Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism GEORGIA ALEXANDRI Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain MICHAEL JANOSCHKA University of Leeds, UK Neoliberalism is a political ideology that has become the hegemonic driver of capitalist economies across the globe since the 1970s. It has provoked a profound market-oriented economic, political, and social restructuring of our lives that ultimately aims at establishing novel forms of class domination, exploitation, and dispossession. At the same time, neoliberal hegemony is a governance technique that uses the umbrella of allegedly unpolitical scientific and technical knowledge to depoliticize the public sphere and the processes of policy-making. As philosophical thought and political practice, it accentuates the virtue of private property rights. Neoliberalism emphasizes the need for entrepreneurial freedom and articulates this claim through the free movement of capital, goods, knowledge, and ideas. But, besides this rhetoric, state intervention is defining neoliberalism in manifold ways, from privatization, welfare cuts, and deregulation (also considered as rollback neoliberalism) to the outsourcing of welfare facilities and reregulation of most public policies (also considered as rollout neoliberalism). These complex processes facilitate the introduction of different kinds of market logics to better dominate social and economic relations in our societies and to constantly produce new markets for capital accumulation. IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS AND EXPERIMENTATION A nuanced and coherent understanding of neoliberalism should begin by tracing it back to its origins before addressing the ways in which it is currently reshaping the dynamics of the present – and future – lives of nearly everyone in the world. In this regard, a reflection on the connections it has to liberal economic theory may facilitate some in-depth understandings of its political stance. Economic liberalism as developed since the eighteenth century argued for the virtue of private property and the freedom of the individual as focal points for politics and economic development. Economic, political, and social relations were considered to be better organized through the rational choices of free actors. While the state was portrayed as a necessary protective device for the individual, it was thought to simultaneously pose great threats to liberty and free will. Throughout the centuries, liberalism varied in relation to the specific geographical and socioeconomic context where it was developed. It is expressed by approaches ranging from mistrust of the state’s powers to acceptance of the necessity of state intervention for the adjustment of inequities in wealth distribution caused by economic competition. Adam Smith’s idea that markets are governed by an invisible hand and as such should be subjected to minimal state intervention defines picturesquely the liberal aspirations in political economy, shaping the intellectual basis for the laissez-faire dogma and corresponding economic doctrines. Modern liberalism also focused on obstacles such as poverty, discrimination, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0220 2 N E OL I BE RA L I SM and inequality created by unfettered capitalism on individual freedom, pinpointing the need for state intervention. By the late nineteenth century such aspirations were reflected in politics dealing with health and safety regulations, control of daily and weekly working hours, and other incipient welfare state institutions like schools’ and hospitals’ public funding and employees’ compensation schemes. Under the influence of Keynesianism for more state intervention after the Great Depression and World War II, principally to sustain economic growth with the higher taxation of capital and the expansion of welfare facilities, policies promoting full employment were established. Moreover, the union movement was boosting workers’ wages in Europe and North America, while the majority of the workforce was enjoying better working and living conditions. This age of embedded liberalism (Harvey 2005) also saw the nationalization of utilities and parts of industry, the broadening of welfare to public pensions, and free healthcare and education for all. In many countries of the Global South, governments in favor of a more just redistribution of resources urged the need to restrict the lawless extraction of natural resources and the power of multinational corporations. While the rates of growth had been rising, the proportion of extreme wealth as a share of the national income was declining. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the share of national income of the richest 0.1 percent fell from 10 to less than 2 percent (Piketty and Saez 2006). However, elites in many countries became increasingly vexed by this loss and by the redistribution of wealth. As a consequence, political thought addressing policies that aspire to return to laissez-faire practices was increasingly positioning the freedom of the individual at the forefront of political debate as the prime economic action. This is expressed particularly by the Austrian-born economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that redistributive means end up in totalitarianism, and by the American economist Milton Friedman, who rejected fiscal policy as a means of economic enhancement. These requests were further accelerated during the 1970s when increased public debt advocated a kind of return to liberalism. However, since then discourses about neoliberalism have recognized the decisive importance of reengineering the state to provide support for the market on an ongoing basis. But, since the electorate in the Western world would not support at that moment a welfare retreat in favor of market freedom, the experiment of regression toward neoliberalism had to start from elsewhere. In this regard, any historic approach to neoliberalism should take into consideration the prominence of communist ideology among the populations of many countries during the Cold War