropriated’ (Skeggs, 2004:  13). Second, there is Samantha Lyle’s notion of the middle-​class gaze, as ‘a mode of production (symbolic as well as material) which is underpinned by an anxiety about the working classes that has historically entailed the (mis) recognition of the working class as being of lesser value, as particularly suited to specific forms of labour, and as a pathological, abject other’ (Lyle, 2008:  320). For Eriksson, this gaze is ‘organized around certain discourses of identity, fashion, actions and values, and [which] promotes a superior, more credible position, which appears to be the natural, normal and respectable way of seeing things’ (Eriksson, 2015: 24). Bearing these concepts in mind, Eriksson shows how the class portrayals and performances occurring on Ullared are about the embodiment (in the subjects themselves) of those aspects of working-​and lower-​class values that the middle-​class mainstream deem to be tasteless and the product of an inferior education. The characters appearing on the programme are examples of ‘pathological’ or ‘flawed’ consumers (Bauman, 2005) in that while they spend money and therefore behave as good citizens in a capitalist economy, they do not do so in the ‘correct’ way. In effect, it is (1) their consumption patterns, that is, where they shop, what they buy and their excessive eating and drinking, in combination with (2) their symbolic behaviour, that is, how they talk, how they walk, how they dress and so on, which construct them (in the eyes of middle-​ class viewers) as new-​age villains and one of the chief ills of contemporary Swedish society. Ultimately, Ullared can be said to be engaged in a form of class warfare, in this case via media portrayal. In doing so, it joins numerous other television programmes currently broadcast in countries around the world, which have as one of their chief attractions the three Ds –​demonization, denigration and delegitimization  –​of individuals and collectives at the

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bottom of the class hierarchy, whose lifestyles and behaviours are deemed to be incorrect. The targets of the three Ds no doubt feel Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) ‘hidden injuries of class’, along with a lack of Silva’s (2013) ‘legitimacy and self-​worth’, both discussed in Chapter 4, as they manifest their inability to ‘transform their selves’ (Silva, 2013: 21). And the fact that they show their ‘deficiencies’ in front of an audience makes their injuries double, as they are not very hidden at all. The studies by Turgeon et  al. and Eriksson discussed in this section are situated in different contexts and involve very different background circumstances and processes. However, they have in common their focus on how people in power reproduce and reinforce inequalities and class hierarchies by positioning particular groups as inferior and worthy neither of respect nor of acceptance into mainstream society. In the next section, I move to consider in detail another example of this kind of class warfare, discursively realized but emergent from the material circumstances of the have-​less and have-​nots in the early twenty-​first century. Specifically, I  examine how from the year 2013 onwards in Spain, a very public and highly mediatized discursive conflict occurred, involving the denigration and delegitimization of individuals and collectives at the bottom of the class hierarchy and those who attempted to defend their interests.

The setting: The PP, the PAH and escraches In this discussion of inequality and class warfare, there are two key participating collectives. First, there is the PP, the Spanish conservative party. The PP governed with an absolute majority from December 2011 to December 2015, and then as a caretaker government for an additional eleven months when there was a hung parliament, before finally gaining enough support in parliament to form a minority government in December 2016. Under pressure from what is commonly known as the troika (composed of the European Central Bank, the EC and the International Monetary Fund), from early 2012 the PP began to apply extreme austerity measures. The measures included across-​ the-​board (and ongoing) pay cuts for civil servants and cutbacks in funding for essential services (especially universal healthcare and education). By the end of 2014, a slight amelioration of the profound economic crisis in Spain in macroeconomic terms was a reality, as the country consistently manifested higher growth rates than its EU partners. Still, while the PP has always tended to exaggerate such developments, the ‘troika’ has generally shown a degree of scepticism. In any case, even if the Spanish government could claim that in macro terms the economy was emerging from the crisis by

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late 2014, the majority of the Spanish people were not feeling the effects. This was the case mainly because although unemployment had decreased from roughly 25 per cent in early 2012 to under 19 per cent in early 2017, most jobs being created (90 per cent according to some sources) have been on short-​ term contracts paid at salaries that are often 50 per cent of what they would have been during the pre-​crisis years. In addition to the economic situation, there are also the numerous corruption scandals involving politicians, which have led to high-​profile trials around Spain. The governing PP is by far the party most affected, although they are not alone, as the Socialist Party, for example, has also had its fair share of scandals. The double whammy of economic crisis and widespread corruption in politics has served to submerge the population, if not in despair, in a kind of uneasy generalized malaise. One key effect of the economic crisis and the policies adopted to deal with it was the increase in home evictions from 2011 onwards, a phenomenon that led directly to the formation and rise to media prominence of the second key participating collective in this discussion, the PAH. The PAH is a grass-​roots organization, formed in 2011, which campaigns on behalf of individuals and families who, because of unemployment or other events, find that they are unable to make mortgage or rent payments and therefore are either threatened with eviction from their homes or are actually evicted. Evictions normally occur with no provision whatsoever of alternative accommodation and they can be extremely traumatic experiences for those who are evicted, sometimes ending in the suicide of the evictee. On the PAH’s web page, one finds the following explanation of how the campaign began: The motives behind the campaign are simple:  they steal our homes and condemn us to continue paying for them. We are left in the street without any housing alternative. Banks, including those which were rescued, continue to display an antisocial attitude, evicting families and accumulating a huge stock of empty houses disregarding the social function of housing. The government protects such actions: it neither stops them nor offers solutions such as social rent, putting a halt to evictions or waiver of payment. PAH’s social project consists of a campaign of occupations and the recovery of the right to housing in response to a generalized state of housing emergency generated artificially and intentionally by banks and the government. To address this situation, we propose the recovery of empty housing held by banks for the homeless and our main demand is a social rent for families, in accordance with their income. The social project connects seamlessly with the trajectory of the PAH: the defence of the population when their rights are amputated, disobedience to recover these rights and in this way force solutions.1 (PAH, 2014: npn)

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Importantly, this text is discursively framed according to notions of class struggle and class warfare, as outlined above. It suggests a clear division between the empowered capitalist class (backed by the government) and the relatively disempowered popular classes (with little or no formal institutional support). In effect, the former –​‘they’ –​act against the interests of the latter –​‘we’ –​thus engaging in a form of class warfare that is denied by the government and most of the media, but surely identified and felt by the popular classes. In the text, ‘we’ refers to the population in general (or ‘families’) and those members of the general population directly affected by the unfair mortgage law. In Göran Therborn’s (2006) terms, the text makes clear that the inequality that exists in contemporary Spanish society involves resource inequality (as unequal access to material and symbolic resources), which is inextricably linked to vital inequality (in this case the lack of access to adequate shelter) and existential inequality (as unequal access to political power and civil rights). It is worth noting at this stage that the Spanish mortgage law, which was passed in 1946 and remained unaltered through thirty years of the Franco regime and then for almost forty years of democratic rule, was extremely biased in favour of the interests of banks. It left home buyers and renters with very few rights if they could not make mortgage payments or pay their rent. The most abusive, and as a result controversial, section of this law was the impossibility of waiving the remainder of a mortgage, even after home eviction for default and the repossession of one’s home by the lending bank had occurred. In essence, mortgage defaulters not only lost their homes, along with all the money they had paid up to the time of default, but also were still legally bound to paying off the remainder of their mortgage at such a point in time when it was deemed (by the mortgage holders) that they were able to do so. A new law passed in May 2013, with the sole support of the majority PP in parliament, alleviated some of the more egregious and crueller aspects of the earlier law (preventing the eviction of families living in absolute destitution), but the obligation to pay off mortgages after home repossession remained. And as regards the prevention of evictions, it is hard to say if the law has had any effect. Official statistics from the Spanish National Statistics Institute show that between 2014 and 2015, the number of evictees for mortgage default decreased from over 34,000 to roughly 30,000. However, it may well be the case that these numbers, descending to be sure, reflect at least in part the fact that from 2008 to 2015 the number of new mortgages contracted annually had decreased substantially compared to the period 2000–​2008.2 In the midst of this drama, members of the PAH developed three types of activity. First, they held assemblies, during which information was shared

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about past or impending evictions and victims were provided legal, logistical and emotional support. Second, they set up and maintained an active web page on which new and updated information was constantly posted on a range of topics. Among other things, there were explanations of Spanish laws, media reports of evictions and other related phenomena, and strategies for dealing with an eviction and/​or other abuses perpetrated by banks. Third and finally, there was direct action, which included a physical presence at evictions, with the aim of stopping them, and participation in mass demonstrations. More controversially, in 2013, some members of the PAH began to engage in another form of direct action, called escraches. These were more focused demonstrations in which groups of activists protested outside the homes or workplaces of politicians.3 The objects of escraches were individuals deemed to have decision-​making capacity with regard to the legislation of banks and practices such as home evictions (mainly, PP members in the parliament). It is precisely these more ‘in-​your-​face’ demonstrations that led to a very public discursive conflict with the PP in 2013. Home evictions and escraches are, without a doubt, material events involving the physical presence of actors (evictors and evictees, and escrache protesters and the objects of escraches) and physical spaces (homes, streets). But what actually occurs in a home eviction and an escrache when these events are framed as acts of semiosis that exemplify and structure inequality and class warfare? Antonio Lorenzo (2013) provides a vivid portrayal (via written text and a photograph) of a home eviction in which we first of all note that there are two main actors: protestors and the police or military. There is a physical confrontation as police officers physically remove protesters from the entrance of a building in which evictees live, while the protestors do everything in their power to prevent this from happening. The use of violence by the police, provoked or not, is not uncommon in evictions, consisting of anything from the pulling of hair and pushing, to the use of batons to strike protestors. The corporality and positioning of the police officers during a home eviction stands in contrast to those of the protesters: while the former are focused only on the removal of evictees, the protesters are engaged in a range of activities that include attempts to talk to the police officers and outright physical resistance, such as hanging on to rails and other fixed objects to prevent physical removal from the scene. Protesters are likely to use phone technologies to contact associates or the press and above all to take photographs of unfolding events. There is, thus, a contrasted semiosis of the two groups in conflict. What this contrast means to those observing a home eviction no doubt depends on one’s views on a range of issues, from the morality of home evictions to the role of the police in society (as guardians of security and order, or as the oppressive arm of the state ideological apparatuses and the interests of capital).

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Applying the parameters of inequality outlined above to the home eviction as an event, we see that it is an instance of Therborn’s vital inequality. Evictees in effect have their physical integrity compromised in that they are at risk of not having access to basic shelter. The eviction also raises issues around Therborn’s existential inequality, and what Grusky and Lu (2008; see Chapter 4) have elsewhere called ‘civic inequality’, as it may be seen as an act of denial and withdrawal of the evictees’ basic human rights (the right to housing). Of course, the root of the problem is the evictees’ lack of economic and political assets in contrast with the substantial assets possessed by banks as the ultimate instigators of an eviction for mortgage default. And further to this, there is the state as guarantor of the banks’ interests. On the other hand, the PAH enters the conflict, providing political, cultural and social assets to the victims of eviction to counter-​rest those assets held by the banks and the state. In effect, members of the PAH are well informed about the legality and procedure of home evictions and they are well organized, with well-​established networks. Importantly, in this battle of assets, it is sometimes the PAH that wins, as they are often able to stop an eviction or rehouse a family. Meanwhile, the escrache shows us a very different semiosis from the home eviction, even if the same two parties, members of the PAH and police officers, are involved. However, the behaviour of the two groups differs here, as we move from evictees as the focal point of the activity to politicians. In escraches, the objects of the activity are seldom seen, unless it is when they rush from their home or office to an official car, so as to avoid contact with protesters and the press. By far the most interesting contrast between an eviction and an escrache is the behaviour of the police officers:  while they are very active in home evictions, executing eviction orders, in an escrache, they are relatively static as they stand, wait and contain. Indeed, for most escraches, the police intervene only when the target is physically present, ostensibly to prevent any possible physical contact between the latter and the protestors. Meanwhile, the PAH has always maintained that they neither engage in physical attacks on their targets nor use abusive and insulting language towards them, and there has never been any reliable evidence to suggest the contrary, despite uncorroborated claims by some members of the PP. At the most, there have instances in which PAH demonstrators have shouted phrases such as ‘sin verguenza’ (‘shameless’) at their targets. Life threats and harsher language do not seem to be a part of the normal repertoire of those participating in escraches and the PAH has publicly expressed low tolerance for such extremism. More typically, protestors hold placards with slogans, such as ‘no criminalización’ (‘no criminalization’), in reference to the way that from 2012 onwards, parts of the media and the PP began a campaign to frame many forms of public protest as illegal.4

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The response to escraches The PP did not stand idly by while the PAH’s discourses around the unfairness of home evictions, the unethical and uncaring actions of banks, and the inactivity and insensitivity of the government gained traction in the media and among the public at large. However, PP politicians were finding it difficult to defend their position in public given that in the run-​up to the passing of the 2013 mortgage law, it had become clear that they would be offering only minor palliatives to the rising number of people affected by mortgage default and the inability to pay rent. Above all, they made clear that they would not be changing the most controversial aspect of the 1946 law, whereby mortgage defaulters not only lose their home, but also are still forced to pay off the remainder of the mortgage. The arrival of escraches changed matters substantially for the PP. For many people in Spain, moving protests to outside people’s homes, and therefore very close to the border between the public and the private, was a questionable tactic. Perhaps seeing this, the PP embarked on a frontal three Ds (demonization, denigration and delegitimization) attack on the PAH and attempted to shift public opinion such that its members were no longer seen as saints, rather as something akin to political thugs. On 13 April 2013, as the number of escraches was increasing in the run-​up to the parliamentary vote on the new mortgage law, Maria Dolores de Cospedal, the general secretary of the PP, made the following statement during a meeting of PP party members (see Appendix for transcription conventions): Harassment/​physical and verbal violence/​attacks on people/​on their homes/​ their families (3) that only reflects a totalitarian and sectarian spirit/​and that’s the most contrary to democracy (1) [applause] we have in our memory/​fortunately it is well documented/​how in the 30s certain people were pointed out/​for belonging to certain political/​ethnic/​cultural/​or religious groups/​and they said/​there they are/​and you have to go and attack them (1) but what is this attempt to violate the vote? (1) this is pure Nazism (1.5) I know they are going to criticize me for this (1.5) [smiling] but this is pure Nazism. (Rachide, 2013: npn)5 Cospedal’s words received a good deal of media attention, not least because of their incendiary content. However, they were not improvised or idiosyncratic: rather, they were integral to an organized campaign by the PP to get a particular message across about escraches and, of course, about the PAH and its members. Just one day later, Esperanza Aguirre, the then general secretary of the PP in Autonomous Community of Madrid, wrote about members of the PAH in similar terms in a blog on her web page:

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Spanish society, its legitimate political representatives and, of course, the state’s judicial and police forces must react to and stand up to the impudence, insolence and impunity with which emulators of the worst forms of totalitarianism in history have decided to harass, insult and intimidate members of the Partido Popular who have been elected by their fellow citizens. No one, with even the slightest sense of democracy, can or should show complacency when faced with the spectacle, which is becoming habitual, of fanatics who with total impunity disrupt the home life of some members of the Partido Popular. These violent stalkers set themselves up as models of all that is good but they are merely followers of the worst totalitarian tactics of the last century: the harassment with which the Hitler Youth or Castro’s patrols tried and try to intimidate those who do not submit to their designs. And they are also imitators of the bullying tactics of the followers of ETA in the Basque Country, this bullying that has prevented the citizens of this part of Spain from living in freedom. (Aguirre, 2013)6 Following Turgeon et al.’s (2014) research on class talk discussed above, it is interesting to see to what extent Cospedal and Aguirre employ some of the discursive strategies that these researchers identified. For example, contrast, as the marking of ‘differences between two groups’, would appear to be at work when both speakers clearly differentiate PAH members and PP members. The former are portrayed as the undemocratic mob, while the latter are the elected representatives of democracy. Clearly, there is at work here an attempt to shift the debate away from class warfare perpetuated by the ruling elites on the popular classes to a dubious debate about democratic principles. The Aguirre text is, above all, one aimed at discrediting members of the PAH via simple name-​calling. There is mention of PAH members’ ‘impudence, insolence and impunity’, and they are described as ‘fanatics’, ‘violent stalkers’, ‘emulators of the worst forms of totalitarianism in history’ and ‘imitators of the bullying tactics of the followers of ETA’.7 I return to this tendency among PP members to present those who oppose them from a left-​wing activist perspective as illegitimate. Explanation, Turgeon et al.’s second strategy, is notably absent as there is no attempt to expound on why the PAH members might be taking the action that they are taking beyond their fundamental wickedness and depravity (and no explanation is offered for this wickedness and depravity either). Meanwhile, Turgeon et al.’s third strategy, offering examples to strengthen one’s position, is adopted by Cospedal and Aguirre in a fairly clear manner: both offer intersecting narratives of democracy and victimhood to present PP members in a positive light, while the category of victimizer is applied to PAH members with the support of history (more on this below). The latter move consists of listing groups from the past and the present deemed to be aggressive and

