When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. (Dawn of the Dead, 1978)
Neoliberalism is a frightening proposition. It is a violent ideology made flesh as a cruel and vengeful material practice (Springer, 2015). The virulence of neoliberalism is, perhaps, even more pronounced in its ‘post’ form, where we think we have a handle on its death, while it simultaneously continues to terrorize our social and political landscapes. The implication is that postneoliberalism is akin to a zombie apocalypse, where the horror we are exposed to is characterized by the mutations, deformity, and insatiable hunger of a living dead idea. In the final months of 2008, when the United States’ mortgage industry imploded – thereby causing several large insurance houses to go bankrupt, the failure of major investment banks, and undermining the credibility of the Security and Exchange Commission and numerous credit rating agencies – we entered a new phase in the unfolding of capitalism's terror. Although the American taxpayer's pocketbook footed the bill for a $700 billion corporate bailout organized by the outgoing Bush Administration, the crisis was hardly a national one. The effects of what began as an American ‘sub-prime mortgage crisis’ cut much deeper as the financial system itself, and hence the crisis it spawned, were necessarily global in scope. For some, it seemed that in every corner of the globe, the free-market project was being called into question (Peck et al., 2010). There had never been such an overt calling to account of neoliberalism's culpability. Both the mainstream media and the blogosphere were abuzz with commentators declaring that the Wall Street meltdown was the final curtain call for neoliberalism (see Klein, 2008; Stiglitz, 2008; Wallerstein, 2008). We could have anticipated such a response from the political Left, as questioning the imperial structure of the world economy and its underlying gender and class hierarchies are now commonplace. Yet, it was perhaps a little surprising that all sides of the intellectual and political spectrum became so vociferous, where in the United States, in particular, critiques of neoliberalism arose from the unlikely source of the libertarian Right and were aligned with its promotion of racist agendas (see Campo-Flores, 2010; Coulter, 2008). Even at the upper echelons of political and economic power, some elites began referring to ‘neoliberalism’ as a catchphrase for the errors arising from the recent crisis, albeit without really questioning existing power relations or the role of capital, competitiveness, and economic growth in the general malaise (Brand and Sekler, 2009b). In the wake of this meltdown, the social forces of a reactionary white supremacy in response to neoliberalism's disastrous effects have since been consolidated, culminating in the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the vote in favor of Brexit in the United Kingdom.
My focus here is not on the social forces that have sprung up in response to neoliberalism, calling for its death from either the Left or the Right. Instead, I want to focus on the frightening continuity of the idea itself, and how the evocation of ‘postneoliberalism’ should not console our fears or anxieties. Neoliberalism is more than a state form or particular set of policies, and this is precisely why I have elsewhere argued that it is politically important to consider neoliberalism as a discourse through which a political economic form of power-knowledge is constructed (Springer, 2016). For this reason, this chapter does not offer an analysis of the changing policies that might be associated with postneoliberalism. Instead, I want to focus on how such terminology is problematic insofar as it attempts to draw a discursive separation from a neoliberal moment (Springer, 2012) that continues to have devastating, resonant effects. Following this introduction, I begin by interrogating the notion that neoliberalism has ended, a discourse that became commonplace in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I view the assumption that neoliberalism has ended as ultimately incorrect, where what we are witnessing, instead, is a dawn of the dead: a zombification of neoliberalism that should give us considerable reason to continue to fight. There is some room for optimism in this regard, as I contend that what has materialized through the organized corporate bailouts is a weakening of the appeal of Marxian arguments and Keynesian arrangements by those engaged in protests against neoliberalism. My hope is that these developments do not compound the power of capitalism and the arguments of the political Right but, instead, open a critical space for deeper consideration of the politics and practices of resisting neoliberalism as is being evidenced by anarchist movements like the Occupy protests. Next, I perform a postmortem examination of neoliberalism by unpacking the ‘post’ in the various postneoliberalism arguments to indicate that despite the desire to transcend neoliberal constraints, there is an undeniable endurance to neoliberalism that must be understood if we ever hope to terminate this rancorous version of capitalism. In the conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the disturbing nature of the current moment, where neoliberalism's continuing salience no longer rests on its intellectual project, but on its crisis-driven approach to governance.