era, as well as the imperialist interventions of European countries, and especially of different US administrations, in the Global South. Against the background of direct US influence in and the importance of Latin America for US multinational companies, Chile proved to be the most appropriate country for neoliberal experimentation. In 1973 the CIA supported, if indeed it had not initiated, the coup by Augusto Pinochet that imposed a military junta eliminating the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the aftermath of the coup, Chile became the prime laboratory of so-called neoliberal restructuring. Following professional advice from Milton Friedman’s research group, privatization of state companies, banks, education, and social security; deep cuts to government spending; elimination of tariffs, subsidies, and price control were implemented as a shock treatment to reestablish laissez-faire politics and accelerate NEOL I B ERAL I SM economic freedom. In similar terms, the military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay asked for the advice of Friedman and his close circle on the regulation of the political sphere and the deregulation of the economy (Hickel 2016). However, the neoliberal beast liberated by the 1976 Nobel Laureate Friedman rapidly returned to its roots. It was only in 1977 that the fiscal crisis of the city of New York was resolved by a recipe that would now be among the key remedies in a handbook of neoliberalism: wage reductions for public employees, layoff of public workers, and a drastic increase in charges for public services. Soon after, von Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideas were enthusiastically embraced by the Republican Party in the United States and by the Conservatives in the United Kingdom. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher promised to bring together free market ideology and the revival of Victorian values of the family, community, and hard work. Margaret Thatcher, after her election as leader of the Conservative Party, had personally met with von Hayek and Friedman on different occasions. Unsurprisingly, when she became prime minister in the United Kingdom, she brought into practice the principles of neoliberalism against state intervention and labor union organization and in favor of privatization. This election was certainly characterized by von Hayek as the best eightieth birthday present he could ever have imagined. Both Reagan and Thatcher managed to reverse much of the established political discourse. Embraced by many countries of the Global South with ongoing economic crises, this rationale permeated international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and, under the terms of the Washington Consensus, economic policy reform packages for economic crisis resolution were launched worldwide from the late 1980s. 3 THE NORMALIZATION OF NEOLIBERAL PRINCIPLES Both the Thatcher and Reagan administrations enhanced individual freedoms by “liberating” capitalism from the burden of the state. Curbing the power of unions; deregulating financial markets; privatizing utilities, public assets, and services; relieving the rich from their burden of taxation; and reducing public spending became the prime tools of neoliberal restructuring. According to neoliberal arguments, supporting free market policies would promote economic growth, and the generated yields would trickle down to the rest of society. During the 1980s mantras celebrating the virtue of private and personal responsibility, deregulation, privatization and free trade, and the downsizing of the state became increasingly normalized. With the fall the Soviet Union and the end of existing socialism, neoliberal arguments became increasingly mainstream through the increasing capacity of dominant actors to generate consensus and argue for the legitimation of this particular political project as if it were universally accepted. Authors such as Peck and Tickell (2002) discuss the dismantling of the post-World War II modes of regulation as a process of creative destruction of primarily rollback neoliberalism that freed up the market economy from various state impediments. This was then followed by a rollout neoliberalism which may be characterized by the introduction of new governing structures and institutions through a reregulation of state competencies. This jigsaw of state practice legitimates practices of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005), that is, the commodification and privatization of the commons, the use of financial operations as means of dispossession, and crisis management that devaluates public assets and favors 4 N E OL I BE RA L I SM state redistribution to support the privileged and allows them to increase again their share in the wealth distribution. Over the course of the 1990s, the neoliberal agenda was reinforced and ever more governments adopted its underlying rationale in both the Global North and the Global South. In many Latin American and African countries, structural adjustment programs introduced in collaboration with the IMF and the World Bank augmented public deficit and debt as most natural resources (agro-industry, petroleum, and mining) and services (telecommunication, electricity, transport, water, and banking) were privatized by multinational corporations, who thus captured local wealth for the benefit of their financial and administrative centers in the Global North. Similarly, Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, became a playground for regulatory experiments and market expansion. