old boss / new boss

Of course it’ll always be necessary to try and define where and when one thing ends and another begins, but nothing just drops out of the sky: the characteristics of any given phenomenon – ideologies, institutions, subjectivities – are never going to be wholly discrete or self-contained, but will always be shaped by the struggles it took to arrive at their present iteration, always bearing a residue of what they’ve jostled up against and displaced in the process. As such, any era’s conclusion will always be fuzzy and porous, always contested, always stumbling over itself as it clings to whatever crumbs of former hegemony it can get its flailing hands on. That’s what it means to think about history dialectically. It’s continuity as much as rupture. It’s reaction to reaction to reaction, all the way down.

Many smart people have suggested that neoliberalism is over, and – after the 2008 bailout fiasco, the pandemic stimulus plans, Trump’s tariff debacle – there’s certainly a case to be made. But, as Neil Vallelly put it in an article for Critical Times last summer, these pronouncements probably say more about us than they do about neoliberalism itself. He suggests, following the literary theory of Frank Kermode, that our investment in conceptualizing the ending of a system we oppose is linked to our desire to make coherent sense of processes that are by nature just the opposite: that “what we end up discussing is a fossilized version of the world, one in which ‘formed wholes’ present themselves as finished and fully formed processes.” That is, in proclaiming neoliberalism’s imminent end, we misapprehend what it actually is.

Now, there’s obviously an impossibly large quantity of takes out there positing different versions of what constitutes neoliberalism – whether as ideology, policy prescription, historical era, or whatever else – and I think the breadth of it all speaks to the slippery and malleable nature of what, to my mind, remains an essential analytical frame through which to understand the last fifty years of world history. Wendy Brown, to take one loquacious example, points to “the paradox of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon, ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself. This dappled, striated, and flickering complexion is also the face of an order replete with contradiction and disavowal, structuring markets it claims to liberate from structure, intensely governing subjects it claims to free from government, strengthening and retasking states it claims to abjure.”

The standard and familiar narrative about neoliberalism frames it as an economic ideology, patiently incubated in the mountains of Switzerland for much of the twentieth century until the crisis conditions of the early 1970s gave it the opportunity to step on the world-historical stage. That’s not untrue, of course, but the real story is obviously a much longer one, which necessarily takes into account the political economic arrangements of power which it was conceived in opposition to, which means going back at least as far as the Great Depression, the New Deal and the so-called “postwar compromise.” Neoliberalism’s whole conception was aimed at dismantling the political and social structures institutionalized during these earlier decades, once they had stopped ensuring satisfactory rates of profit. The ostensible separation of economy from politics that neoliberal ideology putatively prescribes was simultaneously a stripping away of the mechanisms through which the welfare state sought to enact projects of social equality, and the material complement to so-called globalization has been the militarization of police, murderous forever wars, and borders turned into sacrifice zones. Neoliberalism isn’t (or wasn’t, if you like) just an economic logic, as it likes to present itself, but a fundamentally political one as well: it’s about power, and how that power should be wielded in the interests of capital.

Framed in this way, the supposed novelty of neoliberalism quickly fades. Neoliberals have often been referred to as “free-market fundamentalists” to distance their extremism from the apparently less dogmatic liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but as Karl Polanyi was pointing out way back in the 1940s, even this older liberalism was, at its core, hostile to human community: “Born as a mere penchant for nonbureaucratic methods, it evolved into a veritable faith in man’s secular salvation through a self-regulating market. Such fanaticism was the result of the sudden aggravation of the task it found itself committed to: the magnitude of the sufferings that had to be inflicted on innocent persons as well as the vast scope of the interlocking changes involved in the establishment of the new order.”

This is the history of capitalism as such: a history of various attempts to solve the structural problem posed by the tension between the imperatives of accumulation on the one hand and the social demands of human populations on the other – in other words, the problem of class conflict at the heart of the capitalist mode of production. The major phases of capitalism’s development have always been provisional arrangements of power relations, attempts to stave off the perennial threat of impending systemic crisis, successively kicking the can a little further down the road. That’s as true of the welfare state of the postwar “Golden Age” as it is of the historical period we’ve (rightly) come to understand as the neoliberal era, each a different set of strategies carried out in the interest of maintaining the social positions of the powerful.

