The march of the neoliberals | Politics. We are living through an extraordinary political situation: the end of the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10, the defeat of New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition. What sort of crisis is this? Is it a serious wobble in the trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust economic model that has dominated global capitalism? Does it presage business as usual, the deepening of present trends, or the mobilisation of social forces for a radical change of direction?
Is this the start of a new conjuncture? My argument is that the present situation is another unresolved rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as "the long march of the Neoliberal Revolution". Neoliberalism is grounded in the "free, possessive individual", with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The formation of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in May 2010 was fully in line with the dominant political logic of realignment. The protests are growing. Neoliberalism and OWS. This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.” The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives.
Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. This is Matt’s point. We can now, if we like, refight old battles. Facebook in the Age of Facebook. Screenshot of image search for Facebook’s “Like” button. Text of a paper delivered at Theorizing the Web 2012 conference at the University of Maryland on April 14, 2012. Title stolen from @thinkingcatalog To extend the life span of neoliberalism, it needs ideological justification. Facebook explicitly wants to be that. It sustains a subject that is not inauthentic and opportunistic in its perpetual networking but liberated to be and do more.
Quantify yourself, increase that quantity. In the New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello outline the series of “spirits” capitalism has passed through, culminating with the current neoliberalism, which succeeded the postwar corporate capitalism after the economic crises and social protest of the ’60s and ’70s. The demands for autonomy, creativity, authenticity, and liberation were adapted to a “liberated, and even libertarian way of making profit.” Under such conditions, producers and products become less easily distinguishable. Statues and spectacle: Senegal's petit-dictator is the West's man. Kingston, Canada - While governments in Western nations are beginning to disassociate from Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, the unacknowledged fact is that he has served them dutifully. Wade certainly knows this, which is why he feels capable of playing his hand so confidently in his determination to stay in power and suppress opposition, which left six dead in the first week of recent demonstrations.
The changes Wade has made to the constitution, enabling his personalisation of the state, were ushered in alongside a number of other changes that served to further open the country to foreign investment. The fact that this is not discussed by opposition members leading demonstrations under the banner of the "M23 movement" is an indication of the limits of its ability to remove him from power - or to offer the kinds of changes desired by the population. The statue and Senegal’s FDI 'renaissance' Declining terms of trade Land deals and the statue The strengths and limits of opposition.
After the Arab Spring in Palestine: Contesting the Neoliberal Narrative of Palestinian National Liberation. Over the past year, as Arab peoples in surrounding countries erupted in protest against dictators, security regimes, and failed social and economic policies, the Palestinian people living in their occupied homeland have remained quiescent. Neither have mass protests targeted the Palestinian “regime’s” policies or negotiating performance, nor has resistance to Israeli occupation escalated or taken more effective forms. In contrast to the turbulence and revolutionary potential of the Arab Spring, has neoliberal ideology, through its economic policy content, created a Palestinian constituency for normalcy and risk aversion that could hold back progress in the struggle for national liberation?
Intuitively at least, the eventuality of a neoliberal complacency seems unlikely, if not absurd, for a people struggling for liberation from a regime of prolonged Israeli settler colonialism. This leads to a re-examination of conventional Palestinian patriotic wisdom. New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants treated abroad?
Each of these questions led to complex answers driven by fieldwork I conducted with Pakistanis before and after 11 September 2001, in Lahore, Dubai, and New York. After completing my fieldwork, which mainly consisted of an ethnography of labor migration and the role of the state in this process, I continued to think about the social and cultural processes that I was examining in other spheres, from media reportage to films and television shows. Imagining South Asian America.