Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id589148265
neoliberalism as a framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade, a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills” within a specific set of coercive institutions:
Neoliberal theory, the successor to laissez-faire ideology, is arguably more utopian than the original. Yet put to practice, neoliberalism has yielded a brute “restoration of class power” as the economic geographer David Harvey puts it. More than that, neoliberalism has transfigured what it means to belong to a political community and what states are for, dramatically narrowing the scope for resisting economic power.
✏️ Educational note on defining neoliberalism 🔗 View Highlight
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“neoliberalism seeks to regulate society by the market.”
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Theoretically, there would seem to be little shared ground between, say, social conservatives and libertarians. In the real world, commitments to anti-communism and an opposition to basic concerns of social justice and attempts to dismantle hierarchies around race and gender made just such a “fusionist” synthesis the ruling ideology of the American right for decades.
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there is a deep theoretical affinity between the Left’s desire to resist domination and inequality in the economy, and the aspiration to similarly put pressure on unjust patriarchal, ethno-national, heteronormative, and cultural hierarchies
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the yearning to secure liberty, equality, and solidarity for all, regardless of circumstance. Resisting private economic power is one element in this project, and arguably the most crucial, but it isn’t the only one.
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Social oppression and economic exploitation are not one and the same, but they tend to reinforce each other. In practice, one can’t credibly resist the latter without taking a firm stance against the former.
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The Right is eager to condemn “woke” identity politics, and indeed a certain style of discourse on the identitarian left is worthy of some condemnation. But the Right does not disentangle these from legitimate battles against oppression, seeing them as one and the same.
✏️ It’s never black and white. Yes, the left practice some condemnable actions that the right jump on as woke identity politics, but that doesn’t throw out t he legitimate oppressions happening. 🔗 View Highlight