Necroliberalism

It seems inevitable that as the US and global economic picture continues to worsen (confirmed dramatically by every conceivable indicator) there will be intensifying demands for the state to intervene and create a temporary welfare state. That kind of thinking destroys the longstanding neoliberal consensus in both parties. And Republicans in the Senate quite clearly understood that expanded unemployment will give power to workers to choose whether to go back to dangerous, low-paid jobs or just take 75% of their former wages (Sasse, Graham and Tim Scott wrote a statement saying exactly that). And many other provisions for poor people in that package force a new way of approaching public policy that will likely force new demands as the economy gives way. What do people who have fervently believed in the religion of neoliberalism do under these conditions? It is like Hoover saying that we don’t need to deal with unemployment because capitalism will just right itself. At a certain point that language could not address new realities in a credible way. Congress will be pressured from states, localities (urban and rural both), precarious employees, small businesses, and even newly Keynesianized corporate leaders. I also don’t want to overly invest in the fantasy that all the walkouts, sick-outs, wildcatting, talk of rent strikes, etc. beginning to happen is a form of working-class revolt, but it is a hell of a lot more radical labor activity than we’ve seen in years. 


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Producers Parasites Patriots, Race, and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.

 Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Race and American Political Development by Joe Lowndes

“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”

Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

From the New Deal to the New Right

“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White