Neoliberal Economic System Research Articles

“Memory Makes Us Brave”: Hauntological Echoes of the Past in the Music of Chile’s 2019 Social Upheaval

Abstract: The 2019 social upheaval in Chile began with students jumping turn-stiles in protest over a modest increase in the metro fare, but it quickly expanded into a widespread denunciation of nearly every facet of the neo-liberal economic system installed under the 1973–1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. “It’s not the thirty pesos,” protesters claimed, “it’s the thirty years,” referring to the three decades of neoliberal policies after the return to democracy in 1990. In the days and weeks after the protests began, a soundtrack emerged of both original music and songs repurposed from Chile’s past. Even the new songs created in the wake of the 2019 protests also frequently reference, sample, or allude to Chile’s musical icons of the Chilean New Song era of the 1960s and early 1970s or to dictatorship era music. Both the protests and their music are therefore rooted in a hauntological past. Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx (2006), where he examines the ways in which the spirit of Marxism, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future.” In Ghosts of My Life , British cultural theorist Mark Fisher applies Derrida’s concept of hauntology to English language cultural production, arguing that 21st-century cultural products reflect a “slow cancellation of the future.” “It doesn’t feel like the future,” Fisher writes; instead, “we remain trapped in the 20th century.” This article examines how the hauntological songs of the 2019 social upheaval seek to inspire and support an oppositional consciousness against the neoliberal system and how the resilience of that same system maintains Chile’s musical ghosts in a perpetual limbo .

Driving in Cars with Noise

Driving in Cars with Noise

Like a natural mom: social media influencers and digital maternal ambivalence in Italy

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Italian social media influencers whose celebrification is inextricably linked to their performances as mothers. Mom influencers are situated within an economy of visibility that functions to centralise the maternal body in processing marketing models and adopting specific trends and norms of the so-called platformisation of cultural production. I situate these content creators in the context of the ideology of intensive motherhood and the new momism, both of which are discursive ideologies framed in a neoliberal economic system. Through a multimodal analysis of three case studies’ Instagram posts, this paper aims to provide a new framework for understanding the self-branding of Italian mom influencers, interrogating how they operate in what I label as a digital maternal ambivalence. This framework acknowledges that – in order to stay relevant for the platform algorithms – mom influencers operate a constant negotiation between the pressure of adhering to idealised representations of motherhood and the need for re-presenting an authentic self, including affects, actions, and emotions that may contrast with popular understandings of what constitutes a good mother image.

Anxious solidarities against the mental health crisis: connecting personal struggles to wider social and economic injustices

Rates of anxiety have been steadily increasing over the past 20 years, prompting commentators to warn that we are in the throes of a global mental health crisis that is ruining well-being, threatening lives and damaging the economy. By highlighting how a person’s mental health, while nuanced and distinct, is always situated in a larger socio-emotional context or ‘structure of feeling’, this article argues that the issue of rising anxiety is a direct consequence of a biomedical model of treatment and care beholden to a neoliberal economic system that objectifies and isolates people. Through a framework termed ‘liberation health modelling’, it explores the progressive potential of ‘anxious solidarities’ as a way to reframe the problem of anxiety by connecting personal struggles to wider social and economic injustices. At a time when it is becoming impossible to deny the collective and widespread nature of people’s anxieties, the point of anxious solidarity is not simply to recount pain and suffering but to ‘make sense’ of it in relation to overarching structures of social oppression – calling into question the status quo in solidarity with other subjugated groups. Since struggles with anxiety have the advantage of being familiar to most, anyone can be a potential provocateur so long as they disavow an entirely personalised framing of their mental health.

Slavoj Zizek’s Criticism of Neoliberalism and Radical Political Subjects

Neoliberalism strongly endorses private property rights, free markets, and free trade. In the neoliberal economic system, the role of the state is to create and protect the existence of the market. This article aims to discuss Zizek’s critique of neoliberalism and his account of the radical subject. In this article we try to show that neoliberalism has negative impacts on developing countries, among which are the ecological crisis, economic crisis, and the privatization of national assets. We further elaborate on Zizek’s conviction that the presence of radical subjects can solve this problem by breaking through neoliberalism as The Big Other. The post-liberal ideology that he sees as an alternative for creating people’s welfare is “new communism,” which is different from the old communism proposed by Lenin. This communism emphasizes global solidarity in dealing with global problems and reinvigorates the role of the state as a facilitator to support the national economy.

