Triumph Of Neoliberalism Research Articles

Politics and planning: land take between the EU soil strategy and local policymaking in Lombardy

ABSTRACT While the democratic theory of party government contends the importance of accountable decisionmakers’ preferences for policy outputs, the post-politics thesis argues that political differences have become irrelevant after the triumph of neo-liberalism. This paper questions whether politics makes any difference in land-use policy, with specific regard to land take, focusing on attitudes and choices of local elected officers (LEOs) in Italy’s largest region, where legislation on the land take was introduced in 2014. Most LEOs favour limiting land consumption and do not expand developable land. However, such attitude appears to somehow vary according to LEOs’ political leanings, being less common for right-wing administrators. Furthermore, this does not contradict the established pro-development paradigm, as shown by land consumption rates. Typically, under the influence of special interests, local land-use decisions can undermine large-scale strategies aimed at sustainability, such as the European Union’s Soil Strategy.

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Capitalism after communism: The triumph of neoliberalism, nationalist reaction and waiting for the leftist wave

AbstractWas neoliberal capitalism the only possible development path in Eastern Europe after the collapse of real socialism? How did the restoration of capitalism in the former Eastern bloc affect the economic and political situation in the world? Is the support of workers and lower classes for right-wing populists that has been observed in Eastern Europe for the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall a permanent phenomenon? By asking these questions, the authors point out that the offensive of the far right began in Europe before the 2015 migration crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, and that it coincided with the weakening of leftist workers’ parties. This process began in the 1990s after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. What can stop this process and change the situation? The solution is to show that another model is still possible: greater egalitarianism, democracy and the rule of law. This sociopolitical alternative, however, must simultaneously oppose two powerful forces: neoliberal capitalism and nationalist populism.

Fall of Last Safeguard in Global Dejudicialization: Protecting Public Interest in Business Disputes

The importance of courts is shrinking. This is largely due to global dejudicialization: the process of outsourcing disputes to private dispute resolution. In the last several decades, along with the triumph of neoliberalism, privatization of the resolution of disputes has become the gospel of modern judiciaries. Courts have been pushed to the tail end of the private adjudication process and are used only as the last resort. The courts’ warm embrace of this structure along with practitioners’ push has led to a staggering expansion of private dispute resolution. The world therefore has witnessed an unprecedented growth of arbitration — the primary mode of private dispute resolution. Despite its importance, judicial review at the tail end of dispute resolution has been understudied. Much of the existing literature focuses on doctrinal definition, normative recommendations, and commentaries about specific high-profile cases. With at least three decades of growing cross-border business disputes, research is needed to form a more holistic view of national courts’ review of arbitration and to provide a path forward in the redesign of the modern global private dispute resolution. This Article achieves that goal by providing an empirical and doctrinal analysis of the public policy exception as a pivotal indicator for judicial reviewability and supervisory function of transnational commercial disputes. The modern private justice system provides an important (if not the only) substantive safeguard to courts. As one of the last remaining safeguards, the public policy doctrine grants discretion to courts to set aside arbitration agreements and awards that harm the public. Owing to the evasive nature of this doctrine, courts and arbitral tribunals alike have grappled with an appropriate way to define and approach this notion. In a comprehensive study, this Article analyzes arbitral tribunals’ and courts’ treatment of public policy claims in commercial disputes over the last three decades using coding and empirical research. The study demonstrates the frequency of public policy claims in courts and arbitral tribunals, issues presented under this rubric, and the success rate of these claims. Results suggest that public policy arguments have increased, while the courts and arbitral tribunals alike have remained passive to these arguments. This Article argues that a triangle of a pro-arbitration policy of courts, the doctrine of international public policy, and the contractual view of arbitration has led to underutilization, ineffectiveness, and the fall of the public policy doctrine as the last safeguard in the dejudicialization of domestic and global business disputes. This Article calls for an overhaul of this structure whereby judicial review is not exclusively available at the end of the private dispute resolution process.

