neoliberal

Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City

brittany — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Julian Brash’s Bloomberg’s New York is an anthropological study of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration’s implementation of a particular type of neoliberal urban governance (the “Bloomberg Way”) since taking office in 2002, “branding and marketing the city as a luxury good,” an agenda aimed not only at “advancing the economic elite’s class interests” but in shaping the culture and geography of the city of New York by prioritizing this demographic. A thoughtful and rigorous analysis of class, urban development, and neoliberal governance in the context of New York City during the Bloomberg years, Bloomberg’s New York is a thought-provoking read primarily aimed at scholars of urban studies.

Brash’s work interestingly contextualizes the politics of governance in New York City in its “post-fiscal crisis era” but also shows how this paved the way for an individual like Michael Bloomberg (the “CEO as Mayor”) to take on the mayoralty of the Big Apple. The most interesting section of Brash’s work is the more theoretical chunk of this book, which employs an analysis of Bloomberg’s governance style—the Bloomberg Way—of running New York City “like a business,” viewing residents as “clients” and branding the city itself as a product to be marketed to a select demographic. The penultimate section of Brash’s study is a close look at the Bloomberg administration’s promotion of the Hudson Yards plan, contextualized by elite driven redevelopment drives in New York. Brash also illuminates with extensive ethnographic evidence the deeply contested public debates that surrounded the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, highlighting differing perceptions of New Yorkers of what this meant for New York, and pointing the reader to the ruptures that this debate revealed in economic, political, cultural, and other differences between New Yorkers which have long characterized the fabric of this city.

Brash’s meticulous uncovering of the mechanics of class interests underpinning the shaping of the cultural, economic and political space of global cities is in the context of New York, but certainly poses important questions applicable to both urban scholarship of other cities and in furthering our understanding of class as a unit of analysis. For example, Brash calls for a more rigorous interrogation of the interests of the “transnational capitalist class” (or “TCC”)—shorthand for the owners of globalized means of production—and how these interests have a physical and cultural impact on the local spaces in which these classes are formed, live and work. His injunction not to “abstract” elite class interests from the physical spaces they inhabit comes as an important reminder in a time where their transnational mobility (enabled by the travel and technology that global capital allows) can easily allows us to forget the increasingly bigger and more powerful role that private enterprise and business interests have on the physical shaping and growth of cities today.

From a feminist perspective, it is important to note that Brash uses class as his primary unit of analysis but declares at the outset that his understanding of the term extends beyond its use as the individual’s relation to the means of production and that class is mediated by a range of other factors such as race, gender, and sexuality. While he acknowledges how class relationships may be displaced by other identities (such as gender), his own analysis is not necessarily engaged in these debates for the purposes of his book.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, April 8th 2011

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Hester Eisenstein

Paradigm Publishers

I have been waiting for a book to tell me how things went wrong, how we ended up with lady cops and mothers in combat zones, how “feminist” became an insult. Did we women do it to ourselves, or were we pushed? Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, has offered Feminism Seduced, which, as promised and despite its flaws, does map elements of the neoliberal project to some “feminist” initiatives, but it is not the book I have been wanting, the one that explains, not so much the academically popular theory of “recuperation,” but how the radical women might have kept the momentum of the women’s movement going and in the right direction.

Let’s get the most obvious major flaw of the book out of the way: the near total omission of lesbian-feminism, a powerful influence in the radical wing of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Though it is like blaming a reporter for the headline on her story to blame Eisenstein for the judgments of her indexer, the lack of an index entry for lesbianism reflects the extreme once-over-lightly she gives to the historical role of this feminist tendency, which cannot be subsumed under “queer theory” or dismissed with “conflicts over suppression of lesbian influence... eventually faded.”

Eisenstein’s nuanced concern about the limitations of the “women of color” construct apparently does not extend to the inability of the category “GLBT” to comfortably incorporate Rita Mae Brown’s “woman-identified woman.” This is a glaring oversight from an author who rightfully chastises a movement which often alienated women of color and working-class women.

Eisenstein’s argument or rather arguments are directed, she insists, mostly at hegemonic, state feminism (an approved version of reform feminism). She views feminism as driving out what she calls “labor feminism,” the initiatives for women within the labor movement that resulted in laws protecting women. Essentially she argues that women’s demands for wage equality, while benefiting professional women, put working- and lower-middle class women into poorly paid service jobs and undermined the expectation of a “family wage.” These feminist demands served to facilitate more direct anti-union activities begun by big business at the same time. (She seems less interested in the exclusion of women from trade unions in the higher paying blue-collar occupations like plumbing and carpentry.)

