J. D. Vance, neoliberalism, and Trumpalachia

Dwight Billings—Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, preeminent scholar of Appalachia, and occasional contributor to this blog—just completed a chapter for a collection of critical responses to J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins, which will be published by West Virginia University Press. He has kindly agreed to allow me to publish […]

Neoliberalism—ideas AND political project

Back in 2013 (and in a series of other posts), I have argued that neoliberalism (including so-called “left neoliberalism,” as espoused by Hillary Clinton and her new runnning-mate Tim Kaine) is not a unified period or stage of capitalism but, rather, a project to remake the world. Therefore, what we’re living through now is a […]

Neoliberalism or capitalism?

George Monbiot makes a compelling case that the Left still needs to come up with a viable alternative to contemporary economic and social common sense. Monbiot summarizes that common sense as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role […]

After neoliberalism?

The founding editors of the British journal Soundings—Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin—have published an online manifesto in which they argue for disrupting the current neoliberal common sense and challenging the assumptions that organize our twenty-first-century political discourse. Three ideas are, in my view, particularly important. First, “mainstream political debate simply does not recognise the […]

Beyond neoliberalism in Mexico

Is there a future beyond neoliberalism in Mexico? In the second part of his critique of Enrique Semo’s analysis of neoliberalism in Mexico (I wrote about the first part here), Adam David Morton suggests that is both necessary and possible to “go beyond modifying the functions of capitalism.” As the backbone of my book [Revolution […]

Left neoliberalism?

I must admit, I quite like the term: left neoliberalism. It does a good job capturing the position of many participants in the current debate about jobs (and economic policy more generally)—and distinguishes their position both from right-wing neoliberalism and the non- or anti-neoliberal Left. The term itself was invented in a debate on policy […]

Egypt and neoliberalism

Like many people who are not experts on Egypt but also not satisfied with simplistic references to a Twitter Revolution or the universal desire for democratic reforms in the Arab world, I have been looking for good background material. What is it that is driving the current protests and what might the consequences be? As […]

Ecology, Neoliberalism, and Keynesianism

In a recent article in Economic & Political Weekly [ht: is-i], Farshad Araghi (pdf) argues that “the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks is indicative of the depth of the crisis of ‘long Keynesianism’ that has exhausted its positive and negative ways of dealing with the ‘unsustainability’ of global capitalism.” Araghi’s first point is that […]

Changing the subject

From Chile to Lebanon, young people are demonstrating—in street protests and voting booths—that they’ve had enough of being disciplined and punished by the current development model. Last Friday, more than one million people took to the streets in the Chilean capital of Santiago, initially sparked by a sharp rise in Santiago’s metro fares and now […]

Utopia and the exhaustion of the center

We’re ten years on from the events the triggered the worst crisis of capitalism since the first Great Depression (although read my caveat here) and centrists—on both sides of the Atlantic—continue to peddle an ahistorical nostalgia. Fortunately, people aren’t buying it. As Jack Shenker has explained in the case of Britain, one of the most darkly […]