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oppressive, such as Nazis, Stalinists and ETA members. The fourth strategy, generalization, is also alive and well in these declarations, as the intention is not only to paint PAH members in a bad light, but also to generalize from the particular: they are all bad. Finally, concessions and mitigation, strategies five and six, do not come into play here as Cospedal and Aguirre, two of the most powerful politicians in Spain in 2013, had not achieved their positions of power and authority by conceding and mitigating in their interactions with their political opponents. The Cospedal and Aguirre statements are highly interdiscursive, as they involve ‘the insertion of history into a text and of this text into history’ (Kristeva, 1986: 39). They also employ what Ruth Wodak et al. (1999: 85) have called the ‘topos of history as teacher’ and more specifically what Bernhard Forchtner (2014) has called the ‘rhetorics of judging by others’, a discursive strategy that ‘links the data (a past wrongdoing committed by an out-​group) and the conclusion (that similar actions proposed today by others should be avoided)’ (ibid.: 26). In short, ‘since history teaches that specific actions have specific consequences, one should perform or omit a specific action in a specific situation (allegedly) comparable with the historical example referred to’ (ibid.). Using wording such as ‘certain people were pointed out/​for belonging to certain political/​ethnic/​cultural/​or religious groups’, and lexical items ranging from the bald ‘Nazism’ to ‘totalitarian tactics’, the two PP members draw on a discourse that frames the horrors of the Nazi era in Germany: PP party members, who are the object of escraches, are the persecuted Jews of our time, while PAH members (home evictees and those who help them) are Hitler’s henchmen. In Aguirre’s blog entry, we also have ETA and Cuba (and victims of terrorism and political repression, respectively) added into the mix, in an attempt to hammer the point home further. Indeed, the analogy and semantic stretching going on here is so extreme that both texts serve as good examples of what Wodak has called ‘anything goes’. ‘Anything goes’ refers to ‘discursive and rhetorical strategies which combine incompatible phenomena [home evictees victimizing the powerful], make false claims sound innocent [that PAH members ‘are merely followers of the worst totalitarian tactics of the last century’] . . . [and] ‘say the ‘unsayable’ and transcend the limits of the permissible’ [likening PP members to the persecuted Jews of Nazi Germany is surely beyond the pale]’ (Wodak, 2013: 32–​33; my additions in square brackets). And apart from ‘anything goes’, there is also the outright crassness and insensitivity to the descendants of holocaust victims:  comparing what PP members have had to endure with what the Jews endured in Nazi German (and, indeed, in other European contexts) is frivolous to the extreme. However, the entire edifice of PP’s intertextual exercise is extremely shaky and does not hold up under scrutiny for at least two important reasons. First,

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there are Spain’s well-​documented contacts with the Nazi regime both before and during the Second World War. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was occupied with the Spanish civil war, during which Nazi Germany provided Francisco Franco’s insurrectionary fascist forces with valuable material and logistical support, among other things, bombing Spanish cities and transporting forces (Beevor, 2006). After Franco’s victory in 1939, Spain was then officially ‘neutral’ during the Second World War, as Franco sought and achieved formal recognition of his regime by the allied powers after the war. Such historical events (and I  apologize to readers for the elliptical nature of this foray into Spanish history) mean that references to the Nazis and Hitler in the Spanish public sphere often ring hollow, and they never have the kind of visceral value and impact among Spaniards that they would have with British or French audiences, to cite just two examples. Second, the PP itself has clear and unequivocal historical links to the Franco regime, as its earlier incarnation, the Alianza Popular (Popular Alliance), was founded in 1978 by a former Franco era minister, Manuel Fraga. In addition, some of the policies and practices of the PP today  –​its close relationship with ultra-​conservative elements in the catholic church, its latent authoritarianism (see note 2), its overt support for and celebration of ‘national symbols’ such as bullfighting, and so on –​are consistent with nacionalcatolicismo (national Catholicism) that was the ideological base of the Franco regime, dependent on the support of both Catholic fundamentalism and fascism. In sum, the PP arguably has far more links to the persecutors of Jews in 1930s’ Germany than the persecuted Jews themselves and the PAH-​as-​Nazis intertextual turn therefore comes across as a cynical rhetorical ploy. These caveats notwithstanding, members of the PP, led by Cospedal and Aguirre, showed no sense of what Forchtner (2014: 28) has called the ‘self-​ critical narrative of our past failing’, and they went on to use the Nazi-​based topos of history-​as-​teacher for a period of time in 2013. Ultimately, this was an attempt of Orwellian proportions to do what governments defending capital (in this case the interests of banks) have always done:  turning reality on its head and then trying to convince the general public that it is true. In other words, the PP’s claim of victim status is a classic example of Marx and Engels’s ([1846] 1998:  42)  metaphor of ideology as a ‘camera obscura’ as ‘[actors] and their relations appear upside down’. But did this strategy work in the sense of allowing the PP to win the battle of ideas with the PAH (to win, in short, a symbolic victory over the PAH)? This is a difficult question to address and answer because it is hard to find direct evidence in one direction or the other. Thus, while monthly reports provided by the official Spanish statistical office, the Sociological Research Centre (the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas), show that home evictions are never cited as being among the top problems facing Spaniards on

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a day-​to-​day basis, this could hardly be expected in a country facing persistently high unemployment and a continuing parade of corruption scandals. Still, if we consider that the responsibility for economic problems such as unemployment are generally attributed to the government in power (the PP) and the fact that the PP is by far the political party most associated with corruption, then it seems that in both the short and the long term, the effect of the attack on the PAH for escraches could only ever gain a positive reception among the right-​wing media and unconditional supporters of the PP cause. It seems then that the obvious absurdity of the two-​part equation –​PAH = Nazis and PP members  =  persecuted Jews  –​has militated against the prospect of any kind of general or clear symbolic victory of the PP over the PAH with regard to escraches. Meanwhile, the material victories of the state and capital over evictees in the ongoing class war, exacerbated by the economic crisis, have continued. To say the least, the materiality and semiosis of inequality and class struggle and warfare is complex and multilevelled in its characteristics, a veritable moving object over time and space.

The struggle continues As I  explained above, the conflict involving the PP and the PAH took place in April 2013. However, it did not end there for several reasons. First, the PP seemed to find it hard to abandon the discursive battle it had begun. It is beyond the scope of this book to take on what might be called the institutional vindictiveness of a political party, but suffice it to say that the PP has, over the years, shown that it is an organization that does not let public slights or political defeats go. A second reason why the discursive conflict described above did not disappear is that home evictions continued to occur, as did the PAH’s efforts to stop them, publically denounce them and change the mortgage law. Third and finally, from 2014 onwards, new left-​wing political parties were formed on the back of the Indignados movement in Spain and a general discontent with the traditional political parties  –​especially the PP, but also the Spanish socialist party, the United Left (former communists and ecologists) and some regional parties. Podemos was the most visible of these new parties and the only one with a profile in all parts of Spain. In the May 2015 municipal elections, these new left parties performed well and by entering into various forms of coalition with other parties, especially the socialist party, they were able to form municipal governments in most of the large cities in Spain. For example, in Barcelona one of the founders of the PAH, Ada Colau, became mayor, as did Manuela Carmena, a retired judge, in Madrid. Neither Colau nor Carmena has ever been a member of Podemos, although their ideas and approach to political praxis are very similar to those of the party.

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No doubt seeing the enemy closer to the gates of power, the PP has, with the help of a good part of the media, continued with its three Ds campaign to discredit its new left political rivals. One key element of this campaign is delegitimization, that is, to claim that members of these new political formations are not legitimate social and political actors and that they therefore do not deserve the same treatment as those who are considered legitimate citizens. In the latter category are those affiliated to and supportive of traditional parties, such as the PP and the Spanish socialist party, or new parties deemed to be sufficiently committed to economic liberalism and the free-​market economy.8 An example of the total delegitimization of new left politicians occurred in the wake of an incident that took place in Madrid on 16 February 2016. On this day, a group of about 200 municipal police officers participated in a demonstration against the city’s head of security, Javier Barbero. Barbero had recently dismantled the Unidades Centrales de Seguridad (Central Security Units), also known as the Unidades Antidisturbios Municipales (‘municipal anti-​disturbance units’), which his predecessor, a member of the PP, had been happy to create and then subsequently reward for its labour, which included crowd control and breaking up demonstrations. However, Barbero was (and still is) member of Podemos and part of a municipal government led by the aforementioned independent left politician Manuela Carmena. Previous to taking up this post, he was, like so many members of Podemos, an activist with a long history of engaging in street protests. During the demonstration, Barbero was booed and insulted:  documented epithets included ‘gordo’, ‘rojo de mierda’ and ‘hijo de puta’ (roughly translatable as ‘fat’, ‘fucking red’ and ‘son of a bitch’, respectively). According to some eye witnesses, he was also abused physically by some protesters. When asked about this incident a day later, Jorge Fernandez Díaz, the then minister of interior, said that he lamented what had happened, although he focused his attention on Barbero and not the police officers who acted in a violent way. Among other things, he noted: Getting a taste of your own medicine makes you realise how much what you were doing wasn’t exactly something that could be considered freedom of expression. Until recently those actions termed escraches were mainly suffered by other people, and in a greater proportion, without a shadow of a doubt, by public officials in the Partido Popular. And those who carried them out said that it was freedom of expression. What we can’t accept is that when you do them, they are, and when you suffer them, they are odious or criminal behaviour. (Europa Press, 2016)9 Thus, rather than condemn unequivocally the actions of the violent officers, or indeed everyone who participated in the demonstration, Fernandez Diaz

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opted to condemn the victim for his alleged participation in escraches against members of the PP in the past (an allegation denied by Barbero, even if he has always had close contact with members of the PAH). In any case, Barbero and PAH members who had participated in escraches in the past were quick to point out that what happened to Barbero was not an escrache, but a violent demonstration. They pointed to the fact, mentioned above, that there had been no PAH-​organized events in which violence was perpetrated on targets and that the organization has always distanced itself from personal insults and the use of epithets directed at the objects of their protests. Nevertheless, it served the purposes of the right-​wing media and the PP to group together all forms of street protests as the same thing. Significantly, in Fernández Díaz’s complete statement, there is no attempt to establish a parallel between the behaviour of the police officers and the Nazi era (following Cospedal). Nor is there any reference to ‘the impudence, insolence and impunity with which emulators of the worst forms of totalitarianism in history have decided to harass, insult and intimidate members of [Podemos] who have been elected by their fellow citizens’ (following Aguirre). There is only the disqualification of an adversary, giving the impression that a government minister –​and a sitting one at that –​can act in a sectarian manner without consequences. In effect, there is more ‘anything goes’ and more ‘transcendence of the limits of the permissible’, alongside minimal reference to the defence of order, certainly the most common and noteworthy element in Fernandez Diaz’s discourse during the time he was interior minister. There is more of Marx and Engels’s ‘camera obscura’, that is, the world upside down, as the PP continues to defend, on the one hand, its interests as a political party holding power, and, on the other hand, the interests that it most directly represents (the banks, landowners, the municipal police in Madrid who attacked Barbero and so on). Combining cynicism with a twisted use of history, the PP seems to be immersed in an endless battle to perpetuate itself in power via the dissemination of a particular world view. In the process, its members engage in what I would call ‘corrupt discourse’, a topic to which I now turn.

Corrupt discourse As a technical term, corruption has several differentiable meanings. It can refer to something that is deemed impure or damaged (as in a ‘corrupted file’) or even lacking in authenticity (as in a tourist idyll so overrun with tourists that it considered by many to have been ‘corrupted’). There is also what might be called ‘moral corruption’, as when an individual is not bothered by or seems oblivious to how his/​her entire modus operandi is permeated with dishonesty

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and perversion. However, corruption is probably mostly used as a descriptor of particular types of activities taking place in the world of politics. Two types in particular come to mind: (1) corruption as ‘bribes, kickbacks and embezzlement . . . supplemented by practices such as illicit gifts, favours, nepotism, and informal promises’ (Breit, Lennerfors and Olaison, 2015: 319) and (2) corruption as ‘social improprieties . . . such as appointing members of one’s family (nepotism) or friends and colleagues (cronyism) to public office’ (Holmes, 2015: 3). From a Marxist political economy perspective, Wolfgang Streeck has defined corruption as the gross violation of legal rules and systematic betrayal of trust and moral expectations in pursuit of competitive success and personal or institutional enrichment, as elicited by rapidly growing opportunities for huge material gain in and around today’s political economy. (Streeck, 2016: 30) Streeck argues that in a highly financialized economy, where the push towards capital accumulation is constant, the alliance between those working in the financial sector (bankers, fund managers, brokers, entrepreneurs, and so on) and those responsible for institutionalized governance (politicians, civil servants, members of the judiciary, the police and military, and so on) is as inevitable as the insider trading, bribery, embezzlement and cronyism that comes with this alliance. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that capitalism, characterized by private property, the extraction of surplus value and capital accumulation, is inherently corrupt, as none of these features could exist without unethical and perverse behaviour, such as the appropriation by force of natural (and commonly held) resources, the exploitation of others for personal profit and the ‘predatory aptitudes, habits and traditions’ (Veblen, [1899] 2007: 19) discussed in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, beyond the common ground of capitalism, corruption is a variegated phenomenon, differently configured in different contexts and differently framed and understood in these contexts. In short, what is considered corrupt in one culture or domain of activity may not be considered so in another. In addition, once an act or a set of actions is deemed to be corrupt, grades or scales of corruption enter the equation. Thus, an act of corruption may be perceived as more or less serious, more or less tolerable, more or less damaging, more or less active or passive, and so on. Finally, and this brings me to the focus of this section, there is the corruption of discourse –​of language and other forms of communication –​in the attempt to win symbolic battles. I  hasten to add here that I  am not using the term ‘corruption’ with regard to language and communication in the prescriptive sense of suggesting that there is a correct and an incorrect way of communicating. Rather, I  refer to a phenomenon identified by scholars such as Wodak, who have