도구적 관계 사회에 대한 드라마 <나의 해방일지>의 성찰

This paper focuses on the three Yeom siblings, who are the main characters in My Haebang Ilji, who represent their 20s and 30s, and show the difficulty of establishing personal relationships by being hurt and frustrated in their relationships with others. The failure to establish relationships in My Haebang Ilji reminds us of the problematic reality that young people in Korean society are currently experiencing. Accordingly, this paper explores the causes of impersonal and instrumental relationships reproduced in My Haebang Ilji, analyzes the instrumentalization patterns centered on the characters, and examines the characters' reactions and ways of overcoming them. To this end, we examined how the main characters of My Haebang Iljil are objectified as tools or means, through the way objectification is realized based on the relational theory of Martin Buber, a philosopher of human relations theory. Next, we examined the main characters' reactions to the instrumental relationship society and how each of them changes in their own way.
 The instrumental relationships shown in My Haebang Ilji can be seen to be derived from the negativity of reality, such as individualism, centralism, poor bonds of unstable irregular workers, and performanceism and materialism of the younger generation who have internalized infinite competition under the neoliberal economic system. In this instrumental relational society, the three siblings are hurt and frustrated, but they find their own true way of relating to each other, and show the possibility of liberation from non-subjective objectification. In the drama My Haebang Ilji, it was also shown that true relationship can begin when we face each other not as a thing, but as an I-you, that is, a person and a person. In the course of this study, we were able to see that the ontological concern about 'what is human existence' is ultimately replaced by the relationship between the characters in My Haebang Ilji and leads to an opportunity for dramatic reflection. Above all, the search for the spiritual values that we need to recover and a better place in life through dramatic imagination can be evaluated as providing an opportunity for reflection through television dramas.

Analysis of South Korean Class Conflict Revealed by Elements of Lies and Violence in Cinema - Parasite as an Example

Since the implementation of neoliberal economic policies in South Korea in the 1990s, the huge gap between the rich and the poor has become a phenomenon, an acute social issue, and a frequent topic of film and television series, which has stimulated a series of topics and discussions critical of capitalism and anti-neoliberalism. This paper examines the class conflicts that exist in South Korean society in the context of the neoliberal economic system. It explores the representation of class conflict and the gap between rich and poor in South Korean film and television productions. This paper applies a case study approach to the film Parasite, through reviewing its narratives and the analysis of mise-en-scne, it deals with the elements of lies and violence to illustrate the class conflicts in South Korean society. The findings of this study highlight the presence of a severe class conflict in South Korean society, which is reflected in the immoral behavior of the lower-class characters in Parasite, as well as in the violent declaration of war within the lower class and towards the upper class.

Critiquing Neocolonial Digital Barriers’ Impact on eLibraries and African Scholarship

AbstractThis article offers an overview of the Knowledge Exchange Research Group (KERG) West African Elibrary Collaborative (WAELC) study of West African scholars' systemic restricted access to digitized scholarly databases. WAELC, an ongoing qualitative and quantitative study, explores limited accessibility to current open‐access digital repositories and platforms at some African universities. A practical output of the study is to inform the development of a sustainable institutional repository and support the development of an open‐access multimodal digital platform that will feature scholarly and creative works of global Black people. The WAELC data addresses gaps in previous research on library access and usage at African universities and critically responds to the general African Digital Divide literature. A central focus of this article is to discuss the sociocultural and historical practices and processes that shape current digital access to electronic scholarship in Africa. Foregrounded in a Black feminist autoethnographic approach, the author's research process and researcher positionality were central to developing the WAELC research project. A significant finding of this research is that the systemic inequities framing global knowledge access and production in Global South institutions are reproduced in infrastructures weakened from colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal social, political, and economic systems.

Hardly working: eliding remunerative labour in recent Irish women’s fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (2020), Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and Caoilinn Hughes’ Orchid and the Wasp (2018) and The Wild Laughter (2020) as reactions against the capitalist expectation that human worth can be measured by an individual’s contribution towards remunerative labour. These texts are all recent novels by young Irish women writers in which the protagonists seek a form of work which elides participation in the neoliberal economic system – either as profit-making or salaried workers, or in the traditionally female role of providing domestic labour to a profit-making or salaried male partner. The article explores the fraught relationship between these novels’ protagonists and a globalised labour market which is simultaneously scarred by, and in continued denial about, the existential shock it faced in the 2008–9 financial crash, with a particular focus on the Republic of Ireland’s role as a key site of late capitalist deregulation, where the effects of the crash were particularly severely felt.

