Lineages of Revolt

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Adam Hanieh. Lineages of Revolt

Contents

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Chapter 1

Theories and Perspectives

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As later chapters will outline, however, neoliberalism needs to be seen as much more than the familiar litany of economic policies with which it is typically associated. Its essence lies, as David Harvey points out, in an attempt to reconstitute and strengthen class power in the favor of capital.66 Its policies emerged out of the systemic needs of capitalist social reality. Specifically, the turn to neoliberalism reflected the accumulation needs of capital in an era of internationalization, i.e., capital with accumulation spaces increasingly spread across a global level. Its logic came to penetrate all national social formations and was specifically concerned with the ways in which these formations were integrated into global circuits of accumulation. By speeding up the rate at which capital moves across and through national spaces, and widening the spheres of human activities subject to the imperatives of accumulation, neoliberalism aimed to ensure the conditions for capitalist reproduction at a global scale.

The widespread adoption of neoliberal policies was facilitated by the restructuring of the world market that took place during the 1980s and 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of China into the global economy, capitalist social relations spread throughout the world, compelling all states to comply with norms set at the international scale.67 In regions such as the Middle East, this process was closely related to the economic crises of the 1980s and the pressure countries faced to earn foreign exchange revenues in order to service their debt obligations. A range of international institutions drove the technical implementation of neoliberal policies—notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—while governments from the United States and Europe pursued bilateral trade and financial agreements with the region.

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