1. Under Pressure

Not all are in agreement regarding the amount of pressure being enacted on the coal industry. Jonathan Thompson (Thompson, 2012) questions whether coal companies are being as negatively impacted by the new political and economic situation as they contend. In response to Peabody Coal’s announcement that it is laying off 1000 workers in the US and Australia, Thompson writes,

“Peabody, it turns out, is not hurting at all. In fact, the same story about the layoffs notes that its earnings during the third quarter of this year were higher than last year. Peabody has thrived during the alleged war waged by the Obama administration. It’s had higher profits for each of the last four years than it did in 2007” (Thompson, 2012).

Neoliberalism can be distinguished from classical liberalism in three important ways. First, according to neoliberal rationality, market competition is normative, not natural; thus, the role of government shifts from respecting a zone of non-intervention, the laisser-faire market, to facilitating and enabling market competition (Foucault, 2008).

Second, for the neoliberals, “the basic element to be deciphered by economic analysis is not so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises” (Foucault, 2008, p. 225). Neoliberalism then sees an economy and a society “made up of enterprise units,” in which the individual subject takes on the generalized form of the enterprise and becomes “human capital.” Thus, the entrepreneurial self, or subject, is the result: each individual is the source and being of her own capital, and in turn, a market comprised of competitive enterprise units: The individual subject becomes an enterprise, the enterprise becomes an individual actor. Furthermore, the generalization of the enterprise form also functions to extend the economic model, so “as to make it a model for social relations” (Foucault, 2008, p. 242). As Wendy Brown (Brown, 2015) argues, “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres,” rather “the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities” (p. 31).

Third, the generalization of the enterprise form and the market reverses the relationship between the state and the market. If laisser-faire was originally conceived of as a “principle of government’s self-limitation,” then according to the logic of neoliberalism, the market becomes “a principle turned against [the state]. It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government” (Foucault, 2008, p. 247). In other words, in neoliberal terms, market principles such as competition and efficiency become the means for assessing governmental activity. Thus, where liberals saw government policy as a counterweight to unrestrained markets, neoliberals believed “social policy should support economic policy, rather than operate as a counterweight to it” (Flew, 2012, pp. 55–56).