"This is what Gilmore calls the “anti-state state,” a reorganization of the state away from making people’s lives better and toward power and punishment, greasing the wheels for capital accumulation while systematically abandoning less-favored people—and, eventually, all of us. This is neoliberalism, of course, but Gilmore’s formulation helps us to see past the shallow understanding of neoliberalism as simply shrinking the state and into the ways that it actually grows in power in some areas while others are hacked off". 

"As Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in his book The Exhausted of the Earth, this conception of resilience has its roots in research on people who had survived the worst humanity has to offer—Nazi concentration camps—and somehow managed to go on to live seemingly well-adjusted lives. But, as he writes, “resilience theory” became a way to press systems and individual people to “absorb ever greater risk, crisis, trauma, and stress.” Resilience is the expectation that we will just get on with living, no matter what is thrown at us. “Even in its most generous formulations, it looks for just how little some unit—a body, a region, a population—might need, while avoiding the possibility of significant external change entirely,” Chaudhary writes. “Resilience is a management strategy and apology for the status quo, for global capitalism with all its constitutive social and socioecological relations.” We may have to live and organize in conditions not of our own choosing, but this does not mean we have to embrace a philosophy that counsels adaptation rather than that other over-used R-word: resistance. The demand for resilience is keeping us exhausted, isolated, scared: a recipe for miserable compliance".

Sarah Jaffe