Post-Neoliberalism

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

This paper aims at reviewing the content of Buen vivir as an emergent discourse within the “gravitational field” of sustainable development: its genesis, its foundations and its singularity. First, we consider the criticisms to the development discourse and to its direct descendant: sustainable development. Next, we review the position of Latin America in the global discursive field of sustainable development and the situation of Buen vivir facing the debates therein. Drawing on the traditional repository of the aboriginal cultures of the continent, this new discourse has been theorized in the academic sphere and translated into normative principles that have permeated the political sphere, which is especially visible in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia. In this article we refer to “Buen vivir” as the contemporary reelaboration of the quechua concept Sumak Kawsay, and other similar concepts from other indigenous nations. It includes both the idea of interdependence between society and its natural environment, as well as a conception of the universal as plural. Lastly, beyond its implications for environmental debate, Buen vivir also involves an imperative for the redefinition of relations between the citizenry, the state and the market.

It is now widely understood that neoliberalism came to be entrenched in the legal systems of many states after the effective collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s. What is not widely understood, though, are the relations between this turn to neoliberalism and the contemporaneous success of international human rights movements. Many scholars now regard the 1970s as critical for the operational “breakthrough” of individualistic human rights. Yet work on the political economy of this “breakthrough,” especially its relation to the consolidation and concomitant normalization of neoliberalism, is still in its infancy. This article attempts to develop a finer understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights by examining the “North-South Commission,” chaired by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Established with the aim of facilitating “dialogue” between the “First World” and the “Third World,” the Group of 7 and the Group of 77, the commission sought unsuccessfully to win support for a model of global political economy in which enhanced aid, lending, debt-relief, investment, and technology transfer would foster economic growth and meet “basic needs” in the South while countering inflation and unemployment in the North. While the commission’s work has generally been understood as a form of global Keynesianism, and is sometimes linked to the New International Economic Order project of the 1970s and early 1980s, I argue that the commission articulated a broadly rights-friendly form of economic development that accommodated certain elements of the neoliberal movement. 

This collection of essays and notes attempts to tread the invisible borders between mythos, the neoliberal-Christian-nationalist 'world view' and socio-political trends in the rise of Trump, the Red Hats and the Evangelicals to political dominance in the United States.

«Non c'è alternativa, disse una volta Margaret Thatcher. Le profezie della fine del mondo, della storia o della lotta di classe che attraggono le classi medie occidentali sembrano darle ragione mentre si succedono guerre, pandemie e disuguaglianze. Oggi, si dice, è più facile immaginare la fine del mondo che quella del capitalismo. Questo libro è un’inchiesta che risale alle origini dell’immaginario dell’impotenza organizzata e scardina le certezze di una narrazione dominante. Con un’indagine di ampio respiro che va dall’ecologia alla politica, dall’economia alla filosofia, dal cinema alla scienza e alla letteratura, questa contro-storia del presente esplora i mondi dei nuovi pensieri della liberazione ed è ispirata a un pensiero folgorante di Antonio Gramsci: l’attuale politica neoliberale è una rivoluzione passiva accompagnata da magnetici discorsi sul «crollo», la «catastrofe» e la «crisi».

In libreria da giovedì 19 maggio.

Ora qui: https://lnkd.in/dM7qPJhs

Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017

Edited by Chris Cutrone

Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted.  This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.

This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.

'The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea' explores the internal workings of capitalism’s most infamous contemporary offspring by dissecting the diverse interpretations of neoliberalism that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach to pierce the heart of neoliberal theory, the book arrives at a discursive understanding wherein political economic approaches to neoliberalism are sutured together with poststructuralist interpretations in an attempt to overcome the ongoing ideological impasse that prevents the articulation of a more vibrant solidarity on the political left. Reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. In examining how imaginative geographies are employed to discursively bind neoliberalism’s attendant violence to particular places and thereby blame its victims, this vivisection of neoliberalism reveals the concealment of an inherently bloodthirsty character to an ever-mutating process of socio-spatial transformation that simply refuses to die.