And so yes, now we’ve got this resurgence of right-wing nationalism and economic protectionism, and certainly those things contradict some of the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism as we classically understand it, but as Vallelly writes, “Ethnonationalists and anti-immigrant demagogues do not spell the end of neoliberalism any more than liberal cosmopolitans symbolize its apotheosis.” We’re a hair away from losing public postal services, the closest thing we’ve got to a national housing strategy is still fundamentally yoked to private markets, the CAQ have thrown open the door to the privatization of Hydro-Québec, and Mark Carney’s new “Strong Borders Act” is threatening to turn the clock back decades in terms of protections for people without status.

Historical specificity matters as we try to chart our own paths forward, which is why I still think the framing offered by the term "neoliberalism" remains an important one, both in terms of the specific material changes it has brought about and in the ideological structures it has helped ossify (which will be with us for some time yet). At the same time, it’s equally important that we understand there are profound throughlines between what has been, what is, and what’s coming – that's the only way to truly recognize what we're up against.

Our moment is uniquely catastrophic, but it's been centuries in the making. And whatever we want to call it, our enemies aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

There isn’t exactly a theme this time around, but it’s pretty minimalist and drone-forward, and as it ended up, every track included here prominently features the cello.

It kicks off with a meditative thrum courtesy of Bay Area experimentalist Theresa Wong, the opening to her latest LP Journey to the Cave of Guanyin. Per the review I wrote for A Closer Listen, “Sea Eating Sun” “holds the vibrations of a single note up to the light before it prisms into a majestic and gently powerful multitone drone.” Then it’s an excerpt of “Collines,” from Brussels-based cellist Gwen Saint-Rose, a little more emphatic on the attack, which ramps up into a layered, breathing mass of melodic loops. That’s followed by an excerpt from a live recording just released by high-brow ambient titans Deaf Center, sparse flutters of piano and impressionistic cello scratches circling each other out of a looming dark. Forgive me for mentioning this yet again, but if “Erie” does something for you, their 2011 LP Owl Splinters is really a must-listen, all shadowy atmospherics and eerie string swells.

The somewhat ominous tone continues into an excerpt of “Whistling Dust,” worked up from cello and an ancient Telford organ (apparently the second-oldest in Ireland) by Natalia Bayliss and Eimear Reidy for their 2023 LP She Came Through the Window to Stand by the Door. Then it’s “Wellspring,” a slow shimmering wave of guitar fuzz and treated cello from anthéne and Simon McCorry (hailing from Toronto and Stroud, England, respectively), the title track from their latest collaborative album, released in May by Brighton’s Home Normal.

Things start to take on a bit more structure with New York’s Clarice Jensen and “Final,” the stunning apotheosis to her 2020 LP The Experience Of Repetition As Death, wherein the album’s principal melodic figures are looped and bent back over and into each other before converging into a sweeping and romantic closing theme. Next it’s a passage from Irish cellist Clare O’Connell’s latest, a languid and delicately-layered meditation on light and its refraction penned by Emilie Lavienaise-Farrouch, followed by an aching ensemble arrangement from prolific neoclassical composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. “Good Night, Day” is brief but dramatic, coming near the conclusion to 2016’s Orphée, Jóhannsson’s final proper studio album prior to his passing in 2018.

Finally it’s Mexico City’s Mabe Fratti, whom you’ve heard from before and certainly will again, as her star continues to rise in the world of experimental post-pop. “Todo Lo Que Querías Saber” is a bit of an oldie for her, released in 2019, and featuring a hushed, breathtaking vocal melody atop a pensive cushion of plucked strings, before a joyful and skronky cello solo swoops in to conclude.

• Mixcloud: old boss / new boss (june 2025)

• MP3s: 25/06 - old boss / new boss.zip

NB: The zip file linked above contains the individual MP3s as well as a single 50-minute track of the whole mix.

Okay that's it. Thanks for reading, everyone, and thanks as always to Fred for editorial support.

xo, graham