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always been concerned with uses of language to form opinions and manipulate, albeit without using the term ‘corruption’ in her discussions. To clarify further what I  mean by ‘corrupt discourse’, I  provide another example of a PP member attempting to cover up wrongdoing or manipulate understandings of events in a way that is favourable to the interests of the party. The example is taken from a press conference held on 25 February 2013 by Maria Dolores de Cospedal. Cospedal was asked by a journalist why the PP had continued paying a monthly salary of €21,300.08 to its former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, when they had previously claimed that his contract had ended more than two years earlier. At the time, Bárcenas had been indicted for tax fraud, but he was also suspected of having been a procurer of illegal funding for the party for nearly two decades. Notably nervous, Cospedal attempted to explain the anomaly as follows: The negotiated compensation/​was a deferred compensation (.5) and as it was defer/​deferred (.5) as/​effectively/​a simulation/​simulation/​or what would have been delayed/​in parts of a/​of what was previously a remuneration/​he had to have social security remuneration/​because if not it would have been (1.5) now there is a lot of talk about withholding payments/​that do not have social security remuneration/​right?/​well here we wanted/​we wanted to do things/​like they are supposed to be done/​that is/​with social security remuneration/​.10 (https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=hzyHbjgrx8U) The reader may well think that this English translation makes little sense for the most part, but I  would say that this is because the original in Spanish makes little sense. Cospedal is being evasive, constantly searching for the right word or expression so as not to say the wrong (for the interests of her party) word or expression, and her short pauses of .5 seconds are eloquent in this regard. In addition, her disfluency is accompanied by a gaze that is, for most of her intervention, fixed on a small part of the audience (or, indeed, an individual), which makes the proceedings seem more unreal. In effect, Cospedal seems to be in a trance. The latter is broken somewhat abruptly when she surveys the audience and smiles while explaining that the PP did what they did because it was the only legal option that they had. This comment and the smile that accompanies it are revealing, as doing the right thing should go without saying and should be done without even thinking about other, presumably less legal, alternatives. The 1.5 second pause that comes when she does not complete the utterance ‘he had to have social security remuneration because if not it would have been . . .’ is significant in that Cospedal seems to avoid pronouncing the word ‘illegal’, which would have been the most natural lexical choice to terminate with. Meanwhile, throughout the excerpt, Cospedal’s hand gestures are also very telling. From

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an opening, quasi-​didactic accordion-​like movement of her hands, she moves to the more supplicatory gesture of open upward-​facing palms, seemingly imploring the audience to believe her. Cospedal’s behaviour is not surprising when one considers that she was trying to explain the unexplainable, that is, why Bárcenas had been paid an extremely high salary for two years if the PP had indeed dismissed him because he was corrupt. The generalized suspicion among the general public at the time, and to this day, is that the former treasurer knew everything there was to know about financial corruption in the PP and that the two-​year salary was hush money. Bárcenas had, after all, occupied his post for almost twenty years (1990–​2009), and as he was later to divulge, he had documents showing that, among other things, just about every prominent member of the PP (including former prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar; the then-​prime-​minster, Mariano Rajoy, and a number of past and current government ministers) had accepted what in essence were salary top-​ups, paid tax free in brown envelopes at the end of each month. The documents in question, which came to be known as los papeles de Bárcenas (the Bárcenas papers) were a handwritten ledger of incoming and outgoing funds kept in an undeclared (and illegal) alternative bank account, which the press came to refer to as la caja B (the B account). Over the years these papers have been much commented on in the Spanish press and the expression ‘caja B’ has taken on iconic statutes, as a symbol of corruption in the PP. Nevertheless, beyond their notoriety, the papers have not proven to be the damming piece of evidence that Bárcenas claimed and many thought they would be. Indeed, despite several attempts by Bárcenas’s lawyers and prosecuting attorneys, they have not been accepted in the courts as admissible, hard evidence. This means that none of the individuals appearing on the illegal payroll has been prosecuted for accepting illegal payments. Still, once Bárcenas was arrested for tax fraud, specifically for having as much as 38  million euros of unaccounted-​for and untaxed income in Swiss bank accounts (Ekaizer, 2013), and once a long list of corruption scandals had emerged relating to the illegal funding of the PP and the enrichment of individual members via complex systems of bribes, kickbacks, embezzlement and even extortion, the upper echelons of the party became nervous. And this led to a second episode in which PP’s actions to protect itself and corrupted discourses come into play. In late August 2013, the judge investigating the Bárcenas case, Pablo Rus, issued an order requiring the PP to turn over to him two computers from Bárcenas’s office in the main headquarters of the PP in Madrid. Anticipating this court order, in April 2013, technicians working for the party were instructed to eliminate all content from the hard drives on the two computers. When the computers were turned over to Judge Rus, he found that one contained a hard drive that had been erased thirty-​five times and the

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other had no hard drive at all. The former hard drive also showed signs of have been scratched and beaten with a hammer. Reactions to this chain of events varied markedly. Bárcenas, having adopted at the time an adversarial position vis-​á-​vis his former employer, claimed that the PP had tampered with computers that belonged to him and not to the party, as PP officials claimed. Meanwhile, for most of the Spanish public and, seemingly, the judicial system, the PP’s treatment of the two computers seemed suspicious to say the least. Finally, there was the PP’s position: while they never explained why one of the computers had no hard drive, they had an explanation for why they erased the hard drive of the other thirty-​five times (although, curiously enough, they never addressed the physical damage inflicted on it). Here they fell back on the Spanish data protection law of 2007, which stipulates that when an employee leaves a company, the latter should erase all information on the ex-​employee’s computer that could be considered private. The law says nothing about erasing the entire hard drive thirty-​five times, or for that matter beating it with a hammer, as was the case with the first computer. And nowhere does the law recommend the removal and disposal of the hard drive, as appears to have been the case with the second computer. In short, the PP was once again in a difficult position, one that was hard to explain to an increasingly suspicious public. Just how difficult can be seen in the following transcription of a statement made by vice-​secretary of the PP, Carlos Floriano in late August 2013. Look/​as you know/​erhm (4.0) as you know (1.0) we were even subject to/​ we were even subject to/​a (1.0) a legal action/​against the PP disputing the ownership of them [the computers]/​and already a (1.0) a court/​said that these computers/​were the Partido Popular’s/​were the Partido Popular’s/​ and not a private individual’s/​now then/​the Partido Popular/​acted as it acts with all computers/​that (1.5) that form/​that are part/​that form part of the Partido Popular’s material/​and I insist/​as is done with anything/​that forms part/​with any instrument that forms part of the Partido Popular’s material/​.11 (29 August 13; https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=G_​U8ERyxg9Q) Once again, the reader may well think that this English translation makes little sense, but once again, this is because the original in Spanish makes little sense. Like Cospedal above, Floriano seems evasive, as he measures his words. Indeed, in doing so, he produces an extremely long pause at the beginning (four seconds) and then several others, each lasting at least one second in length. The constant repetition of words is also significant as it never leads to more precise terminology. Floriano’s disfluency is accompanied by ample use of hand movements, but above all throughout the intervention he has what

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can only be qualified as a puzzled look on his face, which seems appropriate given the puzzlement that his words were no doubt evoking in those listening to him.12 As was the case with the Cospedal statement above, we have here another classic example of evasiveness with the clear intention of concealing wrongdoing. We also have the ultimate in corrupt discourse: corrupted communication about corruption in the classic sense, that is, destroying evidence that would be vital in showing that the PP had been involved in a clear case of ‘bribes, kickbacks and embezzlement . . . supplemented by practices such as illicit gifts, favours, nepotism, and informal promises’ (Breit et al., 2015: 319). The case of the erased and removed hard drives did not go away immediately and the PP had to answer the charge of destroying evidence in court on two occasions, in 2014 and 2016. In both cases, they were absolved. In the second case, the court reasoned that while PP employees had, in fact, destroyed all the information contained on the two hard drives, there was no way to know if what they destroyed would have been evidence of any illegal activity on the part of party members. This is an interesting piece of legal reasoning in its own right, which I will not pursue here due to questions of space and direct relevance. Instead, I would like to return to why I have cited and discussed this case, as well as the previous one. As I explained earlier, my interest here is in the corruption of language and other forms of communication in the attempt to win symbolic battles, which are part of a larger class warfare. From this perspective, we see in this case how PP members make very effective use of the resources of power. The party’s legal team is very adept at defending accused members of the party in court, thus showing how the legal system aligns with and serves as a bulwark protecting the interests of the ruling elites. Meanwhile, Cospedal and Floriano act as discursive plumbers, using other resources of power, such as access to the media, to defend the PP’s position. Of course, one could suggest that while the party tends to win the material battles (the banks continue to function as best serves their interests and PP members found guilty of corruption are seldom sent to prison for their sins), it is not always successful with the symbolic battles, as we observed above with regard to the conflict over escraches. However, there is evidence to suggest that perhaps none of the discursive battles over what the PP has done or has not done, and what its putative opponents have done or have not done, make that much difference. I say this especially with reference to the party’s electoral resistance and its ability to maintain its position as the most voted party in Spain. Thus, in national elections held in December 2015 and June 2016 (the latter being the rerun of the December 2015 elections due to the hung parliament mentioned earlier), the PP was, by some distance, the most voted party in Spain. It even increased its vote share from 28.7 per cent to 33 per cent. All this, despite the party being enveloped in a very long list of highly mediatized corruption scandals since 2012, as I explained above.

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When PP supporters are asked why they continue to vote for the party despite the number of corruption scandals, their responses vary. For example, Eva Anduiza, Aina Gallego and Jordi Muñoz (2013) note how Spanish voters are far more tolerant of corruption scandals involving members of the party that they normally vote for than they are of scandals affecting members of other parties. This position entails a great deal of loyalty to one’s party and connects with another common reason for voting for PP –​ there is no alternative on the political right. Another view, pessimistic to an extreme, is that all politicians are potentially corrupt and all political parties, therefore, will have their corruption cases. More interesting to me, however, is the response that PP corruption scandals appearing in the media are either exaggerated (a minor infraction elevated to causa mayor) or even the fabrications of left-​wing journalists out to damage members of the PP and the party as a whole. In some cases, the left-​wing conspiracy argument is extended to the judiciary, that is, there are, it is argued, left-​wing judges who deliberately trump up charges against PP politicians. The latter claim is particularly serious, as it questions the integrity of the judicial system. But, more importantly, what these voters say is that one cannot know what is true and what is not in today’s world. And while there are always questions to be asked with reference to official truth and legitimized versions of events, a topic covered by Marx and Engels ([1846] 1998) and Gramsci ([1922] 1971) in their discussions of ideology, recent events shaped by neoliberalism and other societal forces have brought the issue even more to the fore under the heading of ‘post-​truth’.

‘Post-​truth’? Will Fish has recently defined ‘post-​truth politics’ as a form of politics where there is a willingness to issue warnings regardless of whether there is any real sense of the events being likely to come about, or make promises that there is no real commitment to keeping, or make claims that there is no real reason to believe are true, all for the purpose of gaining an electoral advantage –​and, as the Brexit case and the Trump campaign both demonstrate, this has significant consequences for international as well as national politics. (Fish, 2017: 211) In this definition, Fish mentions the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in the United States, both of which occurred in 2016, as examples of what a post-​truth politics can lead to. In doing so, he situates such politics in the present, thus aligning

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himself with a general perception among many in the media (and also in academia) at the time of writing, that what the Brexit and Trump campaigners did was somehow new. However, mendacity, coupled with a cynical intention to deceive, has for some time now formed part of politics as practised by politicians around the world, as Machiavelli argued so long ago in The prince (Machiavelli, [1532] 1985). It is certainly not new in the world of research-​ informed policy and debate, as those who have focused on issues such as climate change, evolution versus creationism, and smoking as a health hazard know all too well. Closer to the topic of this book, Mirowski (2013) has written about neoliberal apologists who have advanced spurious explanations for the 2007–​2008 economic crisis. One example is the argument that the single most important cause of the crisis was overspending on essential services by overly social democratic governments, when it would be more accurate to say that overly liberal governments bailed out banks, draining the public coffers in the process, thereby bringing economies to their knees. But to move back to the narrative of this chapter, which has revolved around the material and discursive class warfare that the PP has waged on the popular classes in Spain, there is an additional problem I  see in Fish’s definition. When he states that post-​truth is a form of politics deployed ‘for the purpose of gaining an electoral advantage’ (Fish, 2017:  211), I  think he is coming up short in cases like the Trump election, as there is far more to what is going on that just gaining an advantage. Indeed, Trump’s ‘post-​truth’ looks a lot like ‘Marx and Engels 101’, in that ‘a willingness to issue warnings regardless of whether there is any real sense of the events being likely to come about, or make promises that there is no real commitment to keeping, or make claims that there is no real reason to believe are true’ is serious business when it comes from the dominant power structures in society. Above all, what is going on runs much deeper, and I would argue that we are once again in the midst of ideology and how it shapes behaviour, perspectives and what counts as true. And just as Marx and Engels’s wrote of the aforementioned ‘camera obscura’ and the world upside down, so we see the Trump power grab as the further strengthening of elite positions in society and as part of the broader class warfare identified by Warren Buffet, as well as Duménil and Lévy and Harvey. The new element that Trump adds to this reality of capitalism is extreme forms of American jingoism and outright racism, wrapped in a defence of the ‘traditional’ working class in the United States –​the world even more upside down.

Conclusion Inequality and class struggle and class warfare are on the rise around the world and in particular in countries like Spain, where the economic crisis has

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hit particularly hard. As noted in Chapter 4 and earlier in this chapter, inequality is multidimensional, existing, as it does, around and through unequal basic life and death chances (vital inequality), unequal human, civil and material rights (existential inequality) and unequal access to material and symbolic resources (resource inequality). And these dimensions mediate specific instances of class struggle and warfare, as defined and exemplified in this chapter, where I have provided analyses of how inequality and class struggle and warfare are constructed via a range of discursive features and strategies. I have done this by examining the specific case of home repossessions and home evictions in Spain, material phenomena leading to a parallel discursive realm in which actors produce conflicting versions of events and phenomena. I  have also focused on political corruption, in particular the PP’s very real (and material) misuse and misappropriation of public funds that has taken place in Spain over the past three decades, and the way that the defence of the indefensible by elites looking after their interests leads to corrupt discourses. A lot is at stake in class warfare, waged both materially and discursively, and it is worthwhile to consider what the kinds of analyses and commentary I have offered in this chapter can contribute to ongoing critical political economy discussions of stratification, inequality, class and class struggle in contemporary societies. In Chapter 1, I discussed this very point with regard to CDS, noting Holborow’s concern over the years, that a postmodern perspective might lead some CDS researchers to ‘see language as the producer of inequality and counter-​discourses as social change’ (Holborow, 2015: 118), somewhat of an inversion of Marx’s base and superstructure. Holborow is also concerned about what she considers a lack of Marxist-​based critical analysis of ‘wider social questions of political economy, of class, or of the role of higher education in capitalism’ (ibid.). In Chapter 1, I also mentioned Fairclough’s call for a ‘radical view of CDA’, based on Marxist thought and the notion of class struggle. This radical view, it will be recalled, ‘emphasises the power behind discourse rather than just the power in discourse (how people with power shape the ‘order of discourse’ as well as the social order in general)’ (Fairclough, 2014: 2). As Fairclough further notes, the goal of analysts is to ‘raise . . . people’s consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, as a step towards social emancipation’ (ibid.). In this chapter I have attempted to take on what Holborow and Fairclough have written, first by providing the political economic background (my focus on inequality and class warfare) for the discursive events analysed, and second by examining in detail the ways in which prominent PP members discursively construct events in such a way as to portray themselves in a positive light, even if this means corrupting the means of communication employed this task. However, beyond reaching the readers of this book, what does this kind of exercise achieve with regard to Fairclough’s call for CDS researchers to