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and especially the consolidation and deepening of the European Union, were altogether designed as models for neoliberal policy implementation in a transnational sphere. And, additionally, ideas of entrepreneurship, free market, and privatization were also embraced by progressive governments, generating policies such as Tony Blair’s Third Way in the United Kingdom, Gerhard Schröder’s welfare adjustments in Germany, and Clinton’s financial deregulation in the United States. Within this framework, those who benefited from neoliberal restructuring were not necessarily the traditional elites but, increasingly, emerging corporate executives, who in many countries have proved to be corrupt and nepotistic. Furthermore, neoliberal principles and ethics utterly changed the perception of citizenship within the society. Devaluating or eliminating concepts related to common needs such as “community,” the “public,” or the “common good” resulted in the restructuring of relations between economy, politics, and society through promoting instead ideas of individualism such as “personal responsibility,” “individual freedom,” and “effective citizenship.” The individual was impelled to develop their own agenda of personal development, primarily engaging with entrepreneurial practices that generate private profits and boost self-prosperity. In simple terms, each citizen has to seek welfare provision through contractual agreements with private companies for basic human needs such as housing (mortgages), employment (business loans), healthcare (life insurance), and social security (pension). Eventually the act of borrowing became a cornerstone in the economic relations of individuals, allowing capital and finance to intervene in and to control most aspects of private and public life. Success is often rewarded with property ownership and accumulated monetary wealth, while failure is reflected in deprivation, and being poor is portrayed as a personal deficiency and thus as a failutre of responsibility toward the rest of society. Meanwhile risks have become outsourced from the state to the individual: the poor citizen is frequently characterized as a lazy burden on the rest of society, and is consequently marginalized in the sphere of labor, consumption, welfare, and housing provision. PRACTICAL EXPRESSIONS AND MULTIPLE DISCONTENTS OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY NEOLIBERALISM This highly influential political ideology may be better grasped by looking at specific policy arenas. The global rule of the market prevails in almost every political and economic decision relating to the free movement of capital, services, goods, and knowledge, with prime examples of such practice being the NEOL I B ERAL I SM World Trade Organization, NAFTA or the now abandoned negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. While very little is known about the TTIP, the NAFTA experience demonstrates that free trade does not necessarily result in the promised trickle-down effects. For instance, the removal of trade barriers between Canada, Mexico, and the United States actually enhanced corporate freedom in the exploration of new markets and investments. Corporations were able to freely move capital to locations where labor was cheaper and labor and environmental regulations looser. It is not surprising that among the three countries participating in this agreement NAFTA especially hurt the small-scale corn farmers in Mexico who were forced to abandon their land as a result of the competition with subsidized grains imported from the United States. Eventually corn prices rose, and rising food costs led to parts of the Mexican population suffering malnutrition and drove them to migrate. The Zapatista uprising was a vivid expression of the outrage of Mexicans at their dispossession of agricultural land and food by multinational corporations. It remains an illuminating example of alternative organization of production and daily life. The neoliberal rationale has also been expressed through reforms in public expenditure on social services, in ways that reflect the specific socioeconomic and political context. In most places reforms in public spending have affected educational, health, and housing especially. However, as discussed, neoliberalism, in contrast to liberal ideas of no state action, is chiefly about organizing ongoing state support for capital circulation and accumulation. The insatiable demand of the corporate world for higher profits, less redistribution, and less restriction is vividly captured and supported by 5 the development of tax havens across the world. Such places offer composite tax structures that are designed to exploit corporate demand for tax evasion, enabling individuals and companies to hide their assets or income to avoid taxation in their home jurisdiction. Earnings generated from real estate or financial activities, which are a key policy arena within neoliberalism, may also be eliminated through such schemes, since taxes paid in the tax haven jurisdiction allow companies to avoid higher taxes in their home jurisdiction. Hence, tax havens, in addition to acting in favor of the corporate world, participate in yet another neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state, dispossessing citizens of welfare support. Profits developed in one place, using local human and natural resources, are transferred to another place that shields these profits from taxation and yields a net capital gain that is returned to the pockets of the corporate world. The home jurisdiction, while it participates in all stages of the production, enjoys no revenues and hence loses capital inputs for income redistribution and welfare provision. Neoliberal reforms in education are a crucial issue. The rationale for imposing fees, especially in universities, is allegedly a natural outcome of limited public resources – which are ultimately limited because of the voluntary decision of administrations to reduce the tax burden on wealthy contributors. Institutions then depend more and more on either private sponsors or affluent students who are able to pay high fees for their education, while initiatives supporting access for less privileged populations in higher education have become increasingly restricted. This leads to the return of stratified educational systems that penalize poverty and perpetuate social segregation and marginalization. Lower- and middle-class potential students have to take out student loans to cover university fees and living costs, which are widely offered by both 6 N E OL I BE