Austerity, Security and Resistance

New York — 15 March 2011.

As austerity measures intensify around the world, the axe has come down particularly hard on public- and private-sector unions, the un/underemployed, and those denied status, with particularly marked gendered and racialized dimensions. Massive state retrenchment in the realm of social services, health care, education, pensions, unemployment insurance and stimulus spending, has been matched by wage controls, the sell-off of assets and resources, as well as tax-shifting for competitiveness, the weakening of environmental laws and employment standards. While resistance from student, trade union and community activists is noted, the state and its police force have responded in the most aggressive of ways. The papers presented here starkly reveal who will pay and who will profit as the transition from rescue to recovery increasingly returns not just to neoliberalism, but a more authoritarian form at that.

• George Rigakos, Carleton University: “Security, Pacification and the Fabrication of Social Order”
• Justin Paulson, Carleton University: “Social Movements and the Crisis”
• Greg Albo, York University: “From Rescue Strategies to Exit Strategies: A Working Class Response?”

Recorded at the Left Forum 2011 in New York City, sponsored by Critical Social Research Collaborative.