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of economics, institutional analysis, state/regulation theory, and human geography. It finishes with some suggestions for areas of further and future research.

Neoliberalism is a frightening proposition. It is a violent ideology made flesh as a cruel and vengeful material practice. The virulence of neoliberalism is, perhaps, even more pronounced in its ‘post’ form, where we think we have a handle on its death, while it simultaneously continues to terrorize our social and political landscapes. The implication is that postneoliberalism is akin to a zombie apocalypse, where the horror we are exposed to is characterized by the mutations, deformity, and insatiable hunger of a living dead idea.

Poland was shown as one of the bright examples of the implementation of market reforms accompanied by democratization in the 2000s. Yet, it entered the path of authoritarianization, where the rule of law eroded, and xenophobia and discrimination increased after 2015, when Law and Justice Party (PiS) came into power. This study seeks answers to two questions from the critical political economy perspective: Which factors led to the rise of nationalist-conservative right-wing populists to come to power in Poland? How should the post-2015 political economic order be defined?

Regarding the first question, the paper suggests that the polarization-based power strategy of PiS has been effective under three conditions: (i) the regression of the institutional, organizational and political power of the working class, and the decline of left-wing politics, (ii) the effects of the global financial crisis, (iii) PiS's successful political entrepreneurship.

As for the second question, the paper argues that an authoritarian post-neoliberal regime is on the rise under the PiS government. Unlike the experiences in Latin America, three dynamics were influential in the post-neoliberal project in Poland: (i) the acknowledgement of the economic nationalism movement, which was led by the local managers of multinational companies, by the state managers, (ii ) the PiS government’s initiative to establish a 'national capitalism', resulting in the re-Polanization of companies in critical sectors, (iii) the establishment of the new conservative welfare regime.

Finally, the paper emphasizes that the authoritarian aspect of this post-neoliberal project does not only stem from the xenophobic and discriminatory ideology of PiS, but also from the exclusion of subaltern classes from the decision-making processes.

--
Polonya, 2000'li yıllarda piyasa reformlarının demokratikleşme eşliğinde uygulandığı parlak örneklerden biri olarak gösterilirken, 2015'te Hukuk ve Adalet Partisi'nin (PiS) iktidarı ile birlikte hukukun üstünlüğünün aşındığı, yabancı düşmanlığının, ayrımcılığın arttığı ve otoriterleşme yoluna giren bir ülke halini almıştır. Bu çalışmada eleştirel siyasal iktisat çerçevesinden bakarak iki soruya yanıt aranmıştır: Polonya'da hangi faktörler milliyetçi muhafazakâr sağ popülistlerin iktidara gelmesine yol açmıştır? 2015 sonrasında oluşan yeni iktisadi ve siyasi düzen nasıl tanımlanmalıdır? İlk soruyla ilgili, PiS'in kutuplaştırma temelli iktidar stratejisinin üç koşulda etkili olduğu ileri sürülmüştür: (i) üç dalga olarak gelişen piyasa reformları yoluyla işçi sınıfının kurumsal, örgütsel ve siyasal gücünün geriletilmesi ve solun etkin bir siyasi özne olmaktan çıkması, (ii) 2008-2009 küresel finansal krizinin ülkeye etkileri, (iii) PiS'in başarılı bir siyasi girişimcilik örneği göstererek toplumdaki hoşnutsuzlukları örgütlemesi. İkinci soruyla ilgili, PiS iktidarı ile Polonya'da otoriter bir post-neoliberal rejimin yükselişe geçtiği ileri sürülmüştür. Latin Amerika'daki deneyimlerden farklı olarak milliyetçi muhafazakârlar tarafından girişilen post-neoliberal projede üç önemli dinamik etkili olmuştur: (i) küresel kriz sonrasında çokuluslu firmaların Polonya'daki yöneticilerin başını çektiği ekonomik milliyetçilik akımının devlet yöneticileri nezdinde de kabul görmesi, (ii) PiS iktidarı ile girişilen "ulusal kapitalizm" kurma girişiminin yeni bir kalkınma stratejisi eşliğinde bankacılık, perakende ve telekom gibi kritik sektörlerdeki firmaların önemli kısmının yerli sermaye tarafından devralınmasıyla sonuçlanması, (iii) iktidarın bu post-neoliberal yönelimine yeni kurulan muhafazakâr refah rejimi eşlik etmesi. Son olarak, bu post-neoliberal girişimin otoriter yönünün sadece onu yürüten siyasi partinin yabancı düşmanı ve ayrımcı ideolojisinden kaynaklanmadığı, aynı zamanda bu otoriterleşme sürecinin çalışanların karar alma süreçlerinden dışlanmasını da içerdiği vurgulanmıştır.