RA L I SM public institutions and banks. It has been demonstrated that student loans place whole generations in debt for as many years as it takes them to pay back the loan. Additionally, the lack of public resources for research and innovation drives institutions to rely on private funding, which means that the corporate world can directly influence academic findings and results. It is not surprising that biostatistics, sustainable engineering, and informatics, rather than the humanities and social sciences, are increasingly being supported by grants and cofunding incentives. Within the entrepreneurial rationale, advances in disciplines with a market potential – for example, through new patents that may generate profit – attract more financial and institutional support than theoretical advances in understanding or in tackling injustice (effectively the result of neoliberalism). The more profitable research and innovation in an institution is, and the greater the dissemination impact in journals with a high impact factor it has, the higher the institution will be ranked in evaluations. And the higher the rating the more attractive the university becomes to competitive investors, human capital, and prosperous students. And so universities transform themselves into neoliberal actors, cutting salaries and contributions to pension funds for their employees while raising salaries for administrators and investing in real estate. Similarly, the neoliberal rationale of public expenditure reductions in health systems allow public infrastructures to be destroyed in favor of privately provided healthcare. Public hospitals and clinics increasingly deal with reduced staff levels and resources, lower wages and a greater workload, deteriorating working conditions, and increasing anxiety levels in staff and patients. Austerity measures imposed on bankrupt states of the Global South or, more recently, in countries of Southern Europe specifically targeted the level of public expenditure on healthcare. Following austerity adjustments, Greek public hospitals now ask patients to bring with them linen and towels in case they may have to stay overnight. The gap in infrastructure is often filled with services from private providers that are linked to the transnational corporate world, either real estate corporations (in Spain public hospitals are run by construction companies) or the pharmaceutical industry (as in Germany). Services related to mental and psychological health are regularly outsourced to private providers, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. The irony is that many psychological illnesses like depression and stress are to some extent caused by neoliberal restructuring promoting labor precariousness. Additionally, public–private partnerships and the sale of public hospitals (as asset and infrastructure) to private investors are promoted as more efficient choices for healthcare provision. The privatization of healthcare services usually leads to broader inequality among patients. In many cases, passing on the cost of medical treatments essentially means that patients unable to afford it are left without appropriate medical care. This especially affects elderly people with mental or chronic illnesses, who are essentially excluded from the specialized services they need to survive or to live a reasonably healthy life. In the Global South, as well as in Russia, the neoliberalization of healthcare has given rise to sprawling infections, a revival of diseases considered as having disappeared, and an increase in mortality levels and a decrease in life expectancy. Other markets created through the dismantling of welfare are related to housing and the urban environment. The promotion of social, public, or council housing has been part of the political agenda of most post-World War II governments. Those from lower social strata, and in some countries NEOL I B ERAL I SM also the middle classes, were offered social rents and benefits to access social, council, or publicly provided housing. Social housing provided tenants with protection from irresponsible landlords, safety from employment instability (becoming jobless did not necessarily mean home loss), better living conditions, and psychological stability. With the growth of neoliberal ideas, social housing was characterized as redundant and was subsequently transformed into an asset. Enhanced by processes of privatization and financialization, it evolved into another market for capitalist accumulation in the emergent forms of new housing markets. In abstract terms, housing is also related to the highly profitable real estate sector, and from one perspective social housing units are highly attractive investments as their construction costs and risks have already been absorbed by the public. With the entrepreneurial shift in urban governance, many authorities sold their local social housing units to tenants or international investors, hedge funds, and other actors in the corporate world – essentially privatizing them. In other schemes, adopted through public–private partnerships and private finance initiatives, private companies are redeveloping social housing units, hypothetically offering better conditions. What is neglected in these transactions is that taxpayers have already contributed to the development of social housing which is now being privatized. For international investors the interest in social housing is also explained by the financial opportunity these assets provide when securitized as titles and exchanged in global financial markets. In more indirect ways, social housing has been privatized through schemes promoting social mixing and the right to buy. These initiatives change the social profile of residents, since more affluent households have the ability to become owners, initiating a process of gentrification. 