Since the onset of the financial crisis in late 2008, the intellectual left has had a great deal to say about the future of neoliberalism, with some calling for an indictment of Wall Street (Klein, 2008), while others have suggested that we must begin by re-reading our economic landscapes to understand that it is only owing to non-commodified practices that people have actually been able to cope in these difficult times (White and Williams, 2012). A general ‘end of neoliberalism’ discourse has picked up steam (Stiglitz, 2008), as many G20 countries now openly discuss the idea of a return to Keynesian-styled arrangements, stressing increased government oversight. Indeed, the bulk of the debate has centered on how the practices and ideologies of free-market capitalism have been discredited, and the need for restraining market forces through regulatory reform and state intervention (see Altvater, 2009; Davidson, 2009; Skidelsky, 2010; Taylor, 2011; Wallerstein, 2008). However, such accounts are problematic insofar as they are concerned with long-run geoeconomic and geopolitical dynamics, thus presuming that it is a singular inherited regulatory system that is supposedly in crisis and will precipitate systemic collapse (Brenner et al., 2010). In other words, they treat neoliberalism as a monolithic entity, and fail to recognize its particularities as a political project, its hybridities as an institutional matrix, and its mutations as an ideological construct.
The idea that neoliberalism itself is ‘in crisis’ presupposes an understanding of neoliberalism in the sense of a noun. That is, the designation of ‘ism’ leads us to a dead-end inasmuch as it represents a theoretical abstraction that is disconnected from actual experience. Neoliberalism is a pure, paradigmatic, and static construct of universal, monolithic, and exogenous processes that transforms places from somewhere ‘outside', resulting always and everywhere in the same homogeneous and singular outcome as the sequencing is predefined. Such a conceptualization of neoliberalism might, indeed, be vulnerable to a scenario of systemic failure and crisis (Kotz, 2009). Neoliberalization alters this slightly by recognizing contextual specificities and neoliberalism's necessary articulations with existing geopolitical, socioeconomic, and juridico-institutional frameworks that result in hybridization and a plurality of forms (Ward and England, 2007; Willis et al., 2008). Yet, the implication, based on its retained status as a noun, is that perhaps eventually the unperfected process will be completed, which still problematically alludes to an ideal blueprint toward which individual neoliberalizations will eventually evolve. Indeed, it is this juxtaposition between paradigm and particularities that has led to a questioning of whether neoliberalism even exists at all (see Barnett, 2005; Castree, 2006).
However, if we are to approach neoliberalism/neoliberalization through highlighting practices and procedures as they unfold in everyday contexts, where they can be pointed to, named, challenged, examined from different angles, and be shown to contain inconsistencies (Le Heron, 2009), new spaces are opened that encourage a different interpretation of crises. In this sense, neoliberalism is to be read as a verb, and understood in a processual, unfolding, and action-oriented sense, even if and when our language and writing hasn't caught up with our thinking and we retain its ‘ism’ and ‘ization’ usages. Neoliberalizing practices are, thus, understood as necessarily and always overdetermined, contingent, polymorphic, open to intervention, reconstituted, continually negotiated, impure, subject to counter-tendencies, and in a perpetual process of becoming. In utilizing this dynamic conception of neoliberalism-as-a-verb over static notions of neoliberalism-as-a-noun, we arrive at the conclusion that while particular social spaces, regulatory networks, sectoral fields, local formations, and so forth will frequently be hampered by crises, this does not necessarily imply that they will resonate throughout an entire aggregation of neoliberalism. In other words, because ‘neoliberalism', indeed, does not exist as a coherent and fixed edifice, as an equilibrial complex, or as a finite end-state, it is consequently unlikely to fail in a totalizing moment of collapse (Peck et al., 2010). So, rather than its ultimate death, what we are perhaps witnessing instead is a horrific reanimation.
