Hayek's Maze: The Ideological Construction of “Workfare,” and Other Members of Late Capitalism's “Problem Family”

Abstract

The ideological construction of key “neoliberal” concepts — particularly workfare, but also globalization, underclass and “neoliberalism” itself — reveals that these terms emerge from, and further support, the ideology of late capitalism. These, and related terms such as “social movements” and “human capital,” (un-coincidentally) mirror and disrupt the key historical materialist concepts of exploitation, the reserve army of labor, the enduring capitalist world-market, capitalist ideology, social class and economic capital. A program of critical “reconstruction” has the potential to re-embed analyses within a clear historical materialist perspective, and so counter the academic “Stockholm Syndrome” that has seen even theorists critical of “neoliberalism” nevertheless often act as replicators of late capitalism's core ideological mechanism of distraction (capture within “Hayek's Maze”): an unjustified focus on empirical units at the expense of systemic interconnectivity.