Insurgent Politics Against Authoritarian Neoliberalism
Alessandro De Giorgi
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Abstract
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The paper analyzes the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism and its implications for contemporary political dynamics, particularly the emergence of right-wing populism in Western societies. By employing Gramsci's framework of hegemony, it argues that current political struggles reflect a crisis of neoliberalism, characterized by a rearticulation of class power and a differentiation between deserving and undeserving social groups. The author suggests that insurgent politics must focus on intersecting oppressions and move beyond single-issue activism to effectively challenge authoritarian populist narratives.
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Neoliberalism, Authoritarianism, and the Crisis of Democracy.docx
Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.
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