7 Privatization, financialization, and gentrification lead to displacement for vulnerable tenants in the form of landlord change and eviction. It is also manifest in intangible forms in terms of the psychological stress of households threatened by eviction, the rupture of social ties, and the extermination of otherness from urban spaces. Displacement has not only affected social housing residents, but also tenants of privately owned housing and homeowners with a mortgage. In areas affected by gentrification many tenants are eventually displaced because of continual rent increases or a denial of contract renewal. The reinvention of spaces through exclusionary renovation projects and the inflow of more affluent users and uses lead to higher profits for realtors and property owners than simply renting to less well-off tenants. A novel trend identified in US and European cities is displacement by touristification through rental platforms such as Airbnb, because revenue from short stays are more profitable than from permanent tenants. In other words, many landlords prefer to evict previous tenants and let their properties on such platforms, while some companies have bought up whole buildings, forced tenants out, and rented them out on Airbnb. Another way in which urban neoliberalization is provoking displacement relates to the mortgage market and financial speculation. For many years homeownership was seen as the mark of a successful citizen, and since the 1980s mortgage provision has been opened up to allow households with limited creditworthiness access to homeownership. It also permitted speculative interest rates and the awarding of mortgages to borrowers with a high risk of defaulting on repayments. A lack of monitoring and further deregulation of the financial markets enabled securitization to function, the practice of turning mortgages and other portfolios into 8 N E OL I BE RA L I SM composites to be exchanged in global financial markets. The promotion of mortgaged homeownership, together with the dismantling of social housing, left less prosperous households, which were eventually persuaded that owning a house is far safer than renting, with fewer options. With the 2008 financial crisis, the most vulnerable could no longer pay their debts. Job loss, austerity, and other factors such as bad health drove people into arrears. Single families, women, migrants, and the elderly faced foreclosure and home repossession imposed by the government, banks, and hedge funds (with examples in Spain, Ireland, and the United States). Repossessed homes eventually gave rise to another new real estate practice from the ashes of eviction. The assets that are now owned by global landlords and transnational investors are promoted as rented accommodation for more affluent residents (gentrification) or tourists (through Airbnb). Again the process of housing neoliberalization has ended up causing devastating social problems for a growing number of people who have to deal with eviction and displacement. The displaced people follow a centrifugal force to the urban periphery, where they have to contend with low quality housing and long daily journeys to access employment. Exhaustion, illness, anxiety, and stress are only some of the health problems affecting the displaced, which remain unaddressed by governments dedicated to providing further pathways to optimize profit-making for private actors in the real estate market. The neoliberal restructuring of space is expressed through the privatization of publicly owned assets and services, and eventually the commercialization of public lands and the environment. In many countries, public companies that used to provide electricity, heating, transport, and water were privatized in order to create new markets, often using the argument of a hypothetical price reduction, which distracts attention from the ideological stance that is the prime motivation for privatization initiatives. In practice, instead of leading to price reductions, privatizations have ended up transferring costs either to customers or to the public and reducing the standard of services and of working conditions. In some cases, this is related to the monopolistic nature of the goods that are being provided. If the potential market competition for a good is low (e.g., water supply), monopoly structures are favored and companies are able to impose higher prices. In many countries, for example across Latin America, multinational companies withdrew from the provision of former public services, overloading the state with the cost of their misconduct in management and miscalculations on network expansion. The enforcement of market logic in the provision of public goods affects accessibility, quality, and efficiency, as the main aim of the private sector is higher profits and yields. In some cases, people are unable to meet the growing cost of these goods, and are excluded from access or obliged to turn to alternatives that may be harmful to human health and the environment (e.g., consumption of impure drinking water, combustion of inappropriate material for heating). Neoliberalism has changed the role that the environment plays in corporate calculation, by considering it as an input into the profit chain. Intensive mining, such as for gold or oil, exhaustive forestry, landfill disposal, intensive farming, and the use of genetically modified crops are some of the practices that jeopardize the quality of the environment, unbalance biodiversity, disrupt the life of local communities, and also deprive future generations of natural resources. Especially in the Global South, indigenous communities are confronted with the frenzy of such speculative modes of production. In the world of free markets, many millions of vulnerable citizens deal with environmental pollution NEOL I B ERAL I SM and health degradation in addition to their violent expulsion from local lands. Neoliberalism has also affected labor relations. Deregulation and reregulation in policies, laws, and rules have been translated into flexible working conditions, instability, and precariousness. In an early move, neoliberal policies dismantled unions and their collective bargaining power. Eventually, collaborative labor agreements were replaced by individual ones, leaving the employee with reduced bargaining powers and exposed to the arbitrariness