The holy family: Neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the current far-right: Interview with Melinda Cooper

Della Torre:

Your work is characterized by a very creative tension between Marxism and feminism, bringing class, gender, and race to the center of the Marxist analysis. Could you tell us about your academic trajectory? ¹

Cooper:

My trajectory is not very linear in part because I am eclectic in my interests but also because of the reality of academic labor. For a long time, I worked on casual research and teaching contracts across disciplines, so I adopted a very transdisciplinary approach. My background was in the humanities—I was interested in French and Italian political philosophy, in particular the encounter between Deleuze and Guattari and Italian autonomist Marxism, which I studied in France under the supervision of the feminist philosopher Françoise Duroux. I was very interested in how Deleuze and Guattari centered the question of genealogy in Marx’s work, although obviously they are not particularly feminist theorists. I then returned to Australia and England for a few years and became much more of a social scientist, focusing on the biomedical sciences and pharmaceutical industry, always with a focus on the period since the 1970s which coincided with the shift from a Keynesian Fordist capitalism to a neoliberal or post-Keynesian capitalism. I always felt that the intersections of race, class, and gender were key to this transitional period and so key to understanding our present “neoliberal” moment, but it took me a while to be able to conceptualize this. In the long run, I think it was through thinking about the politics of Welfare—its constraints and possibilities—that I was able to weave together my earlier conceptual interests around Marxism and the question of genealogy with a more historically informed take on our present moment.

Della Torre:

In your most recent book, Family Values—Between Neoliberalism and New Social Conservatism (Cooper, 2019), you argue that “it would be a mistake to think that neoliberalism is any less invested in the family than are social conservatives” and that we are nowadays experiencing the result of a convergence between neoliberal and neoconservative politics. How did that happen? What were the main vectors of this process?

Cooper:

At one level, neoliberals want to subject all social relations to the private contract relation, that is, to monetize everything that was maintained outside the market under a Fordist division of labor, in which women’s work inside the family unit was not directly waged. This is most clearly demonstrated by the “new household economics” of Gary Becker, who contemplated the creation of markets in love, kidneys, adopted babies, etc. By extension, neoliberals wanted to subject “human services” under the welfare State to market logics as well—hence the push to privatize or contract out State welfare services or replace public schools with school vouchers. But there was a tension here. Even as they dismantled the welfare State, neoliberals also expected many of the care functions previously performed by the welfare State to be taken up inside the family, most of the time by women.

Women bear the burden of this contradiction under neoliberalism. At the same time as they are expected to work outside the home for a direct wage, they are expected to keep working inside the home for no wage—a contradiction that can only be “resolved” by failing at one or the other, or by delegating part of this work to poorer women. For this reason, neoliberals are very much invested in the idea of “family responsibility”—by which they mean the unpaid responsibility of private households to ensure risk, provide health care and pay for the education of children and the elderly. The difference between this and the family wage system of Fordism is that neoliberal States don’t subsidize the delegation of “welfare functions” to women via the male breadwinner wage. In many ways, neoliberalism enforces familial and marital relations—particularly when it comes to the income and asset poor—in much the same way that Fordist paternalism did, but it no longer subsidizes them through the redistributive mechanism of the male wage.

Neoliberals and neoconservatives establish a working relationship over the question of “family responsibility.” Both perspectives need to enforce the non-contractual obligations of family in some way, albeit for different reasons—for neoliberals, family acts as a necessary alternative to the welfare State and a ballast to the free-market, whereas for neoconservatives, family is the unquestioned foundation of all social order. Neoliberals tend to be much less normative about the kind of family form that needs to be enforced (monogamous or not, “legitimated” by marriage or not, heterosexual or other), whereas social conservatives are typically invested in a particular kind of family. The convergence isn’t perfect, but it was strong enough to bring neoliberals and neoconservatives together around the Reagan revolution. Since then, the alliance has been a mainstay of Democratic and Republican social policy in the United States.

This is my account of the logical reasons for the convergence between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. In practice, it is difficult to find a neoliberal or social conservative as ideal type; except in academia, many neoliberals are also social conservatives and don’t experience this as an intellectual contradiction. Importantly, the convergence crosses political, and party divides. President Clinton’s “communitarianism” was also a form of social conservatism, and Clinton was more successful than Reagan in introducing marriage promotion policies as part of welfare reform.

