1. Is a Post-Neoliberal politics possible?
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. In this podcast I talk to him about his recent work on neoliberalism and the possibility of a post-neoliberal politics. The conversation encompasses his last book, After Voice, as well as the broader issues he engages with: how has neoliberalism embedded itself in contemporary society and how can a critical social science help provide the intellectual resources to mobilise resistance to it?
2. South Africa in Focus
Andrew Feinstein was elected an ANC member of parliament in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. He resigned in 2001 in protest at the ANC government’s refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption. Feinstein lives in London, where he chairs the Aids charity Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign, and lectures and writes on South Africa. He is a co-director of the anti-corruption organisation, Corruption Watch. This podcast was produced at the time of the South Africa World Cup and I talked to Andrew about the social and political history of South Africa and how this has shaped the country which was the focus of such enormous international attention during the tournament.
3. Do we live in a post-democratic era?
In this podcast Colin Crouch talks about his thesis of post-democracy. He argues that western liberal democracies are moving into a stage of post-democracy where the formal institutions of democracy continue to exist but the pervasive culture of participation and engagement which sustained an active democracy is increasingly exhausted. The decline of manufacturing and the traditional working class, as well as the advance of economic globalization, has hollowed out processes of democratic engagement to produce an isolated, disconnected and self-referential political class cut off from the public they claim to represent.
We are left with a politics dominated by elites where influential business interests are the only group within society able to make their voice heard. Their pervasive, though often unseen, lobbying activity shapes the priorities of government while engagement with the wider public is increasingly shaped by ‘spin doctors’ and other advertising professionals. Professor Crouch suggests these are tendencies which suggest that democracy is more a legacy of the past than part of our future.
4. Social Theory and Politics of Austerity
A round table session from Discourses of Dissent exploring how social theory can help us understand the politics of austerity. How do theoretical justifications of austerity work to constrain public debate? How does the current government’s incongruous blend of neoliberal realism and superficial progressivism relate to what went before it? What resources can we find in social theory to critique the coalition’s agenda and it’s relationship to the wider crisis of late capitalism?
