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Anti-social security
Abstract
Gavin Smith’s (2014) Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics is a tour de force. It calls for anthropology to attend more carefully to the history of moves by the dominant capitalist blocs to enhance the conditions for their own reproduction and to the ways in which different subordinated and subaltern groups respond to these moves. This is, of course, a well-established line of inquiry. Yet, in Intellectuals, Smith breathes new life into an intellectual project that has been sidelined in recent years, as other preoccupations take hold in the discipline of anthropology and beyond. Smith rethinks what is meant by realist history, arming a new generation of insurgent scholars, readers, and activists, inside and outside the academy with a new set of intellectual priorities. The book thus exemplifies the best kind of politicized writing in anthropology and in other disciplines.
... Craven 1998). However, it took much more time for article 9 to be taken into further consideration by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), which is responsible for monitoring the activities of the treaty members (Scheinin 2001;Riedel 2007). In 2007, the committee adopted a so-called general comment on the right to social security (No. 19) (CESCR 2008). ...
Social human rights have rarely been given attention in social work research or comparative studies on welfare states. The paper aims at filling the gap by analysing the conception of human beings inherent in human rights and in unemployment policy documents in Germany and Finland. Its focus lies on the right to social security, a central norm of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The main question is what impact does the right to social security have on socio-political action in Germany and Finland. The results of the analysis, which was based on the objective hermeneutics, revealed a structural similarity between the conceptions of human beings in both countries. Unemployed people are labelled as deficient and potentially in need of educational measures. Their autonomy is curtailed, sometimes severely. In this sense, the right to social security has hardly any impact. The social work profession in theory and practice should use human rights as a tool against these new forms of oppression.
Globalization creates pressure for greater inequality throughout the world, but these pressures are expressed more fully in
the United States than in other developed nations. Although the distribution of US income before taxes is no more unequal
than other nations, after taxes it is considerably less egalitarian. This occurs because of specific institutional arrangements
that fail to redistribute income effectively and allow the pressures of globalization to be fully realized. These arrangements
represent a shift from the past and were deliberately enacted over the past two decades with divergent consequences for those
at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. The realignment of the US political economy can ultimately be traced
to America's legacy of racism. Once leaders in the Democratic party sought to include African Americans in the benefits of
Roosevelt's New Deal, support for economic populism evaporated in the middle and working classes. The advantage of the wealthy
is further enhanced by a political system in which those with money are better able to have their interests served legislatively
than the poor or working classes.
The social, as a plane of thought and action, has been central to political thought and political programmes since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper argues that, while themes of society and concerns with social cohesion and social justice are still significant in political argument, the social is no longer a key zone, traget and objective of strategies of government. The rise of the language of globalization indicates that economic relations are no longer easily understood as organized across a single bounded national economy. Community has become a new spatialization of government: heterogeneous, plural, linking individuals, families and others into contesting cultrual assemblies of identities and allegiances. Divisions among the subjects of government are coded in new ways; neither included nor excluded are governed as social citizens. Non-political strategies are deployed for the management of expert authority. Anti-political motifs such as associationism and communitarianism which do not seek to govern through society, are on the rise in political thought. The paper suggests some ways of diagnosing and analysing these novel territorializations of political thought and action.
This paper examines the state of cultural studies, primarily in the United States and Northern Europe. Arguing for a radically contextualist and conjuncturalist understanding of the project of cultural studies, it suggests that cultural studies emerged in particular forms as a response to a particular geo-historical conjuncture. However, while the conjuncture has changed significantly, these older forms of cultural studies have congealed into a ‘‘center’’ that has limited its ability to contribute to a better understanding of ‘‘what's going on,’’ of the possible future and the realities and possibilities of both domination and contestation. The paper suggests an understanding of the present conjuncture as a struggle, from both the right and the left, against liberal modernity and the attempt to shape an alternative modernity as the future. It suggests some of the ways cultural studies might have to rethink itself if it is to respond to this conjuncture.
Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
This chapter explores the limits and limitations of the concept of “the neoliberal city” for our understanding of contemporary urban governance. It begins with a brief historical account of the neoliberalization of the city. It then presents three ways of conceptualizing urban neoliberalism: as a global class project; as an articulation of “actually existing” metropolitan political and governmental forces and arrangements; and as an unstable metropolitan political and governmental project that seeks, but often fails, to achieve hegemonic status. The third part of this chapter reviews ethnographic case material that illustrates the necessity of using the concept of neoliberalism in a careful and nuanced manner when analyzing urban governance. The chapter concludes by discussing the limits and limitations of the neoliberal city paradigm, and argues that it is critical to theorize the neoliberal city without suggesting that its proponents have advanced their projects in stable, unitary or uncontested contexts, or that there is a singular, overarching view or account of what it is.
The past two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises, and places expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time. This tipping into radical expulsion was enabled by elementary decisions in some cases, but in others by some of our most advanced economic and technical achievements. I use the notion of expulsions to go beyond the more familiar notion of growing inequality, and get at some of the more complex pathologies of today’s global capitalism. It brings to the fore the fact that forms of knowledge and intelligence we respect and admire are often at the origin of long transaction chains that can end in simple expulsions.