As austerity measures intensify in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis, it is becoming ever more clear that neoliberalization exhibits a distinct relational connection with violence. This is not an admonishment of the protests that continue to swell, but rather a recognition that these movements are in fact pushing back against the violent measures that have frustrated and demoralized everyday existence under neoliberalism. There is now considerable room for scepticism with regard to the ‘rising tides lifts all boats’ discourse that is perpetuated by proponents of neoliberal ideology, as the free market has categorically failed at producing a harmonious global village. Promises of utopia are confronted with the stark dystopian realities that exist in a growing number of countries where neoliberalization has not resulted in greater peace and prosperity, but in a profound and unmistakable encounter with violence. This paper questions how neoliberalizing processes often comes suffused with processes of othering that result in conflict, arguing that neoliberalism itself might be productively understood as a particular form of violence.

With the recent development of the Occupy Movement, public criticism of neoliberalism has climaxed since the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. The mobilization of protesters in cities throughout the world was preceded by much speculation in the media and blogosphere over the past few years, where commentators have been quick to suggest that the end of neoliberalism is upon us. The validity of postneoliberalism, however, remains tenuous, as its advocates continue to treat neoliberalism as a monolithic, static, and undifferentiated end-state. Despite the desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is an undeniable continuity to neoliberalism that must be appreciated if we ever hope to leave this unforgiving version of capitalism truly in the past.

At a time when neoliberalism has become an accepted term in public debate to refer to the current state of modern societies and their political economies, Kean Birch critically analyses the conflicting theories that shape our understanding of ‘neoliberalism’.

With an ever-expanding variety of perspectives on the concept of neoliberalism, it is increasingly difficult to identify any commonalities. This book explores how different people understand neoliberalism, and the contradictions in thinking of neoliberalism as a market-based ethic, project, or order. Detailing the intellectual history of ‘neoliberal’ thought, the variety of critical approaches and the many analytical ambiguities, Kean Birch presents a new way to conceptualize contemporary political economy and offers potential avenues for future research through a judicious exploration of ‘neoliberal’ practices, processes, and institutions.

This work will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers to critically assess the concept of neoliberalism across many disciplines. The book will also serve as a general introduction to a wider audience interested in the term ‘neoliberalism’, its potential pitfalls, and its contested future.

