Neoliberalism has been a long, difficult and violent ride for millions if not billions of people around the world. The financial crash that began unfolding publicly in 2007 marked the end of neoliberalism in some sense, or so it has been suggested by many commentators, but it also provoked a longer view for those [...]
Ten years after the 1991 coup that finalized the demise of the Soviet Union, the events of September 11, 2001 handed the US ruling class an unequalled opportunity to consummate a long sought imperial ambition at the planetary scale. Clearly within grasp lay a new global unilateralism centered squarely on the US. Washington and Wall [...]
This paper examines the events, microgeography and broader context of the effective siege of downtown Toronto by Canadian security forces during the June 2010 meeting of the G20, and the unprecedented assault on peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders alike. An extraordinary clampdown of Toronto streets was organized by integrated security forces at the international, federal, [...]
The new regime of urban security has been tracked back to the 9/11 events, but its origins are longer and deeper. As many theorists from Lefebvre onward have suggested, real estate investment in city building offers a means of displacing crises of capitalist accumulation from the industrial sector, and indeed the “Great Recession” beginning in [...]
We are all now familiar with the story of the rise of neoliberalism – Friedrich von Hayek and the Mont Pe´le`rin Society, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, Pinochet’s Chile – as simultaneously testing ground and template for a whole new phase of capitalism. In intellectual historical terms, neoliberalism marked a return to a Smithean economy based on private property, competition and selfinterest, and to a Lockean politics vaunting the expression of self-interest as the best-for-all pinnacle of bourgeois democracy. But it may be Russia nearly two decades later that marks the most emblematic expression of this ruthless killand-grab politics.