When this is over: reflections on an unequal pandemic; The post-pandemic world and global politics

My main frustration with the conjunctural framing is the omission of two crucial sources.First, it was Stuart Hall that eloquently drew from Louis Althusser, on conjunctural analysis, and Poulantzas, on authoritarian statism, to move from the abstract to the concrete in tracking the Margaret Thatcher counter-revolution.Most crucially, Hall displayed how authoritarian statism (from above) was secured at the base by a complementary shift to authoritarian populism (from below) (see 'The great moving right show ', Marxism Today, 1979).Hall detailed how authoritarian populism built support for attacks on social welfare by renewing personal responsibility for effort and reward, as well as propagating notions of 'rolling back the state' while increasing state power through law and order and policing the crisis.Central to this authoritarian populism was an incipient racism that the media reproduced in the very 'whites of the eyes' of British society (see the multi-volume of Hall's Essential essays, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).To fast-forward to the ongoing conjuncture today, it has been Ian Bruff who has analysed the rise of authoritarian neo-liberalism in the most original way.In a breakout 2014 article, Bruff was the first to trace 'the reconceptualisation of the state as increasingly nondemocratic through its subordination to constitutional and legal rules' in moving away from consent to 'favouring instead the explicit exclusion and marginalisation of subordinate social groups' (see 'The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism', Rethinking Marxism 26: 1, 2014).This has since been expanded and refined across multiple publications focusing on state power and how authoritarian neo-liberalism limits spaces of popular resistance (see Cemal Burak Tansel's States of discipline, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, and the special issue, 'Authoritarian neoliberalism ', Globalizations 16: 3, 2019).My point here is that the Hall-Bruff axis, and their analyses of the slide from authoritarian populism to authoritarian neo-liberalism, go to the heart of the present conjuncture and its crisis conditions.To miss this scholarship gives the sense that the contribution of the book under review is seemingly a bit too post festum, dealing with the results of the polycrisis of neo-liberalism ready to hand, while neglecting the collective intellectual labour that has gone on before it.