El presente Volumen XI tiene 1,809 páginas, organizadas por fecha y agrupadas por mes.  Abarca el texto completo de las conferencias de prensa matutinas  que el Presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador encabezó, entre el 18 de marzo de de 2021 y el 1 de julio  de 2021.    Es el periodo comprendido entre el discurso presidencial con motivo de la expropiación petrolera y el discurso presidencial con motivo de cumplirse tres años del triunfo electoral en 2018. Se trata del quinto periodo, de la etapa de operación inicial fincada sobre hidrocarburos refinándose en México, para consumo interno e incluso para exportación. 
El Volumen I (01 Enero a 30 noviembre 2018) está en https://www.academia.edu/40861116/ .  El Volumen  II (2018 12 01 a  2019 03 11) está disponible gratuitamente en https://www.academia.edu/40757230/  .  El volumen III (2019 03 12 a  2019 06 30), se puede accesar en  https://www.academia.edu/40798502/  .  El volumen IV cubre del 01 julio 2019 a  31 de agosto 2019 y se puede accesar en línea en https://www.academia.edu/40809905/  .  A su vez, el volumen V (01 septiembre 2019 a  30 noviembre 2019) está en https://www.academia.edu/40861296/ .  El volumen VI está en  (1 diciembre 2019 a 1 julio 2020) se encuentra también disponible en línea https://www.academia.edu/42261557/ .  Las versiones estenográfica y en sólo audio, Volumen VII y anteriores, se pueden descargar gratuitamente en internet gratuito  https://www.academia.edu/43454031/ . El Volumen VIII está en el sitio URL https://www.academia.edu/44202516/  .  El texto completo del volumen IX está también  disponible en línea. https://www.academia.edu/44421755/.  El del Volumen X se tiene en https://www.academia.edu/44821158.  El presente Volumen XI está disponible en https://www.academia.edu/45558118/.
Los habitantes de México y planeta tierra ya han caído en cuenta de que pueden ayudar a preservar la memoria histórica del avance de la 4T, en su etapa de arranque.  Para empezar, en propia computadora, cada quien podría organizar y mantener actualizada una base de datos de las cátedras-conferencias presidenciales diarias de AMLO.  Y ahora no hay duda:  es sólo cuestión de querer hacerlo.  Es posible tener acceso, en un solo sitio url, a la lista de reproducción completa de los videos de  todas y cada una de las cátedras-conferencias presidenciales diarias, hasta la fecha y a partir de que inciaron el 4 de diciembre de 2018.    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRnlRGar-_296KTsVL0R6MEbpwJzD8ppA    Además, las versiones estenográficas de todas la conferencias-cátedras presidenciales y de otros actos públicos del presidente AMLO, están disponibles en un sólo sitio URL.  https://lopezobrador.org.mx/transcripciones/  En cada una de ellas, está su respectiva grabación en sólo audio; he hecho ya su respectivo acopio y organización.   
Este estado de cosas justifica el compendiar, de la forma que mas amigablemente permita que funcione como base de datos, la vasta mayoría de los textos que recogen las palabra de AMLO en sus actos públicos.  Hay que hacer algunas puntualizaciones:

1)Esta base de datos se puede usar, impresa en papel o en formato electrónico.  Es preferible echar mano de lo segundo, pues al estar presentado en word u odt; y en PDF;  se facilita enormemente la localización de términos o palabra clave, en las 1,809 páginas de que consta este volumen XI.
2)Se presenta de esta manera, pensando en que se hará análisis de contenido tradicional:  cita textual, inferencia, conexión con indicadores y variables que se desea investigar conforme a métodos cualitativos de las ciencias sociales.
3)No se han incluído, a propósito, los discursos de AMLO pronunciados en eventos que por facilidad analítica aquí llamamos “reiterativos”.s “reiterativos”.

Este trabajo indaga en las principales líneas de conflictividad política configuradas en Ecuador durante los dos primeros gobiernos de Rafael Correa (2007-2009 y 2009/2013). Desde el inicio de la Revolución Ciudadana, tal como se conoce el proceso de cambio liderado por el movimiento político Alianza País, se abrió una etapa de transformaciones políticas y sociales de diversa envergadura que modificó el mapa de la conflictividad. La confrontación en doble línea al gobierno –protagonizada tanto por sectores conservadores como de izquierdas-, el incremento de la frecuencia de los antagonismos y la convergencia de diverso tipo de actores e intereses sociales en múltiples movilizaciones- especialmente a raíz del reemplazo constitucional (2009-2010)- marcó la dinámica política del vigente ciclo político gubernativo. El presente artículo se concentra en el análisis de cuatro líneas de conflictividad política ligadas a distintas problemáticas públicas: reconocimiento político; representación y participación en el Estado; libertades individuales y orientación del modelo de desarrollo y buen vivir.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.

