Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is author of
Contemporary forms of brutalism are characterized not only by the dismantling of social safety nets, the institution of risk-hedging mechanisms, or attempts to replace democracy with the market. These forms are equally recognizable in the obsession with abolishing politics, a distinctive feature of today's “authoritarian liberalism.” The most decisive changes in contemporary capitalism, however, concern not only the deregulation of financial transactions, tax reduction for the wealthy, or vying to be in the good graces of liquidity providers. One major anthropological transformation of our time is humanity's division into multiple racially typed class fractions. This involves making a distinction between solvent and insolvent human persons. And it involves a planetary-scale division between the “mobile part of humanity” and “wandering humanity.”
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