Skip to main content
Skip to McMaster Navigation Skip to Site Navigation Skip to main content
McMaster logo
Austerity and its Alternatives

Faculty of Social Sciences

Alternatives to Constitutionalizing Austerity

Looking for common threads amongst capitalist states in the neoliberal era.

Mar 12, 2019

Hello AltAusterity readers! Today we feature the first paper the has come out of our conference in Berlin last month, "AltAusterity: Coping is Not Enough". This paper is by Dr. Stephen McBride, the primary investigator on this SSHRC-funded grant, and he defines austerity as fiscal consolidation, public sector structural reforms, and the flexibilization of labour markets. From this definition he moves to discuss how austerity has played a key role in neoliberalism "whether considered as an ideology, capital accumulation strategy, or political program".

In this paper we learn how we might be able to conceive of constitutionalization as an alternative to politics as well as how politics can be an alternative to constitutionalization.

You can find the presentation on our Research Page under 'Spending, Reform, & Marketization'. We'll release the presentation from Stephen in the coming weeks!  

To learn more about Stephen, see his profile at McMaster University: https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/people/mcbride-stephen.

We'll post new content every Tuesday morning and our AltAusterity Digest Friday mornings. To keep up with our work, you can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter @AltAusterity and join the #altausterity conversation!