Limited research has been devoted to investigating assumptions about competition dynamics established through a neoliberal lens. Advocates argue that competition fosters innovation and benefits consumers by incentivizing private enterprises to develop better products or services at competitive prices compared to their rivals. Critics argue that competition exacerbates inequality by disproportionately rewarding high achievers. Rewarding high achievers reflects the meritocratic aspect of competition, which has been widely assumed to be rooted in the individualistic culture of Western countries. Contrary to this assumption, the ideology of meritocratic competition thrived in ancient collectivist Asian countries. Moreover, the assumed linear relationship between individualism, competition, and inequality is contradicted by economic literature, which suggests more individualistic nations display lower income inequality. Despite extensive economic and cultural examination of competition, competition’s political dimensions remain understudied. This interdisciplinary book challenges conventional assumptions about competition, synthesizing evidence across economics, culture, and politics.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.

The chapter focuses on how Chile’s conservatives rallied in opposition to the country’s popular mobilization of the 1960s. At its center is a group of authoritarian thinkers named the “Gremialistas.” Buoyed by the ICH and Opus Dei apparatuses, this group was responsible for devising an ideology akin to that of technocratic Spain and, subsequently, stood at the forefront of the opposition to Salvador Allende’s government. In turn, it served as the ideological backbone of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, thereby defining its neoliberal economic model and constitutional frameworks.

The leading early twentieth-century US proponents of a transformation in the social organization of money were – albeit far from unproblematically – collectivist and communitarian in ideological orientation, whereas those that succeeded them tended toward libertarian, individualistic, and free-market positions. This chapter offers the first examination of American literature’s connections to this latter wave of alternative currency campaigns, ranging from 1970s calls for privatized monies to contemporary cryptocurrency. It first introduces the foundational articulation of the right-libertarian approach to monetary reform, by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and connects these ideas to a classic of US avant-garde fiction as well as a landmark of the American libertarian literary canon. It then explores how two of the most renowned economically-themed American novels of recent decades – Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) – put a libertarian understanding of monetary innovation into dialogue with complex questions of trust, value, technology, nation, and identity. It concludes by reading an important recent addition to the tradition of American weird fiction – Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) – as suggesting alternatives both to the too-narrow conceptions of the collective and to the privileging of the individual that have characterized visions of monetary transformation past and present.

This chapter describes the critical and speculative capacities of the Occupy novel, or contemporary novels that represent Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more broadly. It argues that such fiction represents the financialization of everyday life, that is, the colonization of personal life and political subjectivity by Wall Street or finance capital. In doing so, it returns the question of social class to the center of US political debates. However, the Occupy novel also speculates on the possibilities of postcapitalist social life; it treats Occupy Wall Street as prefiguring new kinds of economic relations and social conducts. The chapter frames the Occupy novel in terms of its predecessor, the fiction of the post-2008 financial recession (“crunch lit”). Whereas crunch lit diagnoses financialization as a problem of households (personal debt, family crisis, and so on), the Occupy novel asks whether literature (and art in general) might have the capacity to engage in social struggle, to imagine new forms of public life.

In the confessional conflict in Italy, neither the liberal anticlerical nation-builders nor the Vatican could gain the upper hand. In this stalemate situation, Italian liberals, after having experienced social liberal welfare ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century, fell back on laissez-faire ideas from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They wanted to see the state confined to a residual role in welfare. This stance created a perverted match with the subsidiarity ideas of Italian Catholicism. By agreeing with the liberals on keeping the state out of welfare, the Vatican saw a chance to hold on to its millennia-old poor relief empire.

Chapter 4 considers dilemmas that arise for “successful” LGBT movements with increasing access to and interactions with state bureaucracies. The chapter applies an intersectional lens to neoliberal inclusion to reveal how inclusion along one dimension (sexuality) may constrict organizations along other dimensions (access to resources), influencing the ability of organizations to deploy their identity strategies. The chapter first examines how, in Argentina, activists who took up salaried positions in the bureaucracy were able to deploy their strategy of lesbian visibility from within the state to advance pro-LGBT public policy. However, activists’ engagement with the state weakened the organization and compromised its ability to deploy its identity strategy in the public sphere. The chapter then contrasts this example of state engagement with Free Gender’s decisions in South Africa. Free Gender declined to participate in a major national initiative and chose instead to engage with local police and deploy its identity strategy in these interactions. The chapter concludes by drawing lessons about the consequences of neoliberal inclusion on LGBT organizations, specifically how it may limit their potential to effect change regardless of the choice organizations make to engage the state or not.

