Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class-based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti-poverty politics in southern Africa.

Keywords: neoliberalism, governmentality, South Africa, basic income, poverty

In thinking about the rapidly expanding literature on neoliberalism, I am struck by how much of the critical scholarship on topic arrives in the end at the very same conclusion—a conclusion that might be expressed in its simplest form as: “neoliberalism is bad for poor and working people, therefore we must oppose it.” It is not that I disagree with this conclusion. On the contrary. But I sometimes wonder why I should bother to read one after another extended scholarly analysis only to reach, again and again, such an unsurprising conclusion.

This problem in recent progressive scholarship strikes me as related to a parallel problem in progressive politics more broadly. For over the last couple of decades, what we call “the Left” has come to be organized, in large part, around a project of resisting and refusing harmful new developments in the world. This is understandable, since so many new developments have indeed been highly objectionable. But it has left us with a politics largely defined by negation and disdain, and centered on what I will call “the antis.” Anti-globalization, anti- neoliberalism, anti-privatization, anti-imperialism, anti-Bush, perhaps even anti-capitalism—but always “anti”, not “pro”. This is good enough, perhaps, if one’s political goal is simply to denounce “the system” and to decry its current tendencies. And, indeed, some seem satisfied with such a politics. In my own disciplines of anthropology and African Studies, for instance, studies of state and development tend, with depressing predictability, to conclude (in tones of righteous indignation) that the rich are benefiting and the poor are getting screwed. The powerless, it seems, are getting the short end of the stick. This is not exactly a