It is important to remember that neoliberalism's transformation from a marginalized intellectual perspective into a hegemonic ideology began with economic crisis as the ideas and institutions of post-war ‘Keynesianism’ began to unravel. As neoliberalism mutated into a series of unique and hybridized state projects, regulatory failures and recurrent crises would continue to distinguish, if not energize, the uneven dispersion of neoliberalizing practices across the globe. James Crotty and Gary Dymski (1999: 2) were already asking questions concerning neoliberalism's relationship to crisis in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis of the late-1990s, suggesting that it had ‘arisen due to long-term contradictions embedded in the structures and policies of the global neoliberal regime, political and economic contradictions internal to affected Asian nations, and the destructive short-term dynamics of liberalized global financial markets'. In fact, recognition for the crisis-prone nature of capitalism and its creative destruction dates back to at least the time of Karl Marx's (1867/1976) first volume of Capital. Expectedly, then, the Asian Crisis was itself preceded by several major, but localized ‘neoliberal’ financial crises, such as Mexico in 1994, Turkey in 1990, and the Latin American Crisis of the early 1980s. Each of these crises can be interpreted as having resulted from the regulatory struggles and institutional frameworks instituted via the ‘development’ agenda and its ideological adherence to promoting markets, which was established during the ‘roll-back’ phase of neoliberalism in the wake of the Keynesian crisis (Peck, 2001; Peck and Tickell, 2002).
The incessant series of ‘shocks’ (Klein, 2007) and crises of neoliberalism's own making, including increasing environmental ruination (Heynen et al., 2007; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004), deepening social exclusion (Gough, 2002; Kingfisher, 2007), heightened ethno-nationalism and Orientalism (Desai, 2006; Goldberg, 2009), amplified authoritarianism (Canterbury, 2005; Giroux, 2004; Springer, 2010), and escalating violence (Auyero, 2000; Goldstein, 2005; Springer, 2009), have accordingly shaped the ongoing reconstruction and ‘roll-out’ of neoliberalization. While such internal crises may be managed, at least temporarily, through a trenchant security regime and its revanchist practices of surveillance (Coleman, 2004; Monahan, 2006), policing (Herbert, 2001; Samara, 2010), penalization (Peck, 2003; Wacquant, 2001), border controls (Gilbert, 2007; Sparke, 2006), and a global ‘war on terror’ (Dalby, 2007; Lafer, 2004), they cannot be resolved within the context of neoliberalism itself owing to its violent systemic logic (Springer, 2015). This results in a series of escalations where each subsequent crisis surpasses its predecessor in terms of severity (Duménil and Lévy, 2011), consigning the whole regime to permanent volatility (Rapley, 2004). This series of growing instabilities culminates in a chronic crisis of capitalist overaccumulation (Glassman, 2006; Harvey, 2003), which has long been recognized as a cyclical tendency (Kropotkin, 1891/2005; Marx, 1867/1976) and, in this sense, neoliberalization and crisis can be understood as mutually constitutive phenomena.
Given the relationship between neoliberalism and crises, moments of crisis do not prefigure an impending collapse of the neoliberal project. Instead, crises actually represent a continuation that offers a window on the character of neoliberalism as an adaptive regime of socioeconomic governance (Peck et al., 2010). The corporate bailouts were not reflective of a terminal moment for neoliberalism, but instead represented a continuation of the class project (Harvey, 2009), reconfigured under a modus operandi that explicitly returned its accumulative practices to the basis of taxation. I use the idea of ‘return’ here to remind readers that, notwithstanding the evolutionary, divine rights, and social contract theories – all of which have been largely discredited by the archeological record – anthropologists widely recognize that most governments were originally born through violent coercion (see Barclay, 1982/1996; Carneiro, 1970; Clastres, 1989/2007; Fletcher, 1997; Rojas, 2001; Yoffee, 2005), where the forced extraction of production ‘surpluses’ from producers, or ‘tax', was instituted by elites ostensibly to provide insurance to the subjugated such that they would be protected from other bullies. Renowned Russian novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy (1900/2004: 31) argued that, along with a lack of land, taxes are the equivalent of enslavement as they drive people into a compulsory wage labour, where ‘history shows that taxes never were instituted by common consent, but, on the contrary always only in consequence of the fact that some people having obtained power by conquest … imposed tribute not for public needs, but for themselves. And the same thing is still going on.’ In other words, taxes were and continue to be taken by those who have the means of violence to enforce such tribute. Later, tax evolved to include notions of social service provision, the height of which was Keynesianism, but even as portions of such tribute became used for ‘public aims', taxes were still designed for purposes that were more harmful than useful to the majority. As Henry David Thoreau (1849/2010: 21) proclaimed, refusing to pay taxes ‘would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood'.
