“You’re a fairly pure Benthamite utilitarian. Is that correct?” asked libertarian economist Tyler Cowen. “That’s correct,” responded his podcast guest, Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced former crypto billionaire. Having made billions of dollars before turning 30 by running a cryptocurrency exchange which has since collapsed amid charges of fraud, Bankman-Fried was almost equally famous for his avowed philosophical beliefs, which include supporting the Effective Altruism movement. “Given that that’s the case, as I see it, the replacement costs of human life are pretty low,” Cowen continued. “So why then should we ever spend a whole lot of money on life extension since we can just replace people pretty cheaply? We can grow utils more easily than save them, is another way to put it.” “Yes, I agree,” Bankman-Fried replied (“Sam Bankman-Fried on Arbitrage and Altruism” In Conversations with Tyler, ep. 145, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/).
This conversation—in which wealthy defenders of capitalism openly avow their belief that life is cheap and people can easily be replaced—practically seems designed in a lab to support the arguments in Neil Vallelly’s spirited, polemical book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness. Vallelly sees a world in which the rich get their way and the rest of us are stuck dealing with “the existential futility of neoliberal life” (p. 5)—the pervasive feeling that the work we have to perform is meaningless and efforts to change this are doomed. Vallelly argues that, despite its roots in progressive social reform, utilitarianism paved the way for this arrangement and was transformed in the process. He writes that “the practice of utility maximization, far from pushing us towards a more egalitarian society, has ultimately trapped us in a destructive relationship with capital. Utilitarianism has flipped into futilitarianism” (p. 3). By this, Vallelly means that the language of maximizing benefit and usefulness is now used to justify institutions and policies that require us to perform pointless tasks to survive. As he puts it, “many of us maximize utility to ends that are useless to the greater wellbeing of society, often just to secure some semblance of individual survival. I describe this entrapment as … the futilitarian condition” (p. 3). Exemplifying this for Vallelly are adjunct lecturers trying to stay in academia by shouldering unmanageable teaching loads while desperately trying to publish research.
In this “critique of everyday neoliberal life” (p. 19), the concept of “futility” operates like an empty signifier, tying together a diverse array of phenomena including exploitation, alienation, and climate despair with the aim of forging shared identification with what Vallelly calls the “futilitariat.” The books accordingly ranges widely. Chapter 1 offers a partial history of utilitarianism’s relationship to capitalism, while Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how discourses of human capital and personal responsibility contribute to the futilitarian condition. Chapter 4 considers how neoliberalism has produced an experience of futility in communication. Chapter 5 critiques those who see ethical consumption as a form of political action against neoliberalism. Chapter 6 argues that government action in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic did more to shore up neoliberalism than undermine it, as some had hoped. The conclusion offers Vallelly’s own account of what is to be done, arguing that our common experiences of futility can ironically provide a basis for hope.
Vallelly’s book offers an illuminating new angle on neoliberalism for those familiar with the critical literature and a useful synthesis of existing work for those who aren’t; he builds on and incorporates work by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Jodi Dean, Nancy Fraser, and David Graeber, among others (though I wish there was an engagement with Lauren Berlant’s account of cruel optimism, which offers another approach to some of these phenomena). Vallelly describes the book as “an attempt to give a name to those feelings and thoughts we encounter on a daily basis” (p. 149), and his language will likely resonate with those frustrated by the apparent impasse we face in combatting contemporary economic injustice; those readers who don’t experience futility amid neoliberalism may find that the book does not address them.
Even sympathetic readers may find the book’s picture of the present exaggerated, however. For example, Vallelly claims that since the political ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s, “[a] new human has emerged in the ensuing decades, whose subjectivity must always be sanctioned by its market relevance” (p. 10). Similarly, he asserts that “the art of self-branding has … become the dominant mode of being-in-the-world for the majority of citizens in Western democracies” (p. 60). I’m a believer in Adorno’s slogan that “Only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth” but I worry that by making neoliberalism seem entrenched at the level of ontology, such totalizing claims do more to obscure political possibilities than to reveal them. Vallelly’s claims about neoliberalism also sometimes overstate its novelty; changes in the way we talk about capitalism are assumed to be significant changes in the operation of capitalism. For example, he writes about the concept of human capital, “Where we were once exploited by the owners of the means of production, we are now also exploited by ourselves” (p. 61). Vallely productively draws on Foucault’s analysis of human capital discourse to think through neoliberal subjectivity, but suggesting that self-exploitation is a practice new to neoliberalism overlooks Foucault’s own insight in Discipline and Punish that the internalization of surveillance and exploitation has always been central to capitalist production.