By the way, there is an important historical corollary to this argument which implies that we have often misinterpreted the nature of free-market or laissez-faire liberalisms as they have existed in the past. The principle of “family responsibility” was an important part of the poor law tradition as established in seventeenth-century England. It was later integrated into classical liberalism as a way of disciplining the poor and unwaged. But political theory, even from the left, repeatedly forgets this detail and depicts classical liberalism as a regime of “personal responsibility” focused only on the individual. Arguably economic liberalism has always relied on the principle of “family responsibility” and has always had some working relationship with social conservatism.

Della Torre:

In Family Values, one finds a critique of a left that distinguishes between “the good distribution demands” and “the bad or less necessary identity politics” or the “aesthetic critique of capitalism.” One of the aims of your book, and please correct me if I am wrong, is to demonstrate how dualist and undialectical this approach is regarding the antiracist and feminist movements of the 1970s. Why do you think this is still operating on the left? Is it a theoretical problem, or is it a political one? Or both? Your argument also contradicts some discourses amidst the left, such as Nancy Fraser’s (this also makes an appearance in the Feminism for the 99% Manifesto—Arruzza et al., 2019), who bear the idea that neoliberalism is progressive and neoconservatism is regressive. What are the political and strategical consequences of this kind of analysis?

Cooper:

In recent years, part of the Marxist left has been working very hard to convince people that everything went wrong when the left started to think seriously about gender and race, which they characterize as frivolous identity politics. Some go further and argue that any kind of critical politics around gender and sexuality is tendentially neoliberal or capitalist. For example, a recent critique of Foucault’s work has tended to see his undoubted ambivalence toward neoliberalism as intimately connected to his queerness. Ironically, the implication here is that the socialist project must go together with a restoration of the normative family form that prevailed under Fordist capitalism.

Nancy Fraser has developed a self-consciously Marxist feminist version of this critique, which argues that mainstream feminism has been complicit with the rise of neoliberalism because it conceded to the defeat of the Fordist family wage. I interpret Fraser’s move as part of a more general tendency toward a kind of maternalist feminist position within some currents of social reproduction theory. The upshot seems to be that by demolishing the male breadwinner wage, feminism has contributed to a devalorization of women’s care work and an undermining of motherhood itself. What I find troubling about Fraser’s argument is the return to a normative position around women’s caring role. The work of mothers has always been both overvalorized and underpaid (the two go together). Women have not ceased to perform the bulk of unpaid care work, even when they also work outside the home, so surely the point is not to revalorize or subsidize this work in its current form, but to question the gendered division of care labor between “mothers” and “fathers” in the first place. As I read her, Fraser’s nostalgia for the Fordist family wage precludes a thorough questioning of this gendered division of labor even while she advances the socialist goal of paying for care work.

Della Torre:

The analysis of the AFDC program you conduct shows that one of the main points of convergence between neoliberalism and neoconservatism had to do with re-privatizing welfare, transferring the responsibility for reproduction (understood here in a large sense) from the State to the family. You also demonstrate that, in the middle of the HIV crisis in the 1980s, neoliberals defended gay marriage as a form of family accountability, that is, as a form of transferring the expenses of medical treatment from the State to the families. What kind of politics regarding the State should we have if we do not want to fall into the trap of welfare nostalgia?

Cooper:

Well, it’s complicated because I think we should absolutely fight for greater public spending on health, education, and welfare. I don’t think we can do without a radical fiscal politics of the left. There is not much to learn here from the classical revolutionary tradition, much of which existed prior to the mass redistribution of income by the 20th-century fiscal State, and Marxists have often rightfully been skeptical about the possibility of recuperation that goes along with social insurance. But I do feel that many of the struggles of the 1970s were developing a revolutionary fiscal politics that pushed the Keynesian welfare State beyond its limits. And there is something we can learn from this. The Polish economist Michal Kalecki was very prescient in this regard—he predicted that the expansion of public services and wages under Keynesianism would end up threatening the corporatist consensus between labor and capital and so would eventually be rejected by financial and business interests. But I think we can go further and argue that the breaking point occurred when women, migrants, and racial minorities challenged their position within the Fordist social contract.

