Neoliberal Assault Research Articles

The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics

Under the reign of neoliberalism with its growing commercialization of everyday life, the corporatization of higher education, the dismantling of the welfare state, the militarizing of public space, and the increasing privatization of the public sphere, it has become more difficult to address not only the complex nature of social agency and the importance of democratic public spheres, but also the fact that active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated, and socialized into the world of politics. Lacking a theoretical paradigm for linking learning to social change, existing political vocabularies appear increasingly powerless about how to theorize the crisis of political agency and political pessimism in the face of neoliberal assaults on all democratic public spheres. As the vast majority of citizens become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, political agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based driven form of cultural politics in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and confessional culture become a substitute for systemic change. This paper argues that in the face of a virulent neoliberalism that spawns a vast educational propaganda machine, educators, cultural workers, and others need to rethink the entire project of politics within the changed conditions of a global political/pedagogical sphere. This article attempts to address the current crisis of meaning and political agency as a fundamental challenge to educators, public intellectuals, social movements, and others who believe in the promise of global democracy. In addressing this challenge, it argues that the urgency of the times demands a notion of global politics in which pedagogy, international alliances, and new forms of solidarity play a prominent role in the call for educators and others to be able to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise.

Long-term care: from public responsibility to private good

The neo-liberal assault on the welfare state has not always been direct. The acknowledged popularity of the UK NHS has resulted in governments using covert means to undermine its core principles, namely universality and equity. Long-term care with its vulnerable client base is an important example of how care has become a private responsibility with little or no debate or discussion. Using the social security regulations, the Conservative government of the early 1980s pumpprimed with public funds the massive expansion of private nursing and residential care, to the extent that the past 20 years has witnessed the evolution of a significant new economic market sector. This article charts the trajectory and structure of the market in long-term care provision, from its ‘cottage industry’ beginnings to increasing dominance by generic, often publicly-quoted multinational corporations. It shows how the privatization of funding was accompanied by transferring responsibility for payment of care from central government to local authorities in 1993, and how the introduction of eligibility criteria and the shrinking of public provision has made care a private and personal responsibility. Government is now encouraging companies to diversify into higher-cost specialist areas such as diagnostics, acute psychiatric care and acute hospital and intermediate care, with long-term care increasingly seen as a lower profit ‘core’ industrial package predicated on basic services and casualized, low wage labour. The commodification of the care process is now being extended to other parts of the NHS and has serious implications for the health and well-being of the whole population and not just for the most frail and vulnerable.

Race, Multiculturalism, and Labour Organizing in the United States: Lessons for Europe

THE NEO-LIBERAL ASSAULT on labour unions, the introduction of new schemes of capitalist work organization, and the expansion of low-wage manufacturing and service industries, have probably been nowhere more pervasive than in the United States of America. Massive immigration, the subsequent ethnic re-composition of the working class, and the emergence of new patterns of racial discrimination and segmentation are forming an essential part of what business pundits and mainstream economist like to call the ‘new U.S. economy’. During the recent two decades, however, the U.S.A. has also witnessed important struggles of non-white immigrant workers for social organization and political representation, which have hardly become known in Europe. Furthermore, the open bankruptcy of the Cold War AFL-CIO leadership allowed the rise of labour leaders more committed to the organization of non-white immigrant workers. As the U.S. is re-emerging as a global model for economic restructuring, these developments entail many lessons for the labour movement in Europe. A serious assessment of the implications of the growth of a new, increasingly non-white working class for the reconstruction of trade unions and the labour movement as a political force requires a closer look at the relationship between the changing patterns of racial segmentation in the workforce, the historically established forms of trade unionism, and the changing conditions of the capitalist economy. As any such comparison between the U.S. and Europe, this discussion should neither view global economic restructuring as a U.S.-enforced implementation of neo-liberal principles into the more ‘civilized’ parts of the Race, Multiculturalism, and Labour Organizing in the United States: Lessons for Europe

The Dynamics of Change: Class, Politics and Civil Society—From Marx to post-Marxism

This paper discusses how Marxist understandings of politics and civil society, particularly Marx's own work, can contribute to understanding the dynamics of political change in contemporary capitalist democracies. While briefly exploring the conceptual problems contained in the political-philosophical agenda set out in Marx's earliest works, the paper argues that his subsequent examinations of civil society and class relations are grounded in a political economy of capitalist development which retains considerable salience. The possibilities of a post-Marxist politics of civil society are assessed in this light, using the example of recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative assaults on the welfare state to indicate the ways in which membership of civil society is itself a critical focus of political contestation. A politics of civil society (for example, contemporary 'third way' strategies) lacks any substantive democratic potential, without the type of radical political economy developed by Marx.

Latin America: Neoliberal failure and the search for alternatives

A process of intense market reforms has now been under way for 13 years in Latin America. Since the onset of the debt crisis, marked by the Mexican default of August 1982, a combination of inuences has transformed the Latin American economy in asilent revolution' which has affected every corner of the continent. Suf® cient time has now passed to attempt a preliminary assessment of the successes and failures of market reforms, and to look at likely sources of new ideas in the future. The forces driving market reforms include both domestic and external pres- sures. Domestically the debt crisis was a sign of the exhaustion of the previous model of import substitution which, while it had led to the successful industrial- isation of the larger economies, bequeathed a legacy of underinvestment, inef® cient protected industry and social and economic inequality. In the 1970s Latin American governments had postponed the inevitable adjustment by indulg- ing in an unprecedent borrowing spree. When the inux of hard currency came to an end, the region was forced to adjust at a time of global recession. Externally, the start of the debt crisis came at the high point of the neoliberal assault on Keynesianism- marked by the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980- and the collapse of the French Socialist govern- ment's attempt to reate the economy following FrancE ois Mitterrand's election in 1981. Latin America's crippling shortage of foreign exchange forced govern- ment after government to turn to the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) for relief, placing unprecedented power in the Fund's hands, which it used to implement a rapid neoliberal market reform programme across the region. The programme broadly consists of three stages. The ® rst involves an initial period of stabilisation, since the neoliberals see ination as the greatest obstacle to growth. This is followed by a broader process of structural adjustment to im- plant a functioning market economy in the country bygetting the prices right', removing arti® cial distortions such as price controls or trade tariffs and allowing the unregulated market to determine the most ef® cient allocation of resources. Because of its role in distorting prices and generally interfering with the free operation of the market, the state is seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution; the economy has to be restructured to reduce the state's role and unleash the private sector. This means privatisating state ® rms and the broader deregulation of trade and investment. Deregulation should also remove

The Neoliberal Assault and Latin American Countermobilizations: A Review Essay

The Neoliberal Assault and Latin American Countermobilizations: A Review Essay