Anti Berg Blabla

The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal
Neurosis in the Life and Times of

Jeffrey Sachs
Japhy Wilson
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;
japhy.wilson@manchester.ac.uk
Abstract: This paper draws onSlavoj ieks critique of ideology in seeking to account for
the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of
neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that
neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the
traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood,
not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of increasingly desperate
attempts to hold the very fabric of reality together. Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a
form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of zombie
neoliberalism and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social
engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of
the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachss
trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis.
The paper aims to undermine the apparently monolithic power of neoliberalism, by
challenging dominant critical representations of the neoliberal project in terms of a
hyper-rational governmentality. It also aims to subvert the attempts by Jeffrey Sachs
and other neoliberals to reposition themselves as opponents of the Washington
Consensus, and as spokesmen of the Occupy movement. The chosen method of
attack is more satirical than polemical. Neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs have
successfully appropriated ethical objections to neoliberalism in the name of global-
ization with a human face. In the present conjuncture, an immanent critique that
reveals the internal incoherence of neoliberal ideology, and the hapless oundering
of its proponents, is perhaps more effective than a repetition of familiar forms of
moral condemnation. An alternative subtitle for this paper might therefore be
Towards a satirical materialism.
Keywords: neoliberalism, ideology, fantasy, the Real, Slavoj iek, Jeffrey Sachs
The Enigma of Zombie Neoliberalism
The relentless dominance of neoliberal ideology in the wake of the Great Recession
of 20082009 has surprised even its most battle-hardened critics. Colin Crouch has
noted the strange non-death of neo-liberalism (Crouch 2011), Mitchell Dean has
observed that neoliberal regimes persist in an undead form (Dean 2012:11),
and Jamie Peck has wearily acknowledged that The living dead of the free-market
revolution continue to walk the earth (Peck 2010b:109). These appeals to the
metaphor of the undead indicate a deeper uncertainty concerning the seemingly
irrational endurance of neoliberalism in the face of all failures. Peck himself raises this
question, asking What is it, then, that sustains this perverse form of worst-practice
convergence, in the face of such deep contradictions and episodic waves of resistance
Antipode Vol. 46 No. 1 2014 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 301321 doi: 10.1111/anti.12058
2013 The Author. Antipode 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.
and contestation? (Peck 2010a:108). Yet he is forced to leave his own question
unanswered, resorting instead to the speculative invocation of zombie neoliberalism
(Peck 2010b).
This failure to explain the persistence of neoliberal ideology is matched by a
similar uncertainty concerning the seemingly innite transformability of the neoliberal
project, which has evolved from the macroeconomic abstraction of shock therapy
towards ever-more intensive forms of social engineering. This transition has been
conceptualized as the shift from roll-back to roll-out neoliberalism (Peck and
Tickell 2002); from shallow interventionism to deep interventionism (Cammack
2004); and from the Washington Consensus to the Post-Washington Consensus
(Sheppard and Leitner 2010). Critics have noted the contradictory nature of this
process, through which the supposedly natural order of a market society is socially
produced. Graham Harrison has observed that free market economics can only
realise itself in development policy by engaging in broader social policy
(Harrison 2005:1304), while Thomas Lemke has wryly pointed out that the
neoliberal project endeavours to create a social reality that it suggests already
exists (Lemke 2001:203). Despite identifying the paradoxical trajectory of neoliberal
development, however, these theorists have not adequately accounted for it. As
Harrison admits, we have some work to do before we can dene [neoliberalism] in
a way that works in the present day (Harrison 2005:1304).
This paper aims to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal
project, through a reconceptualization of neoliberal ideology, based on the psycho-
analytic social theory of Slavoj iek. Ideology is of course a terribly unfashionable
concept, owing to its binary juxtapositions of fact and value, appearance and essence,
truth and falsity, and so on (Dike 2013). Much of the critical literature on neolib-
eralism reproduces this standard notion of ideology, conceptualizing neoliberalism
in terms of the projection of a utopian representation of a self-regulating market onto
a more-or-less intransigent social reality.
1
Ben Fine, for example, describes the neolib-
eral project as an attempt to make the world conformas far as possible to an entirely
imagined (free market) representation of itself (Fine 2004:216), while Simon Clarke
claims that its objective is not to make a model that is more adequate to the real
world, but to make the real world more adequate to its model (Clarke 2005:58). This
understanding of ideology rests on the Cartesian ontology of a rational, unitary
subject interacting with an objective external environment. For iek, by contrast,
the subject is not the primordially given subject of the cogito, but is the result of
a process in which traumatic cuts, repressions, and the power struggle intervene
(iek 1999:328), and reality is not instrumentally manipulated by the subject, but
is cobbled together froma combination of Imaginary and Symbolic elements, in order
to protect the subject from a threatening and traumatic Real (iek 1989:133). This
entails an understanding of ideology, not as an appearance projected onto an exter-
nal reality, but as a social fantasy structuring reality itself, as a defence formation
against the traumatic content of a Real social antagonism (iek 1989:126). This
reconceptualization of ideology captures the orthodox neoliberal understanding of
market society as a spontaneous natural order that is already immanent in the
structures of the social world, rather than a social order to be constructed upon a
pre-existing reality. The persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project
302 Antipode
can accordingly be understood, not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality,
or the gradual unfolding of a technocratic masterplan, but as a form of obsessional
neurosisa series of anxious attempts to maintain a social fantasy in which the Real
of Capital is disavowed.
I develop my account of the neoliberal neurosis through a critical engagement
with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs, as a key gure in the evolution of
the neoliberal project. Sachs is notorious for his shock therapy experiments in Latin
America, Eastern Europe, and the ex-Soviet Union, in which neoliberal policy
packages were rapidly implemented, often with extremely negative social conse-
quences. Yet he is now a prominent critic of the Washington Consensus that he used
to endorse, and has reinvented himself as one of the worlds foremost authorities on
poverty alleviation and sustainable development. He is Special Advisor to the
Secretary General of the United Nations, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University, friend of celebrity advocates such as Bono and Angelina Jolie, and the
driving force behind the Millennium Villages Project, which aims to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals within a series of model villages across sub-Saharan
Africa. Yet despite his rejection of the Washington Consensus, and his embrace of
social engineering, the substance of Sachss economic theory and policy prescriptions
retains a commitment to neoliberal fundamentals.
