Without a
doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would
not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the
precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the
existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by
these social processes that make their situations precarious,
as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This
reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the
higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation
of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is
in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the
insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies.
The condition of the "harmonious" functioning of the individualist
micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a
reserve army of the unemployed.
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in title, tags, annotations or urlBourdieu on neoliberalism - 0 views
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Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.
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All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.
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Making up minds | COA News - 0 views
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rust vs. Mistrust by media source How to know? Who to believe? The new-media revolution has subverted as well as expanded the possibilities of knowledge-based understanding. Tony Curzon Price presents openDemocracy’s response to a crisis of trust. The Enlightenment faith that knowledge will lead to understanding, and understanding to a better world, is central to openDemocracy's being. It informs both what we publish - in-depth analysis and commentary by public intellectuals, professionals, writers, academics and activists - and how we view ourselves: the product, process and the purpose alike.
FT.com / Columnists / John Kay - Climate change: the (Groucho) Marxist approach - 0 views
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The modern culture of rights, and the value system that proclaims discrimination the greatest of public policy evils, finds it difficult to cope with this plain reality. It leads to an intellectual blindness that empathises with humankind in general but not in particular. He loves mankind, Voltaire wrote, therefore he does not need to love his neighbour. Many religious leaders and moral philosophers seek to extend our natural, but not unlimited, capacity for solidarity with others by calling on sacred texts and abstract principles. They are rarely very successful in this endeavour, and their efforts are usually most effective when they provide validation of their followers’ instincts.
Zygmunt Bauman: globalisation, politics and Europe Ian Varcoe - openDemocracy - 0 views
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Reading Bauman helps people to insulate themselves from these false solutions to their difficulties.
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might say that the problem for people today is how to resist consumer society, to find ways of caring for others, and to find a new politics that is above the nation-state. The globalisation phenomenon requires this if it is to be encountered by humanity in a more balanced form than at present when its negative side predominates over its positive side. The European integration project may offer some guidance.
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The political institutions of this are parliamentary democracy and the public sphere; the former has been eroded and the latter hollowed out.
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