Thread by @moneyontheleft

New @Superstruc episode just dropped!

✨We Have Never Been Neoliberal, What Now?✨

Please listen & share.

(Description in thread below.)

moneyontheleft.org/2021/10/20/28-…

In this episode, co-hosts @orangeasm & @MaxSeijo argue that the pandemic not only killed neoliberalism as a tacit ideological formation; it also revealed how neoliberal truisms have never captured the actual causal mechanisms and potentials that defined the past 50 years. 2/7

Fleshing out these claims, Naty and Maxx journey through the work of rockstar economic historian @adam_tooze, focusing in particular on his widely-hailed recent book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021). 3/7

Naty & Maxx affirm Tooze’s characteristically thorough demonstration of the myriad ways that the world-wide response to the pandemic, however inadequate, dismantled the pillars of neoliberal governance. 4/7

Yet they critique the elitist complicity of Tooze’s methodological commitment to historical immanence and inevitability, tracing such impulses to back to John Maynard Keynes’ fatal dismissal of Abba Lerner’s proposal to do away with balanced budgets and revenue-constraints. 5/7

For the Superstructure crew, by contrast, proceeding “in medias res,” as Tooze puts it, requires an abolitionist attunement to genuine conditions of injustice and possibility, from #Defund and ongoing labor strikes to contests over #MintTheCoin and the Green New Deal. 6/7

During the conversation, wisecracks and burns abound, per usual. This one, too, is packed with citations, including loving shoutouts to @DavidpStein, @FeinigJakob, @prisonculture, @dnbrgr, @ekhobson, @AlexYablon, @NathanTankus & @rohangrey. 7/end