Today we live in the long aftermath of the backlash against the Keynesian welfare State, so it is tempting for some on the left to simply want to go back there. And it’s likely that if any concessions from the State occur at this point, they will involve strenuous efforts to limit who is eligible for welfare and what kind of kinship forms will be supported. This is already visible in the way some governments are organizing wage subsidies and public services during the COVID-19 crisis. In Australia, for instance, childcare services were the first to lose their subsidies, women workers have disproportionately lost income, and migrant workers on temporary visas have been left with no government support whatsoever. You can be sure that any return to a social wage will be conditional upon some kind of normative family form. There are multiple pressure points here that could usefully be exploited if we want to prevent this from happening and push the State in another direction. The most obvious pressure point comes from the generalized nature of the crisis. COVID-19 is perhaps our first ecosystems crisis—a viral contagion that has made the whole economic system seize up. As such, everyone is implicated, and entire sectors of the working population have been thrust into a State of welfare dependence. This creates a new and broader constituency for State income support and makes it difficult to create invidious distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor—hence between deserving and underserving kinship relations. The second pressure point comes from the danger of leaving any one sector of the population overexposed to contagion. The non-citizen worker and the sex worker, for instance, pose a threat to everyone if they are not included in public health provisions. There is also the sheer force of radical dissent, such as we are seeing with the world uprisings around Black Lives Matter, which I suspect have as much to do with the labor and health inequalities revealed by COVID-19 as police violence. In the US, the slogan to “defund the police” has gone together with proposals to refund public health and education services.

Della Torre:

Concerning New Social conservatism, in your book you also discuss “faith-based welfare.” What is the role played by religion in the right-wing ascension nowadays? I guess part of the left is still very self-conscious concerning the critique of religion—which is a classic Marxist critique, by the way. There is always the concern of falling into elitism and the like. But the role played by religion, especially concerning gender, seems decisive today. In Brazil, we now have a Department of Family, and our minister defends policies such as sexual abstinence until marriage, among others. Should the new feminist Marxist left resume the critique of religion?

Cooper:

The feminist and Marxist left needs a critique of religion for the same reason that it has always needed a critique of the nation-State. Both are ways of organizing the reproduction of social life and the sexual division of labor by positing some collective order of descent and defending its boundaries. While nationalism has historically spoken the language of ethnos, race, and biological difference, the religious community speaks the language of faith and divine order. The dividing lines are never clear-cut, but, in many respects, religion has absorbed the nation-State as the form in which collective genealogy is imagined today. I don’t mean to imply that nationalism is dead (on the contrary) but rather that even contemporary nationalisms tend to speak the idiom of religious tradition in order to distinguish themselves from an alternative or prior nationalism that is imagined as tainted in some way by the forces of secularism or socialism or developmentalism, depending on the context. Hence, the transition to post-socialism in Eastern and Central Europe has seen the rise of new religious nationalisms, just as the decline of pan-Arabism and the developmental State in the Middle East and North Africa saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. We have also seen the spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic christianities in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Bolsonaro’s Pentecostal nationalism is just one instance of this. The rise of neoliberalism in the United States was inseparable from the creation of the “new religious right,” and this faction had a very strong hold over the Trump administration, via the Council for National Policy, even if Trump himself is not particularly religious.

This shift in political form is so strong that even a country such as Australia, which is often considered uniquely secular (mistakenly, I would argue) has now had two Prime Ministers in a row who come from the religious right: the first an orthodox Catholic opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage and the second a Pentecostal climate-change denier who is fixated on introducing “religious freedom” laws that would overturn the most basic protections against workplace discrimination. The generality of this shift, I think, can only be explained if we consider the material transformation of the social that has occurred during this time. In countries such as the US and Australia, the neoliberal project of “defunding the left” by thwarting the flow of public funds to progressive or simply secular institutions has been accompanied by a parallel drive to refund the right by redirecting public monies to faith-based service providers or institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.). The problem here is not only the immediate hold over social subjects that this gives to religious organizations, but also the growing influence of religious stakeholders in the making of public policy decisions and the increasing proportion of social service jobs that come under the authority of the church. This is the context in which courts and governments worldwide have introduced new “religious freedom” bills that seek to nullify anti-discrimination laws based on gender and sexuality. And I think this is also the larger context for the recent ascendancy of the religious far-right.

The far-right today takes many forms, and there are often divisions within the one far-right movement. Some currents are more focused on ethnic and religious differences—hence hatred of Muslims in particular, but also Copts, Hindus, Kurds, Jews, the Roma, and others, depending on the context. But the specifically religious far-right is very much focused on gender and sexuality, and here we find strong commonalities across ethnic and religious communities. I think the left has been less forward in developing a critique of and opposition to the religious far-right because it takes these issues less seriously than xenophobia. I think a large part of the left shares the assumption that the regulation of gender and sexuality is a domestic issue that should be resolved in-house. The problem with this stance is that the various religious fundamentalisms have themselves been actively organizing across national borders for many years now. The global movement against “gender theory”—which brings together Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Muslims—is a very prominent example of this, but only one example amongst many.