of capital. Working time has become flexible, bypassing once established thresholds. And, as employment policies are increasingly affected by the needs of the market, labor protection has been lowered to allow further profit maximization. Labor reregulation affects women especially, who face not only salary discrimination but also glass ceilings. Free capital mobility gave rise to severe regional disparities. For example, deindustrialization in the Global North resulted in masses of unemployed unskilled workers, while intense industrialization in the Global South took place in the absence of any environmental standards or any protection of the health or security of workers in the new industries. Employees share the same precariousness, and workers are increasingly exposed to ruthless exploitation. Job loss and insecurity have become the leitmotif of Foucauldian biopolitics which expanded in the direction of “sharing” economy experiments such as Uber and Airbnb, following the neoliberal rationale of circumventing locally rooted labor regulations. These severe challenges to human rights in relation to housing, healthcare, and employment may be considered as a means used by neoliberalism to jeopardize democracy. The first attempts to control democratic institutions emerged in the Global South in the 1980s, when debt relief was linked to austerity following the conditions set down in 9 the Washington Consensus. Financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs, cuts in public expenditure, tax increases, reregulation of employment policies, and environmental protection. Eventually the way in which national governments confronted austerity and readjusted their economies revealed a loss of sovereignty and the shifting of power toward US financial institutions. Similar strategies were recently implemented in defaulting Southern European countries, especially in Greece. Debt has now become a prime neoliberal mechanism of control and extraction of resources. This means that elected governments are sidestepped as countries follow economic rules that have been determined elsewhere. Although citizens may vote for alternatives, governments seem to follow transnational financial interests rather than the nationally or locally rooted political interests of the working classes. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS Given the severe impacts it has had on the economic, political, and social structures across the globe, it may be that neoliberalism is the contemporary structural violence enforced in all capitalist societies. At a time when basic human needs and rights have become increasingly marginalized and under severe threat, economic and financial interests are thriving. The accumulation of wealth of the wealthiest 1 percent in the world is increasingly facilitated by the dispossession unleashed by successive neoliberalizations. The majority of the population experience social, gender, spatial, economic, and environmental inequalities. It is the more underprivileged who have been the most prominent victims of this violence. Often labelled as “other,” women, single-parent (especially single-mother) families, irregular 10 NE OL I BE RA L I SM migrants, refugees, and everyone else who does not conform to the image of the white successful male are increasingly experiencing violence in the form of work precariousness, insecurity, and uncertainty in different arenas of daily life. Successive dispossessions have resulted in sequential displacements that make the other invisible, pushing them toward spaces where their presence is not upsetting. Such violence and displacement in the end safeguard the facade of the neoliberal society and city where conspicuous consumption in gentrified spaces and exclusive malls should not be disturbed by the victims of this exclusionary process of neoliberalization. Neoliberalism is not a panacea of the market nor a political structure without alternatives. Since it beginnings it has been heavily contested and permanently subverted. For instance, the demonstrations against the G7, G8, and G20 meetings; environmental activism; grassroots unions; societies dealing with citizens’, women’s, and migrants’ rights; housing collectives; and neighborhood assemblies contesting housing debt, food inequality, and austerity have become strong voices speaking out against the ongoing displacements and the inherent violence of neoliberalism. In these spaces social relations may be deconstructed and reestablished in approaches that go beyond the logic of the market and that are based on equality, mutual support, and solidarity. Dispossession has been challenged by the strong feelings associated with comradeship and by alternative economic experiments – based on exchange without intermediates, time banks, or alternative monies – revisiting the logics of the market. These multiple challenges are producing daily cracks in neoliberalism, reminding us that oppression is not enough to sustain violent systems such as the status quo. Neoliberalism may be evolving, but so too are alternative beliefs in and practices for a just society. SEE ALSO: Accumulation by Dispossession; Deindustrialization; Entrepreneurial City; Gentrification; Globalization; New Urban Poverty; Segregation/Desegregation; Speculative Urbanism; Urban Social Movements REFERENCES Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief Story of Neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hickel, J. 2016. “Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy.” In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, edited by S. Springer, K. Birch, and J. MacLeavy, 142–152. London: Routledge. Peck, J., and A. Tickell. 2002. “Neoliberalizing Space.” Antipode, 34(3): 380–404. Piketty, T., and E. Saez. 2006. “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.” NBER Working Paper No. 11955. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. FURTHER READING Peck, J. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peck, J., N. Theodore, and N. Brenner. 2010. “Post-Neoliberalism and Its Malcontents.” Antipode, 41(1): 94–116.