Pardon us for caring: Childhood and the Neoliberal Project

By Rachel Rosen

An insatiable hankering for roller skates. The sounds of Joan Jett, Prince, and Boy George blaring on my Walkman. “Refuse the Cruise” peace marches to demand an end to American testing of nuclear-capable missiles in the Canadian North. Yep. You guessed it. I am a middle-class daughter of the 70s and 80s.

I am neither one of Thatcher’s Children in the UK, nor Özal’s in Turkey, the focus of Deniz Arzuk’s important research and key sites in the 1970s/80s genesis of neoliberal capitalism, along with the USA and Chile. My childhood and youth was spent in Vancouver, Canada. Yet, if we have learned anything about neoliberalism, it is about movement: neoliberalism compresses time-space for the mobility of goods, services, ideas, and capital. For people, it is, of course, more complicated as neoliberal border regimes funnel, direct, and often violently control human movement.

As I listened, back in 1984, to the sound of Prince singing plaintively, “This is what it sounds like, when doves cry”, I was connected to thousands of others around the world listening to his music. Did their stomachs twist like mine, in hearing the pain of a dove, a symbol of the anti-nuclear movement?

I am reasonably certain Prince’s lyrics were not intended as I interpreted them as an 11-year-old. Undoubtedly though, the dove resonated as a symbol of the period’s anti-war and occupation movements from Greenham Commons to Palestine. Similarly, children were the symbol of anticipatory hopes on which competing claims were pinned, during the birth of neoliberalism as they are now, whether as futures lost (to nuclear war) or futures ‘won’, through the neoliberal logic that reduces children to units to be developed as human capital for the sake of ‘the nation’. And, of course, children – myself included – were co-participants in these struggles, even as people whispered to my mother: “Should a child know this much about the dangers of nuclear war?”

As childhood sociologist Alan Prout so aptly puts it, neoliberalism may have brought us into contact with more diversity than ever imaginable, at one and the same time it connects, even homogenises, our imaginaries. With monopolies becoming transnational in reach, production, distribution and consumption chains connect people globally, albeit in deeply unequal and certainly not ‘friction-less’ way. There is no seamless neoliberalism across time and space, no shared project amongst competing neoliberals. Nor has neoliberalism levelled global inequalities – quite the opposite. The quiet demonstrations of my childhood were not those of my neighbours, the Indigenous communities whose claims to land taken initially through colonial appropriation, and later to facilitate resource extraction demanded by neoliberal free trade agreements, were met with violence, imposed underdevelopment, and enforced destitution.

So, while this website strikes nostalgia in minor key for me, as I recognise so many of the objects (roller skates!) and stories (ambivalences about children’s political participation) of my past, it achieves so much more. One message I take from this project, it is that we cannot begin to understand the social institution of childhood in the past 50 years without serious attention to neoliberalisation. This process, whereby nation states and regional bodies have re-engineered the world to the incessant refrain of ‘privatise, liberalise, de/re-regulate, financialise everyday life’, marks the most profound and enduring global transformation of the last fifty years.

This may seem an odd statement to make amid a life-changing pandemic where life is already being marked as inalterably ruptured. Indeed, a new “BC” to mark the times has even entered our lexicon: “Before COVID”. However, we have compelling evidence that the two, neoliberalisation and COVID, are not two independent phenomena, but are utterly interconnected. The degradation of the natural world, trade in wildlife in informal economies, rampant privatisation of health services unpinned by a logic of profit, and systemic racism mean that people of colour, impoverished people, casualised and migrant workers are more at risk of catching and becoming critically ill or dying from COVID.

When, back in 1984, Prince wailed: “How can you just leave me standing; Alone in a world that’s so cold?”, what sense did people make of these words? Did they feel the coldness of neoliberalism, an ideology that tells us that we alone are responsible for our fate and that any form of social support will make us ‘lazy’ or interfere in the ‘free’ operations of the market? For neoliberalism is not just out there, but in here. Literally. It is in our subjectivities, our intimate relationships, and the everyday objects which we use for survival, connection, and leisure.

Not that I put a name to these feelings of atomisation and individualised self-sufficiency in 1984. Neoliberalism shapes the horizons of the possible, so much so that, in the words of Mark Fisher, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”. Neoliberalism is not solely capital’s response to its crises of profitability, it is also a culture and political project.

But the passage of time for me, as with others, has well and truly exposed the class, race, gender, and generational inequalities neoliberalism has exacerbated and spawned, and together people have renewed the conviction that ‘another world is possible’. Not least can we see this in the Black Lives Matters protests currently galvanising against a force as deadly as COVID, white supremacy, and for anti-racist futures. As Prince might have it: “Pardon us for caring, we didn’t know it was against the rules.” (New Power Generation).

Some take solace in the idea that, having dug its own grave notably through the 2008 financial crisis of its own making, neoliberalism is dead. Others disagree, arguing for an understanding of neoliberalism’s diverse local forms generating new mutations, such as the ascendance of ethno-nationalist racism. Whatever our answer to these debates about neoliberalism’s current status and form, it is clear it has fundamentally shifted the ground on which we live.

Childhood and its representations are a part of this world, not a timeless universal somewhere beyond it. What better way to understand the specific localised workings of these transformations than in the quotidian artefacts of childhood – media coverage, everyday objects, and nostalgic detritus. For children are never simply inhabitants of ‘the future’, a singular notion invoking a monotonous continuity with the ethno-national capitalist present. Children and childhood are central to the neoliberal project in the past and present, but, in my most cherished hopes, they are core to its undoing in the futures we are yet to make.

References

Susan Colbourn, “‘Cruising toward nuclear danger’: Canadian anti-nuclear activism, Pierre Trudeau’s peace mission, and the transatlantic partnership,” in Cold War History 18(1): 19-36, 2018.
Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg. Thatcher’s Children?: Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s. London: Psychology Press, 1996.
David Harvey. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins. Greenham Common: Women at the Wire. London: Women’s Press, 1984.
Alan Prout. The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005.
Deniz Arzuk, “Roller skates, playfulness, and boundaries of childhood,” in Changing Childhoods, 8 June 2020.
Deniz Arzuk, ““Mrs. Thatcher is a bloody dictator” Children and Politicisation in the 1980s,” in Changing Childhoods, 26 May 2020.
Damian Carrington. “Pandemics result from destruction of nature, say UN and WHO.” The Guardian, 17 June 2020.
Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.
William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (eds.) Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture. Online first: Fordham UP, 2019.
Rachel Rosen and Judith Suissa. “Children, parents and non-parents: to whom does ‘the future’ belong?” in Families, Relationships and Societies 9(1): 125-141, 2020.

About the Author

Dr Rachel Rosen is an Associate Professor of Childhood in the Department of Social Science at University College London. Her work is located at the intersections of sociology of childhood and materialist feminist thought, with a focus on unequal childhoods, migration and stratified social reproduction. It contributes to key debates about the politics of children and childhood; changing adult-child relations in the context of neo-liberal migration and welfare regimes; and how and to what effect children are involved in migration processes. She is co-author of Negotiating Adult- Child Relationships in Early Childhood Research (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor of Reimagining Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? (UCL Press, 2018).

Cite this article as: Rachel Rosen, “Pardon us for Caring: Childhood and the Neoliberal Project,” in Changing Childhoods, June 23, 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/childhood-and-the-neoliberal-project/