Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital

Human capital is to neoliberalism what Marx's free worker was to liberal capitalism, that is, the subjective formation at once presupposed and targeted by neoliberal technologies of government. According to this thesis, the neoliberal condition involves investors in their own human capital who, as such, seek to appreciate the value of the portfolio of conducts that constitutes them and whose relationship to themselves is speculative rather than possessive—as was the case of their liberal predecessors.