Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Reactionary Populism: Global Perspectives from the South

The world is rapidly becoming less democratic, more unequal, and more hostile. Authoritarian governments and movements seem to be spreading inexorably across the globe. Racist, antifeminist, social Darwinist, nationalist, and other reactionary ideologies are booming. In parallel, neoimperialist politics of resource extractivism, displacement, and dispossession are expanding rapidly, minority rights are increasingly under attack, and so are workers’, tenants’, and other rights of the dominated, often racialized subjects, while states are stripped of their redistributive capacities and expanding their repressive apparatuses. How can we describe, analyze, and understand the authoritarian transformations we observe worldwide? What are their causes, their underlying dynamics, their driving forces, and their assorted outcomes? In which dimensions are these processes happening— on the level of culture, of the state, in politics, or the economy? Should we even speak of authoritarian transformations, in plural, or rather of one global process with its multiple manifestations and ramifications? Far from being of only academic interest, these—and many other—questions have acquired great political urgency. This urgency is only increasing while we witness the expansion and radicalization of authoritarian populist—some say fascist—politics on a global scale. In these dire times, where we often stand in awe in front of the generalization of violence and the dismantling of democratic rights, of many certainties and freedoms that we had taken for granted, an authentically political, strategic question looms over our heads: What is to be done? We are asking, and we’re being asked this question in the midst of unprecedented attacks on academic and civil society spaces. Having to fight back not only neoliberal politics of defunding but also overt repression; the criminalization, incarceration, or deportation of our students and colleagues; and the massive attacks on critical sciences, all at the same time, doesn’t make it easier to reflect on ways out of the crises of our times. Nevertheless, it is our role to interpret our world and change it, as Marx famously reminded us in his Theses on Feuerbach...