Revolutionary populism and democracy in Ghana

ABSTRACTThe article examines two decades of Jerry Rawlings’ rule in Ghana. It seeks to explain why Rawlings’ revolutionary populism did not develop in the direction that he envisaged: a new kind of popular democracy. Instead, Rawlings oversaw the reintroduction of Ghana's popularly preferred political system: ‘Western-style’ multi-party democracy, despite his avowed intention of not doing so. To what extent was this outcome surprising or puzzling? The article explains that it was neither surprising nor puzzling as Rawlings’ regime, the PNDC, lacked the capacity to introduce a radical new political system, despite his desire to do so. His aim – to craft a new kind of popular democracy – was not achievable as both internal and external opposition forces were stronger in their desire for multi-party democracy and a neo-liberal economic system.

“A PEREMPTORY ADIEU TO BIODIVERSICALS”: ECOLOGICAL DECLINE AND EXPERIMENTATION IN PETER READING’S -273,15

Peter Reading (1946-2011), pronounced as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying nation, Junk Britain” by Tom Paulin, has always been concerned with environmental deterioration, climate change, and decline of the species in many of his work from the 70s onwards. His poems of the new millennium advocate a more robust critique of the neo-liberal economic systems and human beings’ involvement in the current ecological crisis. Reading’s -273,15, [Absolute Zero], revisits his decades-long efforts to experiment with various poetic forms, registers and a grief-stricken tone presiding over most of his previous work with his suspicion of human language to convey the complexities of anthropocenic experience. Reading’s text combines his efforts not only to experiment with various poetic and non-poetic materials, registers, but also look for ways to cope with an approaching catastrophe. The verbal and visual collage pieces as the most frequently employed procedures in Reading’s poetry draw his poetry closer to the ‘entropological register’ Skinner puts forward and bring together the sources to show how Reading’s environmental agenda is conscious of its shortcomings. Drawing on Lynn Keller’s recent work on ecopoetics and the concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” this paper aims to explore how Reading’s ecological agenda and experimental practices in -273,15 might forge an improved understanding of the connections between contemporary poetry and environmental justice.

Exploring the Inherent Tensions at the Nexus of Education for Sustainable Development and Neoliberalism

To overcome the anthropogenic and global issues facing humanity today, young people will require a level of democracy, citizenship and altruism that is lacking in our current education system and is often antagonistic to the dominant neoliberal values, structures and underlying assumptions of our increasingly globalized education systems. This article explores the inherent tension between education for sustainable development within a neoliberal political and economic system, through conducting post-structural policy analysis on SDG 4—Target 4.7. This process highlights a highly politicized education development agenda that problematizes both the current state of the world and global education systems as failing to equip young people with the knowledge and skill necessary to promote sustainable development. This leads to a range of discursive and lived effects including the increased reliance on transnational organizations, increasing performativity in schools and the subjectification of teachers and students.

Empowerment of Female-Headed Households

This essay focuses on the empowerment of families headed by solo moms in the United States and argues that the so-called “breakup of the family”—whether through divorce, chosen solo parenthood, or non-heterosexual families—is not the primary problem Christian ethicists should be concerned about. Instead, our attention should be directed towards a neoliberal political economic system that does not consider the rearing of children as a public responsibility and does not prioritize support to families of any type. This essay critiques the traditional Christian framing of family and view of the “family crisis” by drawing on the work of Black queer scholars who offer a more inclusive and interdependent understanding of family that challenges the White heteronormative nuclear family ideal. It concludes with an argument for structural change that prioritizes the rearing of children as a public good and not simply the responsibility of individual households and offers support for the flourishing of all families with attention to particularities of race, class, and gender justice.

ANALISIS KRITIS FILSAFAT MUHAMMAD BĀQIR AL-ṢADR TERHADAP SISTEM EKONOMI NEOLIBERAL

The neoliberal economic system is a system that is used to support economic and political activities in the worldwide. But a series of failures was created by this system. The fundamental problems are economic inequality at the state level and economic gap at the community level. This study aims to prove the fragility of the neoliberal economic system by using Muhammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr's sharpy analysis of materialism capitalism. This study uses a critical literature study method. The main references are Falsafatunā and IqtiṢādunā. According to Bāqir al-Ṣadr, the Islamic economic system is the answer to the problems posed by various economic systems based on capitalism and materialism.

Dance to resist: emotions and protest in Lindy Hop dancers during October 2019 Chilean rallies

ABSTRACT On 18 October 2019, a mass revolt began in Chile against the results of the neoliberal political and economic system. In the context of strong repression by the police, different artistic manifestations appeared as an expression of opposition to the government. This included concerts, performances, street theater and dance as political action. In this article, we present the case of a community of Lindy Hop dancers to explain the meaning given to dancing in public spaces as a protest action during this Chilean social crisis. Using an auto-ethnographic approach, we show that hoppers redefined their dance practices in public spaces as an act of resistance to state violence, from a political and an emotional perspective. However, these actions generated conflict within the hopper community, and the legitimacy of such practice was brought into question.

