International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue VII, July 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186
Appropriation of Micropolitics by the Neoliberal States: A Theoretical Intervention
Mohammad Raihan Sharif
Department of English, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh
Abstract: The article focuses on the reception of micropolitics by the neoliberal nation states. It argues that the neoliberal states in recent times have combined strategies and tactics to maintain their grip on their citizens. It is a theoretical intervention in the sense that while Scott (2008) and Certeau (2011) identify micropolitics in the everyday life of the poor and the weak, the present chapter argues that even the neoliberal states apply micropolitics and tactics. In fact, only within this combination, within dialectical relations between strategies and tactics, any tactic is worth pursuing—an issue this paper foregrounds. Drawing upon Mbembe’s ideas, this chapter focuses on the contexts of necrocapitalism within which the neoliberal states deploy tactics. This chapter also identifies differentiation—how the neoliberal state keeps its citizens divided and separated.
I.STRATEGIES AND TACTICS WITHIN NECROCAPITALISM
Necrocapitalism is the ‘hidden transcript’ of the neoliberal capitalism. The concept of necrocapitalism unveils what the dominant narrative of neoliberal capitalism continuously conceals: its investment in death and destruction in the name of progress and development and strategies of mismanagement of life and death through structural death. Put differently, necrocapitalism reveals how capitalism has always invested in violence for its smooth operation across centuries. Also, capitalism have kept relying on various configuration of power so that it remains always irresistible yet it can successfully manage cheap labor—either by force as in slavery or by fallacy as in neoliberalism. Though such an understanding of capitalism, that it incorporates violence in many forms, is no news to the world, I argue that theorizing its specific strategies, tactics and contexts would provide us insights that we can use to organize social movements that resists its multiple atrocities.
Capitalism has always flourished within different resurgences of the sovereignty. The sovereignty, the omnipotent force claiming life and death has also adopted different modes of governmentality to manage smooth flow of capital: “the origination and the transformation of the capitalist state, however, coincided with a changed ethic regarding the sovereign’s right over life and death.” Necrocapitalism as a hidden transcript reveals the reactive resurgences of the sovereignty as preemptive reconfiguration