Essay Example on Neoliberalism and Anarchism

With the turn of the century, cities tend to globalize, because they are "called" to level with the international economy. To that end, they have to innovate, expanding their competitive capacity, allowing a wide circulation complex (of people, goods, and capital), to develop new infrastructures, so that they are able to attract more and diversified activities. of interest for the hegemonic productive branches at the local level (Harvey 2005). These are the main agents of territorial restructuring. Thus, it is re-urbanized, transformed, modernized, the city is reinvented at all times. It is, above all, to create, from time to time, local conditions of production and reproduction, which are also, global conditions that allow the city to have a fundamental role today. Reinforcing the image of the city through the organization of spectacular urban spaces became a means of attracting capital and people.

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Neoliberalism and globalization are two sides of an economic restructuring that has introduced enormous changes in the general conditions of the urban policy and in the ways of imagining, perceiving, designing and managing cities. These recent changes observed in the process of capital accumulation -provoked by the neoliberal modality of current capitalism- have not modified the essence of the capitalist city, which continues to be the territory where the material supports necessary for production and reproduction (capital and labor power) are based (Harvey 2008). At the same time, the urban remains the privileged space in the construction of the complex engineering of consensus through which the hegemony of a class over society as a whole is legitimated.

Neoliberal globalization, however, has imposed changes to the urban process, which is why, even though they preserve their essence, cities are transformed to adapt to the new demands of transnational capital, which has given rise to the megalopolis and the global city. The urban transformations that take place as a result of the increasing commercialization of the urban space and the proliferation of new forms of real estate production entail an important metropolitan restructuring that at the same time is part of a specific and pre-existing institutional landscape (Miraftab 2009). The contemporary global expansion of capital under the neoliberal modality is characterized, among other features, by the generalization of the market economy, the privatization of public goods and services, commercial and financial openness, as well as by the growing abandonment of activities of the State in the economy and, in particular, of urban issues. The presentation of some reflections arising from this new reality of cities, the result of the impact that neoliberal globalization, contradictory process, multiple and complex, has caused in the field of territorial ordering, is the central theme of these lines.

Neoliberalism could configure a new paradigm that tends to make disappear spatial differences between regions and states due, among others, to the homogenizing effect of information technologies, transnational corporate strategies, market policies and the consequences of the cultural imperialism of the western world (Miraftab 2009). However, and after the successive systemic crises of global capitalism, it is now known with a greater degree of certainty that the proclaimed disappearance of inequalities has been only one of the many fallacies of the discourse of neoliberal globalization (Hammond 2015). Meanwhile, the negative and sometimes nefarious consequences of the neoliberal model can be seen prominently in Latin American cities, and this explains the need to generate, deepen and disseminate critical positions and emerging anti-hegemonic visions.

Neoliberalism projects seek to transform public spaces into stages, disembodied spaces, disembodied fronts; pure advertising image. Urban imaginaries have created similar intervention policies, although visible in the territory in a different way. Although capitalism is an economic system that is flexible, it needs spaces of accumulation and reproduction of capital, and its economic restructuring has transformed places, which has produced and contained new social, political and economic barriers (Harvey 2008). This phenomenon is particularly evident in the large metropolitan regions, since they are currently the main poles of attraction for investment and the main nodes of the global economy, but it can also be seen in a myriad of cities of lower urban hierarchy, since local governments from different latitudes they have used different strategies and instruments of public policy to create, regenerate, re-convert old urban spaces and to produce new ones.

The relationship between the anarchists and the working class has been the subject of recurrent debates for a long time. Anarchism advocates an organized return to popular struggles, stimulating the anarchist presence with the oppressed, in search of economic emancipation and freedom. The workers who participate in the occupations are, for the most part, unemployed, underemployed, and clerks etc., that is, they constitute the marginalized fraction of the proletariat (Hammond 2015). They are partially integrated or in conditions of extreme precariousness in the process of reproduction of capital. However, in the ultra-monopolist phase of capitalism, they play a central role in the exploitation of surplus value, since they are subject to the forms of super exploration.

Social science, geographical science must negotiate its dialogue with the past and with the present, in the future. In this sense the anarchist tradition constituted and constitutes, a way of saying, to communicate the relationship of man on Earth, in the pleural space and time (Hammond 2015). The organization of space then implied a scientific practice, and a way of seeing and experiencing space within a libertarian commitment, of the rationality of the historical situation of man and of the understanding of telluric forces within a totalizing conception in function of the planetary space.

According to anarchists, the Earth is multiproduct of natural and human forces whose historical unfolding has destroyed and built a new evolutionary phase. The final utopia of the spatial organization is harmony, and solidarity (Hammond 2015). All parties should orient themselves in a progressive movement towards a whole that implies a structuring centered on an idea of progress. For anarchists, it is important to coordinate the continents, the seas and the atmosphere that surrounds people, cultivate terrestrial gardens, distribute again and regulate the environments to favor each individual life of plant, animal, man, definitely acquire consciousness of our solidarity humanity, forming body with the planet itself, encompass with our eyes our origins, our present, our near object, and our distant ideal, and that is where progress will take place. The terrestrial space becomes a category whose possibility is activated in the experience of the places and of the magnitudes that are represented in the planetary consciousness of the networks of ebbs and flows. Space is multiplicity and conflict, it is a radical ontological sense of solidarity and an area of liberation in the face of injustice.

For anarchists, a utopia is part of the same human nature. It is what has allowed people to advance and progress for centuries, overcoming the difficulties and problems with which the human being has been found throughout its existence (Hammond 2015). The capacity for self-management is in the people themselves, and not in the management of any higher authority. It is in the intersubjective area where the resolution of current problems must take place since no one knows better than ourselves to know our needs and the best solutions to solve them. Without autonomous individuals, free of thought and action, nothing is possible.