Funciones que se pretenden medir con la Batería neurocognitiva Abreviada y su fundamentación.

Palliation strategies can assume a number of different forms. For Streeck (2014), the history of neoliberalism is the history of changing strategies of crisis alleviation. The tolerance of inflation in the 1960s and 1970s, the growing public indebtedness

role in the 1980s, and finally the promotion of rising private debt levels in the 1990s and 2000s constitute attempts to ameliorate the conflicting demands of capital and society (ibid). These claims mirror Krippner’s argument that US financial deregulation was rooted in an attempt free up credit for the alleviation of social strife arising from the postwar crisis (2011). In addition to such grand strategies of crisis palliation, policies of currency manipulation, corporate tax cuts, and preferential economic diplomacy are also important in postponing the economic ‘day of reckoning’. While such palliative strategies may temporarily reconcile the contradiction between the imperatives of value and human need, they risk damaging the government’s economic credibility – with dangerous repercussions regarding speculation against the national currency and the government’s access to global credit markets. It is therefore important that crisis delaying measures do not appear as such; that is, that they can be dressed up for global audiences as sober evidence- , theory-, or conviction-based policies (the Thatcher government’s public justification of their attempted currency manipulation through exchange control liberalisation is a perfect example of this, as demonstrated in Chapter 7). Palliation, then, is a statecraft strategy that can allow governments to embark on a temporary ‘flight from the present’ (Bonefeld, 1995: 40). Yet it entails important dangers: by facilitating the expansion of credit, it risks provoking unsustainable debt levels that can cascade into severe financial crises, while also drawing allegations of anti- competitive policy-making and thus endangering national creditworthiness.

In contrast, strategies of disciplining do not shirk from the crisis, but instead attempt to bring about what is termed ‘adjustment’ in the sterilised language of economics (Agénor, 2004); that is, the restructuring of businesses, labour markets,

and state finances so as to place the national economy in line with global profitability averages and thus reignite capital accumulation. Disciplining measures can assume a variety of forms: the imposition of high interest rates or the facilitation of currency appreciation can put pressure on companies to rationalise production and resist wage inflation; public sector redundancies, strict trade union legislation, and incomes policies attempt to disorganise workers and reduce wage levels; and the privatisation of national assets, the introduction of departmental spending limits, and the creation of public debt targets aim to bring state expenditure in line with the performance of the national economy. However, if these attempts to restructure society in accordance with the temporal demands of value appear to be the result of discretionary policy decisions, then the governing administration can expect to pay at the polls or even provoke a more serious crisis of state legitimacy. As such, governments often seek to mask their disciplining measures through strategies of depoliticisation.

Depoliticisation is a concept that has been operationalised to explain a host of different phenomena, from US financial deregulation (Krippner, 2011) to UK energy governance (Kuzemko, 2016); yet common to all is a focus on the process of seemingly removing the politics from a specific sphere of social life. As a statecraft strategy, depoliticisation refers to a form of governance in which state actors seek to reconcile accumulation and legitimacy objectives by seemingly emptying policy of its political content, so that it appears to be a purely technical affair. Bulpitt (1986: 28–32) writes that the discipline of governance requires state authorities to gain a certain autonomy from the pressures of various sections of society by seeking to establish ‘automatic rules or pilots’ that allow for the

‘euthanasia of politics’. As Flinders and Buller (2006) pointed out, depoliticisation strategies can be categorised into three types: institutional, whereby politicians delegate governance to ostensibly non-political institutions; rules-based, whereby decision-making discretion is curtailed by explicit rules; and preference-shaping, whereby rhetorical strategies are employed that portray specific social issues as outside of the state’s jurisdiction. The goal of depoliticisation is to place ‘at one remove the political character of decision-making’ so as to allow the state to achieve its policy goals in a more insulated and effective manner (Burnham, 2001: 128). These strategies are especially important during periods of crisis, such as the ‘generalized austerity characteristic of the neoliberal era’, because the state must both manage a lacklustre economy and avoid blame for this poor performance in the eyes of the electorate (Krippner, 2007: 479).

This thesis’ conception of depoliticisation moves beyond the somewhat banal association of these strategies with the reconciliation of long-term macroeconomic goals and short-term political business cycles. Instead, this understanding of depoliticisation points to a state in denial of its own nature (Offe, 1975: 127). The contemporary state must be a capitalist state if it is to ensure its material reproduction, yet it must also respond to the wishes of the formally equal citizens that make up bourgeois civil society in order to ensure its political reproduction. This reflects the more fundamental contradiction between value and tangible social wealths that lies at the heart of capitalist society. Such an intractable dilemma finds its party-political expression in the form of policy ‘realism’ – something that Hillary Clinton (2017: 226-7) castigated Bernie Sanders for his lack of in her memoir:

He didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up ... No matter how bold and progressive my policy proposals were … Bernie would come out with something even bigger, loftier, and leftier, regardless of whether it was realistic or not. That left me to play the unenviable role of spoilsport schoolmarm, pointing out that there was no way Bernie could keep his promises or deliver real results.

Yet the constraints of political realism are not eternal and natural, but rather historically-specific and socially-synthetic: people’s monetised social interactions give rise to a form of wealth that then imposes itself upon them as an apparently immutable reality. Nevertheless, if state operators are to succeed politically in this perverted reality, they must avoid giving the impression that their inability to meet people’s demands results from their own ‘spoilsport’ character. Instead, by pursuing depoliticisation strategies, policy-makers attempt to outsource discipline to extra- governmental mechanisms. Depoliticisation thus denotes a strategy of placing unpopular but materially necessary decisions beyond the bounds of what constitutes the state, so as to maintain the illusion of the state as a genuinely pluralist body.

While palliation and depoliticised discipline represent opposing strategies for responding to crises, they should be conceptualised as two ends of a spectrum. A particular policy may lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, thus constituting a hybrid statecraft strategy, if it contains measures that embody both the former and latter strategies. For example, a policy of targeted industrial subsidies may, on the one hand, extend palliative credit to politically sensitive industries, while, on the other hand, denying credit to less politically important industries under

the auspices of EU rules and thus force them to enact self-discipline (see Moraitis, 2017 for a discussion of such a policy in 1970s France). Which strategy takes precedence at any given moment is strongly influenced by the limits placed on state action by the imperatives of value and human need. If the weight of the crisis threatens to push the national economy over the brink, and state managers discover a mechanism that can veil the state’s hand in the necessary restructuring, then strategies of depoliticised discipline may be pursued. Yet if the political backlash is too strong, if society proves too resistant to its own recreation as an aggregation of single-minded producers, then state managers may be forced to simply ‘buy time’ (to borrow Streeck’s term (2014)) through palliation strategies. The framework of action within which state actors strategise is thus not a structural given, but is rather determined by the antagonistic, unruly assertions of different forms of social wealth.