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raise the general public’s consciousness about discursive machinations of the ruling elites and further to this, to contribute to an emancipatory politics that would benefit those who are the greatest victims of neoliberalism in practice? In September 2014, I attended the ‘CDA 20+ Symposium’ organized by the University of Amsterdam. In the advance information sent out months earlier, the organizers explained the main aim of the symposium as follows: The aim of the symposium is to provide an occasion for the founders of the Critical Discourse Analysis paradigm to look back on developments in CDA over the past decades, and to discuss their thoughts on future directions with representatives of the present CDA community. It concerns a critical reflection on how CDA currently positions itself with respect to social and technological developments that affect communication, social structures and power relations in the world at large and with respect to notions concerning the new ‘neoliberal’ universities. The text goes on for several paragraphs, providing useful information about the symposium. However, one topic that was not mentioned, but that nonetheless arose during discussions taking place during the symposium, was CDS’s impact on society since its inception in the 1980s. Had CDS made any difference, especially as a check on the rise of two separate but interrelatable processes that emerged in the wealthier nations of the world from the 1980s onwards  –​the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of new far-​right political parties?13 As I  have already suggested, CDS researchers have not devoted a great deal of time and effort to the detailed examination and analysis of neoliberal policies and practices. This is my personal view, but it would also appear to be the view of one of the field’s founding scholars, Norman Fairclough, as we observed above (see also Chapter 1). On the other hand, what CDS researchers have devoted a great deal of time and effort to is the detailed examination and analysis of discourses of discrimination and injustice based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexual orientation and so on. However, the impact of such research on public debate, polices and, indeed, behaviour and practices, is open to debate. For example, during a discussion of the impact of research on far-​right political parties that took place during the conference, one researcher made the point that despite having devoted over three decades of her professional life to the study of such political formations in her native country, she could see little evidence that her critiques had had any positive effect on the political situation in that country. A far-​right party, formed in the 1980s, had remained a powerful force for decades and was even gaining support in the present. Given the state of the world at present, with more neoliberalism as the cure for the ills caused by neoliberalism and what looks to be an increasing

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acceptance of xenophobia and racism in well-​established democracies, there is a need for greater activism on the part of academics studying issues relevant to these twin processes. One clear route to activism is through the media, as I suggested at the end of Chapter 5. However, certainly in the traditional media, such as television and radio, it has become more difficult in recent years for more informed voices to be heard. This is because in the kinds of programmes where informed voices would be a useful addition to discussions taking place, directors tend to seek pundits with more status quo views or iconoclastic firebrands who make a lot of noise but contribute little in the way of useful discussion, analysis and critique of real-​world problems and issues. However, this is not to say that academics, and left-​wing academics in particular, are always excluded from debates in the media. Here it is instructive to examine the relative success of new left-​wing parties such as Podemos in the 2015 municipal elections in Spain, which I  discussed briefly earlier. This success was attributable, in no small part, to the extensive media presence of party members, many of whom were academics from politics, sociology and economics departments in Spanish universities. Perhaps the best example is Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos and its leader at the time of writing, who worked for several years as a lecturer in politics at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In his appearances on a range of television channels (some of them operated by extreme right-​wing organizations) from 2012 onwards, he continually engaged in political debates with right-​wing politicians and their journalist allies, by most estimations managing to get the better of his opponents far more often than not. In addition, Iglesias and other members of Podemos have been very active in the social media, especially Twitter, always ready and willing to package their ideas in 140 characters or less. Ultimately, it is impossible to understand the success of Podemos without understanding how Iglesias and other left-​wing academics have been able to bring their views to the general public through their media activities.14 Bearing the Podemos experience in mind, my view is that, where and when possible, CDS researchers should be on hand, in both social networking and the traditional media. In the latter, for example, they can act as well-​informed specialists in how, for example, political communication works. In this case, they would be a welcome replacement for the so-​called communication experts who are now omnipresent in the media around the world. The latter tend to offer fairly pedestrian assessments of various aspects of communication, such as ‘body language’ or clothes style, providing very superficial analyses that Marx would no doubt term ‘vulgar’ were he around to do so. CDS researchers, we may assume, would do much better than this, moving backstage to unmask how ideology is converted into

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the instances of surface-​level semiotic behaviour that we observe in the political class on a day-​to-​day basis. In absence of this kind of media presence, we continue in the current drift of ‘anything goes’ and generalized mendacity without consequences. One could argue that these discursive strategies have always been the daily bread of the ruling class in its need to impose its ideas as the dominant ideology. However, given the responses to the economic crisis of 2007–​2008, one may well wonder if this order of things has not worsened over the past decade. Only time and events will tell.

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Epilogue

I begin this epilogue by restating, very briefly, what I have done in this book. After the preface, in which I  set the scene for the content of the book, in Chapter  1, I  provided a selective review of sociolinguistics research that has been framed as political economic in orientation. I concluded that such research more often than not contains little in the way of thorough and in-​ depth coverage of the key ideas and conceptual frameworks said to undergird it. With this consideration in mind, I then organized Chapters 2, 3 and 4 around in-​depth discussions of, respectively, political economy as a general disciplinary frame; neoliberalism as the variegated variety of capitalism dominant in the world today; and stratification, inequality and social class, as phenomena intrinsic to capitalism, which in the neoliberal era have come to the fore as key issues. Bearing the content of these chapters in mind, in Chapters 5 and 6, I discussed two lines of research that I have developed in recent years around the notions of the ‘neoliberal citizen’ and ‘class warfare’, respectively. Having read the entire manuscript of this book, John Gray (personal communication) commented that in his view, what I have tried to do here is recalibrate sociolinguistics in the direction of a more thoroughgoing sociological orientation. My view is that this is quite an ambitious goal, but that it is one that, nonetheless, I hope to have achieved at least to some extent. Indeed, it is, one could argue, a common thread running through my publications over the past twenty-​five years, as I  have constantly argued for a ‘social’ angle on a range of language-​mediated phenomena. Thus, my work on learner perceptions of classroom events (e.g. Block, 1996, 1998) was informed by my admittedly limited reading in the fields of social psychology and discursive psychology, both of which position cognition as socially situated. My critique of second language acquisition research (e.g. Block, 1999, 2003) lamented how many researchers in this field simply ignored social factors. My later work,

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which focused explicitly on issues around identity, multilingualism and multiculturalism (e.g. Block, 2006, 2007) went further and deeper into sociology for ideas and frameworks to make sense of the phenomena I was examining. And finally, over the past decade, I have branched out more broadly within the social sciences, incorporating political economy as my key frame for thinking about, interpreting and analysing a range of social phenomena. Through these shifts, I have, in part, been inspired by C. Wright Mills, the maverick American sociologist who was as prolific as his life was short: he produced numerous articles and authored books before dying of a heart attack at the age of 45.1 Mills is perhaps most known for having coined the term ‘sociological imagination’, and in his eponymous book (Mills, [1959] 1970), he took on what he saw as the bureaucratization of mid-​twentieth-​century sociology. In Mills’s view, the field had become overly obsessed with methodology and tended to research issues and problems of no concern to the general population. In some ways, Mills was a precursor to what has come to be known as the advocate researcher, that is, the socially and politically engaged scholar who does research both on and for people who suffer discrimination and oppression in their lives. In his call for a less methodological and more engaged sociology, Mills suggested that the way forward was the adoption of the aforementioned sociological imagination, which he defined as follows: The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. . . . The first fruit of this imagination . . . is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. (Mills, [1959] 1970: 5) Mills suggested that a sociological imagination would allow sociologists (although here I would expand what Mills proposes to include social scientists in general) to find more satisfactory answers to questions organized around three key themes. First, there is the structure of a particular society. Here the concern is with the components and constituents of this society, how they interact with one another, and how they are different from the components and constituents of other societies. Second, there is the question of where a particular society stands in human history. Here researchers explore how societies are affected by and at the same time cause historical changes, that is, to borrow a distinction made by Giddens (1984), how societies are simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of historical events. Third and

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finally, there are the varieties and types of people who populate and constitute, through their activities, a particular society at a particular point in history. This question entails consideration of the past, present and future of such varieties and types of people, that is, how they came to exist and how they exist at present, as well as speculation about what varieties and types might prevail in the future. What Mills proposed was, at the time and even now, an extremely ambitious programme for social sciences researchers to take on. One thing I note in what he suggests is a good dose of historicism, especially when he writes that ‘the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period’ (Mills, [1959] 1970: 5). However, it is important to note here that this historicism does not appear to be rooted in Marxism, even if in his later years, Mills was becoming more interested in Marxist scholarship as a source of theoretical frameworks for understanding societies and carrying out the type of sociology that he was interested in. This can be seen in his book The Marxists (Mills, 1962) and his keen interest in Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, which was examined in Listen Yankee! (Mills, 1960).2 As Irving Horwitz (1983) explains, Mills was criticized extensively for Hey Yankee! The Revolution in Cuba, mainly for having written what some considered an ill-​informed opinion piece that acted as propaganda for the Castro regime. In fact, the book was portrayed by critics as something akin to what today might be called ‘gonzo’ sociology, following, at least in spirit, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe and others, who in the 1960s revolutionized the way that journalists chronicled events and phenomena surrounding them. In what is by now a tradition in the media and beyond, gonzo means an immersion in one’s context, but, more importantly, it means showing less concern for facts than effects, even if what is produced is meant to reflect a bona fide reality on the ground. Few social scientists would want to be considered gonzo in word and deed, especially with reference to a relative disregard for ‘facts’; however, they would embrace a parallel, and more long-​standing figure, the flâneur. The flâneur is the invention of Charles Baudelaire, although the personage has served a range of authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel. The flâneur may be seen as the dandy out for a walk, but for our purposes it is best to concentrate on his/​her status as an informed and intent observer of the surroundings as he/​she ambles through a locality (in effect, walking with purpose). But, of course, this is what ethnography has always been about. It is also what anthropologists have always done, and in this sense Mills’s sociological imagination is readable, in part, as a call for sociologists to be more like anthropologists. In my view this imagination turn occurred once many sociologists rejected the dry survey-​based modelling that many researchers, to this

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day, see as the bread and butter of the field (and, in some cases, as the only real sociology!). And, of course, Mills’s imagination is part and parcel of what many sociolinguists, in particular those who also self-​identify as linguistic anthropologists, have been doing for some time. In this sense, taking photographs of signs in a particular location and then writing about them; following political debate in the local media, to make sense of the discourses deployed; unpacking tourism and other leisure discourses; and so on are all research activities in the realm of this imagination turn. Monica Heller has in recent years called for a critical sociolinguistics, which, put simply, entails a ‘concern for what social process means in social difference and social inequality’ (Heller, 2011: 11), and, I would add, an assumption that language and other communicative modes are at the heart of the said social process. In this sense, she follows in the footsteps of scholars such as Del Hymes, who some time ago proposed a similar move under the heading of a ‘socially constituted linguistics’ (Hymes, 1974). I find it hard not to be on board with what Heller suggests and I would only add that I think a Marxist-​ oriented critical sociolinguistics is the way to go. I say this because we live in a present dominated by a variant of capitalism, which is as damaging to societies as it is to the individuals and collectives constituting them, and which ultimately is maladapted to the exigencies of the current political, economic, social, cultural and historical moment. Observing events around us in recent years, it is easy to conclude that the current world leadership will forge on, governing more and more for the few, and less and less for the many, all the while telling all of us that there is no alternative because it is all about human nature. We need big theory to deal with the big reality enveloping our day-​to-​day lives. As part of her discussion of a critical sociolinguistics, Heller writes in a refreshingly candid way of her own personal position as a researcher as follows: I am less focused on ‘speaking truth to power’ or on ‘giving voice’ than I am on the complexities of how power works. That is, I take some distance from the idea that my work should be first and foremost aimed at showing the powerful what the consequences of their exercise of power is, or at providing access to power for those who typically have none, so doing by shaping the research around pre-​existing ideas of who occupies what position in a system of relations and inequality. Instead, I take the position that my job is first to describe and to explain, and only then to decide how I feel about what I understand to be going on and what, if anything, I should do about it. In that sense, I understand my role as one of noticer of important and interesting things, a producer of an account of them, and an interlocutor with other stakeholders about them. (Heller, 2011: 11)

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This seems a modest goal to set oneself with regard to one’s research, although I hasten to add that it is probably an accurate description of what so many sociolinguists (myself included) actually do. We tend to act as ‘noticers of important and interesting things’ and ‘producers of accounts of them’, even if we want to imagine that we actually ‘speak to power’ and ‘give voice to others’ (‘empowering’ them in the process). I  would therefore advocate taking a step or two beyond the noticer/​account producer role, bringing to the fore the very last part of the quote, where Heller mentions being an interlocutor with stakeholders in the contexts in which research is situated. For many ethnographers today, this is simply part of good practice: one should not do blitzkrieg research, parachuting in to collect data and then bidding the context farewell, never to return again. Good ethnographers have always gone back to where they started, both to share their findings and to maintain contact with their informants. They may do so, as Heller suggests, as part of an ongoing dialogue with the research context and as a way to further our understandings of the world around us. All this while leaving the informants and stakeholders to decide for themselves what they wish to do with the findings that the researcher has presented to them. On the other hand, for those interested in ‘speaking truth to power’, there is the additional task of proselytizing, of providing informants and stakeholders with the researcher’s individual (but, it should be added, informed) take on the phenomena and events on the ground, which have been the focus of research. Working in the latter way raises issues, not least the right of the researcher to do what some would see as imposing his/​her views. However, I  would argue that if one takes the view of the world that I  have developed in this book, how can one then ignore this view when dealing with research informants? How can one not do what some might call activist research? An additional issue is about whether or not researchers, via their activity, actually can make a contribution to broader social change. How does speaking to power and giving voice in a local context contribute to broader social change? With difficulty, if we are talking about individual researchers working in relative isolation. Here, I return to what I wrote in the concluding sections of Chapters 5 and 6, namely, that there is a need for the voices of critical sociolinguistics to be heard via all types of media, both traditional and new. Acting locally is fine, but disseminating ideas more globally, via the media, might prove to be far more useful in the long run and in the bigger scheme of things. And, I might add here, it is essential when the research is text analysis and therefore does not involve direct contact with informants, as was the case with the focus of my discussions in Chapters 5 and 6. A final point I would like to make has to do with the aims of any activism that takes place. Nancy Fraser has famously compared and contrasted two general types of actions that individuals, collectives and governments can

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take to deal with inequality and social injustice in general. On the one hand, action taken can be ‘affirmative’, providing ‘remedies aimed at inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them’ (Fraser, 2008: 28). This is what happens when in response to recognition claims (see Chapter 4), diversity and difference are promoted and supported in multicultural societies, as a defence against xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic and religion-​based attacks (anti-​Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-​Christian). In response to distribution claims (again, see Chapter 4), affirmative action exists in the form of measures such as the collection of taxes to fund the provision of resources to those who for whatever reason cannot obtain them and therefore are most in need of them. In both these examples of affirmative action, little or nothing is done to deal with underlying conditions that lead to the inequalities emerging from misrecognition and maldistribution. The question that arises here is whether or not affirmative action is enough if we wish to get to the roots of inequality and injustice in societies with a view to eliminating these ills. In Fraser’s view, it cannot and does not, and she proposes instead that action taken in favour of recognition and redistribution needs to be ‘transformative’, providing ‘remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework’ (Fraser, 2008: 28). Transformative recognition means problematizing group differentiations, such as black versus white, male versus female, or straight versus gay/​lesbian, on the way to social revolution. Meanwhile, transformative distribution means dealing with class-​ based conflicts deriving from material inequality, and therefore requires a deep restructuring of the political economy of a nation-​state, in short, a political economic revolution. In the prologue to one of his many recent books on neoliberalism in contemporary societies, Harvey offers the following assessment of the state of activism and the prospects for real social and political economic change: What remains of the radical left now operates largely outside of any institutional or organized oppositional channels, in the hope that small-​scale actions and local activism can ultimately add up to some kind of satisfactory macro alternative. This left, which strangely echoes a libertarian and even neoliberal ethic of anti-​statism, is nurtured intellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-​ structuralism that favours identity politics and eschews class analysis. Autonomist, anarchist and localist perspectives are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class

