Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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- Link: Shocks/Terror
Link: TerrorAnti-terror efforts are only a symptom of a neoliberal domestic agendaLafer, political economist and is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center 04 (Gordon, “Neoliberalism by other means: the “war on terror” at home and abroad”, New Political Science 26:3, 2004, Taylor and Francis)//AS If the war in Iraq is really about something other than weapons, what is the domestic “war on terror” about? At first glance, the war at home appears to be more straightforward: a genuine if heavy-handed effort to prevent a repeat of anything like the attacks of September 11, 2001. But here too, the administration’s actions point to motives that are mixed at best. On the one hand, genuine security measures are often treated with a surprising degree of laxity. Whistleblowers within the federal intelligence community complain that problems identified two years ago have remained unresolved. The multicolored national security alerts have produced great public drama but, as far as the public has been told, have never had any relationship to major terrorist attacks either committed or deterred. Critical needs such as preparing the public health system to cope with potential bioterrorist attacks, or supporting the anti-terrorism work of state and local police, have gone unfunded as the monies were diverted to tax cuts.34 At the same time, a wide range of initiatives apparently unrelated to anything to do with terrorism—including the tax cuts, “fast track” authority, and deunionization of federal jobs, have all been advanced as critical components of the war on terror.35 I assume that the government is genuinely interested in preventing terrorism. Nevertheless, these facts suggest that the administration’s agenda is more complex, and much more ambitious than simply that of protecting the population from future attacks. And while any one of these items may be viewed as an individual case of cronyism or opportunism, the broader pattern points to the need for a deeper theory of what is driving the regime’s domestic agenda. I believe that the domestic agenda, too, can only be understood in the context of neoliberal globalization. One of the axioms of globalization is that capital accumulation has become disconnected from the nation-state. Before “global city” became the mantra of Chamber of Commerce boosters everywhere, it was geographer SaskiaSassen’s term for the locales that are home to the administrative headquarters of far-flung corporate empires.36 As corporate production, distribution and services have grown into complex, worldwide networks, those at the top need ever greater capacity at central headquarters in order to coordinate these global empires. A handful of cities have come to serve as the central hubs of financial, legal, accounting, marketing and telecommunicationsfunctions for global capital. These cities are “global” because their dominant industries participate in an economy that is increasingly disconnected from the fortunes of any particular nation. The functional colleagues of New York lawyers and stockbrokers are London lawyers and brokers. By contrast, both have increasingly little economic connection to normal manufacturing and service workers. The latter are stuck in a parallel economy that, while sharing the same physical and political space, has no means of participating in the growing fortunes of corporate empires. It may never have been true that what was good for GM was good for America, but over the past 20 years the connection between the success of “American” companies and the prosperity of Americans has grown threadbare. Link: Shocks/TerrorEfforts at resiliency are inextricably linked to neoliberal policies of governmentalityJoseph, Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield 13 (Jonathan, “Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach”, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1:1, 2013, Taylor and Francis Online)//AS In this contribution, I wish to argue that the recent enthusiasm for the concept of resilience across a range of policy literature is the consequence of its fit with neoliberal discourse. This is not to say that the idea of resilience is reducible to neoliberal policy and governance, but it does fit neatly with what it is trying to say and do. A brief glance at the concept’s origins shows it to have certain ontological commitments that make it ideally suited to neoliberal forms of governance. Having briefly examined these philosophical aspects, I move on to define this relationship to governance through the concept of governmentality. This also requires a particular understanding of the dominant forms of governmentality as specifically neoliberal in nature. I then defend this interpretation of both resilience and governmentality against the claim that resilience is part of an emerging post-liberalism. Instead, I argue that we are witnessing two connected but distinguishable processes – the rolling-back of classical liberalism and the rolling-out or embedding of neoliberalism. To give a slightly optimistic tone to the argument, I suggest that this is a contested process and that the perceived end of classical liberalism is as much an effect of the neoliberal discourse as it is an actuality. The concept of resilience has entered the political vocabulary from literature on the adaptability of ecological systems. Unlike engineering resilience which emphasises how things return to a stable steady state, ecological resilience is far from stable. Instabilities may change the system leading to significant restructuring.1 There may even be multiple stable states. These ideas come from applied mathematics and resource ecology and are used to examine the interaction of ecological resilience and human adaptability in complex large systems.2 This approach emphasises such things as complexity, self organisation, functional diversity and nonlinear ways of behaving.3 Ecological and social components are linked by complex resource systems such as economic systems, institutions and organisations. Resilience provides these complex systems with the ability to withstand and survive shocks and disturbances. It also emphasises the capacity for renewal.4 Resilience, therefore, can be related to the way that societies adapt to externally imposed change. The ecology literature is concerned with the impact of global environmental change, but this could also include economic crisis and terrorist threats. The adaptive capacity of social systems depends on the nature of their institutions and the ability to absorb shocks.5 Crises can actually play a constructive role in resource management, forcing us to consider issues of learning, adapting and renewal.6 This idea is picked up in the political literature. A pamphlet from the British think-tank Demos suggests that we think of the concept of resilience, not just as the ability of a society or community to ‘bounce back’, but as a process of learning and adaptation.7 Similarly, the World Resources Institute defines resilience as ‘the capacity of a system to tolerate shocks or disturbances and recover’ and argues that this depends on the ability of people to ‘adapt to changing conditions through learning, planning, or reorganization’.8 The document even goes so far as to define resilience as the capacity to thrive in the face of challenge.Elsewhere,10 I have argued that most contemporary social theories contribute to an ontology that renders the world governable in certain ways. These ontological commitments are certainly not reducible to the political practices and indeed can be found across a range of disciplines including ecology, geography and various intersections of social and natural science. Whether these philosophies go under the descriptions of ‘new materialism’, ‘complexity theory’, ‘network analysis’ or ‘reflexive approaches’, they share a set of ontological commitments. The idea of resilience fits neatly with these ‘new’ ontological commitments. It assumes a world that is increasingly complex but also contingent. Stable and enduring social relations are believed to have given way to complex networks of actors, each with their own individual pursuits. Our social engagements have no necessity to them; they are what we make of them and blend with our own particular narratives. And in order to survive the uncertainties of complex systems, people have to show their own initiative as active and reflexive agents capable of adaptive behaviour. Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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