"The sequence of events initiated by neoliberalism is not unprecedented. In the late nineteenth century, when economic conditions were similar to those of the 1970s, a structural crisis led to a financial hegemony, culminating in the speculative boom of the late 1920s."--BOOK JACKET.

The book examines the rise of the amalgam of economic and political ideas we know as neo-liberalism and how these became the defining orthodoxy of our times. It investigates the inexorable global spread of market economies and how neo-liberal agendas are accommodated or hijacked in collisions with authoritarian states and populist oligarchies.

This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture--the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals--in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt. In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century.

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

Austin Mitchell's book is the first comprehensive study of the rise, fall and consequences of neoliberalism in Britain and New Zealand, the two countries which adopted the new economics most enthusiastically, became its poster boys in the eyes of right-wing economists and media AND suffered the most severe consequences. Growing up in the affluent years of a post-war settlement which brought full employment, economic growth and a welfare state to both countries, Mitchell entered Parliament in 1977 as Labour MP for Grimsby, just as the Settlement was failing. It fell apart because of balance of payments problems and the industrial struggles of what was becoming a zero-sum competition between social groups. This began the long march down dead-end street, first in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, then in New Zealand under Roger Douglas and the 1984 Labour government. Monetarism, the triumph of markets, the pruning of the state and particularly its welfare provisions and the belief in tax cuts to incentivise the wealthy all combined to turn Mitchell's long service in Parliament into a fighting retreat. The social balance of both countries was shifted to wealth and finance, away from industry and the people. The rich took their revenge. Mitchell chronicles the consequences in low growth, zero-sum politics, growing poverty and increasing inequality. He demonstrates how neoliberalism has failed to deliver on its promises and how wealth has trickled upwards not down. He concludes with the turning of the tide by a peasant's revolt leading to governmental and policy changes in both Britain and New Zealand. Ultimately he finds useful lessons in the failure of neoliberalism and points to a society and an economic policy which will be fairer for all.

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.