Individual movements faced crackdown and get co-opted---turns the aff.

Neoliberal antagonism toward capacity-building The comments of these organizers offer a glimpse at how organizing and building collective power in the context of neoliberalism is difficult, especially given neoliberalism’s historical antagonism toward social movements. Hong (2015) described how neoliberalism took hold in the wake of the 1960s liberation movements as a “brutal crackdown by the forces of the state as well as the incorporation and affirmation of those aspects of these movements that were appropriable” (p. 11). Anti-colonial, racial justice, and anti-capitalist movements pose a direct threat to neoliberalism’s precarity-inducing logic of individualism and privatization. Butler (2015) described precarity as “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 33). The precarity wrought by neoliberal capitalism – like low wages, long working days, unaffordable housing, and expensive, privatized healthcare – coerces organizers into replicating its logics by working individually to meet the urgency of the moment rather than slowing down to invest in collective capacity-building or relational networks of support. Put another way, neoliberalism is crafty. It justifies the dismantling of community and public support while making us believe we are primarily responsible for our struggles, inviting a sort of desperate personal effort to persevere. Anna didn’t make the candidate development handbook she had planned before she left her candidate development role and Harriett hasn’t written her book; these infrastructure-building projects were sidelined in favor of producing the quick, visible results that neoliberal capitalism demands. Ultimately, the paucity of mentorship support that some of the organizers expressed and the challenges of mentoring and capacity-building that others discussed reflect a paradoxical relation: On the one hand, newer organizers want mentors to help set the pace, bring in resources and wisdom, and provide guidance. On the other hand, taking the time to recruit and educate volunteer laborers or to archive prior efforts – particularly in a precarity-inducing economy where overwork and underpay is the norm – creates additional labor for experienced organizers that doesn’t necessarily have an immediate payoff. In this way, neoliberal conditions and the related search for more immediate returns produce scenarios in organizing spaces where organizers are positioned as deputies for neoliberal logic. Specifically, they are made into “responsibilized individuals […] required to provide for themselves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so” (Brown, 2015, p. 134; emphasis added). In the excerpts shared above, organizers were driven to labor individually because the work of building capacity was just too difficult in a context where there’s just so much that needs to be done and finding volunteer labor or providing mentor support would supplant another, seemingly more pressing need