Blog
Article Collection
Anti-politics and the illusions of neoliberalism
We live in anti-political times. After a twentieth century in which Western societies experienced the rise and entrenchment of mass representative institutions, where hundreds of millions of people accepted that politics was the main way to have their social interests...
Call for papers: Gramsci workshop for research students
I am currently helping to organise a graduate workshop at the University of Sydney, exploring the work of Antonio Gramsci. All research students, whether based in Australia or overseas, are welcome to submit an abstract for a paper. The call for papers follows below....
Anti-politics, movements & the practical critique of the state
In November I co-organised (with Tad Tietze) a panel discussion on ‘Anti-politics, social movements & the practical critique of the state’ at the London Historical Materialism Journal conference. It featured three papers (abstracts below) and you can hear the...
‘Abolishing the present state of things’
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now...
Reply to Callinicos on anti-politics & social struggle
Tad Tietze and I originally wrote “Anti-politics: Elephant in the room” on Left Flank just over a year ago, and we were trying to summarise the changes in our thinking over the causes and consequences of the “crisis of representation” that the blog had been focused on...
Klein’s ‘shock doctrine’ thesis & the Whitlam dismissal
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) is one of the most widely read critical accounts of neoliberalism. Klein argues that governments have used ‘disasters’ of various kinds to implement neoliberal policies. Transformation occurs through ‘eventful temporality’,...
Neoliberalism’s Dominant Narrative
Use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ is widespread in the social sciences. While debates have raged since the 2008 economic crisis as to whether neoliberalism persists or has faltered, many argue it remains ‘the mode of existence of contemporary capitalism’ (Saad-Filho...
Thinking through David Harvey’s theorisation of neoliberalism
David Harvey is the most significant Marxist theorist of the neoliberal era and his conceptual framework is developed, chiefly, in his works The New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). Harvey’s work is a materialist analysis of...