Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age

Abstract

Under the current reign of neoliberalism, the US has entered a New Gilded Age, more savage and anti-democratic than its predecessor. The current form of market fundamentalism demands a new set of conceptual and analytical tools that engage neoliberalism not only through an economic optic but also as a mode of rationality, governmentality, and public pedagogy. The essay develops a biopolitics of neoliberalism, exploring how it uses market values as a template for realigning corporate power and the state, but also how it produces modes of consent vital to the construction of a neoliberal subject and a more ruthless politics of disposability. Within this new form of neoliberal rationality and biopolitics – a political system actively involved in the management of the politics of life and death – new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and intersection of race and class.