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This chapter explores what motivates and sustains anti-austerity activism within the context of continued austerity. It affirms the centrality of the affective and normative dimensions of political engagement by demonstrating that anti-austerity activism is motivated and sustained by three core elements; emotion, morality and relationship. Individuals are motivated by an emotional response to perceived injustice combined with normative ideals about how society should be and how we should act in relation to others. They utilise notions of humanity and empathy to combat the dehumanising effect of neoliberal capitalism and its focus on individualism and competition. Participants translate such abstract, universal concepts into concrete, particular actions through a focus on everyday activism and individual choices. Rather than an outright rejection of individualism, participants seek to redefine it in ways that move away from the dominant neoliberal understanding and towards reconciling the individual with the wider collective and common good. Here, activism is conceptualised as a moral duty. Participants therefore suggest that everyone and anyone can and should do activism, with small acts making a difference. This chapter begins to unpick the ways in which activists resist, subvert and sometimes unwittingly reinforce neoliberal capitalism, as well as questioning the problematic distinction drawn between ‘non-activist’ and ‘activist’.

Progressive Punishment begins with an early and disorienting moment from Schept’s field research, when he first encountered a local official criticizing the prison industrial complex and calling for significant local carceral expansion. The chapter uses this seeming contradiction as a point of departure for discussing several foundational elements of the book. First, the chapter discusses the ways that carceral expansion in Bloomington fits into and complicates the national picture of mass incarceration. Building on that discussion, the chapter then introduces a central element of the book’s theoretical framework: carceral habitus, or the ways that neoliberal policies and logics structured community dispositions, including those that appeared to reject incarceration. The book uses carceral habitus as a way to reconcile the power of the neoliberal carceral state to structure its own reproduction with the ways communities filter dominant logics of imprisonment to fit particular political and cultural contexts. Finally, the Introduction discusses the importance of ethnography attuned to the structural and historical production of local events and dispositions.

This chapter provides an overview of the main themes of the book. It comprises the historical evolution of capitalism since the 19^th century and its different liberal, regulated and neoliberal phases. The chapter reviews the origin and evolution of neoliberal thinking and the impact of neoliberal policies on the social structure of capitalism (elites, middle class, labor, entrepreneurship) and the growing influence of big money on democracy. The book examines the causes and consequences of economic and financial crises and reviews the scope and limits of existing theories to understand them. It also examines the disruptive features of austerity policies and the emergence of global elites, migration and diasporas and the internationalization of social movements. The book finally elaborates on the concept and applicability of economic democracy as a way to counteract the inegalitarian and concentrating features of neoliberal capitalism and calls for systemic reforms for a prosperous and fair economy in a democratic society.

This chapter documents how the venture capital system captures yearnings for technological alternatives. It follows the workings of a foreign-funded hardware incubator program in Shenzhen that trained people to translate their commitments to social justice into a pitch for finance capital. The incubator program taught people how to see themselves as human capital. Human capital, political theorist Wendy Brown suggests, “is the next step of homo oeconomicus as a neoliberal agent that seeks to strengthen his/her competitive positioning. Neoliberal rationality remakes the human being as human capital.” The chapter then shows that the turning of the self into human capital is all but an inevitable outcome of neoliberal capitalism but has to be actively taught and learned.

Following the short introduction to Part 1, Chapter 1 begins the story of local carceral expansion with an examination of the 85-acre site designated to house the justice campus. The site was the former home of the largest color television production plant in the world, owned for decades by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA was the community’s largest employer at one point but began shifting production to Mexico in the 1960s and ultimately closed the Bloomington plant in 1998. Almost immediately, the county began considering the site for a justice campus. The chapter traces the community’s loss of that plant and subsequent attempt to build the campus as part of broader currents of the neoliberal state, including the geographical movement of capital across scale and space and the rise of the carceral state. As part of this examination, the chapter looks at the municipal growth strategies that created a zone of tax abatements and financing within which the justice campus would have sat. The chapter relies on research from cultural and Marxist geography to discuss the importance of material and symbolic reading of the landscape to consider its telling of history and the way it can be mobilized as an ideological template on which to project a particular vision for the future. The book begins with this history and analysis in order to situate and disturb the "common sense" of carceral expansion.

This chapter interrogates whether international human rights law has settled for preventing and mitigating deprivations without changing the terms under which that suffering is not only made possible but is reproduced, including by reinforcing the structural features that engender it. Human rights exist within an extreme capitalist global economy and their deployment needs to be considered against that backdrop, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it. Taking the inquiry one step further, this chapter considers the ways in which human rights work against a transformative or radical agenda, to the detriment of their own aims and objectives. It explores how international human rights law is not limited to redistribution, but has not gone so far as to effecting ‘predistribution’, that is, making international law just, ex ante, in a structural sense. Moreover, its demands for redistribution in order to realize human rights can also serve to drive the possibility of predistribution further away.

This chapter describes some of the major themes of the postcrisis political economy of Anglo-America. Identifying the central policy pairing between fiscal austerity and monetary loosening, it draws upon accounts of the structural crisis of neoliberal capitalism, arguing that, despite the adoption of unorthodox monetary policy and the restoration of growth, economic recovery has failed to arrest the underlying structural crisis of Anglo-American political economies. In the postcrisis era, the reliance upon a strategy of ultralow interest rates and quantitative easing initiated by the US and the UK demonstrated the continued centrality of Anglo-American central bank leadership to the global economy. But the sluggish return to growth in the West, and the continued stagnation of living standards within the UK and the US specifically, have revealed the declining ability of neoliberal capitalism to deliver economic growth and distributional gains in amounts adequate to bolster democratic consent. The rise of antiestablishment politics in both states—and the fracturing of the longstanding eoliberal center ground of party politics—has led to new political and economic dynamics. Alongside these changes, the rebalancing of the City–Bank–Treasury nexus toward Chinese finance, the policies of Donald Trump, and Brexit are transforming the global economy.