Sachss career thus embodies the persistence and transformability characteristic
of the neoliberal project. Through an engagement with his work, I argue that this
intertwining of persistence and transformability can be thought of as a form of
obsessional neurosis, through which the neoliberal fantasy is held together by all
kinds of frantic activity precisely in order that nothing Real should happen
(Daly 2009:294). I begin by setting out the basis for a iekian contribution to
the critique of political economy, and sketching a preliminary account of the neolib-
eral neurosis. I then develop this approach in the case of Jeffrey Sachs, identifying
the catastrophic failure of shock therapy in Russia as an Event in which his neoliberal
fantasy was ruptured by the shock of a totally contingent encounter with the Real
(iek 1999:185). This traumatic encounter has been disavowed by Sachs in theory
and in practice. In theoretical terms, Sachs has engaged in an elaborate series of
modications of the neoliberal imaginary, framed in medical discourse, through
which symptoms of the Real of Capital have been externalized as pathological
factors threatening the natural health of the capitalist social body. Practically, Sachs
has put this series of disavowals to work in the Millennium Villages Project, which
aims to reconstitute the neoliberal social fantasy in the midst of the supposedly
abject space of sub-Saharan Africa. In their willingness to betray many of the
ideological precepts of neoliberalisminorder to sustain its basic symbolic coordinates,
it is neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs who have ensured the continuity of actually
existing neoliberalism into, and perhaps beyond, its current zombie phase.
Neoliberalization as Obsessional Neurosis
Slavoj iek is arguably the most prominent radical intellectual of our time. Yet in
contrast to the widespread appropriation of his work in other elds, ieks ideas
are rarely applied to the critique of political economy.
2
This is perhaps unsurprising,
The Shock of the Real 303
given that his own work in this eld has lacked the rigour and originality of his
earlier contributions to philosophy and cultural theory (Parker 2004:83; Sharpe
2004:198). Despite his turn from cultural studies towards political economy in
recent years, iek has not adequately grounded his political-economic interventions
in his own psychoanalytic approach, and has not developed this approach through
the rigorous analysis of contemporary global capitalism. However, despite his failure
to adequately realize the potential of his approach in this regard, ieks earlier work
on the critique of ideology provides the potential theoretical foundations for a
reconceptualization of neoliberalism that can help to explain the persistence and
transformability of the neoliberal project (iek 1989, 1993, 1997, 1999). Even when
restricted to this earlier period, ieks oeuvre is immense and extraordinarily diverse,
and I make no claim to providing a comprehensive overview of it here.
3
Instead, I
concentrate on the elements of his theoretical edice that are most relevant to my
account of the neoliberal neurosis.
As already mentioned, ieks ontology destabilizes the foundational Cartesian
assumption of a rational, unitary subject interacting instrumentally with an
objective external reality. Against this assumption, iek adopts Kants post-Cartesian
assertion that there is no reality prior to a subjects positing activity (iek 1999:87).
However, whereas Kant retained the Cartesian subject as the rational constructor of
phenomenal reality, ieks Lacanian reading of Hegel leads himto an understanding
of the subject as constituted through incompleteness and lack. Given the ontologi-
cally constitutive character of the subjects activity, this implies a pathological bias
constitutive of reality itself (iek 1999:87). For iek, following Lacan, what we
experience as reality is composed of three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic
and the Real. The Symbolic is the domain of structure, difference, and gap,
while the Imaginary provides the illusion of stability, content, and wholeness
(Kay 2003:169), and these two registers are intertwined to form a fragile and
incomplete reality against the traumatic Real. iek suggests that the Real can be
understood as both an inert presence resisting symbolization, and a void around
which the symbolic order is structured (iek 1989:170). As such, the Real is an
elusive and threatening X that lies beyond the reach of direct experience, but that
nonetheless imposes itself upon reality, and is identiable by its disruptive effects
(iek 1989:162).
ieks account of the subjective construction of reality places particular signi-
cance on the Event, which he denes as a contingent occurrence in which the
Symbolic and Imaginary co-ordinates of reality are ruptured, and the Real
imposes itself as a terrifying and incomprehensible force (iek 2002:19). In order
to re-establish a sense of identity and reality in the aftermath of an Event, the subject
may resort to unconscious strategies of repression or disavowal. In repression, the
traumatic Real is excluded entirely from consciousness, though it remains operative
in the unconscious, from which it continues to exert its destabilizing inuences. In
the subtler operation of disavowal, the Real is incorporated into the subjects
symbolic universe through a variety of displacements, through which its properly
traumatic dimension is at least temporarily diminished (McMillan 2008). In either
case, reality comes to be plagued by symptoms, certain stains upon the symbolic
fabric, which mark the indelible presence of the Real (iek 1989:78, 1999:331).
304 Antipode
In cases of obsessional neurosis, the subject seeks to cope with the recurrent
appearance of these symptoms through engaging in frenetic activity in order to
stop the stains from spreading, and to guard against the possibility of a repeat
encounter with the Real (iek 1989:191). In such circumstances, iek argues,
reality is held together by a specic fantasy, operating in the Imaginary register,
which infuses reality with a sense of stability and order, and which lls out the
gaps and voids in the symbolic order through which the Real would otherwise
continue to make its presence felt. For iek, then, fantasy is not an escape from
reality, but is integral to the structure of reality itself (iek 1989:30), constituting
the frame through which we experience the world as consistent and meaningful
(iek 1989:123).
ieks ontology is thus permeated by a disturbing vision of order precariously
balanced on a seething morass of disorder, and at the same time incomprehensibly
penetrated by it, so that in the midst of the order there always persists an indivisible
remainder of chaos (Kay 2003:113). Here I suggest that this disturbing vision
captures the predicament of the neoliberal technocrat, who, through a series of
neurotic disavowals, seeks to sustain their social fantasy against the seething morass
of disorder that is the Real of Capital. In recent years, iek has repeatedly identied
Capital as the Real of our age, arguing that reality is the social reality of the actual
people involved in the productive process, while the Real is the inexorable spectral
logic of Capital which determines what goes on in social reality (iek 1999:331).
iek does not develop this point systematically, and his claim has been dismissed
by his critics as evidence of the inconsistency between his psychoanalytic theory
and his Marxist political commitments, given that capital necessarily operates through
the symbols, institutions and practices of phenomenal reality, and therefore cannot
be the Lacanian Real (Laclau 2000:291). However, ieks terminology in this
instance, and in his earlier engagements with Marxism (see iek 1989:1154),
suggests an understanding of capital not as a quantitatively measurable inventory
of things, or as a static relationship between sociologically dened classes, but as
value-in-motionas the alienated product of human labour which comes to develop
a quasi-autonomous, self-expansionary and crisis-ridden dynamic that increasingly
imposes itself upon social reality as an abstract form of domination (Postone 1993).
4
From this perspective, capital can indeed be understood as Real, in the sense of an
intangible substance only identiable by its effects; as the void constituted by the class
relation that cleaves the fabric of capitalist society; and as the spectral and traumatic
presence that the neoliberal social fantasy operates to disavow.
