State and economy

Pace the horrors of war and imperialism, the last four hundred years have expanded governmental protections of populations from what Thomas Hobbes described as ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ life (n.d., Chapter XIII). The changes occurred across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because productivity and health were linked to environment and geography via state research, measurements, estimates, forecasts, and plans (Foucault, 2004, p. 245).

Controlling territory became a secondary priority for governments, behind understanding and controlling material things and social relations. People displaced princes as sites for accumulating power under the sign of ‘the economy’, an anthropomorphized place of social intervention and achievement that could be comprehended statistically. Cities, countries, and empires substituted for households, with all the hierarchical dislocation that implies. The tasks of government were increasingly conceived and actualized in terms of climate, disease, education, industry, finance, custom, and disaster – literally, a concern with life and death, and what could be calculated and managed between them. Wealth and wellbeing became goals to be attained through the disposition of capacities across the population and ‘biological existence was reflected in political existence’. The ‘imperative of health’ was ‘the duty of each and the objective of all’. Bodies were identified with politics, because managing them was part of running countries and empires, with ‘the life of the species … wagered on its own political strategies’. This biopower brought ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’, making ‘knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 143; Foucault, 1991a, pp. 92–95, 97; Foucault, 1991b, p. 4).

An emergent capitalism was articulated to the modern state’s desire to deliver a docile and healthy labor force to business; but not only to business, and not merely in a way that showed the lineage of that desire. Cholera, sanitation, and prostitution were figured as problems for governments to address through ‘the emergence of the health and physical well-being of the population in general as one of the essential objectives of political power’. The entire ‘social body’ was assayed and treated in the name of ‘efficiency’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 241).

So even as Revolutionary France was embarking on a régime of slaughter, public-health campaigns were also underway (Foucault, 1991b, p. 277). And while the UK Parliament considered the Reform Bill of 1832 that definitively denied the vote to women, 30,000 died from cholera. Brought back from imperial outposts, the disease raced through factories assigned to manufacture goods from plundered resources. As doctors tried to explain what was happening, where, and to whom, they introduced what became epidemiology and associated interventions (Dorling, 2013). In 1853, the British Parliament enacted legislation requiring smallpox vaccinations for children, a landmark in the uptake of medical knowledge, regulation of the body politic – and muddle-headed anti-vaccine protest (Synnott, 2002).

Karl Polanyi referred to a ‘discovery of society’ in the nineteenth century: the moment when paupers came to be marked as part of the social world, and hence deserving of attention and aid (2001). Collective wellbeing was progressively incorporated into national identity via rights, problems, statistics, and laws. Science and government combined in new environmental-legal relations under the sign of civic management and economic productivity. Achille Guillard invented ‘demography’ in the 1850s, merging ‘political arithmetic’ with ‘political and natural observations'. The new knowledge codified reproduction, ageing, migration, public health, and ecology (Fogel, 1993, pp. 312–313). Biopower reinvigorated Europe while it colonized and pauperized the rest of the world.

Over the next eighty years, ‘Western’ society was held to be simultaneously the incarnation of the market and its transcendence. Along came public education, mothers’ pensions, and US Civil-War widows’ benefits; and with the Great Depression, some level of social security. The crisis of the 1930s and the diffusion of Keynesianism ushered ‘the economy’ into popular knowledge as an entity with needs and emotions (Arminen, 2010). From that time, ‘it’ began to thrive and suffer in bodily and emotional ways as if it were a person, and hence subject to biopolitical evaluation and intervention. Press attention shifted from relations between producers and consumers of goods onto relations between different material products of labor – a change in emphasis from use-value to exchange-value (Emmison, 1983; Emmison & McHoul, 1987).

During the Second World War, with the Depression still wreaking havoc on everyday life, industrialized democratic states of the Global North effectively said to young proletarian men: ‘we are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 216). That guarantee was kept for decades. Keynesian reconstruction from 1945 to 1973 developed the welfare state across Western Europe and the US, alongside expanded unions, wages, higher education, and civil rights, albeit on an unequal basis in terms of place and social identity. Wealth was redistributed downwards and governments maintained demand and manipulated interest rates to keep economies buoyant.

The 1960s saw a rich proliferation of radical protest emerging from new social movements. They were founded on relative affluence, an embrace of difference and equality, an unpopular war, pan-African resistance, and the suddenly international and instantaneous demotic spread of freedom symbols through television, film, and music, from El Che’s beret to Easy Rider’s motorbikes. Britain withdrew from East of Suez; looked as though it might recognize that its tyranny had faded and failed, as per the disasters of Suez, Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus; and decided to join Europe. The US War in VietNam was opposed by millions of its citizens and a ‘Great Society’ was promised. Third World revolution was in the air. The 1970s were set to be the moment when the Global North’s spirited rebellions of the previous decade might find fulfillment, and the Global South’s struggles for independence, too.

Instead, fashion and music rapidly became more corporate, drugs more ruinous, hypocrisy more blatant – and prosperity’s basis in cheap oil exposed and compromised. Prior successes had been predicated on a seemingly endless and undamaging supply of cheap energy and the ongoing preparedness of corporations to share the profits of the labor and material they controlled with (some of) their First World employees. Once oil prices leapt following cartel action from the Global South in 1973, unemployment and inflation soared across the Global North. In retrospect, it is clear that Western Europe and the US were, ironically, oil states, in that their domestic and international political power relied on it (Mitchell, 2011).

There was a sense of disaster throughout the First World, of rising unemployment and inflation, of booming interest rates, of failed generational change. Capital took this as an opportunity for governmental action to control wage increases and redistribute wealth upwards. It has been thus ever since. For five decades, the ensuing neoliberal ideology has underpinned economic policy in most of the world, further stimulated by the waning of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe from 1989 and the emergence of a massive reserve army of labor in China since 2000, when the global pool of workers doubled virtually overnight (Shepherd & Stone, 2013).

Will this reserve army of labor become endless expansive across nations as workers’ expectations rise? And will the environment survive this seemingly unending lust for growth? These are questions that true believers fail to ask, let alone answer.