An interview with Wendy Brown (UC Berkeley) about her recent book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.
Echoing Marx’s classical exposition of capitalism and its alienating effects, Brown explains how neoliberalism (which we may define as a fundamentalist form of capitalism) involves a form of pseudo-reasoning which reduces human beings to their economic value and activity, and treats all fields of activity as markets and institutions to be managed and run on the model of corporations. This now includes the state as well.
The illogic of neoliberalism has invaded fields of human endeavour and need with no direct or immediate connection to wealth creation — e.g. education, dating, physical exercise, social and medical services — which are increasingly cast “in the image of the market”. In this fundamentalist form of capitalism, people are treated as units of human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future…
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