Neoliberalism: the transfer of social wealth to private hand, enforced by the State. The lie of an expansion of free markets and free human economic activity is belied by State enforced appropriations of commons, created over generations, for private gain and the police repression of all dissenting protest and practice. It is a “government of death”, in the words of Boaventura Sousa Santos. And although he refers by this expression to the Portuguese government’s cuts in pensions, which over the last 3 years ranges between 40 and 50 percent, it is of the essence of neoliberalism; a biopolitics which invests and manages human life politically, to then decide between those lives which are exploitable, and the degree of exploitation, and those who are redundant and burdensome. The death of these latter is not murder, nor is it sacrifice. They are like ancient Rome’s Homo Sacer. The pensioner, in this instance, falls inevitably into the latter category. But today, we are all Homo Sacer.
The Assault
Neoliberalism: the transfer of social wealth to private hand, enforced by the State. The lie of an expansion of free markets and free human economic activity is belied by State enforced appropriations of commons, created over generations, for private gain and the police repression of all dissenting protest and practice. It is a “government of death”, in the words of Boaventura Sousa Santos. And although he refers by this expression to the Portuguese government’s cuts in pensions, which over the last 3 years ranges between 40 and 50 percent, it is of the essence of neoliberalism; a biopolitics which invests and manages human life politically, to then decide between those lives which are exploitable, and the degree of exploitation, and those who are redundant and burdensome. The death of these latter is not murder, nor is it sacrifice. They are like ancient Rome’s Homo Sacer. The pensioner, in this instance, falls inevitably into the latter category. But today, we are all Homo Sacer.
From David Rebordão and Nexus Films, The Assault …