This chapter reviews that the class resistance in Maine's paper industry has waned since the 1990s, including the movement culture which shaped and sustained it. It looks at the folk political economy and economic imagination that has resonance for Mainers and is considered a cultural artifact that can be joined in a critique of neoliberal capitalism. It also explores the widespread antipathy to key features of the neoliberal era. The chapter discusses the loss of local ownership and control of enterprises and the replacement of Chandlerian stability with the fierce and ugly rationalization imposed by financial investors. It refers to antipathy that is aimed at neoliberalism's assumption that only unfettered private markets provide good economic outcomes.

This concluding chapter argues that undermining adolescence in cultural production has its greatest cultural impact not only on how Americans think about youth but also on how they have grown to accept the logic of rehabilitative citizenship as normal. Post-1970s youth culture naturalized endless self-management and transformation by mapping it onto “normal” teen bodies that everybody regards as already changing. This cultural transition from post-World War II externalizing sociologies of juvenile delinquency toward post-1968 internalizing psychological understandings of teen angst took root within a broader cultural turn from collective bargaining toward a neoliberal model of personal responsibility. In this sense, teens became convenient figures for (mis)managing the neoliberal capitalism.

This concluding chapter makes the general case for grounding a twenty-first-century critical Latina/o urbanism in something provisionally called the “cultural political economy” in an attempt to resolve lingering theoretical tensions between socioeconomic (structural) and culture-based (semiotic) approaches to the neoliberal present. This postdisciplinary interpretation reaffirms the centrality of capitalist formations in the study of the Latino urban question by embedding social and cultural categories in the lived spaces of the macroeconomic order. Using this approach, the chapter sketches a few strategic lines to confront changing class formations and deindustrialization in neoliberal capitalism's period of indefinitely prolonged crisis. It then explores the ways the current economic crisis implicates the scholarly projects of Latina/o and Chicana/o urban studies and how these interpretations of cultural political economy might reconfigure these projects to answer the continued attacks from the populist Right.

This concluding chapter reflects on the trajectory of capitalism in Japan and the role of its precarious workers in that process. The key issues facing Japan are whether and how Japan's new labor movement will develop. It is only in studying this recomposition of Japan's working class that one will be able to understand and explain the trajectory of capitalism as it exists in Japan. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether a new mode of regulation emerges, and what role labor—either regular or nonregular, organized or disorganized—will play in any new socioeconomic regime. What is certain is that any attempt to undermine, sideline, or eradicate labor will ultimately be futile, as workers in Japan (as they do elsewhere) invariably continue to disrupt and resist—in different ways in different times and contexts—efforts to consolidate a model of global neoliberal capitalism that cannot be stable.

Chapter 1 charts the origins of freeganism in anarchist movements committed to “dropping out” of capitalism by living off its waste. It shows how the rise of movements with a political program of “prefiguring” a post-capitalist world has been facilitated by the increasing waste produced by neo-liberal capitalism itself.

This introductory chapter proposes hermeneutic communism as an alternative to the current capitalist and neoliberalist strategies that currently dominate the political landscape. Communism cannot be translated into a particular philosophical stance, nor can hermeneutics be translated into a political position, yet both draw our attention to a current lack of emergency, that is, the increasing homologizing of the political, economic, and social structures of power. As the political alternative to the impositions of neoliberal capitalism and the philosophy of the interpretative nature of truth, communism and hermeneutics have become alternative responses for the losers of history, that is, the weak. South American communism and philosophical hermeneutics in particular are shown to be effective examples of emergency, alternative, and change—and it is these models that will be discussed in succeeding chapters.

This chapter explores what happens when neoliberal capitalism becomes a hegemonic system of thought and practice, with its unswerving belief in the virtues of markets and the private, of competition and inequality, and of calculation and individual choice. But it is not a general account of this phenomenon, rather a study of how it plays out in one small part of the neoliberal world – early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England. Nor is this chapter solely critique. It is also about the possibility of thinking differently and an exercise in putting the neoliberal approach to ECEC where it belongs: in perspective, as but one of a number of alternatives, a possibility rather than a necessity. In particular, the chapter explores just one of these alternatives, an ECEC inscribed with democracy as a fundamental value. It makes the case for researching critical case studies of innovative provision and practice to understand better the conditions and processes that might stimulate and sustain alternatives. The chapter concludes it is still possible to envisage a demarketised system based on Children's Centres, each serving all families in a local catchment area and each generating a wide range of projects in response to local encounters.

The conclusion looks beyond freeganism towards more recent efforts to reduce food waste. By studying freegans, we see one part of where these new initiatives concerning waste originated, while also raising doubts about how much waste we can eliminate without a more profound change to our economic and political system.

The final chapter draws together the theoretical and empirical insights advanced in this book. The author justifies the claim that the probation service, criminal justice system, and penal policy, have been subjected to systematic political incursions since 1997 that constitute modernising monstrosities and transformational traumas. In fact, criminal justice reflects and reproduces the organisational logic of neoliberal capitalism, supported by the new public management. These monstrosities and traumas have serious implications for probation staff and their practices, the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies, community supervision, the prison system that continues to expand, and the moral foundations of criminal justice. This theoretical and empirical excavation of criminal justice from 1997 to 2015 is a detailed case study of politico-economic, ideological and material reconfiguration under the harsh realities of the neoliberal order.