In speaking of a neoliberal social fantasy, I am again drawing on ieks own
application of psychoanalytic categories to the broader social realm. For iek, the
Lacanian understanding of fantasy implies a radical reconceptualization of ideology.
In its deepest and most powerful form, iek argues, ideology operates not as an
illusory appearance projected onto an external reality, but as a social fantasy structur-
ing reality itself (iek 1989:33). Just as the individual fantasy conceals the traumatic
presenceabsence of an unsymbolizable Real, so the social fantasy functions to con-
ceal the constitutive antagonisms of a given social order by constructing a vision of
society which is not split by an antagonistic division, a society in which the relation
between its parts is organic, complementary (iek 1989:126). iek tends to draw
his examples of social fantasy from nationalist, racist, and totalitarian ideologies, but
the concept is equally applicable to the neoliberal adaptation of Adam Smiths vision
of a natural and harmonious market society, in which the self-interested activities of
individual entrepreneurs are mediated by the invisible hand of the market to ensure
the optimal allocation of resources. As I argue in greater detail in the case of Jeffrey
Sachs, this ideology operates at the level of fantasy, to the extent that it is perceived
not as a utopia to be constructed, or as a vision to be projected onto an intransigent
reality, but rather as a natural reality already immanent in the structures of the social
world, to be uncovered from beneath the bureaucratic undergrowth of the interven-
tionist state.
5
Just as fantasy functions to conceal the void of the Real, so the neoliberal
social fantasy functions to ll out the voids of the bourgeois symbolic universe against
the Real of Capital: value is concealed by marginal utility; class relations are obscured
by freedom of exchange; the crisis-ridden dynamics of capitalism are nullied by the
assumption of perfectly competitive equilibrium; and the spectral logic of capital as
an abstract form of domination is expressed in disavowed form as the benign
operation of the self-regulating market. In the case of neoliberalism, then, as iek
argues more generally:
Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape reality; in its basic dimension it is
a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself: an illusion which
structures our effective social relations and thereby masks some insupportable Real
The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer
social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, Real kernel (iek 1989:45).
The trajectory of the neoliberal project can be interpreted in precisely these
terms, as marked by repeated attempts to structure reality as an escape from the
traumatic Real of Capital. Adam Smiths theory of the invisible hand was itself born
in the midst of the violent establishment of capitalist social relations, providing
Smith with a reassuring vision that concealed the harsh reality of the world around
him (Perelman 2000:208). The economists of the Mont Perelin Society likewise
formulated the neoliberal project in the context of the Great Depression, the
Second World War, and the rise of communism, and have described themselves
as drawn together by a common sense of crisis, and huddled together for
warmth on a cold dark night (cited in Peck 2010a:50, 66).
6
In this traumatic
moment, the neoliberal fantasy acquired an irresistible attraction the almost
silent hum of a perfectly running machine; the apparent stillness of the exact
balance of counter-acting pressures; the automatic smooth recovery from a chance
disturbance (Robinson 1962:7778).
Neoliberalism rose to hegemonic status through representing subsequent
economic crises as crises of Keyensianism or developmentalism, against which the
neoliberal project could be advanced as a return to the natural order of a market
society (Peck 2010a:83, 106). From the 1980s onwards, however, with the consol-
idation of neoliberalism as the hegemonic ideology, these crises began to tear
through the fabric of the neoliberal fantasy itself. The continuity of the neoliberal
project has thus taken the form of an increasingly elaborate process of disavowal,
through which the symptoms of the Real of Capital have been incorporated into
the symbolic universe of neoliberalism.
7
Hence the proliferation of discourses of
306 Antipode
market failure, imperfect competition, bad equilibrium and so on, which have
modied the neoliberal imaginary while leaving its fundamental co-ordinates
unchanged, and which have framed the trajectory of the neoliberal project towards
increasingly intensive forms of social engineering (Fine 2006; Peck and Tickell 2002).
In the eld of international development, for example, this trend has been embodied
in the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Post-Washington Consensus,
which retains the basic principles of the Washington Consensus, while augmenting
them with multiple social interventions that aim to address the proliferating negative
symptoms of uneven capitalist development in order to maintain the neoliberal ideal
of rational utility-maximising individuals engaged in harmonious exchange relations
(Taylor 2004:17). Despite their divergence from orthodox neoliberalism, the Post-
Washington Consensus and other forms of roll-out neoliberalism should therefore
be understood as preserving rather than transforming the fundamental structures of
the neoliberal fantasy. As iek explains in a different context:
The general lesson to be drawn with reference to how ideology works concerns the
gap that separates ideology qua discursive formation from its fantasy support: an
ideological edice is of course submitted to incessant retroactive restructurations, the
symbolic-differential value of its elements shifting all the time, but fantasy designates
the hard kernel which anchors an ideology in some substantial point and thus
provides a constant frame for this symbolic interplay (iek 1993:213).
From this perspective, the evolution of the neoliberal project appears not as the
meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of anxiety-ridden attempts
to hold the very fabric of reality together, through constant ideological modications
devoted to explaining away the symptoms of the Real of Capital in such a way that the
contours of the neoliberal fantasy can be retained. This process typies the behaviour
of the obsessional neurotic, who builds upa whole systemenabling himto postpone
the encounter [with the Real] ad innitum (iek 1989:192). We can therefore
conceptualize neoliberalism, not as a hyper-rational technocratic project, but as a
form of obsessional neurosis. The remainder of this paper develops this argument in
the case of Jeffrey Sachs, interpreting the failure of shock therapy in Russia as a
traumatic Event, in which his neoliberal fantasy was shattered by the Real of Capital,
and exploring the strategies of repression and disavowal through which he has
sought to reconstruct the co-ordinates of his social fantasy.
8
From Shock Therapy to Clinical Economics
For Jeffrey Sachs, as for the members of the Mont Perelin Society before him, the
attraction of neoclassical economics was rooted in an obscure dread of communism.
Sachs describes a high-school trip to Russia and a subsequent visit to East Germany as
life-changing experiences, in which he was confronted by the differences between
capitalism and communism in ways that caused him to question the inherent
superiority of the capitalist system (Sachs, in Richardson 2003).
9
In 1972, Sachs
entered Harvard to read Economics, and was placed under the tutelage of
Abram Bergson, a neoclassical economist and an expert on the Soviet economy
(Ofer 2005). Bergson introduced Sachs to the work of the key gures of the
Mont Perelin SocietyFriedman, Hayek, and Von Mises, and as Sachs recalls, I learned
about a way of seeing the world (Sachs 2005b:495, emphasis in original).