John Dewey on public office and representative democracy

ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen rising interest in John Dewey’s political philosophy, often in discussions of the presumed crisis of democracy, rising populism in Western political systems, or the triumph of neoliberalism. This paper presents a rare reading of Dewey as a theorist of office and political representation, where it is only meaningful to approach ‘the public’ in terms of public offices organised through the state. In Dewey’s understanding of democracy, public office is extended to the citizen, who must be educated to participate in public engagement and who has a duty to vote not as a private person but as a representative of the public interest. From this perspective, a democracy must be judged by the extent to which it is able to secure both its traditional public officers’ and its citizens’ representative functions, character, and conduct rather than by its ideas, for instance, of freedom of speech or public will.

De-industrialization: strengths and weaknesses as a key concept for understanding post-war British history

AbstractThis article argues for a central role for the concept of de-industrialization in understanding the evolution of the economies of urban Britain in the years since 1945. Above all, it is suggested, this concept is crucial because it focuses attention on the consequences of the transition from an industrial to a service-dominated labour market. To make this argument requires a careful definition of the term, along with recognition of its potential weaknesses as well as strengths. Key issues are highlighted by drawing on three diverse urban areas, which help to show the ubiquity of the process, but also its diverse patterns, chronologies and impacts. These examples are a stereotypical ‘post-industrial city’ (Dundee); a major city where de-industrialization has played an under-regarded role in developments (London); and a medium-size town in the south of England (High Wycombe), where the decline of a core industry (furniture) was crucial to its recent history. The final sections analyse the relationship between de-industrialization and other key frameworks commonly deployed to shape understanding of the recent history of Britain: ‘decline’, ‘globalization’ and ‘the triumph of neo-liberalism’.

The poverty of (critical) theory

The triumph of neoliberalism globally signifies what one might term the poverty of (critical) theory, as does the phenomenon known as ‘post-theory’, with its cynical rejection of the claims of theory. Here I do not wish to retrace the steps of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment to remind ourselves of the fatal dialectical intertwinement of enlightenment with obfuscation and domination; rather, I wish to follow the trail suggested by critical motifs in the work of various thinkers to demonstrate the ‘poverty of (critical) theory’, that is, its incapacity to effect the crucial transition from theoretical insight in, and exposition of, the sources of alienation, oppression and ideological obfuscation, to emancipatory action. The work of Gil Germain on technology and consumerism highlights the extent to which contemporary humans’ world has been constructed as one ‘minus desire’, where all needs have supposedly been satisfied, and which tends to produce self-satisfied beings, incapable of ‘acting’ in accordance with the demands of freedom. With Kant's famous motto, ‘Sapere aude’, as a point of departure, Hardt and Negri’s corrective in terms of the need to act, and not only ‘think' critically, is pursued. This is followed by an elaboration on Arendt’s vita activa, to unpack what action amounts to, and whether the conditions for its enactment exist today. What becomes clear is that critical theory is incapable, by itself, of guaranteeing emancipatory action. By way of analogy, first the importance of (critical) ‘thinking’ according to Stiegler, and then that of distinguishing between theory and what Parker describes as potentially effecting a ‘revolution in subjectivity’ at the psychoanalytical clinic is emphasised; that is, the subject’s re-articulation of her or his relationship with power. The point is that this amounts to a ‘preparation’ for possible commensurate transformative action in social reality, and similarly, it is argued, ‘thinking’ as well as critical theory can merely prepare the subject for emancipatory action, which is something irreducibly different from theory. To illustrate the difference between critical theory and emancipatory action, a glimpse is afforded of instances of such action reported in the work of Foster and Klein, before demonstrating (with reference to Nietzsche) what is at stake to move from the level of the individual to that of the collective.

