potlatch

new paper: The Emerging Neo-communitarianism

I've had an article accepted by Political Quarterly (Andrew Gamble's last act as editor, no less; there's one for an incredibly niche and tedious pub quiz) entitled 'The Emerging Neo-Communitarianism'. It'll be published in October, but I've uploaded a pre-print here.

This was a paper I initially presented in Delhi last year, in the Rising Powers symposium. It attempts to interpret and characterise emerging forms of government, in terms of micro-political departures from key tenets of neoliberalism. By abandoning the Hayekian and the neo-classical emphasis on an autonomous, choosing individual, to be governed through prices and incentives, in favour of a more social and habitual individual, policy-makers are moving towards a form of 'neo-communitarianism'. Neo-communitarianism is to communitarianism as neoliberalism is to liberalism, that is, it is a technocratic, economised derivative of a moral and political philosophy.

If you're still reading, this chart lays out a typology of the two rival styles or logics of government that the paper explores:

The paper is pretty speculative in its outlook. Clearly we do not have a grand new paradigmatic idea, such as Keynesian demand management. But perhaps scholars and policy-makers need to accept that crises do not always occasion grand paradigm shifts, but also occasion more subtle and organic changes, which enable governments to simply cope. The belief that an Idea, probably produced by some brilliant grey-haired man in a university, will rescue us, may be a comfort blanket we need to abandon.

how not to save a tiger

In my best impression of Alan Partridge, I recently lost my rag with someone in the street by shouting at them, "that's not how tigers die!" An unusual form of insult, I'm sure you'll agree. The person in question was a chugger, probably from the World Wildlife Fund or somewhere, who had been trying to block my path in the now-standard manner of waving a clipboard in my face and doing a silly little dance. But as I walked past, still smiling falsely at them, they had the nerve to say "this isn't about a direct debit! I just want you to send one text and save a tiger!"

How dare they? How dare they insult both me and the tiger community (as they are probably known), by implying some equivalence between a text message and a tiger's life. An absence of text messages, as I informed the young chugger, is "not how tigers die". I am usually a more gracious respondent - chuggee? - than that, but I am becoming increasingly wound up by the marketing strategies of charities and their phoney account of digital media. Exhibit B:

Again, the imputed equivalence in this advert is horrific, and entirely unbecoming of a charity of Amnesty's stature. This is one of a series of ads on the London underground, implying some magical omnipotence to the possessor of a commuter with a mobile phone (or, conversely, some peculiar impotence or triviality on the part of a prison guard or torturer several thousand miles away). 

First and foremost, the advert is a lie, although the word "and" is of course ambiguous. Maybe they're not implying any causal link between the two events, in which case one might place an advert saying "A man in Colchester shops in Tescos and he wins the lottery". Maybe that's what most advertising effectively does anyway, but the bit after the "and" is normally represented with an image, to the effect that "a man uses a deoderant and [image of woman with large breasts]".

But there is something more troubling about this, than just standard marketing mendaciousness. Adam Smith was concerned by the fact that human beings seem to feel less sympathy for others, the further they are away (see this interesting piece in the LRB on how this problem manifests itself in climate change). This is not a problem that can be easily solved or got round. But the strategy of these charities is not to work on increasing the level of sympathy, but of trivialising the nature of the problem. In the advert above, it is assumed by Amnesty that human beings (at least in London) have very little capacity to imagine the situation of others, to sympathise over distance or to adopt an unconditional moral position. Rather than nurture imagination, sympathy or moral sentiment, the advertisement effectively suppresses those things by containing them within the solipsistic realms of the ego-phone. The individual's solitary comfort zone is reinforced by this, rather than rattled in any way.

Aside from this, there is also the problem of economic and technological functionalism, that I've complained about before, in which social life is reduced to a series of inputs and outputs. Institutions are hollowed out by a philosophy that understands them entirely in terms of their measured outputs, rather than their routines and rules. But when digital technology is thrown into the mix, something quite preposterous happens: the relationship between input and unput becomes utterly mystified, as if it's no longer anything to do with us. The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran.

What does Amnesty or anyone else gain from this? Their aim seems to be to build up a database of phone numbers, as the tiger chuggers were apparently doing also. Hopefully this makes them better equipped to prevent torture and illegal imprisonment; they must know what they're doing. But they're also engaged in a political equivalent of "quantitative easing", which runs the risk of political hyper-inflation: in their desparate bid to get political will moving, they're exaggerating the efficacy of their tactics, to the point where they will start to lose value. A greater and greater 'quantity' of political output is being promised, for a smaller and smaller 'quantity' of ethical action on the part of the Western consumer. As credulity declines as well, the long-run effect can only be bad for the charitable sector as a whole.