10
Once
immersed in the neoliberal imaginary, Sachs rose rapidly through the academic ranks
at Harvard, becoming a tenured professor in 1983 at the age of 28. Two years later, a
Bolivian delegation requested his assistance in managing a crisis of hyperination. It
was here that Sachs rst developed the doctrine that became known as shock
therapy, based on the imposition of a sudden and systematic package of neoliberal
reforms, including privatization, trade liberalization, macroeconomic stabilization,
and the abolition of subsidies and price controls. The speed and comprehensiveness
of shock therapy was designed both to shock the economy into health, and to shock
the population with its immediacy, in order to avoid effective political contestation
(Murrell 1993:111115; Sachs 1990, 1994b).
11
Against theories of neoliberalism which
see it as a constructivist project that aims to socially produce a market society (Brown
2003), shock therapy was understood by Sachs as a project that aspired not to construct
a utopian reality but to reveal a natural order. This is clear fromthe following statements:
Shock therapy has been attacked by many intellectuals as being yet another construc-
tivist system of social engineering, trying to replace one dogma with another. This is
mistaken Whereas Lenin had also advocated a kind of shock therapy in 1902 in
his fateful and disastrous What is to be done?, his version was to create a new world
that had never existed Shock therapy was relentlessly down to earth by contrast
(Sachs 1994c:270).
Like the old discussion of how you make a sculpture of an elephant You just cut away
everything that doesnt look like an elephant (Sachs, in PBS 2000:19).
For Sachs, shock therapy is therefore premised not on the creation of a new world,
but on the removal of everything that does not correspond to the pre-existing reality
of a market society. As we have seen, this assertion of the neoliberal nature of reality is
characteristic of social fantasy, understood as a deeper level of ideology that structures
the very coordinates of reality itself. The implementation of shock therapy in Bolivia
seemed to conrm the reality of this fantasy by ending hyperination and facilitating
a rapid transition to a free market economy, despite being characterized by increased
poverty and political repression (Green 2003:7475; Klein 2007:153). Sachs received
international acclaim, leading to consultancy roles around the world in which he was
invited to repeat his experiment (Sachs 2005a:108). When communism began to
collapse, Sachs returned to Eastern Europe, contributing to shock therapy
programmes in Poland and elsewhere. Despite inducing a deep recession with severe
social consequences, Sachss role in Poland was again hailed as a triumph. Sachs was
described in the New York Times as the Indiana Jones of economics (Wayne 1989),
and commentators marvelled at his Sachs appeal (Holstrom 1992).
In November 1991, while still only 37years of age, Sachs was invited to serve as
an economic advisor to the Yeltsin administration, with the responsibility of
planning Russias transition from communism to capitalism.
12
This was an
immensely signicant opportunity, in personal as well as world-historical terms. After
all, Russia was the place where Sachs had rst been confronted by an alternative
systemof economic organization. It was the specialist subject of his mentor at Harvard,
who provided himwith the conceptual framework with which he was able to afrmthe
308 Antipode
naturalness and superiority of the capitalist system. This framework then inspired his
political interventions around the world, which seemed to offer dramatic conrmation
of its validity. Now, riding a wave of elite adulation, Sachs had the opportunity to imple-
ment his shock therapy programme in Russia itself, at a truly world-historical moment
in the consolidation of global capitalism. As Sachs himself recalls, Communism was
falling, and I was pinching myself because I was in the centre of this, the absolute
epicentre of it (cited in Richardson 2003).
At that moment, disaster struck. Russias shock therapy programme resulted in the
longest and deepest recession in recorded human history (Clarke 2002:187). Indus-
trial production halved between 1990 and 1999 (Clarke 2002:196197), and the
number of people living in poverty increased from 2 million in 1989 to 74 million in
1996 (Klein 2007:237238). Furthermore, the Russian privatization process of
19921994the largest and most rapid privatization in world historyhas been
directly correlated with a dramatic increase in mortality rates (Stuckler et al
2009), while also facilitating the rise of the notorious oligarchs (Holmstrom
and Smith 2000). In 1994, Sachs resigned from the Yeltsin administration,
and abandoned Russia to its continued implosion (Erlanger 1994). He has since
described Russias collapse as a whirlwind (Sachs 2005a:131), which gener-
ated confusion, anxiety, and [a] profound sense of bewilderment about
market forces (Sachs 1994b:507), and which he experienced as life in the
shock-trauma unit (Sachs 1994b:503). This language suggests the disorientation of
someone whose fantasy frame has disintegrated, and who is suddenly and directly
confronted by the Real of Capital, revealed not as a harmonious natural order, but
as a formless vortex, a destructive force operating beyond the limits of human
control.
13
As Sarah Kay argued, the shock of the Real thus makes legible what was
repressed or rendered invisible by the current order. However, the Event and its
truth are unrecognizable within the order of knowledge that is sanctioned by the
prevailing ontology (Kay 2003:118). Despite being confronted by Real of Capital,
Sachs was therefore unable to comprehend the truth of capitalism that Russia had
laid bareits grounding in the production of specic class relations, its generation
of poverty and inequality, and its uncontrollable, crisis-ridden dynamics. In the years
following his abandonment of Russia, Sachs published a series of papers celebrating
the nal consolidation of a global capitalist world system, with profound benets
for both rich and poor countries (Sachs 1995:50), and setting out a vision of capital-
ismfromwhich all symptoms of the Real had been erased. Marx, he argued, had been
correct in his prediction of the triumphant march of globalization, but had been
limited by a very crude labour theory of value, according to which the income
of capitalists resulted fromthe exploitation of labour (Sachs 1999:91). Equally, Keynes
had been mistaken in his claim that capitalism was inherently unstable, as the Great
Depression had proved to be a one-time uke of grotesque proportions rather than
indicating an intrinsic feature of industrial capitalism (Sachs 1999:100, 96). Further-
more, colonialism was not the pioneer of capitalism, but was to be ranked alongside
communism and developmentalism as examples of failed non-market systems
(Sachs 2000). Capitalism was thus cleansed of exploitation, crisis and past violence.
Yet these same papers were haunted by incongruous visions of possible social collapse,
of chronic chaos, turbulence and value destruction, disease ravaged societies
and an orgy of lawlessness and war (Sachs 1995:64; 1998: 7, 2; 2000:36).
The intrusion of such apocalyptic imagery within Sachss determinedly Panglossian
representation of global capitalismcan be interpreted as the return of the repressed
as the intrusion of the Real within a symbolic universe from which it has been forcibly
excluded (iek 1989:55, 169). Over time, however, Sachss understanding of
capitalismhas come to be characterized less by repression than by disavowal. Poverty,
inequality and other symptoms of the internal contradictions of capitalismare increas-
ingly acknowledged, but are explained in terms of external pathologies threatening
the natural health of the capitalist social body. Sachss work in this regard includes a
revival of environmental determinism, in which uneven geographical development
is attributed to inherent environmental differences rather than political-economic
processes (Bloom and Sachs 1998; Gallup et al 1999). He has also sought to
reframe the relationship between poverty and health, arguing that poor health is
a cause of poverty rather than vice versa, and reducing the value of healthcare to
its quantiable contribution to labour productivity (Commission on Macroeconomics
and Health 2001). Continuing the medical metaphors of shock therapy, Sachs now
describes his approach as clinical economics (Sachs 2005a:7489), according to
which multiple infectious agents can contribute to the crisis of a normally healthy
system, provoking a downward spiral of catastrophe (Sachs 2005a:76).
