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Welcome to Issue 42:2 (March 2010) of Antipode
The crisis of neoliberalism has now firmly taken hold across the world. Endless accumulation based on ever increasing indebtedness and speculation on our futures has finally reached its limits. Meanwhile, we face not only a crisis of accumulation but a series of biocrises, not least climate change, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Greece is in turmoil, with several general strikes in recent weeks and massive demonstrations building on the December 2008 insurrection. At the same time the neoliberal organisation of capital continues unabated, as papers in this issue illustrate.
We are experiencing what can be understood as ‘zombie-neoliberalism’, where despite the death of neoliberalism as an operative way of organising capital, the ideology of neoliberalism is alive and well. From call-centres to public services management, the neoliberal mantra continues to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Nonetheless, from the refuse workers of Johannesburg to the recoding of urban space in Nicaragua, we find resistance to this dead system to be fertile. What we hope is generated is a shared discourse for understanding these struggles, a lens through which we see diverse resistances resonating in the creation of another world.
We understand that the papers in this issue fall into three themes: the extension of neoliberal practices and their material manifestations in the creation of a more precarious life; the importance of understanding resistance as apriori in shaping local and global dynamic of capital accumulation and creative-resistive practices of struggling subjects.
Guido Starosta provides a Marxist critique of ‘Global Commodity Chains’, arguing that whilst they provide useful empirical investigations into the world, it is only through returning to an analysis of the Marxian concept of Value that we can understand the general laws of motion of capital as a whole. Sagie Narish‘s paper provides a useful addition to the growing literature on the geographical aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalisation. These processes of neoliberalisation are analysed through the lens of the water sector at the scale of the local state in Durban, South Africa. Narish provides examples of private sector influence on public sector governance, aiding its neoliberalisation. Timothy Collins uses the 2006 El Paso – Ciudad Juarez flood disaster to examine how uneven socio-spatial development, driven by the neoliberal market economy, leads to the production of unequal risk and indeed the creation of risk.
Melanie Samson looks at the case of refuse management in Johannesburg to explore how diverse struggles across the city, rendered by the material and ideological re-articulations of race, gender and class, has concrete affects on the unfolding of neoliberal policies. Angela Coyle examines the relocation of call centre jobs from the UK to India. Contrary to the popular belief that call centres are the most mobile of industries, this paper examines the role of worker resistance in shaping the geographies of call centres. This exemplifies the importance of worker organisation and resistance in defining capital, where its geographical configuration may be less about ‘efficiency gains’ and more about enhancing direct control over the labour process.
Mark de Socio analyses the campaign to free Professor Ghaza-Walid Falah. The paper focuses on the spatial distribution of campaign supporters/participants and the utilization of telecommunications technology in the coalescence and speed of the campaigns development. James Freeman, drawing on Pred’s classic account of popular geography from 19th Century Stockholm, discusses how inhabitants of Managua in Nicaragua develop their own way of navigating the city. These unofficial forms of labelling streets and areas resist all attempts of official ordering and naming.
Additionally, intervention pieces from Sarah Starkweather, Allan Watson and David Roberts and Minelle Mahtani provide further insights into the extension of neoliberal management and politics, with particular focus on race and the shaping of the US political sphere.
Together these papers remind us that we are in a period of uncertainty, both in terms of how capital is likely to reorganise itself in response to the multiple crises and how resistance will manifest itself. Will we see the development of struggles for emancipation or will the right gain more ground? We would like to issue a challenge to all potential contributors to critically explore moments of resistance and ways forward from the contemporary global impasse.
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