Buying Time” or the Temporal Walls of Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

The article questions the opposition of the concepts of "neoliberalism" and "welfare state". It is more productive to consider them not as mutually exclusive alternatives, but as two coexisting regimes of contemporary capitalism. It is their coexistence that gives the latter additional stability. Switching regimes within the framework of its general "governmental" strategy, capitalism copes with historical challenges much more successfully, turning the external history into internal dynamics. The assemblage of these two regimes is carried out in temporal and functional planes. In terms of temporality, they equally rely on the logic of progressive historicism. That is, they construct modernity by setting the present against a "dark" past. At the same time, the historical narrative of neoliberalism (in the past - cumbersome state regulation, in the present - effective private management) is the inversion of the narrative of the welfare state (in the past - wild predatory capitalism, in the present - reasonable government intervention and social policy). Switching between these two narratives, capitalism makes people feel that they continue to move "progressively" towards a better future. Risk management becomes another functional common feature of the capitalist project. But if a welfare society implies a minimization of risks at the state's expense, then neoliberalism plays a more complex game with them. For neoliberalism, crisis is not a test of survival, which must be passed successfully, but rather a new opportunity to strengthen its own position through the "rational” redistribution of funds and constant modification of management strategies that spread more and more widely in all spheres of society. In this model, crises turn out to be a necessary switching point of two regimes - a regulator of both financial flows and social expectations.