I would like to focus our discussions on the educational implications of three major themes explored throughout Arendt's work: plurality, promise and natality. Plurality, she argued, defines the human condition, which is characterised by both the freedom of the human agent and the unpredictability that necessarily results from the free interplay of human interaction. She further argued that binding promises – from the inter-personal to the interstate and potentially global – are the ways in which we protect ourselves from the unpredictability of the human condition while at the same time recognising one another as free agents. I shall put forward the view that the prime purpose of the university is to fulfil a particular promise: a promise, that is, to transfer the necessarily provisional and contestable inheritance of one generation to the next. But, in order to fulfil that promise, the university must recognise that each new generation – and each new individual within that generation – speaks back to previous generations with the unpredictability of new beginnings: or, in Arendt's terms, with an assurance of its own natality. The university, in other words, is both a bulwark against discontinuity and a space for the unpredictability of self-realisation.

This paper contrasts the experiences of neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile, exploring why two countries that implemented apparently similar market reforms came to different stances on marketization: a post-neoliberal politics in Argentina, and a tempered neoliberalism in Chile that has only recently come under scrutiny. The paper traces the common antecedents that inspired these reforms and the different outcomes and reactions that they produced. In contrast to recent literature, which emphasizes one or another explanatory factor, this article offers a synthetic comparison of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors in play, helping to understand how capitalists achieved a hegemonic class position in Chile and not in Argentina.

This book theorises Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution as a counter- hegemonic globalisation project in which the construction of "21st century socialism" occurs simultaneously at the local, national, regional and global levels and scales through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA- TCP). In these processes, the Venezuelan government's higher education for all strategy assumes a central role in the direct democratic and participatory democratic processes upon which the pluri-scalar construction of counter-hegemony depends. Within a critical theory approach, this fully revised and updated PhD thesis is grounded in a total of 16 months of ethnographic research conducted between 2005 and 2010 in Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador, eight months of which in a municipalised Bolivarian University in Venezuela. The significance and originality of this interdisciplinary study of the construction of "21st century socialism" is revealed through the elaboration of structural features, political alignments and empirical findings, to explain the dynamics and geographies of the multi-dimensional development project.

In this paper, we critically engage with the notion of a ‘post-neoliberal turn’ in Latin America. The analysis interrogates the existence and characteristics of post-neoliberalism as a mode of regulation, and explores the contributions (and limits) of the concept as a means of theorizing political and economic re-structuring. We critically synthesize the literature, articulating commonly cited principles and practices of post-neoliberalism according to different political, ideological, and geographical contexts. To generate productive engagement across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, we draw on perspectives from Latin America and on concepts of ‘variegated neoliberalization’ and ‘counter-neoliberalization’ (thereby abstracting from, rather than about, Latin America).

Se analizan  las distintas formas y espacios para la incorporación de los sectores populares organizados y de los movimientos sociales,  la evolución de sus prácticas, las lógicas que orientan sus  acciones frente  al Estado, la forma en que tales lógicas se construyen y transforman y las consecuencias en términos de la inclusión, principal objetivo de la democracia nolivariana:  ¿en qué medida el modelo de democracia participativa venezolano que discursivamente debería romper con la lógica del modelo neo-liberal y de la democracia representativa ha contribuido al  reconocimiento-inclusión-y participación de los sujetos excluidos tales como los sectores populares, los indígenas y las mujeres, entre otros,  sin excluir a los sujetos previamente incluidos?,

In responding to Weller and O’Neill’s ‘argument with neoliberalism’, I question the novelty of their approach and the problematics of denying the critical power and associated violence that neoliberalism continues to wield in our world. While they do raise an important epistemic challenge, a closer reading of the geographical literature on neoliberalism reveals that Weller and O’Neill tend to paint with the broad strokes of caricature. Notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or as a paradigmatic construct have long been debunked by human geographers, replaced by protean notions of variegation, hybridity, and articulation with existing political economic circumstances. A discursive understanding of neoliberalism further reveals it as an assemblage, and thus to hold neoliberalism to a sense of purity is little more than a straw man argument. Despite the positive desire to allow space for alternatives, Weller and O’Neill unfortunately construct their argument in such a way that positions it as part of an emerging genre of  ‘neoliberalism in denial’.