Of course, we know that the ostensibly ‘gentler’ model of Keynesian taxation was disassembled under neoliberalization, which saw taxes return to their more violent originary purpose. The difference now is that while social welfare is almost universally in shambles as states funnel tax money either into debt repayment or their respective security apparatuses and military pursuits, taxpayers who have been stripped of their own social safety nets are presently being coerced to play savior to those very corporate and elite interests that have been slowly pulling the rug out from under them since the 1970s. Taxation, as a result, has become a public anathema of sorts, which ultimately weakens the popular appeal of Keynesian ideas while increasing the temptation of ultra-rightist libertarianism, evidenced by the meteoric rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States. However, far from rendering leftist politics obsolete, the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ has been also galvanized by the crisis, particularly those elements espousing a decidedly anarchist position (see A Committee of Outside Agitators, 2008; Anarcho, 2008; CrimethInc., 2009; Workers Solidarity Movement, 2009). The rise of polarized positions is of significant concern with respect to the latent potential for violence that exists as diametrically opposed viewpoints increasingly come into conflict, but what the recent crisis, at least, potentially precipitated is the weakening of neoliberalism's political legitimacy. People are now openly asking questions as to why the general population should shoulder the responsibility of those who got us all into this mess by effectively paying for the financial misappropriation of a small group of wealthy elites.
The financial bailouts have accordingly tied tax policy more explicitly to exploitation, which has thereby exposed taxation and bailouts as capital accumulation via a compounding of state and class power rather than the product of just one or the other. This is where an anarchist critique supersedes Marxian analyses, as it allows for a more comprehensive view of the multiple intersections of domination as opposed to a singular focus on class exploitation, and is consequently able to recognize the current conjuncture as a new method of extracting surplus (Springer, 2014). Ultimately, the latest crisis has threatened to overwhelm the discursive hold of neoliberalism on our political-economic imagination, as markets themselves have also come under more intensive scrutiny and suspicion as the gap between rich and poor becomes evermore glaring. As the Occupy Movement amply demonstrated, the ensuing discontent has ultimately stoked the fire for a deeper, anarchistic, and more emancipatory struggle engaged via nonviolent means. The inherent inequality and ‘othering’ of neoliberalism is now being openly challenged by slogans like ‘we are the 99%', which has come to signify a united global movement of oppositional struggle against market fundamentalism. On the other hand, neoliberalism has also galvanized reactionary forces on the Right, where Hilary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump, much like the Brexit vote, can be read as the neoliberal crisis, and its inherently racist and sexist agenda, coming home to roost. The multiple crises of neoliberalism have produced fertile soils for the cultivation of populism, which the political Right has seized upon, not to undo the general thrust of neoliberalism and define a new economic trajectory, but rather to advance its own divisive political agenda by exploiting reactionary sentiments.
Even before the 2008 crisis hit, scholars were already beginning to posit what ‘postneoliberal’ statutory and policy frameworks might look like. Wendy Larner and David Craig (2005) questioned whether emergent partnership programmes and social governance strategies to strengthen local communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand were indicative of a ‘postneoliberal’ political environment and institutional landscape, where revamped territorial accountabilities and social outcomes might become possible. Edward Challies and Warwick Murray (2008: 241) took a slightly different approach by comparing the transitional policy and regulatory ‘roll-outs’ of Aotearoa/New Zealand with that of Chile and, despite noting multiple similarities, differences and continuities in both projects, they highlight the emergent potential that ‘the growing body of theory offers in forging post-neoliberal alternatives'. The intention of these preliminary assessments of a ‘postneoliberal’ conjuncture was to envision possible transformations that might enable developments beyond what was considered a neoliberal impasse (see also Craig and Porter, 2006; Hart, 2002).