14
These
external agents include urgent problems involving poverty traps, agronomy,
climate, disease, transport, gender and a host of other pathologies that undermine
economic development (Sachs 2005a:79). Fromthis perspective, capitalismappears
not as a social order to be constructed, but as a natural body to be returned to health.
This again suggests that, for Sachs, neoliberalism is not a utopian ideology projected
onto an external reality, but a fantasy structuring reality itself.
15
What is it, then, that has allowed Sachs to sustain this fantasy? In other words, if
actually existing capitalism is so diseased, what grounds his belief in its natural
health? Here we reach the level of the fundamental fantasy, which for iek is
always a fantasy of origins (Sharpe 2004:154). iek identies Adam Smiths myth-
ical prehistory of capitalism as the quintessential fantasy of origins (iek 1997:11),
and it is precisely this fantasy that grounds Sachss faith in the natural health of
capitalism. Following the Russia Event, Sachs has increasingly invoked the name of
Adam Smith as the subject supposed to knowthe gure whose knowledge the
subject typically appeals to in the generation of new meaning (iek 1989:185).
16
The attraction of Smith for Sachs is clear. As discussed above, Smith himself was
concerned with providing an account of capitalismthat removed all traces of internal
antagonism. Central to this account was an imagined history of the original accumu-
lation of capital as a natural and inevitable process. According to Smith, the origins of
capitalism lay in private smallholding farmers accumulating capital by dint of their
own frugality, and putting it to work in the process of further accumulation, leading
to the division of labour and the growth of trade, and resulting in the peaceful emer-
gence of a commercial society of small-scale entrepreneurs (Perelman 2000:171228).
In setting out his own account of economic development, Sachs reproduces this
fantasy of origins, telling a story of the emergence of capitalism through the
accumulative activities of a single farm household (Sachs 2005a:51), which
310 Antipode
exemplies Smiths insight (Sachs 2005a:53). Through hard work the household
acquires some savings, moves from subsistence to cash crops, begins to specialize
in a single crop, upgrades its capital inputs, and acquires more land (Sachs
2005a:5253). Capitalism, Sachs concludes, is the aggregate outcome of this pro-
cess operating through the interactions of thousands or millions of households
linked together by markets (Sachs 2005a:54). This, then, is the naturally healthy
capitalist social body that clinical economics endeavours to cure and protect.
Adam Smiths fantasy of origins can therefore be identied as the fundamental
fantasy upon which Sachs has structured his system of disavowal, through which
symptoms of the Real of Capital appear as external pathologies, rather than internal
contradictions. For Sachs, this fantasy also functions to conceal the necessarily
violent foundation of capitalist social relations (iek 1997:11). As Marx has argued
in his critique of Smiths account of original accumulation, this paradise lost of the
bourgeoisie functioned precisely to obscure the violence of primitive accumulation
the separation of the peasantry from the land through which capitalist social
relations were historically established (Marx 1972:59; 1977:873940). This
founding violence was implicit in the rapid privatization programmes so central
to shock therapy, but it was only in Russia that Sachs was confronted with the full
material force of its social implications. Smiths fantasy of origins is thus a screen that
shields Sachs not only from the Real of Capital, but also from his own instrumentality
in the violence of its production. As iek insists, There is no order of being as a
positive ontologically consistent whole: the false semblance of such an order relies
on the self-obliteration of the Act (iek 1999:287). The following section interprets
the Millennium Villages Project as a further attempt at obliteration in this sense,
through which Sachs has sought to realize his fantasy of origins within the supposedly
abject space of Africa.
The Sublime Object of Neoliberal Ideology
Since the start of the new millennium, Jeffrey Sachs has successfully reinvented
himself as a development guru. His work on clinical economics discussed in the
previous section led to his appointment in 2002 as the UN Secretary Generals
Special Advisor on the Millennium Development Goals, and in the same year he
was appointed Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He has made
high-prole journeys to sub-Saharan Africa with celebrities such as Bono, Madonna
and Angelina Jolie, and was listed among Time Magazines 100 most inuential
people in the world in 2004 and 2005. In his best-selling anti-poverty manifesto,
The End of Poverty, Sachs distances himself from shock therapy, makes no direct
mention of capitalism, and argues for an increased role for state intervention and
international aid in providing the big push necessary for poor countries to gain
a foothold on the bottom rung [of] the ladder of development (Sachs 2005a:2).
Many inuential critics of neoliberalism, including David Harvey (2005:221) and
Naomi Klein (2007:247), have suggested that Sachs new agenda indicates an
abandonment of neoliberalism. Equally, unreconstructed neoliberals such as
WilliamEasterly have attacked Sachs for betraying the fundamental tenets of neoliber-
alism by engaging in utopian social engineering (Easterly 2006:96). Here I suggest
that, on the contrary, Sachs newfound concern with poverty in sub-Saharan Africa
continues to demonstrate the characteristic tendencies of the neoliberal neurosis.
iek argues that when the Real of Capital is disavowed, when its key structuring
role is suspended, other factors may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they
may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism (iek 2000:97). For
Sachs, it is Africa that has come to bear this weight. Following his abandonment of
Russia in 1994, Sachs immediately became xated upon sub-Saharan Africa, making
his rst journey there in 1995 (Sachs 2005a:188). Sachs recalls experiencing Africa as
a horric catastrophe (Sachs 2005a:7), collapsing from social and economic
disorder (Sachs 1995:59), and characterized by the omnipresence of disease and
death (Sachs 2005a:194), and he persistently depicts the continent as the land of
the voiceless dying (Sachs 2005a:188), in which people have nothing and are
not even successful enough to stay alive (Sachs 2006).
17
Sub-Saharan Africa is of
course confronted by very severe socio-economic problems. Nevertheless, the apoca-
lyptic imagery with which Africa is relentlessly portrayed by Sachs, and his sudden
shift of attention fromRussia to Africa, together suggest that the disturbing symptoms
of the former may have been displaced onto the latter. Writing in 1994, only months
after leaving Russia, Sachs contrasted Russias circumstances to those of Africa,
arguing that If its reforms are given a chance, Russia will prove not merely viable
economically, but highly promising. The same cannot be said of Africa, where
misrule, disease, and civil strife have left hundreds of millions untouched by the forces
of global economic integration (Sachs 1994a:28). For Sachs, then, the discovery of
Africa allowed the symptoms of shock therapys failure in Russia to be displaced into
an abject space in which they could be attributed not to global capitalism, but rather
to its absence, appearing as grotesque aberrations of poverty, crisis and death, in
relation to which Sachs has been able to reconstruct his own identity as an economic
doctor administering emergency treatment.