Leveson and the cultural contradictions of conservatism

With the usual half-hearted apologies for recycling my own chat, watching the delightful spectacle of the Murdoch clan and the Tories knocking chunks out of each other reminds me of this piece on the cultural contradictions of conservatism I wrote last summer, when Hackgate first exploded:

The greater significance of ‘hack-gate’ will lie in how it affects the character of British conservatism more generally. Conservatism, as a cultural and political movement, is intrinsically unwieldy and self-destructive, as hack-gate may now be demonstrating once more. From Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution onwards, conservatism has achieved its identity through what it rejects and despises. It projects a pessimistic scepticism towards political deliberation as a basis for authority, insisting that modern societies are too complex, human beings too different, and language too frail, for us to reason our way towards a collective destination...

All modern conservatives have a love-hate relationship with the establishment, which ultimately is their undoing. They can never really make up their mind whether they want more government or less. Complaints about bureaucrats, ‘red tape’ and tax are matched by despair that the state has lost its nerve in various ways, until this ambivalence is eventually overwhelmed by events. Political leaders and parties that appeal to ‘traditional values’ are undermined by revelations of fraud and sexual intrigue; financial markets that are untouchable because ‘self-correcting’ end up costing the taxpayer a figure that is (according to the National Audit Office ^↑ ) more than eight times the annual budget of the NHS; military efforts to impose democracy eventually retreat into actual negotiation. That News International profited fabulously from highlighting all of these hypocrisies and U-turns in the past does not mean that the public won’t take some glee in witnessing the latest contradiction of conservatism: Rupert Murdoch’s inner circle being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, cheered on by the families of murdered children, military charities and – no doubt – the vast majority of the ‘great British public’. How loudly the Conservative Prime Minister is prepared to cheer may be crucial to how this conflict plays out.

To paraphrase the old American political adage, we might now say: "watch two pigs mud-wrestling; they both get dirty, but you can enjoy it."

CRESC conference on 'promises' and crises

The CRESC Annual Conference looks excellent this year:

Weds September 5 - Friday September 7, 2012, Manchester University

Keynote Speakers

• Barbara Adam (Social Sciences, Cardiff University)
• Robert Boyer (ENS, Paris)
• Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian) 
• Will Hutton (Hertford College, Oxford University)
• Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight)
• Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Anthropology, Columbia University)

Promises: Crises and Socio-Cultural Change

In the midst of global financial crisis and radical transformations in states, institutions and social relations, it has become urgent to explore the role promises play in effecting socio-cultural change. As particular plans, projects, policies, initiatives, dreams and visions, promises both open and close the possibility of different kinds of socio-cultural futures (and pasts). What promises are contained in the current political and socio-cultural moment?

Hopefully see you there!

Nylumni journal issue

Over the course of my PhD, I had the great pleasure of taking part in the NYLON network, organised by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett at NYU and LSE. And thanks to Melissa Aronczyk and Ailsa Craig, there was an excellent alumni meeting in Ottawa last year, with papers presented within the general theme of 'cultures of circulation'. We even got to use one of Carleton University's log cabins:

A selection of these papers has now appeared as a special issue of Poetics, introduced with a piece by Melissa and Ailsa, and featuring a number of really great papers.

My contribution is called Ways of Owning: towards an economic sociology of privatisation (open access pre-print here) looks at why economic sociology has been so preoccupied by the institution of markets, at the relative expense of property. My argument is, firstly, that it has inherited certain idioyncratic liberal preoccupations from the 19th century, of examining the separation of 'economy' from 'society', which can be interpreted as an effect of markets. But as a result, sociologists have implicitly bought into a worldview that believes goods spontaneously move around of their own accord, without recognising the huge amount of work that goes into facilitating this (or preventing it), in the form of property rights.

What I've tried to do - probably over-ambitiously - is to then set out a framework through which normative arguments over property can be analysed at work within the economy. Building on the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski, Thevenot et al, I identify three conflicting 'orders of appropriation': socialist (the critique of privatisation), neoliberal (the critique of socialisation) and liberal (justifying the separation of private and public). The point is to try and move away from the conceptual disagreements between scholars and theorists, and towards those going on 'in the wild' amongst economic actors themselves.

Hence, a single institution (e.g. an investment bank) might be riddled with its own conflicting philosophies of what does or does not constitute 'property'. For example, value is both a shared social asset within a firm (such as 'tacit knowledge'), but a private piece of 'property' to its shareholders; there is a necessary contradiction here. During the finanial crisis, the banks' capacity to shift from a rhetoric of neoliberalism (risks could and should be entirely privatised) to one of socialism (risks could and should be entirely socialised) represented a key political asset, as many have pointed out. I make the possibly implausible argument that bankers displayed a Marxist sensibility at the crucial moment. But this then leaves the question hanging of how we might restore a liberal critique, of separating what ought to be private risk from what ought to be public risk; this problem is unresolved.

why we need Foucault

After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today - philosophical activity, I mean - if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.

