Past Event: Philosophy Dept. Colloquium: Elizabeth Anderson (Univ. of Michigan)

Title: Outsourcing, the Criminalization of Poverty, and the Proletarianization of the Professional-Managerial Class: Legacies of the Work Ethic

Abstract: In this talk, I link three notable trends in 21st century neoliberal policy: (1) the outsourcing of state functions to private, for-profit firms; (2) the criminalization of poverty, and (3) the demotion of a large portion of the professional-managerial class to a deskilled, subordinated, precarious status, stripped of autonomy over how they perform their duties. All three trends are legacies of what I call the "conservative" work ethic, a secularized descendant of the Puritan work ethic of the 17th c. Although better-known than its "progressive" or pro-worker version, the conservative work ethic amounts to a hijacking of the work ethic by its original targets of critique--the idle and predatory rich. Bentham was a leading proponent of the first two trends. I shall show how the third follows from the first, by the logic of profit-maximization.