Some key dates in recent US history help us understand the paths of Latinx literature since 1992. This chapter considers five key years: 1992, 1994, 2001, 2008, and 2016. The Columbian quincentenary catalyzed decolonial thinking as writers think about the shared histories of colonization that unite Latinx groups. The events of 1992 help frame NAFTA’s 1994 enactment as a form of neocolonialism that rewrote the terms of national belonging. 9/11 further tears the social order asunder as the US violently reacted. While some writers provide accounts of the persistent grief and trauma experienced by Latinxs after 9/11, others critique US militarism and consider Latinx complicity in state violence. Ramón Saldívar poses the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as inaugurating a period in which Latinx writers turn to speculative forms to articulate new racial imaginaries. If Obama’s election produced possibility, the 2016 presidential election stimulated Latinx writers to contest the administration’s anti-immigration policies, while other writers examine the white supremacy that underlies the administration and festers in some quarters of Latinidad.

What do fantasy football managers want? Critics have suggested that they harbor dreams of front-office management and perhaps racial dreams of managing Black bodies. Chapter 6 suggests an alternative theory: that fantasy football doesn’t sell users on an identification with management but a disidentification with forms of labor – manual, high-risk, short-term – once associated with Black people, people of color, and immigrants but now carried out by more and more white people of a declining middle class. From Rotisserie League Baseball in the 1980s to daily fantasy sports in the 2010s, the fantasy hasn’t been to win in the market but to get out of it.

This chapter investigates the policy’s ideational foundations by perusing economic theories and determining which would recommend its provisions. According to some scholars, austerity theories, based on Ricardian equivalence, rational expectations, and perfect capital markets, have inspired its design. For other scholars, these rules reflect neoliberal ideas in support of small government and rejection of Keynesian demand management. The chapter argues that these claims are unconvincing. Austerity theories suggest a diminished effectiveness of expansionary fiscal policies and would recommend looser oversight. Since 2005, policy provisions have accommodated business cycle fluctuations, major structural reforms, and public investments. There are no provisions about the size of governments. The chapter shows that these rules are designed to prevent negative cross-country externalities arising from expansionary fiscal policies adopted by authorities with short-term incentives to boost output at the expense of inflation. This reasoning is based on standard macroeconomic theories and the more realistic assumptions of fiscally illuded voters and policy- and office-seeking politicians.

This chapter begins from the premise that vocabularies matter in international law and organisation, as ideologies that can reify and make seem necessary and neutral contested and structurally biased means of governance, and in international relations, as disciplinary mechanisms of control. It advances a critical political economy approach to the language of resilience in global governance. By asking the critical political economy questions of ‘who gets what’ from resilience talk and just ‘whose resilience’ are we talking about, the chapter explores resilience as an ideology of new constitutionalism governance. Resilience talk is deconstructed as the language of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the individualisation of responsibility for crisis management. This language obscures the deep class, gender, racial, and intersectional implications of global governance initiatives. The chapter makes the case for destabilising and disrupting this discourse and practice as a necessary move in humanising important institutions of global governance.

Ernesto Galarza’s Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story is a genealogical study of the Mexican migrant farmworker experience in California under the Bracero Program. His study was a direct response to the deaths of thirty-two migrant workers in the Chualar bus crash of 1963. Galarza traces the political-economic origin “story” of this labor force and its role within a historical moment defined by rapid increases in modernization. Of considerable importance are his insights regarding the central characteristics of an emerging neoliberal paradigm, which are brilliantly grounded in his analysis of how Mexican braceros were transformed into a disembodied “labor pool” for US agribusiness. The chapter examines Galarza’s critique of the Bracero Program and his analysis of early farmworker struggles against exploitative labor practices, particularly the manner in which “labor pools” were used to transform the concrete existentiality of the bracero into a commodity abstraction, thus establishing a blueprint for the systemic exploitation of racially marginalized peoples. The chapter concludes by addressing how Chicana/o activists affiliated themselves with the farmworker struggle after the Chualar tragedy, thus bridging the rural–urban divide while calling attention to the movement’s anti-war protests and demands for political reform.

Perhaps the most pressing threat to agonistic democracy, indeed to any form of participatory democracy, in contemporary life is neoliberalism. I conclude the book, then, by considering how neoliberalism undermines the material conditions, citizen capacities, and forms of life necessary to practice radical democracy, and then imagine how local experiments in grassroots democracy can contest neoliberalism and renew the civic life of persons and communities. One such example is participatory budgeting initiatives, wherein portions of municipalities’ public funds are made subject to the deliberation, determinations, and authority of citizen assemblies. I analyze one particular instantiation of this democratic practice in Cascais, Portugal, showing how it has served to re-engage ordinary persons in the democratic system, develop their capacities for self-governance, and make constructive use of conflict-negotiation for democratic ends. I conclude by suggesting that grassroots democratic practices like these provide contexts in which citizens can cultivate the kinds of democratic virtues necessary for sustaining an agonistic politics.