Homo Oeconomicus and the Limits of Storytelling: Italian Apocalyptic Fiction of the Long Downturn

This paper focuses on three contemporary Italian novels that operate within the apocalyptic paradigm and voice a sense of collapsing reality that characterized Italy in the wake of the global financial crisis. Ruggero Cappuccio's Fuoco su Napoli (2010), Gianni Miraglia's Muori Milano muori! (2011), and Francesca Genti's La febbre (2011) represent worlds in which the disruption of daily life exposes the invisible conventions that make it possible. In shaping narratives in which their characters attempt to cope with the fact that their worlds are coming to a definitive end because of their relationship to profit, power, and spectacle, the authors articulate an underlying critique of the present socio-economic system and its ancillary effects. From this perspective, these novels highlight the ways in which the neoliberal economic system of the long downturn undermines the conditions that guarantee the future of social and biophysical life as we know it. I argue that the manipulation enacted by the authors in relation to established genre paradigms invites a rearrangement of values and of human relations with respect to homo oeconomicus, thus envisioning a new ethics as the pulsing core for activating a political shift and bringing about a new future.

Urban Megaprojects as Disorderly and Unruly Endeavors

Megaprojects have multiplied around the world as an urban response to the pressures of neoliberalism and globalization in favor of development, competitiveness and innovation. The protagonists of the megaprojects adopt a narrative of international competitiveness, framing a discourse dominated by the rhetoric of economic survival. The response has been urban transformations in which governments and private sector actors have struggled to position their cities and services within a global socio-political division of labor, production and consumption, and to coordinate their local networks with the requirements perceived or real aspects of an increasingly deregulated and neoliberal international economic system. It seems clear, then, that the phenomenon of megaprojects is intrinsically linked to the logic of growth, development, qualitative urban transformation, wealth creation, competitiveness and prosperity. One of the consequences of this overall framework is that megaprojects usually evolve from an orderly planning project to a disorderly an unruly endeavor. The complexities of construction, operation, management and governance of large projects entail a series of stochastic processes where risk and unpredictability become fundamental components of urban economic life.

“Bungkalan” and the Manobo-Pulangihon tribe’s resistance to corporate land-grab in Bukidnon, Mindanao

The island of Mindanao, dubbed as the “Land of Promise” is home to more than half of natural and mineral resources in the country. It hosts the largest rubber, banana and pineapple plantations as well as huge mining explorations. These big agri-plantations and mining corporations encroach peasant communities and Indigenous Peoples or Lumads in Bukidnon, South Cotabato, Sarangani, Compostela Valley and Davao provinces. Around 500,000 hectares of land in the five regions of Mindanao are planted with crops primarily for export. Ethnographic data were collected during fieldwork in the province of Bukidnon from May to October 2017. Raw data were obtained through formal and informal interviews, direct observation and collective discussions. Field research was carried out mostly with the Manobo-Pulangihon tribe in the municipality of Quezon. This article explores how corporate land-grabbing generates Lumad resistance, thus creating emancipatory politics. First, I briefly lay down the basis of “development programs” of the government within the framework of the neoliberal economic system and contextualize the issue of land-grabbing in Lumad communities in Bukidnon. I rely heavily on the theories provided by David Harvey in crystallizing the neoliberal economic paradigm. I then propose that this market-driven economic model inevitably results in accumulation by dispossession as experienced by the Manobo-Pulangihon tribe. Third, I describe how big landlords and agro-corporations encroach the Manobo-Pulangihon Tribe ancestral lands and explore a novel form of Lumad resistance against corporate land-grab.

L'avenir de l'esclavage : l'histoire sociale comme histoire radicale

The legacies of slavery and colonialism are diverse. They include institutionalized racism, racialized poverty, the social marginalization of racialized peoples, a neoliberal economic system that has facilitated the expansion of human trafficking, and, of course, the imposition of a system of imperialism on the former colonies of France (and other European countries). The first step towards dismantling these systematic social and economic injustices must be the writing of a version of history that destabilizes the problematic hegemonic narratives that continue to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Keeping the System Going: Social Design and the Reproduction of Inequalities in Neoliberal Times

The reproduction of inequalities is a necessary product of neoliberal economic systems. Meanwhile, attempts to ameliorate this within social design actually perpetuate this situation. This, we argue, is partly due to the institutional configuration of design whose precarious professional norms mitigate against long-term consolidation. Relatedly, this struggle for recognition produces a kind of performativity of social design that draws the focus of practice away from the problems it seeks to address.