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remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint. (Harvey, 2014: xii–​xiii) This is a bleak assessment of the state of things, but it is one that I recognize when I look at what is going on around me. Above, I mentioned uses of the various media available today as a way to provide more informed interpretations and analyses of ongoing events. The latter, I argued, might serve as counterweights to the dominant ideology that tells us that we live as we live because it is natural and the only way to live. And, with a wink towards something that is topical at the time of writing, I add that these informed interpretations and analyses might serve to combat power’s new kid on the block, the ‘alternative facts’ of the populist neoliberal right in the United States. But is appearing in the media not simply another example of what Harvey sees as an attempt to ‘change the world without taking power’? Power, as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and many others have understood all too well over the years, is not taken piecemeal. Nor is it likely to be granted to the popular classes just because they ask nicely. Power, as we see from so many examples in the history of the world, must be taken. In the present, this means moving beyond the same old palliatives, which, I hasten to add, no longer achieve the minimal good effects they once did. It means a transformation of societies and how they function. The trouble is how to achieve such change. Some scholars, such as Streeck (2016), offer the view that capitalism has reached its end, but that it will take a while for those who hold power and populations at large to realize this and act accordingly. We are thus in for a what Streeck calls ‘an age of entropy’, a long period of slow-​burn, economic, political and social upheaval constituting the death throes of capitalism as we have known it over the past century and a half. The alternative to waiting for such events to unfold is for the masses to storm the gates of power, which, of course, would involve violence and bloodshed. But this is not likely to happen for many reasons. First, there is the way that financialization (see Chapter 3) has made power that much harder to confront directly. There is also the fact that in many parts of the world, though by no means not all, populations do not have the stomach for the kind of violence that taking power from the powerful requires. Meanwhile, Streeck sees the problem as residing in the individualism that has taken root and become so firmly ensconced in modern societies, and how most people today accept the notion that they have to act alone and depend on no one else. They do this through their resilience, which involves accepting hardship and trying to make matters better. They also engage in distractions such as shopping and the consumption of performance-​enhancing and performance-​replacing drugs. Finally, many people simply hope for or dream of a better life in the immediate future, even if circumstances are such that

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this is the most unlikely of all scenarios. Ultimately, as Streeck argues, we will live through this age of entropy until capitalism exhausts itself, although at this point, it is anybody’s guess what will ensue. Will we ease into a new version of socialism around measures such as an unconditional basic income for all citizens and making maximum use of the technologies that we have at our disposal, sharing the benefits across the population? Or do current events, such as Trump’s victory in the United States, point in the direction of far more sinister and negative outcome (a new dark ages)? The proverbial ‘time will tell’ comes to mind, unless, of course, enough people opt for the more proactive alternative of taking power from the powerful. In the midst of all this, and independent of what actually happens in the years that come (e.g. Streeck could be completely wrong), it is worthwhile to focus on sociolinguists as political actors, in particular those who self-​identify as ‘critical’. In my view if critical sociolinguists are to contribute to the ongoing debate about the state of the world –​and in addition, play a part, however modest, in the transformation of societies into fairer and more liveable social entities –​then they need to develop not only a sociological imagination (one could argue that there is already a surfeit of imagination out there!), but also a political economic one. If this book contributes in any way to such a change, it will have achieved something.

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Appendix: Transcription conventions Slash (/​) shows the end of a chunk of talk, normally paced. Pauses are timed to the nearest second and the number of seconds is put in brackets: (.5). Question mark (?) indicates question intonation. Square brackets [] are used for comments. Italics indicate the adoption of a second-​party voice as a rhetorical device. . . . indicates text deleted.

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Notes Preface 1 Translated from the original in Catalan: Barcelona és una de les ciutats més atractives d’Europa per crear start-​ up, hi ha una gran comunitat d’emprenedors, hi ha molta vitalitat, encara que siguis ambiciós no t’estresses. Encara que tinguis passió per la feina dediques temps a altres coses, gaudeixes de la vida. Jo m’organitzo els horaris i treballo on em ve de gust, entre 20 i 40 hores setmanals. Disposo de prou temps lliure per tocar el violí, anar al gimnàs, sortir amb els amics . . . I ara començaré a fer classes de castellà. (Bosch, 2015: 2) 2 Translated from the original in Spanish: [En el año 1998] el Banco Santander le dio un préstamo por 6.850.000 pesetas (unos 40.000 euros). Hasta 2005 pagaba unos 400 euros al mes. Después, rehipotecó la casa porque necesitaba dinero y la cuota subió hasta mil. Pagó hasta hace tres años y no pudo seguir pagando. El bar iba mal y ahora, después de que cerraran el puente por las obras de la circunvalación, aún peor. El caso es que aunque parezca difícil de creer, ha acabado abonando en cuotas al banco casi 120.000 euros (el triple de su valor inicial) y aún debe otros 100.000. El Banco Santander no ha dado opción y se quedará con la casa. (Garcia, 2013: npn) 3 Translated from the original in Catalan: La prioritat d’aquest col·lectiu és recórrer el planeta, estar només unes setmanes o temporades més llargues en una destinació. El seu ordinador és la seva eina principal i es connecten en centres de cotreball, en cafeteries o en platges de pel·lícula. (Bosch, 2015: 1) 4 Translated from the original in Spanish: Mi futuro es tan incierto como que no tengo futuro. ¿Dónde voy a ir? O alguien me ofrece una habitación o dormiré en la calle. Me siento en contra de este sistema, de los jueces, los políticos y los bancos. No tienen por qué tratarme como basura. (Garcia, 2013: npn) 5 Of course, I do not actually know Danielle and therefore my positioning of her, based on how she is presented in Bosch’s article, may be totally misguided

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and unfair. Among other things, Danielle may experience in her lifetime the same kind of professional precariousness as a European Union (EU) citizen with far fewer qualifications who does not live outside his/​her home context. In addition, as someone who is self-​employed, she is not, strictly speaking, the polar opposite of Cati, who is also self-​employed. However, it is worth noting that just as among the salaried there will be great differences between the minority and the majority in terms of life conditions (compare a chief executive officer with a cleaner), among the self-​employed the same differences apply. In short, I believe that there is a contrast to be made here, even if Danielle cannot be said to embody the ‘barbarous indifference’ and ‘hard egotism’ that Engels wrote about with such vigour.

Chapter 1 1 However, it is perhaps worth mentioning here Jean-​Jacques Lecercle’s A Marxist philosophy of language, published in 2005. This book cannot be said to be a sociolinguistics text per se, but it does, as the title suggests, attempt to develop a Marxist view of language. As Lecercle lays out the case, a Marxist view of language means a rejection of more static framings of language, such as Chomskyan linguistics, and the embrace of language as praxis, embedded in historical, political, economic, social and cultural processes.

Chapter 2 1 I am, of course, oversimplifying matters, as Marx’s disagreement with the physiocrats ran much deeper than just this. 2 In this paragraph, I use masculine pronouns throughout in order to maintain consistency with the quoted excerpts from Marx ([1844] 1988). 3 Mirowski argues that ‘neoclassical economics . . . dates from the 1870s, and encompasses mathematical models of the constrained optimization of utility, which still exists today as the core of economic orthodoxy’ (Miroswki, 2014: 8). 4 The orginal in French: L’économie politique perdit ainsi tous les bénéfices de son principe. Elle resta une science abstraite et déductive, occupée non à observer la réalité mais à construire un idéal plus ou moins désirable; car cet homme en général, cet égoïste systématique dont elle nous parle n’est qu’un être de raison. L’homme réel, que nous connaissons et que nous sommes, est autrement complexe: il est d’un temps et d’un pays, il a une famille, une cité, une patrie, une foi religieuse et politique, et tous ces ressorts et bien d’autres encore se mêlent, se combinent de mille manières, croisent et entrecroisent leur influence sans qu’il soit possible de dire au premier coup d’œil où l’un commence et où l’autre finit. (Durkheim, 1888: 7–​8)

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5 It is worth noting that throughout his career, Bourdieu maintained a rather estranged relationship with political economy. In a critical discussion of Bourdieu and Giddens, Alex Callinicos (1999) describes the two as scholars who ‘sought to occupy a space somewhere between the classical sociological tradition and historical materialism’ (Callinicos, 1999: 78). In Bourdieu’s case, this meant a rejection of the reliance on questionnaires and a lack of theory in the former and a rejection of the Marxism of the latter. Callinicos applauds that part of Bourdieu’s research that sought to reveal, analyse and condemn the effects of neoliberalism (e.g. Bourdieu et al., 1999) and his challenge to the existing orthodoxy of neoliberalism and the general acquiescence to its implantation that he observed. However, Callinicos finds that even in this critical work, more typical of Bourdieu’s final years than the earlier part of his career, there is a ‘noteworthy . . . absence of anything amounting to an elaborated analysis of the changes in economic structures and class relations that lie behind this challenge’ (Callinicos, 1999: 88). In a sense, what Callinicos is pinpointing is the way that Bourdieu’s anthropological approach to political economy led him to a treatment of neoliberalism in sociocultural and existential terms (important, to be sure), with little or no engagement with the structural bases of capitalism (or, dare I say, the logic of capitalism).

Chapter 3 1 Capitalism is here understood as ‘any social formation in which [the] process of capital circulation and accumulation are hegemonic and dominant in providing and shaping the material, social and intellectual bases for social life’ (Harvey, 2014: 7). 2 Even economists who no doubt had read Smith, and therefore perhaps knew better, attributed to him views on the economy that do not take into account the period in which he lived and wrote. For example, the noted MPS member Henry Simons attributed to Smith the view that that both ‘political and economic power must be widely dispersed and decentralized’ and that ‘economic control must . . . be largely divorced from the state and effected through a competitive process in which participants are relatively small and autonomous’ (Simons, 1941: 213; in Stedman-​Jones, 2012: 99). 3 Here I am perhaps being charitable when I use the term ‘social democratic’ to refer to the Democratic Party, which lost the 1980 presidential election and then began to reform itself as the precursor for New Labour and ‘third way’ politics in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the British Labour Party, up until the rise of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1994 onwards, functioned as a social democratic party. 4 von Mises’s exact words were as follows: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is not merely a novel. It is also –​or may I say first of all –​a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-​styled ‘intellectuals’ and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and

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Notes political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the ‘moral cannibals,’ the ‘gigolos of science’ and of the ‘academic prattle’ of the makers of the ‘anti-​industrial revolution.’ You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. (von Mises Institute, 2007: npn)

5 Popper was a noteworthy critic of what he called ‘historicism’, which he attributed to Marx and his followers in his book The poverty of historicism. He defined historicism as ‘an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is . . . [the] principle aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the “rhythms” or “patterns”, the “laws” or the “trends” that underlie the evolution of history’ (Popper, 1957: 3). For Popper, if one adopts such a view of the social sciences, then a ‘peculiar variety of fatalism’ (ibid.: 53) takes hold, which flies in the face of calls to activism found in Marx’s work. And this fatalism runs into direct conflict with Popper’s ideas about freedom and the individual, and above all the ability of individuals to shape their worlds. Popper no doubt engages in some interesting thinking in this book, and even may be seen to have developed an early version of what in recent years has become a debate about the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative research in the social sciences. However, he presents as his main point of criticism a version of Marxist thinking that authors such as Richard Hudelson (1980) have seen as too convenient a foil for the arguments he wants to make. For Hudelson, there are several reasons why Popper does not successfully dismantle and refute Marx’s discussion of capital: 1. Even if one accepts Popper’s critique of Marx, most of Marx’s economics remain immune from this criticism. 2. Marx did not hold many of the tenets of historicism. 3. Popper has failed to show that there cannot be laws of social development. 4. Popper has failed to show that we cannot know laws of social development. 5. Marx does not confuse trends and laws in the way that Popper suggests and makes basic to this critique of historicism. (Hudelson, 1980: 268) 6 Nevertheless, so extreme was his belief in the hands-​off approach with regard to all matters social, he also declared his opposition to anti-​racist legislation that was being discussed at the time that he wrote the book. Thus after arguing that racism is bad and indeed does not make sense in business terms, as it means turning away potential paying customers or possibly not hiring the most qualified person for a job, he suggests that the changing of minds can never be via legal coercion and must come through a kind of open communication market in which the exchange of ideas can change minds. In this sense, Friedman suggests that ‘the appropriate resource of those of us who believe that a particular criterion such as color is irrelevant is to persuade our fellows to be of like mind, not to use the coercive power of the state to force them to act in accordance with our principles’ (Friedman, 2002: 115). At best this is a display of extraordinary naiveté, and at worst, it is cynically racist.

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7 Ordo (for Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft –​ The Ordo Yearbook of Economic and Social Order) was also the name of the journal, founded by Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm in 1948, in which prominent German liberals of the time published their work (Stedman-​Jones, 2012). 8 Despite the name, the majority of these economists were educated not in Chicago, but in Santiago de Chile, specifically in the economics department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, which had an associative link to the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. In any case, either through direct contact in Chicago or via the Chicago-​Santiago de Chile connection, Freidman and his colleagues were able to see their ideas tried out on an economy deemed to be in need of salvation from the socialism of the Salvador Allende presidency (1970–​1973). Of course, it took a bloody coup, during which President Allende was killed, and the repressive regime that followed, to provide the perfect backdrop for neoliberal policies to be applied with little or no resistance from the population. 9 Curiously, and perhaps accurately, Offer and Söderberg (2016) do not put the renowned American economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman in this category. This, despite the pair’s recent unequivocal criticisms of neoliberalism. However, as Mirowski (2013) suggests, far too many American economists, Stiglitz and Krugman among them, were content for far too many years to work within the mainstream of American economics and the mainstream of the American political system, both of which clearly embraced neoliberalism over Keynesianism. 10 As Clara Han (2012) notes, Chile has gone through several debt crises since the early 1980s and in each case, it has been a model of good behaviour, paying off far more debt than other countries equally dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, by the 1990s Chile had become the darling of the NTC, as it was often classified, in a positive way, as one of the most ‘liberalized’ nations in the world. Nevertheless, not everyone would agree that the ‘Chilean miracle’ has been to the benefit of the majority of Chileans, nor that economic liberalism has led, ipso facto, to a truly democratic society where liberty and freedom prevail. And one would be hard put to argue that Chile today is an ‘independent’ nation. As Han explains, Chile was transformed ‘from a welfare state to a subsidiary state that addressed the inevitable generation of “extreme poverty” produced by the market . . . [through the application of] focalized programs aimed at sustaining minimum requirements for biological survival’ (Han, 2012: 9). 11 Carly Collins (personal communication) provides a good example of such light control. It seems that once the economic crisis had hit, the Committee of European Securities Regulators, began to require fund managers to produce short, standardized documents in simple language to help investors to understand the nature of the fund they were investing in. These new documents explained more clearly than had previously been the case the different redemption conditions, minimum holding periods and so on. But, of course, once this new policy was implemented, it was far easier to blame the ignorant investor if things went wrong.

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12 An example of how this has been the case arose in December 2016, when the European Court of Justice ruled that Spanish banks had been engaging in illegal and unethical activity since 2011 (the year that many of them were bailed out by the Spanish government), as they systematically tricked mortgage clients into signing contracts containing hidden ‘floor clauses’. These floor clauses included a minimum cap on interest paid in order to avoid a situation in which the official interest rate was so low as to make lending money unprofitable for banks. The ruling came three and half years after a Spanish Constitutional Court ruling in May 2013, which prohibited hidden clauses. However, the latter ruling was relatively ineffective given that there had been little or no vigilance over the ensuing three and half years to ensure that banks were complying. The European Court of Justice ruling called the protection provided to Spanish consumers ‘incomplete and insufficient’ and it ordered banks to repay over 4.2 billion euros in unjustified interest payments. At the time of writing, it is unclear if and how the banks will comply.

