The Double Binds of Neoliberalism

Reviews / Votes

In The Double Binds of Neoliberalism, the contributors provide a detailed and astute unveiling of our contemporary dilemma. Neoliberalism has proven itself adept at offering a false sense of progress by mimicking (but not offering) many of the demands that came from the late 1960s in terms of racial, gender and sexual justice. In doing so, Neoliberalism has effectively separated political and economic forms of determination-commandeering the product of work for their own purposes. This is the double bind of the title: fake moves towards negative freedoms based on identity with a concomitant usurpation of positive, economic freedoms at the same time. The double bind means that leftist modes of organizing and fomenting change are readily coopted by neoliberalism to further reaction and the accumulation of capital by the one percent. If you want to read a volume that explains exactly how we got into the mess we are in and learn how many leftist solutions are bound to fail from the get-go (although these contributors do give a sense of new and better directions to go in), this is the book for you. -- James Martel, professor of political science, San Francisco State University Uniformly insightful and provocative, the essays of this book take up the multiple and still very much undecided legacies of the events of May 1968 in order to engage the contemporary problems and practical deadlocks of critique and collective action today. In a global context wherein the possibilities of radical change unlocked by 1968 have often been re-appropriated by dominant strands of neoliberal individualism and capitalism, these contributors bring out in multiple ways the suggestive and unsettled potentials for liberation and transformation that still lie concealed within that moment's promise of new forms of political and social organization at a distance from both party and state. For its insightful critical analyses and acute sensitivity to the contradictions of the present, this book will be eagerly sought out by those who, in the face of the global retrenchment of capitalism and dominant forms of subject formation and state power, nevertheless can still hear today the call of 1968 to 'be realistic -- demand the impossible!' -- Paul Livingston, University of New Mexico The Double Binds of Neoliberalism offers an incisive critique of the contradictions of neoliberalism, while resisting any reduction of complexity. It uniquely combines the sobering analysis of the current impasses of the Left with a staunch defense of the heritage of '68, mapping much-needed potentials for revolutionary breakthrough. -- Sjoerd van Tuinen, Erasmus University Rotterdam