The Choice of Civil War Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy

Dardot et al. now paint neoliberalism as a form of political and economic warfare, claiming that what has widely been perceived as the gradual emergence of a new governmental rationality, a capillary production of economic
subjects, or a transformation in the structures of economic life, is first and foremost to be understood as a kind of civil war, a frequently one-sided class struggle that has recently taken particularly virulent forms across the globe,
from the Trump ascendancy to the juridical coup against the Partido dos Trabalhadores that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power in Brazil, from the securitarian onslaught against the gilets jaunes in France to the consolidation
of authoritarian and exceptional forms of rule in the heartlands as well as the intermundia of global capitalism. Far from constituting a bloodless technocratic rationality, neoliberalism now appears as a fundamentally political form, one that is always strategically oriented against socialism, trade unionism and the welfare state. Alberto Toscano New Left Review