The talk is based on Saskia Sassen’s forthcoming book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014)
There is no doubt that neoliberalism is having profoundly harmful effects on the academy and the world at large, and that it constitutes a major ideological and material project to which the academic Left must respond. Many academics have done so by, for example, opposing the advent of consumerist, market-driven learning; the privatization, corporatization, and branding of the university; the decline in public spending on higher education; the speed-up of the academic assembly line; audit culture; outcomes assessment and other efficiency-oriented interventions; and the casualization of academic labor, to name several developments that can be usefully glossed as neoliberal.1
Yet targeting neoliberalism for critique raises some significant theoretical and political challenges. Where does neoliberalism begin and end? What, and where, are its limits? How has it influenced academia? How does it interact with other political projects that influence academia and public intellectualism today? To my mind, these questions have a direct bearing on how we conceptualize the current relation between academia and activism. If exciting new protest movements, such as Occupy the University, are to effectively challenge business-as-usual on college campuses, they will have to grapple with the ways that neoliberal economic imperatives have undermined the idea of the “free university.” They will also have to invent new programs that deepen democracy and that decommodify academic (and other) spaces.2
Yet we should be careful not to overstate the omnipotence of neoliberalism or to exclude from our attention other forms of power, authority, and government. Major power dynamics can be overlooked when the concept is used without a great deal of nuance.3 For example, recent public university budget cuts are but one expression of a new austerity that has swept across the United States (and Europe) in the aftermath of the 2007 economic meltdown. Although it is tempting to gloss these developments as part of a broader neoliberal assault on public education, including public universities, the austerity measures that states have adopted are a direct consequence of the Tea Party’s right-wing (not neoliberal) populism. This populism outflanked Obama’s centrist pragmatism in the wake of the failure of neoliberal economic orthodoxy to guarantee economic growth and social welfare in the long term. As this example suggests, neoliberalism’s limits, limitations, and failures create spaces for other political projects to succeed, affecting the academy in ways we should not disregard.
In fact, acknowledging the variety of political and governing projects—from the libertarian to the neoconservative, to the social democratic, among others—that circulate inside and outside the academy seems crucial if we are to properly account for the broader landscape in which academics operate, and to which we may wish to respond politically. What seems necessary today in fact is much harder than contesting a generalized “neoliberalism.” Instead, we must grapple with an unstable and contradictory scene in which no one project is hegemonic. Three interconnected crises that influence academia-activist dynamics deserve our attention.
First is the crisis of delegitimation affecting the academy, a crisis that reflects neoconservative politics as much as or more than neoliberalism. The demands of consumer-oriented teaching, the destructive effects of the academic “star” system, and the wider academic employment crisis are among many developments that limit academics’ capacity to participate in social justice work. Yet we must remember that these challenges emerged alongside the New Right’s attack on “ivory tower” elitism. Indeed, the New Right has been particularly effective at putting the academic Left on the defensive with its politically disabling portrayal of academics as overly privileged “tenured radicals” whose romance with the counterculture and overzealous pursuit of “illiberal” causes such as affirmative action, multiculturalism, and political correctness corrupts the academy and undermines the quality of higher education. So too has its use of think tanks and other nonacademic institutional contexts from which to launch attacks on the academy and challenge academic findings. We must acknowledge also recent right-wing attempts to intervene directly in tenure decisions, to record and publicize controversial lectures and public statements by academics whom they oppose, to organize and coordinate cross-campus student groups, and to endow chairs at esteemed institutions of higher education.
Second is the crisis...
Neoliberalism has emerged as one of the key concepts for studies of cultural and political-economic change on a global scale. Yet its enthusiastic adoption and application in recent anthropological work raises some significant theoretical and political problems. At the center of these is the challenge of discerning its limits. This Special Issue argues for the need to move beyond abstract and totalizing approaches that treat neoliberalism as a thing that acts in the world. We argue instead for approaches that stress its instabilities, partialities, and articulations with other cultural and political-economic formations, and that direct attention to the ways that culture, power and governing practices coalesce into concrete governmental regimes with their attendant patterns of inequality. Specific articles probe the limits and boundaries of neoliberalism as it plays out in different cultural and political-economic contexts.
This paper explores the changing fortunes of the public realm during the last two decades. It poses the problem of how we think about globalisation and neo-liberalism as forces driving these changes. It then examines how different aspects of the public realm – understood as public interest, as public services and as a collective identity – have been subjected to processes of dissolution. Different processes have combined in this dissolution – in particular, attempts to privatise and marketise public services have been interleaved with attempts to de-politicise the public realm. Tracing these processes reveals that they have not been wholly successful – encountering resistances, refusals and negotiations that mean the outcomes (so far) do not match the world imagined in neo-liberal fantasies.
The viewer society: Michel Foucault's ‘panopticon’ revisited
- Mathiesen
The end of identity liberalism
- Lilla
What is the left without identity politics?
- Michaels
- Hall