This rather formalistic, academic, and lengthy piece (you can skip many of the details) focuses on the impacts of neo-liberal policies in Eastern Europe with particular emphasis on the consequences for the lives of women. Women always bear the primary responsibilities of "social reproduction" by which is meant all the tasks related to the maintenance of families. the rearing of children, etc. The impacts have been felt most dramatically in these countries due to the fact that under previous "socialist" regimes there existed considerable governmental supports for families. Thus, under neo-liberal policies everything that incurs costs for the capitalist sector is being removed and the effects are often devastating for the lives of ordinary people, often literally killing them.
Although the author focuses on Eastern Europe and on women, the political strategies of neo-liberalism used there can be seen here in the US as well; and her delineation of these strategies are useful for an understanding of what is happening here. She argues that the economic situation can no longer be described as a financial crisis because...
bailed out banks and subsidized investors are doing well. All countries in the region used anti-crisis measures to strengthen investors and businesses at the expense of protecting households. Now the increased budget deficits and growth in public debt are treated as an excuse to continue neoliberal public sector reforms.And what she refers to as "public sector reforms" means drastic cuts to all social programs like health, education, welfare, childcare services, etc.
But now the solution to solve this former financial crisis is being "shifted to people, who are reconstituted as major cause of the crisis. How it is done?"
- Step one has been to put the the spotlight on budget deficits, while the causes of the budgetary deficits (bailing out falling banks) are removed from the agenda.
- Step two has been to reconstitute budget deficit and public debt as major causes of crises that need to be addressed with a variety of social austerity measures. In this way spending on people (or in other words on social reproduction) is constituted as the cause of the crises that is being addressed.
- Step three: with crises reinvented, what actually caused it: neoliberal governance with its mantra of deregulating social rights in the name of facilitating business growth, cutting public spending and privatizing social sectors is brought back as the solution to the problems that contributed to the crisis in the first place.