Finally, I wonder if futility is as capacious an umbrella for anti-capitalist resistance as Vallelly hopes. Arguing that the language of futility can produce “a unitary political subject” (p. 181), he writes, “If you feel trapped in a job that pays well but feels pointless, then you have something in common with the migrant worker who flits between jobs and worries about their immigration status. If you suspect that your zero-waste and organic lifestyle is miniscule in the face of climate change, then you have something in common with the climate refugee” (p. 178). But is having this in common enough to create shared identity and agency, given what’s not shared and other interests that may conflict? Even the experience of futility may vary wildly among these groups. Do sweatshop workers in the Global South and adjunct lecturers in the Global North experience futility in a sufficiently similar way to ground a coalition? Is the futility experienced by a minoritized job seeker turned away because of racial discrimination sufficiently similar to the futility of a white professional stuck in a “bullshit job”? Early on, Vallelly offers the caveat that “of course, it is also essential to note that these experiences of futility are differentially distributed across the social sphere, depending on a host of identifiers such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality” (p. 15). Yet the political significance of these forms of difference are not much discussed in the book. Vallelly’s book is rich enough that one is left thinking these questions are worth exploring, even if it does not itself try to answer them.
Vallelly’s book is thus read profitably alongside the outstanding edited volume Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South, which delves deeply into how neoliberalism has operated outside of the major economic centers of the Global North. In contrast to the predominant scholarly approach, which emphasizes how neoliberal policies are imposed on the world by the United States and Europe with legitimating ideologies diffusing from the center to the periphery alongside them, the chapters collected here trace the different ways that neoliberal advocates have mobilized local intellectual and cultural resources around the world. Unlike stories of Reagan and Thatcher sweeping into office with mandates to roll back regulations, here we encounter neoliberals trying and sometimes failing to navigate circumstances in which the transition to a liberal market economy is not preordained.
The result illuminates dimensions of neoliberalism that are obscured by approaches that exaggerate its coherence or see it only as a homogenizing force. As editors Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe observe in their introduction, “neoliberal thinkers themselves contested the idea of a single universal homo economicus and advocated for hybrid versions of market rationality and tradition or liberalism and conservatism, in addition to genuinely novel ideas and concepts” (p. 12). Instead of seeing these as local variations on what already happened in the Global North, Slobodian and Plehwe argue that these varied politics show paths the Global North may yet go down itself. As they put it, “neoliberalism is often most radical when it travels farthest from the ‘heartland’ of the industrialized North and West” (p. 17).
Some of the adaptations discussed are indeed quite literal; Esra Elif Nartok describes how Turgut Özal employed a direct Turkish translation of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “There Is No Alternative” during his time as Prime Minister of Turkey (p. 85). In other cases, there was direct diffusion; Isabella M. Weber and Jeremy Walker respectively note how important Milton Friedman’s speaking tours were in China (p. 151) and Australia, where he came straight from advising Pinochet in Chile (p. 200). Even here, though, there are surprising insights, as in Walker’s argument that the Australian case reveals “the rise of the environmental movement” as “a crucial catalyst” for neoliberalism (p. 198).
In other cases, the contributors uncover underappreciated local forms of market liberalism that preceded contact with prominent neoliberals, as in Aditya Balasubramanian’s chapter on India and Tobias Rupprecht’s chapter on Russia. Other chapters show neoliberals using local cultural resources in novel ways as they struggled for hegemony. Reto Hofmann’s chapter on Japan shows how neoliberalism’s cosmopolitanism can be compatible with ardent nationalism. Antina von Schnitzler’s chapter on South Africa lays bare how neoliberalism, and Hayek’s thought in particular, was deployed to provide new cultural justifications for apartheid.
While Market Civilizations largely focuses on elite networks, which could make neoliberalism appear to be exclusively a top-down phenomenon, many chapters elucidate its grassroots support. For example, Jimmy Casas Klausen and Paulo Chamon’s chapter on Brazil crucially focuses on the appeal of neoliberalism and ultraliberalism in youth culture—a crucial corrective for views that see neoliberalism as unrelentingly joyless. Any approach to resisting neoliberalism that doesn’t examine how young people could be genuinely excited about it is doomed to fail.
Market Civilizations also undermines totalizing visions of neoliberalism as all-powerful, with several chapters showing us neoliberal intellectuals and policy advocates as marginal political actors who did not drive events. Lars Mjøset’s chapter on Iceland amusingly punctures the pretensions of one Hayekian public intellectual whose efforts are shown to be largely superfluous while Rupprecht provocatively argues that Russia’s rapid privatization of state resources was driven not by the strength but the weakness of neoliberals, who had to make deals with well-connected elites to gain support for marketization.
If the book has a flaw, it is its ironic lack of biographical information about its contributors, which would allow us to better trace this burgeoning network of excellent anti-neoliberal scholars.