More recently, a special issue of Development Dialogue (Brand and Sekler, 2009a), published after the financial meltdown, came at the idea of ‘postneoliberalism’ from a rather different perspective, specifically examining diverse responses to the deleterious impacts of neoliberalism and the political economic orthodoxy's mounting failures vis-à-vis contradictions and crises. The focus here, then, is not on the question of whether a new, postneoliberal era in general has begun, or what criteria might support or negate such an assessment. Rather, Ulrich Brand and Nicola Sekler (2009b: 6) consider postneoliberalism as,
a perspective on social, political and/or economic transformations, on shifting terrains of social struggles and compromises, taking place on different scales, in various contexts and by different actors. All postneoliberal approaches have in common that they break with some specific aspect of ‘neoliberalism’ and embrace different aspects of a possible postneoliberalism, but these approaches vary in depth, complexity and scope, as well as everyday practices and comprehensive concepts.
Understood in this sense, neoliberalism might be considered as invariably already ‘postneoliberal', or beyond itself, precisely because, as we have seen, neoliberalism is never actually a noun but is, instead, always a verb. In other words, when we consider neoliberalism as an ‘actually existing’ assemblage of practices (Brenner and Theodore, 2002) that function as mutable and ‘mobile technologies’ (Ong, 2007), there is a necessary deviation from the abstraction of neoliberalism as an archetypical, generic and obstinate economic theory. Postneoliberalism here is really an acknowledgement of the path dependency, difference, and unevenness of neoliberalization, and the multiple, variegated, and unique mutations that arise through articulation with existing political economic contexts and geoinstitutional configurations.
In light of this apparent continuity between neoliberalism and postneoliberalism, it would be beneficial at this point to work through some of the connotations of what the ‘post’ in postneoliberalism might perhaps mean. It seems appropriate to frame this discussion in terms of the different theorizations surrounding postcolonialism, and to draw some potential parallels therein. This particular comparison is useful because discussions surrounding postcolonialism have clearly shown that any prefix of ‘post’ is inextricably bound to its signifier which, in turn, calls the ‘post’ itself into question (Sharp, 2008). In this regard, James Sidaway (2000) identifies three shared uses of the term ‘postcolonialism', or ‘post-colonialism', in his exploratory essay. The first of these relates to successor states, or those societal formations that arose following formal independence from a colonial occupier. The second sense refers to those colonizing forces that ascended after official colonialism. This could be either internal colonizing forms of rule by particular ethnic, identity or class groups against a presumed ‘Other', or it could refer to the colonizing discourses that arose after colonialism proper but retained a colonial character. These first two senses are typically considered ‘post-colonial’ (with a hyphen) in that they are thought to operate ‘after’ colonialism. The hyphen, then, serves to acknowledge some form of separation or rupture to suggest that colonialism exists in the past. The third, and final, sense of the term is written ‘postcolonialism’ (without a hyphen) to signify a continuation, as it is meant to suggest that while colonialism in its formal sense has ended, it still has innumerable reverberating effects in the present. This third sense is the deconstructing critique of colonial discourses and their persistent unfolding of aesthetic, theoretical and political legacies. The best example of this sort of critique and, indeed, one that is widely considered as responsible for establishing postcolonialism as a theoretical perspective, is Edward Said's (1978/2003) account of Orientalism. The notion of Orientalism can be understood as both a discursive formation and a ‘corporate institution’ that materializes its constellation of power/knowledge as ‘a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts’ for the production and domination of presumed ‘Others’ (Said, 1978/2003: 3, 12), which in turn, constitutes a key discursive resource in the anatomy of neoliberal power.
