(A review of Send in the Clowns! Popular Politics after Neoliberalism by Seán Kennedy and James McNaughton, first published by Rupture magazine)

 

There are some radical texts that every socialist should read, which nevertheless defy easy categorization. Send in the Clowns! Popular Politics after Neoliberalism is one of them: an extended film review that often feels more like a political manifesto, or a handbook for the maladjusted. Offering a nuanced commentary on Todd Phillips’s super-villain movie, Joker (2019), Kennedy and McNaughton simultaneously deliver a concise history and blistering exposé of neoliberalism – as an ideology, but also, more importantly, as a hybrid economic-political form of class warfare. The result is a singular and compelling essay in cultural criticism, which makes the case for a reinvigorated public politics based on egalitarian principles.

 

Part of what makes Send in the Clowns so striking (and valuable) a study is its use of the Marvel/DC superhero genre as a lens through which real-life social tensions can be understood and clarified. The term, “blockbuster”, they remind us, was first “coined by the US military during World War II to describe a bomb of such stunning violence it could destroy a whole block of buildings.” From a hegemonic perspective, arguably, one of the main functions of the Marvel/DC movies is to naturalise those violent capabilities, converting them – spectacularly, self-righteously – into family-friendly entertainment. Iron Man, for example, tells the story of a billionaire war tycoon and weapons manufacturer who has a life-altering experience, prompting him to assume a personal, more proactive role in the deployment of those highly destructive technologies his company designs – and all, needless to say, for the greater good. 

 

Likewise, Bruce Wayne – noble hero to Joker’s nihilistic villain – is the heir to a tax-dodging, multi-billion-dollar conglomeration of financial and “defence” enterprises, who has a secret life as a vigilante (disguised as a man-bat), beating up corner-hustlers in the hope of improving the health of his city. As Kennedy and McNaughton remark, “Wayne doesn’t ask whether an economic system is rigged, why the state cuts healthcare, why the media goes in for blame rather than structural diagnosis.” Instead, he pummels presumed street-criminals under cover of darkness, becoming more powerful than the Law itself, whose codes he repeatedly breaks. “For the likes of Wayne,” they say, “what matters is that Capital be put beyond suspicion”. For him, “Capital is always innocent”.

 

In a certain sense, Batman is the embodiment of neoliberalism’s vexed ideological vision of what a good society should be. He is both product and representative of an elite, parasitical class, his wealth accrued by means of financialized plunder. Distrustful of the state, he nevertheless assumes his own exclusive right to inflict violence in the name of an ordered society, to enforce discipline in the name of peace. Naomi Klein reminds us in The Shock Doctrine that it was in Pinochet’s Chile that the economic theories of Milton Friedman and “The Chicago School” were first realised in practice – enacted through a long and pitiless campaign of military terror against the civilian population in that country. Anyone deemed (by the authorities) to be subversive of the dictatorship’s proclaimed values was killed, tortured, disappeared, or monitored. As Kennedy and McNaughton point out in more general terms: the “state does not recede” when populations are subjected to neoliberal rule; rather, the coercive apparatus of the state is mobilized to manage “the poor by castigating and warehousing them, by expanding the corrections system, police forces, probation rolls, and prisons.” Less social welfare; more social warfare.

 

The authors make note of the fact that Joker is set in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan came to power. In the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, they observe, the economist John Maynard Keynes had called for a “redistribution of incomes”. Half a century later, “Reagan obliged – only he redistributed upward”: a measure they describe as a “sadofiscal policy” (because “it pleasures the rich while punishing the poor”). Arthur Fleck – the future Joker, played by Joaquin Phoenix – is acutely vulnerable to this new governmental orientation. Employed in the gig economy as a clown-for-hire, he still lives with his mother as an adult man, attempting and failing to make ends meet – in a city where the streets are lined with garbage and the prisons are rapidly filling up. Gotham (a stand-in for New York) seems to incarnate the worst aspects of a political culture committed to eradicating social supports, community investment, and rent controls, all under the rubric of enhancing personal liberty – by supposedly saving private citizens from the big state. 

