The Supply Chain Beneficiary: Review of Benjamin McKean’s Dis-orienting Neoliberalism

Abstract

The Supply Chain Beneficiary: Review of Benjamin McKean’s Dis-orienting Neoliberalism Stefan Yong (bio) Benjamin L. McKean. Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 304 pp. $32.99 (pb). ISBN: 9780197674192. The political theory of the supply chain presented in Benjamin McKean’s Dis-orienting Neoliberalism is a powerful response to critiques of neoliberal ideology or theories of global justice that remain erroneously unmoored from the concrete conditions of capitalist production in our present. The book’s over-arching argument is elegantly ambitious. If neoliberalism is a comprehensive worldview or “complete orientation” (21) that explains how the world operates, deigns to legitimate those operations, and offers a normative guide for action in such a world, then neoliberalism’s interpellated subjects must disorient themselves from neoliberalism and reorient themselves to an emancipatory political theory. This alternative theoretical edifice, which McKean carefully constructs over six main chapters, proposes to explain the supply chain as a political institution shot through with struggle; legitimate justice-oriented subjectivity around “the outer limit of freedom”; and guide action understood as a disposition to solidarity and a habituation to social movement participation. “Today,” as McKean puts it in his nod to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “though man is born free, he is everywhere in supply chains” (47). The supply chain, [End Page 783] a new “economic form” (15) instantiating chains per se, is the ubiquitous acme of unfreedom and injustice. When contemplated by the North American consumer—the book’s presumed reader, sometimes addressed in the second person—the supply chain produces affective disquiet that McKean describes as “dizzying” or “unsettling” feelings at capital’s “uncanny magic” (51). The supply chain is McKean’s central object because it modulates between capitalist enormity and capitalist intimacy, implicating a planetary ordering of social relations under the sign of value as well as the experience of that ordering in the perceptual and affective registers of everyday life. In figurally anchoring McKean’s analysis, the supply chain becomes a synecdoche for global capitalism in a roughly periodized totality, lending the book its undeniable scope and urgency. The supply chain is that paradigmatic “neoliberal transformation” (24–26) which the “influential political theory” of neoliberalism (5) seeks to justify. It is “inseparable from the texture of daily life” (47) not only for justice-seeking consumers, but also for neoliberal ideologues, for whom the flaring up of supply chains in everyday perception presents an opportunity for sociodicy. For a Friedman (Milton or Thomas), a supply chain commodity “appears as a kind of miracle” (52), while the frictionless, flat supply chain world inspires not disquiet but “grateful wonder” (51) in an aesthetic experience of symphonic perfection. Any unsettlings from the mystery of the commodity’s production are thereby contained by the neoliberal conviction that this is the best of all possible material worlds, that “while the ways of the market are mysterious, their results are nevertheless assuredly good” (34). McKean rightly argues that such ideological tropes of neoliberal orientation must be discarded in favor of viewing supply chains as “political institutions” (70), spaces of contestation where lead firms, price-taking subcontractors, and supply chain managers claim authority, impose governance, and intensify exploitation over the outsourced proletariat of the export-oriented global South, comprising workers who resist, organize, and participate in episodic but antagonistic struggles to improve their lot, assert control over points of production, and “raise claims of justice” (70). And what of the justice-seeking consumer? When McKean invokes “visceral discomfort at the way we literally wear violations of our principles against our skin” (107), his link between T-shirt, garment worker super-exploitation, and consumer concern simultaneously partakes in and resists what Bruce Robbins calls “the discourse of the beneficiary,” grounded in the feeling “that your fate is causally linked, however obscurely, with the fates of distant and sometimes suffering others.”1 Crucially, this discourse is axiomatically addressed to beneficiaries rather than victims, is spoken by a fellow well-intentioned beneficiary, and is not entirely obviated by the fact that beneficiaries may not experience present capitalist conditions as unequivocally or only good. For McKean, the exemplary beneficiary gesture of “unmasking” hidden supply chain exploitation...