wendy brown from the u.s. radical left...
critical analysis of neoliberalism:
"...We know neoliberalism has to do with dismantling the social state, deregulation, privatization, regressive
taxation, and suspicion of public goods in favor of entrepreneurial, privatized, and for-profit endeavors.
However, there are two other things that I want to bring into the frame. ...neoliberalism... [is] a form of
governmental reason... that shapes our conduct across every dimension of life, from schooling to healthcare,
to thinking about leisure or retirement, to survival itself. For example, do we understand education as a good
oriented toward making a democracy or as an investment that an individual makes in order to enhance their
human capital? By grasping neoliberalism as a form of governing reason, we can understand how it orients
individuals as self-investing subjects.
...Democracy works best in small face-to-face orders. We know this when we sit in a room, whether it’s a
classroom, workspace, or a collective cooperative, and decide together how we will make decisions and how
we will live by them together. That was Rousseau’s conception. Can that order of things be in some modest
way scaled up or connected to other democratic forms? Can we have lots of democratic pods in connection
with one another that leave us some honest control over the conditions, the terms and principles, and the
rules we give ourselves—and at the same time reckon with a truly globalized world?
...My thinking about neoliberalism has been very much affected by watching the near total neoliberalization
of a great public university, namely UC Berkeley and the University of California system as a whole. The UC
higher education system was an amazing thing. ...worked brilliantly, until neoliberalism began to take it apart.
It led to the precaritization of the labor force—both faculty, lecturers, and graduate students, on the one hand,
and all the other workers in the university who lost secure positions with full benefits, as those jobs were
outsourced and made part time. Public divestment replaced investment, students’ tuition went up and up,
and that changed students’ orientation to education.
Wendy Brown is currently the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute
for Advanced Study, and Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley..."
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/rights-without-bounds-wendy-brown/
|
