‘The Callous Credit Nexus’: Ideology and Compulsion in the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Many accounts of the rise and decline of neoliberalism forefront its ideological nature and capacity for hegemonic leadership. In contrast, I argue that outside of elite groups neoliberalism did not become hegemonic in Gramsci's sense of a ‘national-popular’ force. Neoliberalism is a convenient term to describe a two-stage process of ‘purifying’ the coercive nature of the capital relation through what Gramsci broadly called ‘a war of movement’ in the 1970s and 1980s and ‘a war of position’ in the 1990s and 2000s. This double-movement compelled credit-worthy individuals to routinely market, sell, purchase and perform for money-wages. New techniques of the self were perfected in the marketised war of position to service the credit-led financialisation of everyday life. Social positionings dependent on financialisation are now subject to a ‘crisis of authority’.