Page 42 - ILC Together For a Just World Broşür.indd

Together For A Just World

Since the late 1970s, neoliberal restructuring has been institutionalized globally
as a systematic project targeting wage labour, the welfare state, and collective
rights. Policies of privatization, deregulation, flexibilization, and de-unionization
have eroded the historically constructed protective framework of labour rela-
tions and established a new regime of accumulation in favour of capital. The
most visible outcome of this process has been the deepening of inequality on
a global scale. The concentration of a significant share of global wealth in the
hands of the top strata of the population demonstrates that the neoliberal order
operates not as a contingent outcome, but as a structural mechanism of redist-
ribution. The systematic upward transfer of wealth has become a constitutive
feature of this regime.
This transformation is not confined to deteriorating economic indicators. Th-
rough strategies of individualization and market-centred discourse, neolibe-
ralism has also reconfigured the ideological foundations of social relations.
Social success is no longer defined through collective rights and solidarity,
but through individual performance and competitive capacity; the citizen as a
bearer of rights has been recast as a consumer of services. Structural inequa-
lities have been reframed as the outcome of individual choices rather than as
products of political and economic relations, while the notion of the public good
has been devalued under the dominance of market rationality. This ideological
framing has institutionalized a mode of governance that codes social policy as
a “burden” and solidarity as a “cost.”
One of the most effective instruments of this transformation has been the
displacement of class-based collective struggle by identity politics. While iden-
tity-based claims are historically legitimate and necessary fields of social stru-
ggle, under neoliberal hegemony they have been rearticulated within a fragmen-
ted political culture that marginalizes class solidarity. Workers’ shared structural
problems -low wages, precarity, harsh working conditions, and the erosion of
social protection -have been rendered invisible in the shadow of identity-based
polarizations. Anti-immigrant sentiment, ethnic and cultural tensions, and nati-
onalist discourses have placed segments of the working class in competition
with one another, producing divisions that benefit capital and reproducing the
logic of “divide and rule” at the societal level.
The most immediate consequence of this fragmentation has been the weake-

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