18
Within the symbolic universe of Jeffrey Sachs, Africa has thus come to function as
what iek would call a sublime object of ideology (iek 1989). A sublime object
is a common material object which acquires a peculiar fascination for the subject,
due not to some inherent essence, but to its symbolic location as an object that
both obscures and embodies the void of the Real. The sublime object provides
stability to the symbolic structure by concealing the traumatic Real within it, yet
at the same time, the Real shines through this object, illuminating it with an
uncanny presence that is both terrifying and compelling (iek 2001:100).
19
For
Sachs, Africa can be understood as a sublime object in this sense, covering the
void in his symbolic universe that the Russia Event had revealed, but bathed in
the light of the Real of Capital that shines behind it, leading Sachs to recoil in
horroras demonstrated by his apocalyptic descriptions of the continentbut also
drawing him towards it as site for intervention in which the Real can be meaning-
fully and bearably engaged with, if only in disavowed form. As Sachs himself says
of his experience of Africa, in terms that capture this unsettling mixture of horror
and fascination, The dominant experience is disease and death; it was shocking
and riveting on an emotional level (cited in McClellan 2003, emphasis added).
Increasingly, Africa has come to occupy the place of a sublime object, not only
for Sachs, but for the neoliberal project as a whole. The shift to the Post-Washington
312 Antipode
Consensus has been accompanied by the representation of sub-Saharan Africa as
the one place on the planet still excluded from the virtuous circle of globalization.
This has functioned both to detract attention from the persistent failures of
neoliberal development elsewhere in the world, and to foreclose the possibility
that the economic and social crises of sub-Saharan Africa are not an exception
to globalization, but are integral to the functioning of global capitalism itself
(Ferguson 2006:41). A dening moment in this process was the designation
of 2005 as the Year of Africa. Events that year included Make Poverty History,
the G8 Summit on African development, and the publication of Tony Blairs
Commission for Africa report, all of which contributed to the consolidation of
the Post-Washington Consensus (Cammack 2006; Harrison 2010a). Sachs
played a key role throughout, publishing The End of Poverty and the United
Nations Millennium Project report, which was produced by a 250-strong task
force chaired by Sachs himself. The report set out a comprehensive policy
package for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Despite
being framed in the discourse of human development, the report retained a
commitment to Washington Consensus fundamentals concerning free trade,
export-led development, and macroeconomic stability. The macrostructures of
globalized neoliberalism were therefore to remain unchanged, with interventions
limited to the targeted provision of basic needs to the poorest of the poor
(Millennium Project 2005).
The fundamental assumption underpinning the Millennium Project is that If
every village has a road, access to transport, a clinic, electricity, safe drinking water,
education, and other essential inputs, the villagers in poor countries will show the
same determination and entrepreneurial zeal of people all over the world (Millennium
Project 2005:15, emphasis added).
20
This appeal to the universal human nature of
homo economicus is combined with a revival of the Dickensian fantasy of the seless
deserving poor, who are hard working, prepared to struggle to stay aoat and to
get ahead They are also ready to govern themselves responsibly, ensuring that
any help they receive is used for the benet of the group rather than pocketed by
powerful individuals (Sachs 2005a:242). Here we can see the outlines of the
Smithian fantasy of origins discussed in the previous sectionthe imagined history
of capitalist development based on the entrepreneurialism and community spirit of
the smallholder village. This fantasy is now being realized in the Millennium Villages
Project, which Sachs launched in 2005 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
Millennium Project agenda. The Millennium Villages Project applies this agenda
in 80 villages across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with the aim of achieving
the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
21
Funded by his own Millennium
Promise philanthropic organization, and drawing on the scientic expertise of the
Earth Institute, the Millennium Villages Project constitutes Sachss rst direct
engagement in policy implementation since his abandonment of Russia. As such,
the Project can be interpreted as a further attempt by Sachs to reconstitute his social
fantasy, through revealing the immanence of a harmonious market society within
the sublime object of Africa. As Sachs himself explains, this social order is already
latent in African reality, and will spontaneously emerge as soon as the right
conditions are in place:
Almost all of Africa is the private sector. Farmers, thats the private sector But private
sector doesnt mean you just leave them alone They cant get started because theyre
so impoverished. So we should help a private sector-led development by helping these
farmers use inputs, boost their productivity Bring in micronance and let them rip.
And thats basically the model (Sachs 2006).
The irony, of course, is that far from demonstrating the natural order of a
market society, the Millennium Villages Project demonstrates the extent to
which this society must be socially produced. The rst 5-year phase of the
Project included a comprehensive and integrated set of interventions targeting
all dimensions of everyday life, and focused on raising the inhabitants human,
social, physical, natural, and nancial capital to the threshold level, above
which the villages can move towards self-sustaining growth (Sanchez and
Sachs 2007). Beginning in 2011, the second 5-year phase is focused primarily
on business development (Millennium Villages Project 2011). Subsidies are
being replaced by micro-credits for farm inputs, links are being established with
private sector agribusinesses, and peasant farmers are being encouraged to
diversify to off-farm employment, and to make the shift from sub-subsistence to
small-scale entrepreneurs (Sanchez and Sachs 2007). Having begun his career
with shock therapy, which assumed that the removal of state impediments
would be sufcient to reveal the spontaneous order of a market society, Sachs
is thus nally forced to engineer that society in its entirety in the form of the
Millennium Villages.
For Sachs, the success of the Millennium Villages is paramount. Were the
Project to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, Sachs would
not only have further distanced himself from the legacy of shock therapy, but
would also have successfully reconstituted his social fantasy in the face of the
Real of Capital revealed by the Russia Event. The Projects ofcial statistics
suggest that the Goals are indeed on target to be achieved (Millennium Villages
Project 2011), but these statistics have been disputed by independent econo-
mists (Clemens and Demombynes 2010; Wanjala and Muradian 2011).
Development experts have also questioned whether the successes of the Project
can be scaled up to a more inclusive level, or sustained beyond its completion
date in 2015, given the failure of similar projects in these respects in the past,
and the Projects afrmation of the macroeconomic structures of neoliberalism
(Cabral et al 2006; Carr 2008). Furthermore, by misrepresenting the African
village as the smallholder community of Smithian fantasy, the Project threatens
to exacerbate the inequalities of wealth and power that already exist in such
places (Mueller 2011; Oya 2010). Project inputs have proven vulnerable to
elite capture (Overseas Development Institute 2008), and the expansion of
agribusinesses and cash crop production is likely to extend capitalist social relations
while aggravating their attendant tensions and antagonisms, leading to the produc-
tion of a social reality very different from the harmonious village that Sachs imagines.
