Neoliberalism resorts to violent enforcement when local socialities reject its order

Evidence

Neoliberalism entails closely guarded mixtures and streamed flows, violently asserted, arranged, and aggressively enforced where vigorously challenged or resisted. Responses to neoliberal order may range from enthusiastic embrace to violent rejection, from instrumental mobilization for the sake of narrowly defined self-interest to equally forceful resistance to the imposition of its regimes of rationality and relationality, its restrictive order of being, its codes of governmentality. Where the sort of strained and constrained mixture is rebuffed in favor of indigenous or local sociality – coded as different, as irrational or antique, religious or premodern – there the force of neoliberal imposition and insertion may be brought to bear. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1887

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the recurring theme of racialized ‘premodern’ coding used to justify coercion, echoing the reader’s work on how difference gets pathological. — connects to: Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179; Neoliberals pathologised political struggle by framing the market as peaceful and politics as violent — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 64; Neoliberal market freedom required state violence to enforce submission to the market — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 328 (+7 more)