The Double Binds of Neoliberalism

In the wake of the new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of global narratives of progress, and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes or at least starting to fundamentally mutate. This provides us with a roughly fifty-year cycle with which to re-assess the rise and potential fall of neoliberalism. Using 1968 as one of the inaugural moments of this history, this interdisciplinary collection seeks to reassess the significance and legacy of the global 1968 uprisings from today’s vantage point. While these uprisings arguably helped bring an end to a number of forms of oppression, the period following them also saw the re-entrenchment of class power to a level not seen since the 1920s. Without drawing any simple or direct lines of causation, the sequence of the past fifty years reflects what could be termed a double bind or “lose-lose” scenario. Yet, particularly given the present-day indicators of a crisis of neoliberal hegemony, this volume argues that returning to 1968 today may offer critical and comparative resources for thinking a way out of our current impasse.

“In The Double Binds of Neoliberalism, the authors 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 60s 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 1%. 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 authors do give a sense of new and better directions to go in), this is the book for you.”

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.

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.

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!'

Guillaume Collett is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent.

Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Malta, a Visiting Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and a Research Fellow with the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent.

Iain MacKenzie is a Reader in Politics at the University of Kent, and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Thought.

In the wake of the new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of global narratives of progress, and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes or at least starting to fundamentally mutate. This provides us with a roughly fifty-year cycle with which to re-assess the rise and potential fall of neoliberalism. Using 1968 as one of the inaugural moments of this history, this interdisciplinary collection seeks to reassess the significance and legacy of the global 1968 uprisings from today's vantage point. While these uprisings arguably helped bring an end to a number of forms of oppression, the period following them also saw the re-entrenchment of class power to a level not seen since the 1920s. Without drawing any simple or direct lines of causation, the sequence of the past fifty years reflects what could be termed a double bind or "lose-lose" scenario. Yet, particularly given the present-day indicators of a crisis of neoliberal hegemony, this volume argues that returning to 1968 today may offer critical and comparative resources for thinking a way out of our current impasse.

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