In other words, the Millennium Villages Project threatens to confront Sachs with
precisely the return of the repressed that it has contributed to protecting him from,
by once again exposing both the Real of Capital and his own continued instrumentality
in its social production.
314 Antipode
Traversing the Fantasy?
This paper has drawn on the case of Jeffrey Sachs in seeking to account for the
remarkable exibility and endurance of neoliberal ideology in the face of the
repeated failures of the neoliberal project. In contrast to other critical approaches
to neoliberalism, I have argued that neoliberal ideology operates less as a utopian
ideal to be constructed within reality than as a social fantasy structuring reality itself.
The persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project can therefore be
understood, not as the calculative manipulation of social reality, but as an increasingly
desperate struggle to hold reality together, against the traumatic incursions of the
Real of Capital. It is this continual struggle, advancing through multiple processes of
repression and disavowal, which has driven the neoliberal project towards ever more
intensive forms of social engineering, resulting in the social production of the suppos-
edly natural order of a market society. This constant anxious activity, directed towards
ensuring the stability of the subjects symbolic universe against encounters with the
Real, is the denitive characteristic of obsessional neurosis. For this reason, I have
suggested that the neoliberal project can be conceptualized in terms of a neoliberal
neurosis. This is not to claim that all neoliberals are neurotic. On the contrary, the
parameters of mainstreamdebate are increasingly dened by neurotic neoliberals like
Sachs on one side, and unreconstructed neoliberals like William Easterly on the other.
As we have seen, Easterly accuses Sachs of compromising his commitment to the
market. Yet it is precisely through their willingness to compromise certain ideological
precepts that Sachs and his fellow neurotic neoliberals have succeeded in sustaining
the basic symbolic coordinates of neoliberalism as the foundation of mainstream
development policy. It is therefore the neurotic neoliberals, as opposed to their more
orthodox counterparts, who have ensured the continuity of the neoliberal project.
22
To conclude, we can return to the metaphor of the undead with which this
discussion began. As we have seen, the neoliberal neurosis is characterized by
repeated attempts to maintain the coherence of the subjects social fantasy against
the Real of Capital. Yet because neoliberalism is premised on removing all barriers
to the movement of value, and on extending capitalist social relations to the ends
of the earth, it paradoxically intensies the very contradictions of capitalism that it
is shielding its protagonists from. The predicament of the neurotic neoliberal thus
recalls that of the private investigator Harry Angel in Alan Parkers Angel Heart,
who fruitlessly pursues a serial killer through numerous false leads, only to make
the nal discovery that he himself is the murderer. In a similar way, the neoliberal
neurosis compels its agents to engage with the symptoms of capitalism, but in a
disavowed form that prevents them from identifying themselves as those responsi-
ble for the exacerbation of the very symptoms that they are attempting to address.
Angels nal realization results in psychotic breakdown. Is this not analogous to the
zombie neoliberalism that Jamie Peck alludes to? The strange non-death of
neoliberalism in the aftermath of the global crisis of the neoliberal project could
then be compared to the disintegration of the symbolic universe characteristic of
psychosis, in which the distance between the Imaginary and the Real has nally
collapsed, and the subject is gripped by what Freud called death drivethe
blind insistence that follows its course with utter disregard for the requirements
of our concrete life-world (iek 2001:98). This denition of death drive resonates
with an understanding of the Real of Capital as an abstract form of domination that
is blind, processual, and quasi-organic (Postone 1993:270). Could this be the
mysterious force that continues to animate the living dead of the neoliberal
revolution? If so, then the death drive of zombie neoliberalism is the Real of
Capital itself.
For the neurotic neoliberal, an unlikely alternative to this blind submission to the
death drive would be to traverse the fantasy (iek 1999:460), confronting the
Real of Capital in all its traumatic horror, and forging a genuinely transformative
politics on the basis of this experience. Strangely enough, this would appear to
be exactly what Jeffrey Sachs has done. Since the onset of the Great Recession,
Sachs has launched outspoken tirades against the mad pursuit of corporate
prots (2011a) and the avarice of globally mobile capital (Sachs 2011b). He
even appeared at Occupy Wall Street, where he gave an angry speech denouncing
bankers, corporations and the business press.
23
Yet this seemingly radical discourse
continues to be underpinned by an appeal to Adam Smiths faith in a benign and
ethical capitalism, based on both the invisible hand of the market and the moral
sentiments of the good capitalist. In the pages of the Financial Times, for example,
Sachs continues to insist that self-interest, operating through markets, leads to
the common good, while gently warning his readership that self-interest, without
morals, leads to capitalisms self-destruction (Sachs 2012). The neoliberal fantasy
is thus retained, and corrupt bankers and corporate law-breakers are only the latest
symptoms through which the Real of Capital is disavowed. Once again, the solution
to the pathologies of global capitalism is to be found in capitalism itself. Indeed, it is
capitalism that is to be defended against its own potential self-destruction. In this
way, the transformative potential of Occupy Wall Street is sublimated into a
reafrmation of the status quo. If there is a lesson for those struggling against
zombie neoliberalism, it must be to keep a close eye on those who appear to be
ghting alongside you. As iek warned during his own appearance at Occupy,
Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us,
but who are working hard to dilute our protest (iek 2011). In other words, Jeffrey
Sachs wants to eat your brain.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Terrell Carver, Greig Charnock, Andy Merrield, Fabiola Mieres, Jamie Peck, Stuart
Shields, Erik Swyngedouw, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an
earlier draft. Any errors are of course my own. Versions of this paper were presented to the Third
World Research Group at Aberystwyth University in May 2012, the Northern IPE Networks
annual meeting at the University of York in June 2012, and the Open Spaces Forum at the
University of Manchester, also in June 2012. I amgrateful for the comments that I received from
the audience on these occasions. I acknowledge the nancial support of the Hallsworth
Research Fellowship in the funding of this research.
Endnotes
1
This literature includes key contributions from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including
Marxist (Cammack 2004; Harvey 2005), constructivist (Mirowski 2002; Peck 2010a), and
Foucauldian (Lemke 2001; Dean 2012). The Foucauldian contributors in particular might
wish to contest the charge of Cartersianism, given the centrality of the critique of the subject
316 Antipode
within Foucauldian theory. Yet much of the literature on neoliberal governmentality concep-
tualizes neoliberalism as a meticulously instrumental rationality.
2
Other applications of iekian theory to questions of political economy include Dean 2008;
De Vries 2007; Kapoor 2005; Kingsbury 2005; Secor 2008; Sharp et al 2010; Swyngedouw
2010.