I suspect that today’s religious far-right is less historically exceptional than we assume. For example, the Catholic far-right played a very prominent role in early twentieth-century Europe, in countries such as France, Belgium, Romania, Spain, and Portugal. Still, its gender politics are not often incorporated into typologies of European fascism. I suspect that this is an oversight of the historical literature more than anything else.

With regard to the role of religion on the Latin American left, I would like to know how progressive liberation theology was with regards to women’s reproductive freedoms or homosexuality. The Christian Marxisms I am familiar with have not been particularly progressive on these issues—I would characterize them as conservative or maternalist socialisms—but I am no expert on liberation theology, so I would be interested in learning more.

It’s very important to puncture the “anti-elitist” argument you refer to as it is used again and again as a pretext for empathizing with the far-right in one form or another. I suspect when people use this argument, they are either being condescending or using imagined vulnerable others as an alibi for their own political preferences. It’s a kind of reaction by proxy. The fact is, there is nothing about oppression as such that predisposes people to have left-wing politics — or right-wing politics for that matter—so the idea that the “common people” are somehow more xenophobic or fundamentalist than the “elite” doesn’t make sense to me. Having said this, a feminist anti-capitalism will perhaps always be an especially challenging position as it has to be as uncompromising about the family and religion as it is about the nation—whereas most Marxisms will seek to find some kind of genealogical foundation or resting place “in private.”

Della Torre:

You are critical of the Social Reproduction Theory. How does Family Values address some of the problems you see in this theory?

Cooper:

I have learned a lot from the various currents in “social reproduction” theory, and I think the term is often used quite loosely, so it is difficult to propose a general critique without losing a lot of valuable work. My concern, however, is that Marxist feminists often use the term as a self-evident description not only of what women “do” but of the foundational value of women’s work. Ultimately, I don’t think the term “reproduction” can be disentangled from its historical associations with nineteenth-century theories of biological and legal heredity. And if we look at the way Marx used the term when referring to the reproduction of the worker, he is very prescriptive about the importance of the male breadwinner wage for the working-class movement. As such, I think it would make sense to redeploy the term “social reproduction” as target rather than the starting point of feminist critique. Far from offering a foundation to our critical politics, reproduction is better understood as the abstract principle that organizes both the vertical transmission of wealth—in the genealogical form of the family, race, and nation—and the horizontal division of labor—class, race, and gender-based. In other words, reproduction is what orchestrates the literal intersection of race, class, and gender.

This is a perspective that many feminist theorists have developed. I’m thinking of intersectional theorists such as Nira Yuval-Davis in Gender and Nation (Yuval-Davis, 1997) or Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, edited by Minoo Moallem, Caren Kaplan, and Norma Alarcón (Kaplan et al., 1999). These perspectives, however, aren’t often integrated with a Marxist analysis of capitalism, and I think there is room for doing this if we consider “reproduction” as referring to any legal, institutional, or cultural framework through which property can be transmitted. The vertical transmission of property through the family, nation, race, etc., was a blind spot in Marx’s thinking, but it is implicit in his analysis of capitalism as simultaneously “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” (to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of the Grundrisse—(Marx, 1993).

Della Torre:

Finally, how do you see the right-wing ascension nowadays? Some are talking about fascism and neofascism, and a significant part of the left disagrees. What is your take on this phenomenon?

Cooper:

I think we need to distinguish between fascism as an established State form (of which there were relatively few in the mid-twentieth century, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan) and fascism as a movement and tendency, which has always been a much more widespread phenomenon. I have no problem using the word “fascistic” to describe the movements we see today. These are revolutionary conservatisms—movements that combine a revolutionary upsurge against the established political order with the aim of installing a radically reactionary new social order. This doesn’t mean we have seen full-blown State fascisms. Trump has gone very far in deconstructing the administrative State by purging professional officeholders not loyal to him—something the American New Right talked about doing in the 1970s. He has gone further than anyone thought was possible in aligning the Republican Party around himself and has blatantly flouted anti-corruption laws when it comes to blurring the lines between the Trump Organization and his presidential office. He has won the support of far-right white supremacist and Christian militias. This is coming very close to State fascism. But as the recent Black Lives Matters protests have demonstrated, he has crucially failed to win over the military and National Guard. But as you well know, Trump is not the only fascistic leader out there.