Bringing the discussion back to postneoliberalism, it is difficult to draw a direct comparison to the first sense of post-colonialism identified above. Neoliberalism is not a condition from which states can easily achieve formal ‘independence’ by declaring a complete qualitative break from the past. Institutional legacies die hard and, as such, to speak of a ‘post-neoliberal’ successor state, while perhaps conceivable, seems a little premature. Even as some studies are keen to highlight the nationalization of companies, progressive social policies, and the proclamation of new constitutions following elections in various Latin American countries – including the promised ‘new socialism for the 21st century’ of Hugo Chavez's victory in Venezuela in 1998, the rise of the Socialist Party and Ricardo Lagos in Chile in 2000, Lula de Silva's Worker Party victory in Brazil in 2002, and indigenous socialist leader Evo Moralez entering office on an anti-neoliberal platform in 2005 (see Ceceña, 2009; Macdonald and Ruckert, 2009) – others are quick to underline the endurance of neoliberalism's regulatory structures and the sidelining of emancipatory experiences as the emergent neodevelopmentalism, predicated on lower interest rates and devalued exchange rates, closes spaces for alternatives in countries like South Africa and Argentina (see Bond, 2009; Gago and Sztulwark, 2009). Similarly, difficulties arise when we try to draw a line of equivalence to the second sense of post-colonialism, as neoliberalization is always an intramural process driven by particular local actors and, unlike colonizing practices arising after colonialism where we might find colonial-like expressions of domination exerted by one group over another, neoliberalizing forces of dominance arising internally from a particular class-based group represent the heart of the neoliberal project itself (Carroll and Carson, 2006; Harvey, 2005; Sparke, 2004). This points us back to the discussion above, where we are not able to properly differentiate between postneoliberalism and neoliberalism.
Yet, perhaps such continuity should be read as the overarching and most fundamental point, which moves us into the third sense of postcolonial in its unhyphenated form. Here ‘postneoliberalism’ collapses its prefix into its signifier and is to be understood not as a condition arising after neoliberalism. Rather, it constitutes a critical theoretical standpoint where we can position ourselves to recognize the banality of neoliberal discursive formations (Springer, 2016) and, perhaps, begin to successfully strip away its capacity as a ‘corporate institution’ and the corresponding commonsense presentation of neoliberalism as monolithic, impenetrable and beyond reproach. Thus, by mounting deconstructive criticisms of neoliberalism's power/knowledge matrix and its uneven distribution across various geohistorical, political economic, and sociocultural fields, critical scholars have adopted a postneoliberal position from the very moment they began to identify neoliberalism as an ideological hegemonic project (see Duménil and Lévy, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Peet, 2002; Plehwe et al., 2006) or, alternatively, as a complex of governmentality (see Barry et al., 1996; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Larner, 2003; Lemke, 2001). Such engagements can be read as a reification of neoliberalism à la J.K. Gibson-Graham's (1996) assessment of capitalism but, like Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (2001), I remain convinced that such challenges are preferable to accepting neoliberalism's euphemizing vocabulary and, at the very least, potentially more enabling than silence. If philosophers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida have taught us anything, it is that critique is at once the seed of resistance and the impetus of transformation and, thus, its potential to dismantle neoliberalism's exigent and disciplinary logics (Gill, 1995) cannot be overstated. If the point is to change the world, where do we begin to initiate such a process but from sharing our imaginings of and desires for alternatives? Neoliberalism itself, lest we forget, began as a marginalized discourse, an ideological ideal on the fringes of right-wing political thought (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2008).
The ambiguity that surrounds postneoliberalism compels us to acknowledge such fractures from neoliberalism without overlooking the continuities that persist (Brand and Sekler, 2009b). This is precisely why the current moment is so terrifying, because a new hyphenated post-neoliberal moment has not arrived and we may, instead, be witnessing the emergence of a novel, consolidated version of neoliberalism that substantively expands its content (Hendrikse and Sidaway, 2010). The very idea of crisis resides, Antonio Gramsci (1930/1996: 32–33) once claimed, ‘precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass'. So, perhaps ‘neoliberalism is dead’ inasmuch as it can no longer claim political viability, but Neil Smith (2008: 2) reminds us that ‘it would be a mistake to underestimate its remnant power … neoliberalism, however dead, remains dominant', precisely because ‘the left has not responded with good and powerful ideas'. Presumably Smith's assessment includes an introspective examination of the current state of critical academic scholarship, which should admit at least some fault in the perceived futility of the left as it continues to cling to what some activists regard as the same ‘boring’ political ideals of the last three decades (C. Nadia, 200?). While Marxism no longer appeals to those on the street (arguably so long before the recent crisis), this frontline location of struggle in the contestation and denial of neoliberalism clearly demonstrates signs of a renewal of radical leftist politics (see Day, 2005; Ferrell, 2001; Gordon, 2009; Graeber, 2002; Springer et al., 2012; see also Worth, Chapter 45 in this volume). Both the anti-war and anti-capitalist protests that have become increasingly common and diffuse in recent years signal the arrival of new forms of emancipatory politics, breaking with Marxian notions of class, yet simultaneously refusing conservative rationalities and parochial notions of identity politics (Ackelsberg, 2009; Newman, 2007; Springer, 2013).