This is a course about neoliberalism, its social and psychological consequences, and possible alternative conceptions of the social and forms of subjectivity in the 21st century. Neoliberalism is a contested signifier that designates both an economic program and a cascade of cultural changes that began coalescing and accelerating in the early 1980’s and has continued to exert an influence that has only recently been challenged by the resurgence of nationalism ushered in by the Trump era which has reverberated across the globe. Neoliberalism has had widespread ramifications not only as an economic doctrine that spurred and intensified globalization but also as a cultural ideology that has influenced self-concept and modes of social relating. This course focuses on the concept of human subjectivity and how subjectivity appears within a neoliberal horizon. The critical psychologist Thomas Teo states, "society, culture, and history provide forms (molds) of subjectivity, whereby (developing) individuals have the agency to sometimes choose, expand or change forms, and in rare circumstances, they may even be able to transcend these forms. Under normal circumstances, however, humans adapt, (ful)fill, and actively 'suture' into these forms, allowing for variations and new actualizations." To elucidate the current cultural molds informing neoliberal subjectivity, the historical development of neoliberal economic doctrine and its implementations will be studied, followed by an examination of neoliberal cultural products (e.g. Serial TV and Social Media) considering both their content and form. Finally, recent reactionary phenomena will be considered in relation to the effects of neoliberalism as well as what social and subjective alternatives exist within our current indeterminate conjuncture.

In Deutschland werden gegenwärtig verschiedene stadtpolitische Re-Regulierungen beobachtet: neue Wohnungsbauprogramme, Instrumente zur Mietpreisbegrenzung oder Ansätze zur Restriktion von Investitionen in Gentrifizierungsgebieten. Nun wird diskutiert, ob solche ‚sozialen‘ Re-Regulierungen einen Bruch mit urbaner Neoliberalisierung anzeigen. Der Aufsatz geht dieser Frage am Beispiel Hamburgs nach. Hier haben Forscher_innen kontroverse Positionen vertreten, ob ‚progressive‘ Strategien hin zu einer ‚Stadt für alle‘ zu beobachten sind. Der Aufsatz stellt zunächst die stadtpolitischen Re-Regulierungen vor und rekonstruiert anschließend die darin produktiven normativ-strategischen Rationalitäten politisch-administrativer Akteur_innen. Die zusammenführende Analyse zeigt, dass sich in Hamburg sozial-integrierte und unternehmerische Strategien zu einem ‚Urbanismus der Ungleichheit‘ verdichten. Die ‚Stadt für alle‘ soll durch Strategien der Verbürgerlichung realisiert werden, die Ungleichheiten verstärken.

**

An Urbanism of Inequality. ‚New social urban politics‘ in Hamburg as strategies of embourgeoisment.

In Germany, the housing question is back on the agenda. Various political reregulations could be observed, aiming at ‚affordable housing for all‘. Now, researchers discuss whether these ‚social‘ re-regulations indicate an end of urban neoliberalization. I contribute to this debate by analyzing urban policy in Hamburg. Is Hamburg an example for ‚progressive‘ strategies towards a more just ‚city for all‘, as scholars have recently argued? To answer this question, I first discuss the current urban policy in comparison to other cities in Germany. I then adopt a genealogical perspective on the specific rationalities which shape the current ‚new social urban policy‘. Against this backdrop, I re-interpret the current re-regulations. One central finding is, that they are less ‚progressive‘ or ‚post-neoliberal‘, but manifestations of an ‚urbanism of inequality‘. The ‚city for all‘ shall be realized through strategies of ‚embourgeoisment‘ which foster inequality rather than reducing it.

For around fifteen years now, anthropology has been engaged in the study of neoliberalism. What contribution does the discipline have to make to a debate largely monopolized by economics and political science? To answer this question, the present article returns to the major texts and highlights the three perspectives from which anthropology has approached neoliberal expansion: culturalist, systemic and the approach based on governmentality. Each has its own epistemological presuppositions and a specific conception of anthropology, globalization and neoliberalism. The article highlights the relevance and limitations of these approaches.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943