Vrb Wirtschaftsreform

Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.

What is new about neoliberalism? Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval contend that it is more than just a new economic paradigm — it is a system for transforming the human subject. Rather than a return to classic liberalism, or the restoration of a ‘pure’, unconstrained market, neoliberalism envisages the modern corporation as a model for government, conjuring a future in which society is nothing other than a web of market-based relations. Cutting through contemporary misunderstandings about its genesis and prevalence, Dardot and Laval distil neoliberalism to its core meaning and examine how it might be challenged on new political and intellectual terms.

Untangling the long history of neoliberalism Neoliberalism is dead. Again. Yet the philosophy of the free market and the strong state has an uncanny capacity to survive, and even thrive, in times of crisis. Understanding neoliberalism’s longevity and its latest permutation requires a more detailed understanding of its origins and development. This volume breaks with the caricature of neoliberalism as a simple, unvariegated belief in market fundamentalism and homo economicus. It shows how neoliberal thinkers perceived institutions from the family to the university, disagreed over issues from intellectual property rights and human behavior to social complexity and monetary order, and sought to win consent for their project through the creation of new honors, disciples, and networks. Far from a monolith, neoliberal thought is fractured and, occasionally, even at war with itself. We can begin to make sense of neoliberalism’s nine lives only by understanding its own tangled and complex history.

Scholars have traditionally identified two fundamental, and somewhat separate, discourses in Isaiah 1-39. In what might be labelled the social-critical discourse, we supposedly encounter a prophet who condemns the Jerusalemite elite for their complacent attitudes and decadent life-style in general, and for their more or less systematic oppression of the less fortunate in particular. This lack of social justice, Isaiah emphasises, will indeed be punished by YHWH. In the discourse that might preferably be labelled foreign-political, scholars have found that the prophet repeatedly discourages Judahite participation in anti-Assyrian rebellions, since such strategies are offensive to YHWH and their plans will therefore come to nothing.Olof Backersten presents an attempt to question the existence of a social-critical discourse in Isaiah 1-39. He argues that the texts that have been proffered as proofs for such a discourse relate instead, with surprisingly few although notable exceptions, to the critique of Judah's anti-Assyrian policy.The result of this investigation has implications for our understanding of the book of Isaiah as a whole. A social-critical emphasis can only be detected in Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 56-66, whereas Isaiah 2-39(55) provides variations on a foreign-political theme in the sense that the focus falls on the relationship between nations in general and Judah's position on the international arena in particular.