Moreover, feminist emphasis on paid labor undermined women’s work in the home and thus “welfare” programs. On a global level, feminism linked with modernity destroyed traditional societies and allowed access to markets to the forces of globalization, by focusing on such issues as “genital cutting,” which Eisenstein comes close to defending. She charges that the empowerment of individual Third World women through measures such as microfinance has taken the place of state-led development. She then recounts the use of feminist ideology in the promotion of imperialist initiatives, such as President George W. Bush crowing about liberating the women of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression, and in encouragement of Islamophobia.

The author presents a not entirely trustworthy account of feminist history and its continuance in women’s studies and a fairly standard leftist rendition of the neoliberal project—a lot of ground to cover. The reader is left to piece together her thesis from topic-based chapters that operate as silos, disrupting both the narrative history and the argument—without the aid of a Venn diagram.

In the end, she presents a post hoc analysis that stops short of proving her case against even mainstream feminism. Her solutions—maternalism, a socialist state, ACORN, and the California Nurses Association—seem neither particularly feminist nor radical. Perhaps that feminism is best that doesn’t take a gendered view of all the evils of the world but rather gives women the power of agency to uproot them.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 9th 2010

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:04:00 +0000

By Jesook Song

Duke University Press

Having recently read Marxist scholar David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, I was eager to dig into Jesook Song's explanation of how her own nation became a case study for the neoliberal state. Amid a worldwide economic crisis, now seems a fine time to explore the assumptions underpinning global capitalism. Harvey argues that neoliberalism, disguised as the liberation of populations and markets, is actually a reassertion of class power that redistributes wealth into the hands of an elite few. Yet how elites could perpetrate such a coup in the class war, with so little opposition, is difficult to demonstrate at a global level. Enter Song, an ethnographer who explicates the unique culture of South Korea, showing how neoliberalism took hold and developed in one exemplary country.

Neoliberalism took root in the late 1970s as a response to stagnant economies. In contrast to planned economies controlled by (often despotic) states, liberalization encouraged deregulation and the growth of financial rather than industrial capital, while discouraging collective activities like labor unions through a cult of personal choice and identity politics. As Song explains, South Korea first experienced government liberalization after thirty years of military dictatorship, and then economic liberalization through International Monetary Fund (IMF)-mandated restructuring and break-up of large conglomerates. After the Asian Debt Crisis of 1997, Song explores how neoliberal, free-market ideology combined with existing Korean concepts of family and gender as well as civil society movements. Strange bedfellows—activists, scholars, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—cooperated with the new liberal government in the delineation of deserving (those willing and able to sell their labor) from undeserving (those who cannot or do not), in the new welfare state. Song focuses primarily on the treatment of two demographics: unemployed youth and the homeless.

In Seoul in the wake of the debt crisis, Song worked in a public works program to assist shaping unemployment policy; there she was able to meet and interview city officials, scholars, NGO members, activists, and homeless and unemployed people themselves. These interviews are often illuminating. One city official clearly differentiated two categories: "IMF homeless are people who came to be homeless due to layoffs after the IMF crisis. They are normal people, not 'rootless vagabonds.' They have the intention to rehabilitate and the desire to work." One type of homeless person was normalized—a worker laid-off from the break-up of the conglomerates that had once provided job security and benefits—while others were marginalized. Women, not considered breadwinners, typically became homeless for reasons like domestic violence, not unemployment. Homeless women and their advocates either had to fit them into the script of a work-ready neoliberal subject, or give up even temporary assistance. Similarly, unemployed youth who received assistance were expected to be (paradoxically) self-sufficient and self-governing entrepreneurs. In the new economy based on finance and technology rather than industry, educated youth became commodities themselves, expected to sell their flexible labor and technical know-how.

Combining Marxist class theory and Michael Foucault's concept of governance, Song's analysis in South Koreans in the Debt Crisis_ _is densely academic; she wisely reviews key points at the beginning and end of each chapter. A larger weakness is the presentation of data. Much of the supporting evidence feels idiosyncratic—interviews, the summary of novels and popular movies, officials' speeches. While no doubt all of these are vehicles for ideology, they are not enough bricks to lay a solid foundation for Song's thesis of how NGOs, activists, and scholars were co-opted into the neoliberal project. This is disappointing, as her arguments make intuitive sense, and her critique of (neo)liberalism is timely, particularly for those of us who make activism and scholarship our lives.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, December 14th 2009