 

In the same way, Arthur’s poorly paid job may be symptomatic of the kind of macro-economic trends hastened by Reagan’s administration, substituting “flexibility” for security, while consistently eroding workers’ rights. For economists like Friedman, the authors suggest, “flexibility” 

 

... is held to extend individual liberties with freedom of choice. The reality for so many, however, is precarious working conditions and generalized insecurity. The reality is that labor shrinks as a political force. These are the signature modes of economic existence under neoliberalism.

 

The ultimate effects of this disruptive economic order are manifold and long-lasting. Extending their analysis, Kennedy and McNaughton draw a direct line of association between the neoliberal agenda pursued by successive American governments over the past four decades and the toxic, tyrannical politics of the Trump administration today, which purports to combine isolationism abroad with white supremacy and oligarchy at home.“By abandoning empire rhetorically, while keeping military expenditures high,” they write, “Trump repoliticized conspiracy [culture] and made available a new mode of fascist politics.” 

 

Thankfully, the authors resist that hand-wringing exceptionalism which many liberals cultivate with regard to Trump's conduct as president. While “Trump exaggerates the script,” they say, always finding new scapegoats to blame and punish for the social crimes of his own class, “he didn’t write it”. Rather, it was the Clinton administration (with the help of a zealous legislator by the name of Joe Biden) that first invoked the societal threat of street-level “superpredators”, in order to justify the gutting of welfare programmes, in tandem with a bonanza of carceral innovations. Similarly, it was Obama who drastically expanded the surveillance powers of the federal state, and set a new deportation record – forcibly expelling two million migrants from within U.S. borders.

 

As Obama himself exemplified, whereas many nominally progressive political figures respond to incremental totalitarianism by shifting to the right – marketing themselves as more competent at social austerity and institutionalized xenophobia than the conservatives who originally touted such policies – Kennedy and McNaughton insistently lean in the opposite direction. For them, the neoliberal world-view is both morbid and lethal, a danger to the very society its proponents claim to serve. “Left to the mercies of a self-regulating market”, they summarize, “biological life” itself “will be exhausted and destroyed”, one more sacrifice to the god of profit. This line of thinking, needless to say, cleaves against the grain of dominant political opinion in the United States (and indeed, Europe), coming it does at a time when popular disaffections have been repeatedly weaponized by neo-authoritarians and their reactionary corporate allies, intent on swelling their own already bloated stores of wealth and power.

 

The central argument of this volume is that without outlets and mechanisms that enable genuine public debate, without sustained efforts to ensure the redistribution of wealth and the democratization of power, communities crumble, grievances fester, and social divisions deepen – paving the way for demagoguery and reaction. “The solution”, Kennedy and McNaughton suggest, “is more democracy and more equality”, with a view to subverting (and reversing) current socio-economic trends. “The enormous sums spent on housing millions of people in prison”, they posit, “could be shifted back to public housing schemes.” Furthermore, childcare “should be publicly provisioned”; community halls and local services must be rejuvenated; and the continued operation of “unceasingly rapacious” extractavist industries, particularly those linked to fossil fuels, should be halted, their infrastructures re-purposed as a matter of urgency. Taken together, their cogent arguments amount to a rallying-call – perhaps even a blueprint – for democratic socialism.

 

Of course, every critical study has its blind-spots. Here, the most glaring is that Todd Phillips, also the director of The Hangover trilogy, is patently not a socialist. By the same token, Joker – an in-your-face franchise-flick, painted in the paranoid colours of a range of older (and better) Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, and Michael Cimino movies – is hardly as revolutionary as Kennedy and McNaughton imply. As an exercise in democratic imagining and wider cultural critique, however, Send in the Clowns! is exactly the kind of provocation that activists and movie buffs alike require: a sophisticated and accessible account of cinema as both a political art and an occasion for collective self-examination. “Citizens need more ways to share in the formation of political power than elections”, they conclude, taking the example of the (fictional) Arthur Fleck as a cautionary parable. The book ends with a quotation from Angela Davis, which flows to the heart of the matter: we have to “resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals”, she says, and “recognize” instead our “potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” The fight starts now.