What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neoliberalism?

A Question to My American Friends, Colleagues, Students and Comrades on the Academic Left

The term “neoliberalism” drives me crazy, specifically when used in the U.S.. It explains too much with too little, concealing crucial distinctions, as it frustrates crucial coalitions against the clear and present danger of the new authoritarianism of Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczynski, et al.. Further, it’s meaningless for much ...
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What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neoliberalism?

Review of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party

On Collectives, Communicative Capitalism, and Suspension of the Individual Ego

Nowhere was this sense more palatable than in Zucotti Park, where the #OccupyWallStreet protesters set up camp. It was a moment when, especially for the Left, the world paused as if the railroad switch of history might suddenly direct the country on a new, more equitable track. Six years later, even ...
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Remembering the Female Sit-Down Strikes of the 1930s

Lessons for Today

Students of labor and working class history have searched the past to find examples of female militancy in the workplace, including strike activity. As strikers, women may be very militant, challenging authority of management and even the police, risking arrest for their activism. During the legendary sit-down strikes of 1937, ...
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The Uses and Limits of Anti-Neoliberalism

There is a generalizing story circulating about the 2016 presidential election that is, I think, a clear example of how trust and suspicion not only can but must coexist whenever we reflect on events: call it “the anti-neoliberalism narrative.” The story goes like this: the establishments of both the Republican ...
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Warehouse of Identities

A Neoliberal Delusion

Feminism & Capitalism Has second-wave feminism as an epochal social phenomenon unwittingly supplied key ingredients to the new spirit of capitalism named neoliberalism? This is the troubling question Nancy Fraser asks in her lecture Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.[1] At stake is the possibility that the cultural changes jump-started by ...
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The End of Progressive Neoliberalism

A chance to build a new, new left.

The election of Donald Trump represents one of a series of dramatic political uprisings that together signal a collapse of neoliberal hegemony. These uprisings include the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the rejection of the Renzi reforms in Italy, the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in ...
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On Trump and Trumpism

8 posts in 1

I am devastated. All of my public commitments are under attack. I thought there had been progress during my lifetime. Democracy and the positive developments of democratic culture, free speech and expression, social justice and the fight against racism, sexism, class exploitation, xenophobia, and much more, all seemed to advance, ...
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On Trump and Trumpism

Moral and Political Competence, Redux

The View from the Rubble

Last spring, when the Democratic primary was still somewhat in doubt, and people worried about the “bruising” primary season damaging the likely standard bearer in the general election, I suggested that the center/center-left/left coalition needed to hear out the debate between Sanders and Clinton. I argued that this was sound ...
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Moral and Political Competence, Redux

Democratic Politics in the Time of Trump

Defend. Resist. Bridge.

We who believe in democracy are going to have to get very serious about the practice of democratic politics over the months and years to come. And we’re going to have to be smart about it. Protest matters, but protest will not build the structures that can secure democracy against ...
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Democratic Politics in the Time of Trump

Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

The Left is very good at both recrimination and self-recrimination.  While salutary, both can be carried to extremes, and thus become self-defeating. Public protest about the election of Trump is both understandable and righteous – after all, he has publically and I assume sincerely expressed contempt for the norms and ...
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Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

The Pursuit of Happiness… and Cruelty

American Politics and its Commitment to Oppression

The most disturbing trend of 2016 has been the progressive revelation of cruelty in American political life. As someone who has always believed in the kindness and generosity of Americans, I have found this extremely difficult to acknowledge. I'm not only thinking of the Trump campaign, which seems to have, ...
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The Pursuit of Happiness… and Cruelty