“Buying Time” or the Temporal Walls of Neoliberal Capitalism

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.

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