Historicising Neoliberal Freedom: GB84 and the Politics of Historical Fiction

To imagine alternative futures it is essential to historicise and denaturalise neoliberal iterations of freedom. This paper builds on Wendy Brown’s injunction to ‘undo the inevitability or givenness of the present’ and Jameson’s analysis of historicity as ‘a perception of the present as history […] which somehow defamiliarises it’ produced by representations of past or future. I argue that many recent British historical fictions historicise the ‘inevitability’ and hegemony of neoliberal freedoms by figuring them as the product of sustained political/ideological conflict in the 1980s. This article’s case study is David Peace’s GB84 (2004), which presents the 1984-85 miners’ strike as a civil war in which the battle to define and embody ‘freedom’ is central. However, I argue that the text also produces a highly suggestive contradictory sense of historicity without futurity. It denaturalises the neoliberal present as the product of struggle and structural forces but also tacitly presents the neoliberal triumph of the 1980s as the ‘End of History’, after which political alternatives seem impossible to imagine and subjects remain inescapably determined by neoliberal ‘common sense’. This article argues that the novel is political only in profoundly ambivalent ways but that its aesthetic strategies offer a significant critical intervention which teases out what Jameson terms the ‘limits beyond which [contemporary subjects] cannot think.’

Analyzing Zombie Dystopia as Neoliberal Scenario: An Exercise in Emancipatory Catastrophism

This article starts with a hypothesis that the sociological analysis of literary and film production on the ‘living dead’ in the 21st century, owing to the triumph of neoliberalism that has accompanied by the process of globalization, allows us to better understand the transformations that act on the population and the individuals that integrate it. The zombie genre, considered a dystopia -where the scenario of the uncertainty surrounding the risk has happened to that of the catastrophe- reflects the split between resilient and redundant population, inviting us to explore three fundamental features: 1) the causes of this split; 2) The construction of a new subjectivity that accompanies it; and, 3) the displacement of bio politics to the thanatopolitics that accounts for the fracture between liberalism and neoliberalism. Dystopian thinking, based on detecting the germs of negative evolutions in the present, the causes and their possible consequences, posing different scenarios for the future, can be understood as a method of cosmopolitan sociological analysis, which ends in what Ulrich Beck described as emancipatory catastrophism, that is, not only to identify the seeds of the negative, but the good of the bad.

Re:Orienting Queer/Asian/Canadian

In 1980, Richard Fung helped found Gay Asians Toronto and in 1984 he produced the interview-based documentary Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. In this short article, he reflects on the shifts and continuities in identities, issues and political and social conditions from the 1980s to today. How have the AIDS crisis, the fulfillment of gay rights demands, increased physical mobility and the triumph of neoliberalism helped shape how we see ourselves and how we come together as LGBTQI Asian Canadians?

A Tale of Two Cities: Employer and Trade Union Responses to Local Government Retrenchment in Britain

This paper examines the strategies and dilemmas faced by local employers and trade unions in Britain in responding to austerity measures. Drawing on two local authority case studies this paper extends strategic choice analysis highlighting the use of pro-austerity and anti-austerity frames by local actors to advance their strategies. We challenge the dominant interpretation of austerity as signalling the triumph of neo-liberalism in which there is no scope for the exercise of strategic choice with the assumption Conservative and Labour councils pursue similar policies of outsourcing and wage cuts. Our findings consider austerity as practice as well as ideology and indicate variable responses at local level by employers and trade unions. These differentiated outcomes underline the divergent policy responses to the economic crisis between and within countries.

Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories

Through case studies of key texts across history of inquiry, this article analyzes temporality, affectivity, and politicization of term in its academic usages. My goal is to lay bare inarticulate and opaque method that orients what objects, processes, and relations count as within studies. For if is singularly mobile and mutable term, capable of adjectivally modifying range of phenomena-from sex practices, to social formations, temporalities, affects, diasporas, and inhumanisms-it is, nevertheless, not equally capable of being applied to anything nonnormative or boundary crossing. The method that orients what may be felicitously named is, I propose, fundamentally affective: it is matter of sensing some resonance between ones object of study and inchoate cluster of feelings that inhabit and animate term queer. These feelings, I propose, must be understood as in origin. Specifically, I argue that despite frequency with which inquiry has described itself as uncommitted to its pasts and by definition attuned to questions of immediate political urgency, it remains affectively haunted by histori- cal and political moment of U.S. 1990s in which it emerged. Ultimately, I propose that future of field of studies-and its relevance for scholarship on prior periods, racialized populations, and areas outside of United States-requires reckoning with field's affective haunting hy inaugural moment of U.S. 1990s. This reckoning may take form of re- rather than dehistoricization. That is, whereas scholars have tended to gesture toward unbounded future as domain in which can have renewed life hy becoming other to what it has been so far, it may he more efficacious to engage queer's multiple pasts-including those prior to its explicit deployment as political and theoretical term in 1990s-in order to differently animate queer's dense affective histories. I close hy offering attachment genealogy as method of exposing, fragmenting, and reworking queer's inheritances to enable to do different work in new contexts.Queer and NowBefore elaborating on significance of 1990s, I want to begin with text that marks an important moment in studies scholarship: introduction to 2005 special issue of Social Text edited hy David Eng, J. Jack Halherstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz titled What's Queer about Queer Studies Now? Published as field intervention that markedly highlighted work of a younger generation of scholars, this special issue, as described in its introduction, sought to foreground question of the political utility of queer in its assessment of what's queer about contemporary studies scholarship (Eng, Halherstam, and Munoz 2005, l). The antennae of political utility, in turn, orients editors to identify target of critical intervention as series of late-twentieth-century global crises which they describe, quoting Walter Benjamin, as historical (l). Their list of emergencies to which this special issue responds includes:[T]he triumph of neoliberalism and collapse of welfare state; Bush administration's infinite war on terrorism and acute militarization of state violence; escalation of U.S. empire building and clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; devolution of civil society and erosion of civil rights; pathologizing of immigrant communities as terrorist and racialized popula- tions as criminal; shifting forms of citizenship and migration in putatively postidentity and postracial age; politics of intimacy and liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and return to moral values and family values as prophylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. …

The triumph of neoliberalism and the world dominance of capitalism

Neoclassical economics dominates modern economics and provides an important theoretical basis for neoliberalism. Among its inadequacies are failure to take sufficient account either of technological change or of marketing activities, both of which are central features of modern capitalism. Neoliberals believe that the state should be confined to safeguarding individual and commercial liberty and strong property rights. But in practice, corporations’ dependence on states has been pervasive for at least 100 years. Corporations aim to secure higher profits. They lobby international organizations, as well as states, both to create conditions more favourable to their own individual interests, and also to increase the proportion of economies in which private corporations are allowed to operate. This may apply, for example, to privatization of health and education services which is not always in the public interest. This paper outlines several examples of interactions among corporations, technological change, marketing, state support and international organizations. Examples include huge state support for road construction, which facilitated the domination of cars over land transport; the role of marketing and technological change in the food and agricultural industries; and state support for scientific and technological change in semiconductors and the Internet, and for the development of biotechnology. In conclusion, the paper suggests an alternative approach to studying the dynamics of the modern world economy, viewing it as complex networks of interlocking systems. This might produce more useful analyses than those based on obsolete theories.

Is capitalism compatible with democracy?

Capitalism and democracy follow different logics. During the first postwar decades, tensions between the two were moderated through the sociopolitical embedding of capitalism by an interventionist tax and welfare state. Yet, the financialization of capitalism since the 1980s has broken the precarious capitalist-democratic compromise. Socioeconomic inequality has risen continuously and has transformed directly into political inequality. The lower third of developed societies has retreated silently from political participation; thus its preferences are less represented in parliament and government. Deregulated and globalized markets have seriously inhibited the ability of democratic governments to govern. If these challenges are not met with democratic and economic reforms, democracy may slowly transform into an oligarchy, formally legitimized by general elections. It is not the crisis of capitalism that challenges democracy but its neoliberal triumph.

MYSTICISM AND MOURNING IN RECENT FRENCH THOUGHT

There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book onThe Fantasy of Feminist Historydoes a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.

Energy Privatized: The Ultimate Neoliberal Triumph

Energy Privatized: The Ultimate Neoliberal Triumph

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN J. M. COETZEE

This essay reads J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year in its historical context (the moment of the US war in Iraq, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism), while also probing the problems at stake in the practice of contextual reading and of taking the work as staging the opinions of the biographical Coetzee. The essay teases out not only the question of whether Coetzee should be seen as a public intellectual (the short but not entirely satisfactory answer is ‘no’), but also how the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ play out in his oeuvre and are helpful in pondering Coetzee's approach to questions of genre, censorship and authorship.