Chapter 4 1 As soon as Obama became the Democratic Party presidential candidate and as such a perceived threat to a Republican Party (deemed by power structures in the United States to better represent their interests), the infamous ‘birther’ campaign began. Questioning whether or not Obama was born in the United States called into question his legitimacy as a candidate and once he was elected, it challenged the legality of the election itself, given the US law that presidents must be born in the United States. Ironically, the man chosen to oppose Obama as the Republican Party candidate in 2008, Arizona Senator John McCain, was born outside the United States, on a naval base in Panama. However, as all US military bases, whatever their location, are considered to be US soil, no one questioned McCain’s legitimacy as a presidential candidate. In any case, when the birther campaign began, there were very well-founded suspicions that its promoters would not have acted as they did had Obama been 100 per cent European in physical appearance, and in addition, had he not had a foreign-​ born African father and a ‘Muslim-​sounding’ name. Indeed, during his time in office, Obama was subjected to a continuous campaign to undermine his authority, orchestrated by the Republican Party in Congress and the Senate, the right-​wing press (led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel) and prominent members of the business community, such as Donald Trump, one of the most visible birther campaigners. The latter, of course, was elected Obama’s successor in 2016 after running as viciously racist a campaign as has ever been seen in a US election. In this campaign, ‘Mexicans’ (considered ‘thieves’, ‘rapists’ and ‘murders’) and ‘Muslims’ (considered potential or actual terrorists) bore the brunt of his attack. Add to this the systemic problem in police departments across the United States, whereby historical institutional racism combines with racial profiling to produce the unjustifiable killing of young male African Americans with

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alarming frequency, and one finds it difficult not to see racial stratification as an enduring legacy and reality in the United States. Meanwhile, post-​racial, as a descriptor of contemporary America, seems bizarrely inaccurate, to put it mildly. 2 Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to note that in the case of movements such as the indignados in Spain and ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in the United States, it is middle-​class young people, worried about their future in the midst of the 2007–​2008 economic crisis, who have been predominant. Therefore, with regard to these movements, any claim that they both transverse and represent the interests of the popular classes must be handled with care. On the other hand, movements that act on behalf of people who have been evicted from their homes (see Chapter 6) or advocate for people who have been victims of bank scams, manifest greater transversality, with the participation of more working-class and poor people. 3 Elsewhere, I have written in great detail about social class (Block, 2014) and there are sections addressing the question ‘what is class?’ in a long list of book chapters and articles appearing over the past several years (e.g. Block, 2012b, 2012c, 2015b, 2016b, 2017d, 2017e, 2017f). In this chapter, I cannot avoid a good deal of overlap with what I have written in these publications, but I will nonetheless try not to repeat myself too much. 4 It was also about the practice of politics in societies of all kinds, what Weber called ‘party’. 5 I thank May Sabbagh (personal communication) for reminding me of this.

Chapter 5 1 I should mention here how in most countries in the world today, there are a good number of non-​nationals, living, working and (in many cases) just surviving. These individuals live according to a range of different formal and informal regimes. Cohen (2006) divides non-​nationals in countries like the United Kingdom into two general categories. First, there are the ‘denizens’, who might be seen as ‘privileged aliens’. Denizens might hold more than one citizenship, but they do not have legal citizenship in the country in which they reside. They may or may not have certain citizenship rights, such as the right to vote. Two good examples of denizens are EU member-​state citizens, who have freedom of movement across borders and equal rights as EU citizens (although Brexit means that this will soon change for EU nationals in the United Kingdom), and recognized asylum applicants, who are also granted many citizenship rights. The second general category proposed by Cohen is what he calls ‘helots’. Helots have few or no rights where they reside as non-​nationals. In some cases, they will be ‘foreigners who are regarded as disposable units of labour power to whom the advantages of citizenship, the franchise and social welfare are denied’ (Cohen, 2006: 152). However, their most basic rights may be protected by agreements such as the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (again, in the case of the United Kingdom, this will probably change in coming years). Examples

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include undocumented workers, unrecognized asylum applicants, visa over-​ stayers and individuals trafficked for illegal activity, such as drug smuggling and prostitution. In today’s unequal societies, denizens can and do act as neoliberal citizens, as described in this chapter, and thus are often positioned in a favourable way, as ‘legitimate’, in society at large. By contrast, helots –​as political, economic, social and cultural outcasts –​find it far harder to achieve the ideal of the neoliberal citizen, and are generally positioned as ‘illegitimate’. 2 In writing this, I do not wish to suggest that Beck was aligned with Hayek, Becker and other scholars who were foundational to the rise of neoliberalism as a dominant economic and social phenomenon. Rather, my point is that his ideas on individualization could be read in a sideways manner as granting some degree of succour to the neoliberal project. 3 Reading Schumpeter, one realizes that while Naomi Klein (2007) was famously timely in writing about what she called the ‘shock doctrine’, Schumpeter arguably got there first with his theory that capitalism needs periodic disruptions for its very survival, followed by innovations produced by entrepreneurs, which resolve the resultant crises. 4 The original text in French: Vous êtes un(e) travailleur (-​euse) modèle, voire zélé(e), les patrons vous adorent. Mais attention à ne pas vous faire avaler tout(e) cru(e) par le travail . . . Vous êtes un(e) travailleur (-​euse) ‘lambda’, vous êtes sérieux (-​euse) sans pour autant sacrifer votre vie a votre travail. Gare a l’ennui qui pourrait vous guetter. . . . Vous travaillez plutöt en dilettante. Êtes-​vous vraiment à l’aise dans le monde du travail? Au fond, peut-​être est-​ce vous qui avez raison. (Brillant et al., 2010: 147) 5 The original text in French: Les discours caricaturaux sur les patrons, c’est fini. Il y a une bienveillance, les Français savent que l’économie c’est la vie, que rien n’est figé, que des entreprises doivent mourir et d’autres naître. Il y a un dynamisme nouveau. Beaucoup de jeunes comencent également à comprendre qu’entrer dans la vénérable grande enterprise n’est plus synonyme de salut éternel. C’est l’avantage de la crise, elle nous pousse à oser faire de choses qu’on se refusait de faire juqu’ici. Je suis optimiste pour la création d’enterprise en France. (Heuand Mabilet, 2015: 137) 6 The original text in Spanish: uno de los graves problemas de la economía y sociedad española es la alta tasa de desempleo juvenil, que para el caso de los menores de 25 años duplica la media de la UE-​27. Las causas de ello hay que buscarlas, además de en algunas deficiencias que han venido caracterizando a nuestro modelo de relaciones laborales, en la ausencia de una mayor

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iniciativa emprendedora entre los más jóvenes que haya llevado, ante la falta de oportunidades de trabajo por cuenta ajena, a unos mayores niveles de autoempleo capaces, a su vez, de generar más empleo. Para invertir esta situación, es necesario un cambio de mentalidad en el que la sociedad valore más la actividad emprendedora y la asunción de riesgos. La piedra angular para que este cambio tenga lugar es, sin duda, el sistema educativo. (Boletín Official del Estado, 2013: 78791) 7 The original text in Spanish: 1. Los currículos de Educación Primaria, Secundaria Obligatoria, Bachillerato y Formación Profesional incorporarán objetivos, competencias, contenidos y criterios de evaluación de la formación orientados al desarrollo y afianzamiento del espíritu emprendedor, a la adquisición de competencias para la creación y desarrollo de los diversos modelos de empresas y al fomento de la igualdad de oportunidades y del respeto al emprendedor y al empresario, así como a la ética empresarial. 2. Las Administraciones educativas fomentarán las medidas para que el alumnado participe en actividades que le permita afianzar el espíritu emprendedor y la iniciativa empresarial a partir de aptitudes como la creatividad, la iniciativa, el trabajo en equipo, la confianza en uno mismo y el sentido crítico. (Boletín Official del Estado, 2013: 78800) 8 The expression ‘chance would be a fine thing’ comes to mind here, for if people could by sheer will and determination overturn inequality and other deleterious effects of capitalism, would they not ‘just do it’? And as a result, would the world not be a better place than it is at present? 9 ‘¿Donde está el límite?’, Talk given in June 2015; available online: https://​ www.youtube.com/​watch?v=dWWFNF-​AmEg 10 The original text in Spanish: No soy ningún ex-​broker que un buen día tuvo un bajón, decidió replantearse la vida, empezar de cero, abandonar la Bolsa y dedicarse a ir en bicicleta. No, no soy de esos. Decidí convertirme en ultrafondista y participar en las pruebas más duras del mundo para tratar de averiguar dónde estaba el límite del cuerpo humano -​dónde estaba mi límite-​, del mismo modo que un buen corredor de Bolsa husmea, escucha, tantea y arriesga para aprovechar una buena onda y averiguar hasta cuándo aguantar y en qué momento hay que vender (Ajram, 2010: back cover) 11 NB: Spanish salaries are almost always divided into fourteen payments, with extra payments coming in June and December. 12 The original text in Spanish:

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para mi/​emprender es/​arrancar una idea/​auto-​emplearse/​ser autónomo/​ ser una persona que entiende que las catorce pagas al año y el mes de vacaciones en España/​se han acabado/​y ser una persona que entiende perfectamente/​que ser autónomo/​no es más arriesgado que estar en nómina (.5) a partir de aquí/​una persona que es autónoma desde el año 2001/​y que en 2002 empezó a crear su primera sociedad/​debe decir que no todo el mundo sirve/​para trabajar como autónomo/​para emprender/​ para presentar un proyecto/​. . . pero sí que creo que hay mucha más gente capaz/​y uno de los grandes males que tenemos en España/​ es el ¿que dirán si sale mal?/​Lo que no peude ser/​es que el mayor enemigo sea nuestro entorno (La Sexta Noche, 14 May 2016; available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=UiAfzGCDCHY). 13 The original text in Spanish: yo/​lo que veo/​es que si gobierna Podemos/​va a haber una fuga de capitales extranjeros muy importante/​y esto financieramente/​a corto plazo/​España lo va a sufrir tremendamente/​eh/​señor Iglesias dijo una cosa que es estúpida/​con respeto/​que es que si J.P Morgan dice algo/​ se presentará a las elecciones/​gracias a J. P. Morgan/​hoy estamos en el euro aun/​porque si no hubiese sido por el/​la inyección de dinero internacional que ha recibido España estos años/​que nadie cobraria ni una pensión/​y nadie cobra/​cobraria nada de sanidad/​(Ajram, La Sexta Noche, 29 November 2014; available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=maWt9zFrYww). 14 The original text in Spanish: nadie va a defender a J.P. Morgan/​y hablamos de J.P. Morgan/​como ejemplo de mercados financieros/​no hay que personalizarlo/​como banca privada/​(Ajram, La Sexta Noche, 29 November 2014; available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=maWt9zFrYww). 15 The full citation, of course, reads as follows: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of materialproduction at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance. (Marx and Engels, [1846] 1998: 67) 16 An example of a critique of Ajram and his views (in Spanish, as are all the examples I have been able to find) can be found at http://​blogs.elconfidencial.

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com/​tecnologia/​emprendedorfurioso/​2014-​12-​02/​josef-​ajram-​o-​por-​que-​no-​ hay-​que-​fiarse-​de-​los-​hombres-​hechos-​a-​si-​mismos_​513095/​

Chapter 6 1 The original in Spanish: Los motivos que sustentan la campaña son sencillos: nos roban las viviendas y nos condenan a seguir pagándolas. Nos dejan en la calle y sin alternativa habitacional. Los bancos, incluso los rescatados, siguen con su actitud antisocial desahuciando y acumulando un gigantesco parque de viviendas vacías, vulnerando la función social de la vivienda. El Gobierno lo ampara: ni lo detiene ni ofrece soluciones como, por ejemplo, el alquiler social, paralización de los desahucios, dación en pago . . . La Obra Social de la PAH es una campaña de ocupaciones y de recuperación del derecho a la vivienda que responde a un estado generalizado de emergencia habitacional generado de forma artificial y deliberada por los bancos y el gobierno. Frente a ello, se propone la recuperación de viviendas vacías de bancos para los desahuciados y la principal reclamación es el alquiler social para las familias, en función de su renta. La Obra Social entronca de forma natural con la trayectoria de la PAH: defensa de la población cuando se le amputan sus derechos, desobediencia para recuperarlos y así forzar soluciones. 2 If we compare 2006, the peak year of the property boom in Spain, with 2015, the first full year of economic recovery, we see that the number of home mortgages granted by banks was 1,342,171 and 244,827, respectively (Idealista, 2015). 3 The word was perhaps first used in Argentina in the mid-​1990s to refer to the activities of a human-​rights group called HIJOS (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio –​Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetfulness and Silence). This group organized demonstrations to protest against then-​president Carlos Menem’s pardon of members of the Argentinian military and other state institutions found guilty of the mass murder of individuals and groups considered to be political opponents during the civilian-​military dictatorship (the self-​named Proceso de Reorganización Nacional–​Process of National Reorganization), which lasted from 1976 to 1983 (see HIJOS web page: http://​www.hijos.org.ar). 4 This campaign culminated in the passing of a new public order law in March 2015, the Ley Orgánica de Seguridad Ciudadana (Organic Law of Public Security), known to many as the Ley Mordaza (the gag law), with the sole support of the PP. This law severely limits the right to freedom of speech in Spain, affecting not only activities such as escraches, but also more traditional forms of protest. 5 The original in Spanish:

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los acosos/​la violencia física y verbal/​los ataques a las personas/​a sus viviendas/​a sus familias (3) eso no refleja más que un espíritu totalitario y sectario/​y eso es lo más contrario que hay a la democracia/​[applause] . . . tenemos en el recuerdo/​y se ha ilustrado mucho afortunadamente/​ como en los años 30 se iba a señalar a las casas de ciertas personas/​por su pertenencia a ciertos grupos políticos/​étnicos/​culturales/​o religiosos/​y decían/​están ahí/​y por tanto tenéis que ir a atacar/​pero qué es esto de tratar de violentar el voto? (1) esto es nazismo puro (1.5) ya sé que esto me lo van a criticar (1.5) [smiling] pero esto es nazismo puro/​(Rachide, 2013: npn) 6 The original in Spanish: La sociedad española, sus legítimos representantes políticos y, por supuesto, la Justicia y las Fuerzas de Seguridad del Estado tienen que reaccionar y plantar cara a la desfachatez, a la chulería y a la impunidad con que unos émulos de los peores totalitarismos de la Historia han decidido acosar, insultar y amedrentar a los políticos del Partido Popular, que han sido elegidos por sus conciudadanos. Nadie, con un mínimo de sentido democrático, puede ni debe mostrar la menor complacencia ante el espectáculo, que se está convirtiendo en habitual, de unos energúmenos que, con total impunidad, irrumpen en la intimidad familiar o doméstica de algunos políticos del Partido Popular. Estos violentos acosadores se creen el paradigma de los buenos sentimientos pero sólo son simples epígonos de las tácticas de los peores totalitarismos del siglo pasado: el acoso con que las juventudes hitlerianas o las patrullas castristas en Cuba trataban y tratan de amedrentar a los que no se someten a sus designios. Y también son imitadores del matonismo de los seguidores de ETA en el País Vasco, ese matonismo que no ha dejado vivir en libertad a los ciudadanos de esa parte de España. (Aguirre, 2013) 7 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna –​Basque Homeland and Liberty) is the recently disarmed Basque separatist organization that carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Spain between 1968 and 2010. 8 The most noteworthy example in this is category is Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’), a party originally formed in Catalonia in 2006 to combat the Catalan sovereignty movement, but which by 2015 was seen by many as the marca blanca (store brand) of the PP –​neoliberal, but without the corruption scandals and the conservative Catholicism of the PP. 9 The original in Spanish: Probar el sabor de la propia medicina te hace dar cuenta hasta qué punto lo que estabas haciendo tú no era precisamente algo susceptible de ser considerado como libertad de expresión. Hasta no hace mucho tiempo esos hechos calificados como escraches los padecíamos otras personas fundamentalmente y en su mayor proporción sin ningún género de dudas cargos públicos del Partido Popular. Y quienes los protagonizaban decían que era libertad de expresión. Lo que no podemos aceptar es que cuando tú los haces lo son y que cuando tú los padeces son conductas odiosas o delictivas.