3
There have been several book-length attempts to provide a synthetic overview of ieks
work, but even these have found it necessary to concentrate on a specic dimension of
his work, be it the Real (Kay 2003), jouissance (Dean 2006), objet petit a (Sharpe 2004),
or the master-signier and the Act (Butler 2003).
4
iek draws on Postones work in his own recent proposal for a return to the critique of
political economy, although he does not engage with Postone in the way that I am
suggesting here (iek 2010:181243).
5
It is important to distinguish here between the ordoliberal and neoliberal strands of the
neoliberal project, the former of which originated in Germany, with the latter being most
closely associated with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Whereas for the
ordoliberals, neoliberalism was a self-consciously constructivist project, the Chicago
School neoliberals understood market society as a spontaneous order to be revealed rather
than produced (Lemke 2001; Peck 2010a:6568). It was the latter strand of the project
that became hegemonic, hence my privileging of it here.
6
As Karl Polanyi pointed out at the time, The origins of the cataclysmlay in the utopian endeav-
our of economic liberalismto set up a self-regulating market system (Polanyi 1944: 39) Given
this fact, it seems incomprehensible that the members of Mont Perelin would have chosen to
resurrect the same project, and Polanyi himself discounted the possibility of such an
occurrence. Yet this is to misunderstand neoliberalism as an ideology projected onto reality,
as opposed to a fantasy providing the basic coordinates of reality itself, which the traumatized
subject strives to reconstitute rather than replace.
7
In the words of one neoclassical economist cited by Naomi Klein, Its as if there is a very
pretty but highly complex picture out there, which is perfectly harmonious within itself
and if theres a speck where it isnt supposed to be, well, thats just awful it is a aw
that mars the beauty (cited in Klein 2007:53). This comment captures the experience of
the symptom as a stain which colours the alleged neutral universality of the symbolic
frame (iek 1999:331).
8
My engagement with Sachss work in this paper is necessarily brief and impressionistic. For
a more detailed and sustained critique of Sachs, see Wilson (2014), which builds on the
theoretical approach taken in this paper.
9
Sachs recalls that he was besieged with questions from young East Germans. Why do you
have unemployment in the US when we do not? Why do you have poor people and
inequality in the US? I could not challenge or give satisfactory answers to these questions
I did not even know what the appropriate framework was to think about these questions
(Sachs, cited in Snowdon 2005:29, emphasis added).
10
Bergson was not a doctrinaire neoliberal, and also introduced Sachs to the work of
neo-Keynesians such as Paul Samuelson. Nevertheless, Bergson considered his
research on Russia to be a conrmation of Hayekian theory (Ofer 2005).
11
There is an immense literature on shock therapy, and my concern here is only to indicate
something of its theoretical content and personal signicance for Jeffrey Sachs. For
discussions of the social impact of shock therapy in Bolivia, see Garca Linera (2006)
and Green (2003). For Poland, see Murrell (1993) and Shields (2008). For Russia, see
Burawoy (1996) and King (2002). Wilson (2014:ch 1 and 2) provides an overview of
the social consequences of shock therapy in Poland, Bolivia and Russia.
12
Sachs describes his project in both Poland and Russia as a return to normalcya phrase
which again demonstrates the extent to which neoliberalism is perceived by him, not as a
reality to be constructed, but as the structuring principle of reality itself (Sachs
2005a:133134).
13
For Lacan, fantasy is on the side of realitythat is, it sustains the subjects sense of
reality: when the phantasmatic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a loss of
reality and starts to perceive reality as an unreal nightmarish universe with no rm
ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not pure fantasy but, on the contrary,
that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy (iek 1999:57,
emphasis in original).
14
There is a long tradition of medical metaphors in bourgeois economics, dating back to
eighteenth century political economists such as Locke, Mandeville and Quesnay
(Caffentzis 2003; Groenewegen 2001).
15
Discussing the politics of disavowal, iek notes the appeal of the medical model: society is
a corporate body, an organism; social divisions are like illnesses of this organism, which
must be cured if the health of the social body is to be established (iek 1999:226). The
implicit assumption of a healthy social body underpinning Sachss metaphors of pathology
and disease typies this medical model.
16
Sachs appeals to Adam Smith as an unquestionable source of authority on innumerable
occasions, including his writings on geography (Sachs 2005a:34), his theory of value
(Sachs 1999:91), and his account of human nature (Gallup et al 1999:166). In Sachss
own words, Its all in Adam Smith! (Sachs, in Snowdon 2005:37).
17
When Sachs speaks of Africa he generally means sub-Saharan Africa. The language Sachs
uses to describe Africa reproduces Enlightenment representations of the continent as a
void of chaos and despair (Mbembe 2001:19). Indeed, at one point Sachs uncritically
cites Adam Smiths claim that All inland parts of Africa seem in all ages of the world
to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we nd them at
present (Gallup et al 1999:132).
18
This representation of African poverty also obscures the contribution of shock therapy-
inspired programmes to the exacerbation of poverty and conict in sub-Saharan Africa
(Harrison 2010b:100).
19
As such, the sublime object possesses the quality of the sublime as theorized by Kantthe
encounter with a presence that can be sensed in chaotic, terrifying, limitless phenomena,
but that transcends the powers of subjective representation (iek 1989:202203).
20
The Report thus reproduces the basic assumption of the Post-Washington Consensus,
according to which It is not the substantive irrationalities of marketized social relations
that are causatively related to the creation and reproduction of poverty, but rather the
failure of poor people to adequately access and participate in markets owing to institutional
and social impediments (Taylor 2004:19).
21
The countries participating in the Millennium Villages Project are Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya,
Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. These countries were se-
lected for their established records of good governance, and the Millennium Villages are
thus embedded within neoliberal policy landscapes at the national level. The total population
of the Millennium Villages is approximately 500,000 (Millennium Villages Project 2011).
22
Other examples of neurotic neoliberals might include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and
Nicholas Stern. Like Sachs, Stiglitz has made a name for himself as a critic of the neoliberal
project, but has remained wedded to its fundamentals. Stiglitz served as Chief Economist
of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000, and masterminded its transition from Washington
to Post-Washington Consensus, which he described as a shift from shallow intervention-
ism to deep interventionism (Cammack 2004). Despite his current status as a reborn
Keynesian, Krugman served as an Economic Advisor in the Reagan administration, and
then played a key role in the shift to the Post-Washington Consensus, through the
development of his new economic geography (Wilson 2011). Stern has similarly evolved
from an orthodox neoclassical economist to a key architect of the Post-Washington Consen-
sus, the Commission for Africa, and market-driven policy responses to climate change
(Cammack 2006).
23
Sachss speech at Occupy Wall Street can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=mB_eoUqbKDw (accessed 15 May 2012).
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