Reconnecting the King with his head: The fall and resurrection of the state in criminological theory

This article examines the relation between criminology and the state in the postwar period. The article begins by looking at the role of the criminologist in the emerging welfare state. Here the state was regarded as benevolent, while the task of the criminologist was to help guide penal policy along benevolent lines. We then chart the development of a more critical approach to the state, now conceived as an authoritarian formation by critical theorists who no longer considered themselves insiders. We then trace a range of forces that worked to marginalise the state now increasingly viewed as irrelevant. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the reception of Foucault’s work and globalisation theory on mainstream criminological thinking. We conclude by drawing attention to the reality of a post-welfare, neoliberal order, in which the state never went away, and profile recent attempts to theorise its nature. In the context of societies where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.

Eggs-ploiting women: a critical feminist analysis of the different principles in transplant and fertility tourism

Intergovernmental agencies have recognized that inconsistencies in the way that nation states regulate commerce in human kidneys lubricate transplant tourism, and have repeatedly exhorted recalcitrant governments of both organ-importing and organ-exporting nations to criminalize the exchange of cash for kidneys. Yet these same organizations have elected to remain silent on inconsistencies in the regulation of the trade in human eggs that lubricate fertility tourism. This article is a critical feminist analysis of this paradox. Sketches of the histories of regulation of the global markets in human kidneys and human eggs allow attribution of the different approaches to sales of kidneys and eggs to the triumph of neo-liberalism in the 1990s. Neo-liberalism supports the growth of the medical tourism industry and its niche market catering for infertility, and is responsible for exacerbating the relative disadvantage of poor and powerless women in destination countries, thereby creating the conditions for ‘bioavailability’, that is, the willingness to exchange body parts for cash. The paper identifies a disturbing correlation between deeply engrained conservative attitudes to women and a plentiful supply of eggs, and concludes by suggesting that what women need to lift themselves out of poverty and discrimination is secure and dignified work. Intergovernmental agencies have recognized that inconsistencies in the way that nation states regulate commerce in human kidneys lubricate transplant tourism, and have repeatedly exhorted recalcitrant governments of both organ-importing and organ-exporting nations to criminalize the exchange of cash for kidneys. Yet these same organizations have elected to remain silent on inconsistencies in the regulation of the trade in human eggs that lubricate fertility tourism. This article is a critical feminist analysis of this paradox. Sketches of the histories of regulation of the global markets in human kidneys and human eggs allow attribution of the different approaches to sales of kidneys and eggs to the triumph of neo-liberalism in the 1990s. Neo-liberalism supports the growth of the medical tourism industry and its niche market catering for infertility, and is responsible for exacerbating the relative disadvantage of poor and powerless women in destination countries, thereby creating the conditions for ‘bioavailability’, that is, the willingness to exchange body parts for cash. The paper identifies a disturbing correlation between deeply engrained conservative attitudes to women and a plentiful supply of eggs, and concludes by suggesting that what women need to lift themselves out of poverty and discrimination is secure and dignified work.

Accounting for human rights: The challenge of globalization and foreign investment agreements

The triumph of neoliberalism has promoted trade and investment as the dominant routes to economic and social development. This has further enhanced the power of transnational corporations. Developing countries are increasingly expected to secure foreign investment to stimulate their economies and lift the local population out of poverty. However, foreign investment also has implications for protection and enjoyment of human rights. Transnational corporations manage their risks by imposing stabilization clauses on host countries that constrain their ability to protect and enhance human rights. Conventional accounting and corporate social responsibility reports seem to be unable to respond to the emerging agenda on human rights. This paper seeks to stimulate debates about the protection and enjoyment of human rights by drawing attention to the way corporations constrain governments and people through clauses in investment agreements. Some evidence is provided through an examination of an investment agreement relating to the Chad–Cameroon oil and pipeline project. The paper calls for the production of counter accounts to challenge the hegemony of corporations and create spaces for the enjoyment of human rights.