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10 The original in Spanish: la compensación negociada/​fue una indemnización en diferido (.5) y como fue una indemnización en difer/​en diferido (.5) en forma/​ efectivamente/​de simulación/​simulación/​o lo que hubiera sido en diferido/​en partes de una/​de lo que antes era una retribución/​tenía que tener la retención a la seguridad social/​es que si no hubiera sido (1.5) ahora se habla mucho de pagos que no tienen retenciones a la seguridad social/​verdad?/​pues aquí se quiso/​se quiso hacer como hay que hacerlo/​ es decir/​con la retención a la seguridad social/​. (https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=hzyHbjgrx8U) 11 The original in Spanish: mire/​como sabe usted/​erhm (4.0) como usted sabe (1.0) se nos planteó incluso/​se nos planteó incluso/​una (1.0) una acción judicial/​contra el PP discutiendo la propiedad do los mismos/​y ya un (1.0) un tribunal/​dijo que estos ordenadores/​eran del partido popular/​eran del partido popular/​y no eran de nadie particular/​a partir de allí/​el partido popular/​actuó como actúa con todos los ordenadores/​que (1.5) que forman/​que son parte/​que forman parte del material del partido popular/​como insisto/​como se hace con cualquier cosa/​que forma parte/​con cualquier instrumento que forma parte del material del partido popular/​. (29 August 2013; https://​www. youtube.com/​watch?v=G_​U8ERyxg9Q) 12 It should be noted, however, that Floriano has never been known to be a particularly lucid or coherent speaker, as most of his public interventions contain long pauses and tortured syntax. As for the puzzled look on his face during this press conference, some would say that he always looks puzzled. 13 The British National Party was formed in 1982, although there had been neo-​Nazi groups in Britain since the 1950s. The French Front Nacional was founded in 1972, but it was not until 1983 that it began to make its presence felt in French politics. Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block; later to form part of Vlaams Belang –​Flemish Interest) was founded in the late 1970s. 14 Numerous examples of Iglesias, other Podemos members and members of other new left parties and organizations in action are easily accessible on YouTube.

Epilogue 1 See Adrian Holliday (1996), who retrieved Mills from relative obscurity in applied linguistics circles with his 1996 article ‘Developing a sociological imagination: Expanding ethnography in international English language education’.

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2 I write this, all too aware of how Mills has traditionally been classified as a Weberian sociologist, a label that Mills would not likely have contested. In addition, scholars ranging from Sweezy (1968) to Poulantzas (1978) to Therborn (1978) were critical of Mills from a Marxist perspective, not least because of his lack of a theory of capitalist development and his inattention to exploitation as a key element in capitalism. In short, Mills lacked a political economic base from which to analyse and critique capitalism. In addition, in his book The power elite, he was dismissive of class as a concept, famously calling ‘ruling class’ a ‘badly loaded phrase’, part of a ‘short-​cut theory’ and ‘a simple view of ‘economic determinism’ (Mills, 1956: 277). Nevertheless, as Clyde Barrow (2007) notes, Mills was still embraced as far more of a friend than a foe by most Marxists when he published The power elite, and as Horwitz (1983) argues in his biography of Mills, the latter did find some aspects of Marxist theory attractive. Indeed, despite his parodying comments and sometimes biting criticism of Marx in The Marxists, he was far more a man of the left than one of the centre or the right, as is evident when one reads Hey Yankee.

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216

217

Index Aaker, Jennifer 114–​15, 116, 121 Aaker’s brand personality 131–​2 Aaker’s model, and worker 118, 119 accumulation by dispossession 141 activism 167, 173–​4 Adam Smith Institute 57 adolescent speech patterns 13 affirmative action 174 agricultural labour 32 Aguirre, Esperanza 151–​3, 154 Ajram, Josef 130–​4 and Aaker’s brand personality 131–​2 charisma 131 definition of entrepreneur 132–​3 and detractors 134 developing profile 131 life philosophy 132 and neoliberalism 133–​4 and Podemos 133 ‘youth cool’ 131 Algan, Yann 40 Alianza Popular (Popular Alliance) 154 alienation of labour 35–​6 Allan, Kori 16 Althusser, Louis 34 American Economics Association 41 American Enterprise Association 57 Anduiza, Eva 163 Anglo/​Scottish/​American enlightenment 62 Annanmalai, E. 11 ‘anything goes’ 153, 168 apparent concessions, and classtalk 144, 153 Arab spring 78 Arrighi, Giovanni 52 Asiatic mode of production 51 assets 82–​3 crystallization of 82–​4

Atkinson, Will 91 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 58, 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail 142 Balzac, Honoré de 171 Bangladesh, English language in 11 bank bailout of 2011, 105 banking sector, deregulation of 64, 72 Barbero, Javier 156–​7 Bárcenas, Luis 159, 160–​1 Barrow, Clyde 190n. 2 Baudelaire, Charles 171 Bazou, Virginie 116–​18 Becker, Gary 109, 110–​11 Beckham, David 115, 131 Bell, Daniel 87 benevolence 107 Benjamin, Walter 171 Bentham, Jeremy 80 Bernstein, Basil 4, 12, 87 Béteille, André 80 Bhaskar, Roy 45–​6 bifurcation 140 Bikse, Veronika 126 bilingualism 11, 20, 21 biopolitics 108–​9 Birth of biopolitics, The (Foucault) 27 Block, David 14, 39 Boletín Official del Estado 122–​3 Bosch, Rosa M. vii Bottero, Wendy 76 Bourdieu, Pierre 3–​4, 12, 38–​9, 89, 179n. 5 Bourdieusian version of class 97–​8 Bourdieu’s work, criticism of 91 Bourguignon, François 77 Boutet, Josianne 14, 15 Bowles, Samuel 12, 74 Brand-​Ajram 131

218

218

Index

Brand-​Beckham 131 branding, practice of 114 brand-​me, and language 121 brand personality 114–​15 dimensions of 114–​15, 131–​2 human characteristics 115 ‘brand you’ 114 Breman, Jan 100 Brennetot, Arnaud 50 Brexit 163–​4 Brief history of neoliberalism, A (Harvey) 27, 49 Brillant, Corina 116–​18 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 97 British National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification 97 Brown, Wendy 106 Bruthiaux, Paul 5 Buffet, Warren 138–​9 Burawoy, Michael 39, 44 Bureaucracy (von Mises) 58 Business studies 124 Butler, Yuko 9 Cafruny, Alan 44 call centres 15 Callinicos, Alex 44, 90, 179n. 5 camera obscura 154, 157, 164 Cameron, David 15, 84 Canada, English language in 16 Capital (Marx) 32 Capital 1 (Marx) 36, 41, 51, 79 Capital III (Marx) 85–​6 Capital in the twenty-​first century (Piketty) 101–​2 capitalism 46–​7, 50, 85, 175–​6, 179n. 1, 184n. 3 Chinese 51 evolution 112–​13 as hierarchical structure 106 and humanism 34 Keynesian economics 53 logic of 56, 70 and neoliberalism 50, 56, 68, 71 Capitalism and freedom (Friedman) 62, 63, 107 Carmena, Manuela 156 Carreel, Éric 120, 121

Carroll, John 33 Carroll, William 10 casino capitalism 71 Castells, Manuel 70 Catalan 13 Catalan universities 124 Cato Institute 57 CDA 20+ Symposium 166 CEFRL (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) 117 Centre for Policy Studies 57 Chicago boys 65, 66 Chicago School 62 Chile 181n. 10 neoliberalism in 65, 66 China English language in 9, 16 neoliberalism in 51 Chun, Christian 26, 50 citizenship as feeling 104 as practice 104 as status 104 civic inequality 150 class consciousness 56, 86–​7 classes 8, 9–​10, 85–​9 formations of 86–​7 indexing of 3 and Leninism 86 and living conditions 36–​7 and Marxism 85–​7, 96 quantifiation and categorization 96–​101 as specialized occupation 87 warfare, neoliberalism as 70 classical liberalism 57 class interests 86–​7 class practices 86–​7 class struggle and class warfare 86–​7, 137, 138–​41, 164–​8 class struggle, definition of 140 corrupt discourse 157–​63 and Critical Discourse Studies 143–​6 Partido Popular (PP) 146–​7, 150 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) 1, 146, 147–​9 post-​truth politics 163–​4 classtalk 143–​5, 152–​3

219

Index Cobb, Jonathan 95, 146 ‘CO-​CREATION-​01-​2017: Education and skills: empowering Europe’s young innovators’ 125 Codó, Eva 16 coercion, and power 70 Cohen, R. 183n. 1 cold war 62 Coleman, James 12 Collège de France 108–​9 Collins, Carly 181n. 11 Collins, Jim 13 Colloque Walter Lippmann 56–​7 commodification of labour 61–​2 common good 111 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 96, 137 Comparative Study of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations 97 Competition and entrepreneurship (Kirzner) 113 Comprendre les salaries français en 6leçons (Understanding French employees in 6 lessons) 118 Condition of the working class in England, The (Engels) 36, 37 consent, and power 70 conspicuous consumption 89 constellation of dimensions model 91, 92–​4, 139 consumption patterns, and class 88–​9 contrasts, and classtalk 144, 152 Cooke, Hannah 128 Copson, Andrew 33 correspondence principle 74 corrupt discourse 157–​63 corruption, definition of 157–​8 cosmopolitanism 9, 10 Cospedal, Maria Dolores de 151, 152–​ 3, 154, 159–​60, 162 Coulmas, Florian 1, 5–​6 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 23–​6 Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 23–​6, 138, 141–​3, 165–​8 and class warfare 143–​6 critical realism 45–​6 critical sociolinguistics 172–​3, 176 Crititcal Discourse Analysis (CDA) 166 Crouch, Colin 72

219

Cuando tu pareja es tu mejor arma (When your partner is your best weapon) (Fernández) 131 cultural capital 89 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey 97 Culture and economy in the age of social media (Fuchs) 49 Culture, class, distinction (Bennett) 97–​8 culture, commodification of 21 cutbacks, government spending 54, 71 Danielle, Swedish ‘digital nomad’ 135 Dardot, Pierre 55, 64, 69, 70, 72, 106, 113 Davies, William 124 deficit spending 53 delegitimization 145–​6, 156 democracy 53, 60 democratization, and neoliberalism 53 demonization 145–​6 denigration 145–​6 deregulation, and neoliberalism 53, 64, 71 devolution, and neoliberalism 53 dialectical materialism 35 Digital labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs) 49 discourse-​historical approach 142 Discourse on the origin of inequality (Rousseau) 78–​9 discourses, definition of 142 Discourses of capitalism: Everyday economists and the production of public discourses, The (Chun) 50 disenfranchisement, ethnolinguistic diversity 18 Distinction (Bourdieu) 89 division of labour 2 domains, intersectionality across 91 ¿Donde está el limte? (Where is the limit?) (Ajram) 130, 132 double truth doctrine 67–​8 Drucker, Peter 113 DuBord, Elise 20 Duménil, Gérard 70, 77, 140 Durkheim, Emile 37–​8, 87 Eagleton, Terry 68 Eckert, Penny 8

220

220

Index

Economic and philosophic manuscripts (Marx) 35 economic anthropology 38 economic crisis vii–​viii economic inequality 77 economic orthodoxy 58, 64 economic orthodoxy in West Germany 64 economics definition of 41–​2 field of 37–​9 Nobel Prizes in 65 Economics of Language (EL) 1, 17–​20 economic stratification 80 Édito, Niveau B2, 2nd edn. (Brillant et al.) 116–​18 Édito, Niveau B2, 3rd edn. (Heu and Mabilat) 118 education, neoliberalization of 73–​4 Eells, Kenneth 96 Einstein, Albert 19 Elias, Norbert 111 elite closure 12 elites 84 and neoliberalism 56 elitism 22–​3 El pequ ño libro de la superación personal (A little book on personal improvement) (Ajram) 131 EL research 17–​20 empowerment 127–​8 enculturated symbolic economies 22 Engels, Friedrich vii, viii, 32–​3, 37, 68, 85, 137, 154, 164 on human condition 36–​7 influence on Marx 36 English class origins 7 global spread of 7 ‘English divide’ 8–​13 ‘English frenzy’ 9 English-​language immersion programmes 11 English-​language textbooks 116 English-​medium programmes 11 Enigma of capital, The (Harvey) 49 entrepreneur 112–​13 Ajram’s definition 132

and education 123–​4 industrial entrepreneur 112 and innovation 113, 128–​9 and law 121–​4 in Spain 121–​2 traits of 113 entrepreneurial actors 108 entrepreneurialism 124, 125 entrepreneurial partners 128 entrepreneurship 105 and education 124 epistemic fallacy 46 epistemological break, of Marx 34–​5 epistemology 44–​6 era of globalization 43 Eriksson, Göran 144–​5, 146 escraches 146, 149–​50, 162 response to 151–​5 esteem, and class 89 estrangement of man from man 36 ethnolinguistic diversity 18–​19 ethnolinguistic factionalization 18 European Commission 124–​5, 127 Horizon 2020 105, 134 examples, and classtalk 144, 152 exchange 32, 33 existential inequality 81, 150, 165 explanations, and classtalk 144, 152 extramural linguistic activity 2 Fairclough, Norman 24, 25, 141–​2, 165–​6 Fernandez Díaz, Jorge 156–​7 Fernández, Sulaika 131 fictitious commodities 61 fields 89–​90 financialization 62, 140, 175 financial stratification 80 Fink, Ben 66 Fish, Will 163–​4 Fleming, Peter 109, 128 Floriano, Carlos 161–​2, 189n. 12 Foley, Douglas 8 footloose capitalism 71 Forchtner, Bernhard 153 foreign-​language-​and-​culture learning 117 Foucault, Michel 27, 39, 56, 64, 69, 70, 103, 108–​9, 111–​12

221

Index Fourcade, Marion 40 Fraga, Manuel 154 Franklin, Benjamin 32 Fraser, Nancy 93, 173–​4 freedom 57, 60, 65–​6, 67, 68 free market 51 fundamentalism 58–​9 and social market economy 64–​5 free-​trade 51 French, in Canada 13 French-​language learners 105 French-​language textbooks 105, 130, 134 105, 116–​121, 134 French workers 118 Friedman, Milton 58, 62–​3, 65–​6, 70, 107–​8, 130, 131 Fuchs, Christian 15, 49 Fuhui Tong 9 Galbraith, John Kenneth 65 Gallego, Aina 163 Gal, Susan 1, 4 Ganar en bolsa es posible (Winning on the stock market is possible) (Ajram) 131 Gao, Andy 9–​10 Garcia, Saúl vii Gazzola, Michele 20 Gee, James Paul 1, 6 generalizations, and classtalk 144, 153 GfK 98, 99 Giddens, Anthony 170 gifts, and inequality 82 Gill, Stephen 106 Ginsburgh, Victor 18 Gintis, Herbert 12, 74 globalization 43 Global Political Economy (GPE) 42–​3 definition of 43 Goldstein, Tara 17 gonzo sociology 171 Good society, The (Lippmann) 56 Gorz, André 87–​8 government functions of 52–​3 spending 63 Gramsci, Antonio 69–​70 Gray, John 39, 105, 114, 116–​17, 169

221

Great British Class Survey (GBCS) 97, 99 greatest-​happiness principle 79 Great transformation, The (Polyani) 61 Grin, François 17, 18, 19–​20 Grusky, David 76, 82–​4, 150 Gunnarsson, Brit-​Louise 26 Halbwachs, Maurice 87 Han, Clara 181n. 10 Harvey, David 27, 37, 44, 49, 51, 68, 70, 90, 140, 141, 174–​5 Hayek, Friedrich 43, 57, 59–​60, 62, 65, 70, 107 Heath, Shirley Brice 8 hegemony 69–​70 Heller, Monica 8, 13, 14, 15, 21, 172 Herat, Manel 15 Heritage Foundation 57 Herzog, Benno 71 heteroglossia 142 Heu, Élodie 117–​18 Hidden injuries of class, The (Sennett and Cobb) 95 HIJOS 187n. 3 historicism 180n. 5 History of the English working class, The (Thompson) 94–​5 Hoggart, Richard 94 Holborow, Marnie 1, 6, 7, 14, 24–​5, 26, 39, 50, 56, 68, 90–​1, 109, 121, 127, 134, 165 homo economicus 110–​11, 112 homo oeconomicus 28, 38–​9 Horizon 2020 124–​30 Horwitz, Irving 171, 190n. 2 housing market, and inequality 82 Hull, Glynda 1 Hülsmann, Jörg Guido 58 human capital theory 110–​11 human geography 49 humanism 33–​7 elements of 33 Humanism: The wreck of western culture (Carroll) 33 Hume, David 62 Hunt, Tristram 36 Hymes, Del 4, 172–​3

