Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Alt Solvency

Refusing the “natural” desire for capital breaks down the ideology of neoliberalism.

Fisher, 13

(Mark- program leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures @ Goldsmiths University of London, “How to kill a zombie: strategizing the end of neoliberalism,” https://www.opendemocracy.net/mark-fisher/how-to-kill-zombie-strategizing-end-of-neoliberalism)

The emphasis on direct action, though, conceals a despair about the possibility of indirect action. Yet it is via indirect action that the control of ideological narratives is achieved. Ideology isn’t about what you or I spontaneously believe, but about what we believe that the Other believes – and this belief is still determined to a large extent by the content of mainstream media.¶ Neo-anarchist doctrine maintains that we should abandon mainstream media and parliament – but our abandoning it has only allowed the neoliberals to extend their power and influence. The neoliberal right might preach the end of the state, but only while ensuring that it controls governments.¶ Only the horizontalist left believes the rhetoric about the obsolescence of the state. The danger of the neo-anarchist critique is that it essentializes the state, parliamentary democracy and “mainstream media” – but none of these things is forever fixed. They are mutable terrains to be struggled over, and the shape they now assume is itself the effect of previous struggles. It seems, as times, as if the horizontalists want to occupy everything except parliament and the mainstream media. But why not occupy the state and the media too? Neo-anarchism isn’t so much of a challenge to capitalist realism as it is one of its effects. Anarchist fatalism – according to which it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than a left-wing Labour Party – is the complement of the capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism.¶ None of this is to say that occupying mainstream media or politics will be enough in themselves. If New Labour taught us anything, it was that holding office is by no means the same thing as winning hegemony. Yet without a parliamentary strategy of some kind, movements will keep foundering and collapsing. The task is to make the links between the extra-parliamentary energies of the movements and the pragmatism of those within existing institutions.¶ Retrain ourselves to adopt a war mentality ¶ If you want to consider the most telling drawback of horizontalism, though, think about how it looks from the perspective of the enemy. Capital must be delighted by the popularity of horizontalist discourses in the anti-capitalist movement. Would you rather face a carefully co-ordinated enemy, or one that takes decisions via nine-hour “assemblies”? ¶ Which isn’t to say that we should fall back into the consoling fantasy that any kind of return to old school Leninism is either possible or desirable. The fact that we have been left with a choice between Leninism and anarchism is a measure of current leftist impotence.¶ It’s crucial to leave behind this sterile binary. The struggle against authoritarianism needn’t entail neo-anarchism, just as effective organization doesn’t necessarily require a Leninist party. What is required, however, is taking seriously the fact that we are up against an enemy that has no doubt at all that it is in a class war, and which devotes many of its enormous resources training its people to fight it. There’s a reason that MBA students read The Art of War and if we are to make progress we have to rediscover the desire to win and the confidence that we can.¶ We must learn to overcome certain habits of anti-Stalinist thinking. The danger is not any more, nor has it been for some time, excessive dogmatic fervor on our side. Instead, the post-68 left has tended to overvalue the negative capability of remaining in doubt, scepticism and uncertainties - this may be an aesthetic virtue, but it is a political vice. The self-doubt that has been endemic on the left since the 60s is little in evidence on the right – one reason that the right has been so successful in imposing its programme. Many on the left now quail at the thought of formulating a programme, still less “imposing” one. But we have to give up on the belief that people will spontaneously turn to the left, or that neoliberalism will collapse without our actively dismantling it. ¶ Rethink solidarity¶ The old solidarity that neoliberalism decomposed has gone, never to return. But this does not mean that we are consigned to atomized individualism. Our challenge now is to reinvent solidarity. Alex Williams has come up with the suggestive formulation “post-Fordist plasticity” to describe what this new solidarity might look like. As Catherine Malabou has shown, plasticity is not the same as elasticity. Elasticity is equivalent to the flexibility which neoliberalism demands of us, in which we assume a form imposed from outside. But plasticity is something else: it implies both adaptability and resilience, a capacity for modification which also retains a ‘memory’ of previous encounters. Rethinking solidarity in these terms may help us to give up some tired assumptions. This kind of solidarity doesn't necessarily entail overarching unity or centralized control. But moving beyond unity needn’t lead us into the flatness of horizontalism, either. Instead of the rigidity of unity – the aspiration for which, ironically, has contributed to the left’s notorious sectarianism - what we need is the co-ordination of diverse groups, resources and desires. The right have been better postmodernists than us, building successful coalitions out of heterogeneous interest groups without the need for an overall unity. We must learn from them, to start to build a similar patchwork on our side. This is more a logistical problem than a philosophical one.¶ In addition to the plasticity of organizational form, we need also to pay attention to the plasticity of desire. Freud said that the libidinal drives are “extraordinarily plastic”. If desire is not a fixed biological essence, then there is no natural desire for capitalism. Desire is always composed. Advertisers, branders and PR consultants have always known this, and the struggle against neoliberalism will require that we construct an alternative model of desire that can compete with the one pushed by capital’s libidinal technicians.¶ What’s certain is that we are now in an ideological wasteland in which neoliberalism is dominant only by default. The terrain is up for grabs, and Friedman’s remark should be our inspiration: it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Movements against neoliberalism can solve – they have produced new methods of organizing space and governance