Identity, of course, continues to matter, and we have seen it consolidated in problematic ways, such as the new form of white supremacy being advocated by the so-called ‘alt-right'. On the left we are seeing the opposite, where an embrace of agonism (Springer, 2011) and the creation of ‘convergence spaces’ (Routledge, 2003) have compelled interest groups to engage in multi-scalar political action, to celebrate their irreducible plurality, and to build general alliances around the shared cause of social justice (Featherstone, 2005; Wills, 2002). So, while social struggles are mobilized around issues and concerns that are relationally connected across space – namely, neoliberalizing practices and the various wars through which they have been articulated (Harvey, 2003; Lafer, 2004) – protesters are nonetheless comprised of heterogeneous groups that defy universal subjectivation to the proletariat identity, break down the binary between ‘Self’ and ‘Other', and are clearly not interested in formulating strategies that replicate traditional representative structures (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006). This goes some way toward explaining why it was so difficult for municipal authorities and media commentators to understand exactly what the Occupy Movement represented and who represented it. In Denver, a frustrated Mayor Michael Hancock insisted that Occupy Denver choose leadership to deal with city and state officials, while protesters responded by electing Shelby, a three-year-old border collie (Pous, 2011). The anarchistic refusal of Occupy Denver to define its ‘leadership’ in the terms of the state is indicative of a political climate on the Left that no longer believes in the authority of either government officials or a vanguard party. Although himself a Marxist, Smith (2008: 2) appeared to implicitly recognize the limits of Marxian proposals that continue to function within the confines of the state, noting how the recent fate of various Latin American governments suggests that ‘the parliamentary road to socialism is not necessarily inimical to neoliberalism, indeed, a certain “liberal neoliberalism”, neoliberalism with a smiling face, now seems to be an ascendant alternative to its harder edged, revanchist inflection'. This version of neoliberalism, however, may be a calm before the storm, an interregnum, where morbid phenomena simply gestate as an even more regressive and dominating form of capitalism is (re)animated.
With such a macabre realization, we might ask ‘which way the tide is actually going, when financial risk is being socialized at an incredible rate, and when the rationalities of Wall Street and Washington have become sutured together as never before?’ (Peck, 2010: 109, original emphasis). Is this really a nightmare on Wall Street, or simply the nightmare before Christmas, where financial elites will wake up tomorrow with even more ‘gifts’ piled around their hearth? Only time will tell, but it is hard not to suspect that the bailouts have simply allowed politicians to play Santa Claus to the wealthiest of the wealthy, while the poorest of the poor are left, as they always are, to clean up the cookie crumbs and spilt milk. In the face of intensifying police brutality and violence against a largely peaceful anti-capitalist movement, it becomes clear that while neoliberalism may be essentially dead as an intellectual project, as a mode of crisis-driven governance, its dominance remains ‘animated by technocratic forms of muscle memory, deep instincts of self-preservation, and spasmodic bursts of social violence’ (Peck et al., 2010: 105). Wars, famine, racism, poverty, environmental destruction, forced eviction, alienation, social exclusion, homelessness, inequality, violence, and recurrent economic crises are the footprints of neoliberalism's evermore capricious gait, a path of devastation that could mark the emergence of its ‘zombie’ phase (Fine, 2010; Peck, 2010), ‘dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around’ (Harman, 2009: 12). This makes a critical decentering of neoliberalism's capitalist project all the more necessary and urgent. Zombies, after all, feed on human flesh.
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