222

222

Index

icon, entrepreneurship 134 ideology definition of 68 and neoliberalism 68–​9 Iglesias, Pablo 133 impoverishment, society-​wide 82, 105, 139 incentives 41 indexing social class 3 India, English language in 11 Indignados movement, Spain 155 individualism 57, 59, 175 individualization 184n. 2 Indonesia, English language in 11 inequality vi–​viii, 67, 78–​85 class struggle and class warfare, see class struggle and class warfare distributive perspective 80 increase in 76–​7 relational perspective 80 Institute of Economic Affairs 57 intellectual leadership, and power 70 interdiscursivity 142–​3 International Political Economy (IPE) 42–​3 intertextuality 142 intranational inequality 77 Irish Times, The 127 Irvine, Judith 1, 2–​4, 5, 8, 14, 74 Islamophobia 76 Japan, English language in 10–​11 Jaworski, Adam 21–​3 J. P. Morgan 133 Kamwangamalu, Nkonko 12 Kant, Immanuel 43 Keister, Lisa 80 Keynesian economics 53 Keynesianism 135 Keynesian social democratic consensus (de facto or conscious) 77, 81 Keynes, John Maynard 53 Kirzner, Israel 113, 132 Klein, Naomi 184n. 3 knowledge economy 7 Korea, English language in 9 Kristeva, Julia 142

Krzyzanowski, Michal 23 Kubota, Ryuko 10–​11 Ku, Manwai 76, 82–​4, 150 labour agricultural 32 alienation of 35–​6 commodification of 61–​2 price, in free market 59 Labov, William 2, 4, 12 LaDousa, Chaise 11, 16 land, as private property 62 landlords 85 language as commodity 5–​6 conflation with qualities and skills 15–​16 denotational and representational functions of 2–​3 economics of 17–​20 and gender 7 indexical nature of 3 and money homology 5 and social differentiation 3–​4 and tourism 20–​3 in workplace 14–​17 Language and economy (Coulmas) 1, 5 Language and neoliberalism (Holborow) 50 languages commodification 5, 14 cost and value in multilingual settings 6 language teaching 6 Lankshear, Colin 1 Lash, Scott 39 La solución. El método Ajram (The Ajram Method) (Ajram) 130 late capitalism viii Laval, Christian 55, 64, 69, 70, 72, 106, 113 Laws, The, Book V 78 League for the Fifth International 41, 42 Leclerc, Jean-​Jacques 178n. 1 leisure class 89 Lemke, Michael 64, 108–​9 Lenin, Vladimir 86 Leslie, Larry 39

223

Index Lévy, Dominique 70, 77, 140 liberal democracy 60 liberty 60 Limits to capital (Harvey) 49 Lippmann, Walter 56 Lising, Loy 17 Listen Yankee! (Mills) 171 living conditions of proletariat 36–​7 London School of Economics 57 Loomis, Erik 37 Lorente, Beatriz 15 Lorenzo, Antonio 149 los papeles de Bárcenas (the Bárcenas papers) 160 Lyle, Samantha 145 Mabilat, Jean-​Jacques 117–​18 Machiavelli, Niccolò 70, 164 macroeconomics 42 managerialism 7 market civilization, definition of 106 markets and government 68 and neoliberalism 58–​9, 60, 61, 64–​5, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73 subordination of politics and social relations to 61 market turn 65 Martin, Gonzalo Pozo 44 Marxism 7, 171, 178n. 1, 180n. 5 and economics 40–​1 and neoliberalism 70, 71 Marxist persuasion 80 Marxist philosophy of language, A (Leclerc) 178n. 1 Marxist political economy 33, 37–​8, 46–​7, 49 and humanism 34 Marxists, The (Mills) 171, 190n. 2 Marx, Karl vii, 14, 15, 32, 33, 37, 41, 44, 51, 68, 73, 79, 85–​6, 111, 130, 137, 140, 154, 164 on alienation of labour 35–​6 epistemological break of 34–​5 humanism of 34 influence of Engels on 36 material life conditions 93 mathematical modelling, and economics 40–​1

223

McCain, John 182n. 1 McCloughlin, Linda 15 McGill, Kenneth 14 media, and neoliberalism 56 Meeker, Marchia 96 mercantilist economics 32 methodological nationalism 43 microeconomics 41–​2 middle class 36, 70 middle-​class gaze 145 Milanovic, Branco 77 Mill, John Stuart 32, 79, 98 Mills, C. Wright 170–​2, 190n. 2 Mirowski 109, 181n. 9 Mirowski, Philip 55–​6, 66–​7, 68, 164, 178n. 3 mitigation, and classtalk 144, 153 money, trading of 62 Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) 57, 58, 60, 61, 62–​6 mood economy 95–​6, 117 Moore, Emma 13 moral corruption 157 moral inequality 79 moral leadership, and power 70 Mosco, Vincent 49 multilingualism 6, 18, 20, 21 Muñoz, Jordi 163 Myers-​Scotton, Carol 12 Myrdal, Gunnar 65 nation-​state 104 neoclassical economics 37, 109 alternative to 39–​42 neoliberal citizen 104, 135, 196–​10 French-​language users 116 self-​branded entrepreneur 115–​16 neoliberalism viii, 14, 15, 26, 47, 49–​50, 88, 105, 106, 139, 140, 166–​7, 174–​5 discourses of 109 as focus of attention in contemporary political economy 50–​5 as form of existence 106 influencers 57–​62 key characteristics of 66–​7 normativity of 69 policies 128

224

224

Index

rationalities 118, 121, 127 as rationality 106 rise of neoliberal thought 55–​7 rise to power of MPS spirit 62–​6 roll-​back stage of 53–​4 roll-​out stage of 54 stability of 52 use of term 51 as variegated phenomenon 51 Neoliberalism and applied linguistics (Block et al.) 50 neoliberal keywords 126 neoliberal regimes 124 neoliberal subject 103–​4 neoliberal thought collective (NTC) 55, 57, 66–​74 neoliberal values 126 New Deal 62 new economy viii New work order: Behind the language of the new capitalism, The (Gee et al.) 1, 6 NGOs 54 Niehaus, Laura 143 Nike slogan 127 Nobel Prizes in economics 65 ‘non-​class of non-​workers’ 88 non-​nationals 183n. 1 No sé dónde está el límite, pero sí sé dónde no está (I don’t know where the limit is, but I know where it isn’t) (Ajram) 130–​1 notion of human capital 105 novelty 129 Obama, Barack 76, 182n. 1 O'Brien, Robert 43 Offer, Avner 65, 181n. 9 off-​shorization 15–​16 and living conditions 37 and neoliberalism 72–​3 Ollion, Etienne 40 ontology 44–​6 Ordoliberalism 64 Organisation for Economic Co-​ operation and Development 123 Ortu, Claudia 143 Osler, Audrey 104 outsourcing

and neoliberalism 72–​3 Oxford Social Mobility Study of England and Wales, The 97 Palmer, Deborah 13 Park, Joseph 25, 27, 103 Parsons, Talcott 80 Partido Popular (PP) 132, 135, 137, 146–​7, 150, 151–​5, 156, 157, 160–​3, 164 Passeron, Jean-​Claude 12 Peck, Jamie 51, 53 Pemberton, Justin 101 performing plenty 23 Peters, Tom 114, 130 Petty, William 32 physical inequality 78–​9 physiocratic school of economics 32 Piketty, Thomas 77, 82, 84, 85, 101–​2 Piller, Ingrid 16, 17 Pinochet, Augusto 66 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) 137, 146, 147–​9, 150, 151–​3, 155, 157 Plato 78 Podemos 133, 155, 167 Polanyi, Karl 61–​2 Polanyi, Michael 57 political class and neoliberalism 56 political economy 31–​3 definition of 32–​3 and humanism 33–​7 international dimension 42–​4 Marxist 37–​9 ontology and epistemology 44–​6 political economy in sociolinguistics 2–​8, 26–​30 ‘English divide’ 8–​13 political inequality 79 Politics of English, The (Holborow) 1, 6 ‘Ponzi’ scandal, United States 141 Popper, Karl 57, 59, 60, 107, 180n. 5 positivism 37, 45 post-​feminism 76 postmodernism 25, 121 postnationalism 21 post-​racism 76 post-​structuralism 45–​6

225

Index post-​truth politics 163–​4 Poverty of historicism, The (Popper) 180n. 5 Poverty of philosophy, The (Marx) 35 power 69–​70, 175 and Global Political Economy 44 and inequality 80 Power elite, The (Mills) 190n. 2 ‘precariat’ citizens 84, 98, 100–​1 predator 135 predatory class 88–​9 preferentes scandal, Spain 141 prestige, and inequality 80 primitive accumulation 140 private property, inequality 79 privatization, and neoliberalism 54, 71 privileged international students 10 production 32, 33 and neoliberalism 71 proletariat 33, 34, 73 living conditions of 36–​7 public interest 111 public services, government finance for 54 Putnam, Robert 104–​5 Qing Shi 9 Quell(le) travailleur(-​euse) êtes-​vous? (‘Which worker are you?’) 118–​19 amateur worker 119 independent-​minded worker 118–​19 ‘lambda’ worker 119 model worker 119 productive worker 118–​19 Quesnay, François 32 Racine, Romain 116–​118 racism 167 Ramanathan, Vaidei 11 Rampton, Ben 12 Rand, Ayn 58, 108 Rappaport, Julian 128 rational action theory 38–​9, 110 rational choice theory (RCT) 105, 110 characteristics of 110 key assumptions of 110 rationality, neoliberalism as 69 Ravenhill, John 43

225

Reading Marx in the information age: A media and communication studies perspective on capital, Volume 1 (Fuchs) 49–​50 realm of distribution 93–​4 realm of recognition 93–​4 redistribution policies 53 regressive tax regimes 64, 71 Reich, Robert 7 renewal, and neoliberalism 53 representational repertoires 116 Republic, The, book IV 78 resource inequality 81–​2, 139, 165 Ressources Humaines (Human Resources) 118 revenue collection policies 63 Ricardo, David 32 Ricento, Tom 5, 27 Riemere, Inga 126 Riha, Tomas 31 Rise of the meritocracy, The (Young) 74 Rivza, Baiba 126 Road to serfdom, The (Hayek) 59, 60 roll-​back stage of neoliberalism 53–​4 roll-​out stage of neoliberalism 54 Roosevelt, Franklin 62 Ropke, Wilhelm 57 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 78–​9 Royal Swedish Academy of Science 65 Rubdy, Rani 12 Sabaté, Maria 16 Savage, Mike 91, 97, 98, 100–​1 Say, Jean Baptiste 32, 112 Schenker, Jean Charles 116–​18 scholastic fallacy 38–​9 Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life (Bowles & Gintis) 74 Schumpeter, Joseph 112, 127, 132, 184n. 3 scientific political economy 35 scientism 37 Scott, John 110 self-​branding 105, 113–​15 self-​help gurus 130 self-​interest, prototype for citizenship 107

226

226

Index

Sennett, Richard 95, 146 serial entrepreneur 120 Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism (Harvey) 49 Shin, Hyunjun 27 Silicon Valley 120 Silva, Jennifer 95–​6, 117, 146 Simmel, Georg 171 Simons, Henry 62, 179n. 2 Skegg, Beverley 145 Sklair, Leslie 10 Slade-​Brooking, Catharine 114–​15 Slaughter, Sheila 39 Smith, Adam 32, 37, 43, 46, 62, 73, 107, 179n. 2 functions of government 52–​3 legacy, myths surrounding 52 and neoliberalism 52 Snell, Julia 13 social capital 89 social class see classes Social class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status (Warner et al.) 96–​7 Social class in applied linguistics (Block) 50 social constructivism 46 social democracy, and neoliberalism 65 social differentiation, and language 3–​4 social entrepreneur 126–​127 ‘social entrepreneurialism’ 126, 130 socialism 57–​8, 60, 176 post-​Second World War 60 Social justice and the city (Harvey) 49 social liberal stance 117 social market economy 64–​5 Social media: A critical introduction (Fuchs) 49 social mobility 84–​5 social reality 45–​6 Social structures of society, The (Bourdieu) 38 society, evolution of 111 sociolinguist 103, 135 sociological imagination 170–​2 Söderberg, Gabriel 65, 181n. 9 Sonntag, Selma 11 Southgate, Darby 80

Spaces of global capitalism (Harvey) 49 Spain 146, 164–​8 class struggle 137–​8 continuation of class struggle 155–​7 economy 122 entrepreneurship 105 entrepreneurs’ law in 130 escraches 149–​50 escraches, response to 151–​5 government 122 labour reform law in 54–​5 law 124, 134 liberalization in 16 PAH see Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) post-​truth politics 163–​4 PP see Partido Popular (PP) Spanish 13 Springsteen, Bruce 131 standardization, ethnolinguistic diversity 18 Standing citizens 84 Standing, Guy 98, 100–​1 Starkey, Hugh 104 status, and inequality 88 Stedman-​Jones, Daniel 52, 57, 59, 62 stock broker, and qualities 132 strange non-​death of neoliberalism 72 stratification 76–​8 Stratification: Social Vision and Inequality (Bottero) 76 Streeck, Wolfgang 158, 175–​6 structures of feeling, individuals as 70, 95 students of the new global elite 10 superiority of economists 40 Switzerland 18 symbolic market place 21 symbols analysts 7 Taggart, Dagny 108 Takahashi, Kimie 16 Talani, Leila Simona 44 Tan, Peter 12 tax cuts 53 tax policies 64, 71 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 15 Taylorism 15

227

Index Taylor, Tiffany 143 Teesside 13 Terasawa, Takunori 8 territorial deregulation 72 textbooks 116–​21 Thatcher, Margaret 108, 134 Therborn, Göran 80–​1, 139, 148, 150 Thompson, E. P. 35, 94 Thurlow, Crispin 21–​3 TINA (there is no alternative) 56 Touraine, Alain 87 tourism, and language 20–​3 Traité d’économie politique (Say) 112 transformative recognition 174 transnational capitalist classes 10 Trudgill, Peter 12 Trump, Donald 3, 163–​4, 182n. 1 Tupas, Ruanni 12 Turgeon, Briana 143, 146, 152 Turgot, Anne-​Robert Jacques 32 Twitter 3 Ullared 144–​6 unemployment 105 causes of 122 and neoliberalism 54–​5 Unger, Johann 24 United Kingdom education system in 73 neoliberalism in 62 outsourcing/​off-​shorization in 72 United States education system in 73, 74 neoliberalism in 62–​3, 65 University of Chicago 57 Urciuoli, B. 16 Urry, John 39 utility principle 79 utopianism, socialist 60

227

Vandrick, Stephanie 10 variegated neoliberalism 33 varieties of capitalism 33, 51 Veblen, Thorsten 37, 38, 88–​9, 134–​5 vital inequality 81–​2, 139, 150, 165 von Mises, Ludwig 57–​9, 60, 62, 70, 107, 113, 132 as free market libertarian 59 vulgar economics 41 wage-​labourers 85 Warner, Loyd 96 wealth, and inequality 80 Wealth of nations, The (Smith) 52 Weberian sociology 87–​8 Weber, Max 80, 87, 111 Weber, Shlomo 18 Weedon, Chris 142 West Germany, economic orthodoxy in 64 Wickström, Bengt-​Arne 20 Williams, Marc 43 Williams, Raymond 26, 94 Wodak, Ruth 142, 153, 158–​9 working class see proletariat ‘working poor’ citizens 84 workplace, language in 14–​17 Wright, Eric Olin 86–​7, 91, 140 xenophobia 167 Young, Michael 74 YouTube 130, 134 Zentz, Lauren 11 Zhang, Haixin 126 Zhang, Jun 51 Zhang, Mengying 126 Zhang, Q. 16 Žižek, Slavoj 72

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