Harvey, 11

(Ryan, writer, an organizer with the Civilian-Soldier Alliance, “Globalization” Is Coming Home: Protests Spread as Financial Institutions Target Global North”, Thursday 27 October 2011, http://www.truth-out.org/world-finally-fighting-infection-neoliberalism/1320164620?q=globalization-coming-home-protests-spread-financial-institutions-target-global-north/1319721791)

Though it reads like a mystical story of upheaval, to say that the protests in Europe or Wisconsin were “inspired by” the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia is only half true; they were inspired by the successful protests, but they were also pushed forward by similar conditions being imposed on them by many of the same institutions. There can be no denying that there is a strong, energetic relationship between the Arab Spring and all of these movements that have emerged since then. However, it is a relationship that mostly exists through consciousness rather than direct communication, and has manifested as a series of movements that are globally understood to be linked, much like the “movement of movements” of the “anti-globalization” years. Though the Indignados knew little of the Wisconsin protests, their movement bore many similarities to it in terms of organization, demands, disagreement over vague or direct purpose, size, and relations with the community. In both Madison and Barcelona, a few hundred people remaining in a fixed location with little previous organizational connections brought hundreds of thousands of people together on multiple occasions. In both cities, a shared space became an epicenter of cultural and social change. And in both cities, after a little over a month, the protests disintegrated with a mixture of success and shortcoming. In reflection, participants from both movements feel everything from celebration to confused defeat, some believing their actions did not push hard enough, others seeing them as the early stages only for future events. Shortcomings aside, the Indignados, the movement in Wisconsin and the protests now spreading from Wall Street expose a new, directly democratic, non-dogmatic politic, one that has been clearly inspired by movements of the last ten years, but which also includes a wide variety of people with a range of political affiliations and visions. Perhaps the main characteristic of all of these movements, and their main strength, is the creation of social spaces in which movements can host dialogue and experience fast-paced social changes and collective transformation. This is why Tahrir Square became a symbol, and why the Capitol in Wisconsin and the Plaça Catalunya became sites to defend and celebrate. Whereas many movements struggle constantly to find collective space, usually through the hosting of regular marches or demonstrations, the establishment of such spaces as the encampments in the Plaça Catalunya or at Occupy Wall Street, allows for a more rapid sense of power to develop, often leading to a more horizontal arrangement of power within a movement. They also create space for real debate and dialogue around issues of power and privilege. A number of essays and videos discussing race, sexism, class privilege, and homophobia within the “occupation movement” have gone viral over the last two weeks. Interestingly, almost all of these have been written with a sense of urgency, not to discredit the occupations, but to urge those participating to push them to new levels, to move them beyond their traditional comfort zones, to help them grow by ensuring they take on issues that have historically killed emerging social movements in the United States. Such collectively organized spaces, with their rejection of traditional leadership models and their emphasis on the empowerment of their participants, have the capacity to become key focal points of transformation for this generation. That is, if their participants are able to recognize their shared power and learn from the needed critique mentioned above. Perhaps they will, as has Egypt’s Tahrir Square, become both the symbols and sites of global revolt against the neoliberal economies of the corporate-era. Of course, there are still many battles ahead, but it is certain that what happens next in New York may be influential throughout the world. It seems accurate to say that right now, the whole world really is watching.