The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality vol 2 (1984)

If only I'd had a T-shirt with that on it in 1997, to ward off the reactionary history students in my college bar, who were endlessly lauded by the University authorities on account of their ability to name all 15 of Henry IV's French sisters-in-law. Bitter? Yes. Still? You bet.

what do banks and prisons have in common?

I've published an article at openDemocracy, as part of the Uneconomics debate, in which I attempt to stand back and take a wide-ranging look at the policy dilemmas posed by the banking system. There is, I suggest, a serious problem in that the state has become an under-writer for a wasteful and ineffective risk management system, on which it cannot now easily turn its back. In that respect, the financial system has become like the prison system: a poorly calculated strategy for reducing risk, which may have the exact opposite effect, but which the taxpayer has become entangled with. As I argue:

Nearly five years after the dawning of the financial crisis, we can now identify one of its possible long-term legacies: the implicit association between the modern state and large financial institutions has become an explicit one. It is no longer possible to specify exactly where the state ends and the banking system begins...

We are living with a situation in which billions of pounds of public money is still being effectively siphoned into the pockets of private individuals, via quantitative easing and other forms of support for the banking sector. The on-going hand-wringing over the 'fairness' of bankers' pay tends to ignore the graver public insult, that billions of pounds are being removed from the banking system in the form of bonuses, which the taxpayer will have to provide if the system collapses again. Gordon Brown cites figures ^↑ showing that if bankers had reduced their pay by a mere 10 per cent between 2000-2007, the banks would have had £50bn more of capital available to them when the crisis struck, which is the same amount that the government injected into RBS and Lloyds-TSB in October 2008.

There is a structural problem here that has still not been dealt with. If this situation is to change, the government will need to take risks with its modus operandi of risk management. While regulators and policy-makers view the future via traditional risk management techniques, they will effectively endorse traditional risk management institutions of the City of London. Only with an ethos of experimentation can anything genuinely new be anticipated and valued.

You can read the rest of the article here. Comments might be better placed underneath the article itself, rather than on this blog.

New paper on Europe and the neoliberal 'exception'

I've had an article accepted by Theory Culture & Society, entitled 'When is a market not a market?: 'Exemption', 'externality' and 'exception' in the case of European State Aid rules', which I've now uploaded a pre-print version of. This paper was originally something I prepared for a seminar last summer, as part of the Rising Powers network I took part in (and also wrote this paper [pdf] for).

The paper attempts to identify the various logics and justifications through which neoliberalism delineates the limits of the market, or rather, the limits of certain market-based forms of economic reasoning. Clearly, the assumption that any society allows markets or economic logic to determine everything is falsified by simply walking down the street or reading the newspaper. So the question (as posed by Karl Polanyi) is where and how to draw the line around market principles and values; Keynes famously said that this was what Hayek had no capacity to do, but pragmatically speaking, states do manage it. One way that these limits are codified is in EU State Aid rules, which is why I thought that would be an interesting empirical place to look.

I guess the contemporary pertinence of this paper, if there is any at all, is in how I've attempted to theorise the current condition of (European) neoliberalism as existing in a state of exception, in which market norms and techniques are constantly dependent on necessary forms of executive intervention for their survival. Hence, neoliberalism lives on, but only on the condition that it is in a possibly long-term state of emergency. This can be shown empirically via the shifting emphasis of the Commission, away from a logic of 'market failure' as a justification for state intervention, towards a logic of necessity, at least for a period of time.

Here are some of the paper's conclusions:

How long does this state of exception last and how far does it extend? One criterion by which Aid to banks would be considered compatible with State Aid rules was that it be reviewed at least every six months (EC, 2008b). In December 2008, the Commission announced a new ‘Temporary framework’ authorising necessary rescue packages in the ‘real economy’ (i.e. non-financial firms), such as loans and guarantees that the financial sector was itself unable to offer (EC, 2008c). This framework expired on 31^st December 2010, and subsequent communications were issued to provide guidance on the phasing out of Aid to financial institutions (EC, 2010). Statements made by the Commission therefore indicate a desire to terminate the formally recognised exception to market-based principles and techniques of valuation. But this doesn’t mean that these principles and techniques are now restored to the status of state-endorsed norms. On the contrary, the exception does not need to be legally validated or recognised to persist; that is its definition. From a Schmittian perspective, the legality of sovereign rule always tacitly allows for non-legal acts. But moments of rupture and publicly declared states of exception create the possibility of permanently exceptional states, in which executive political power acquires the legal right to act purely out of necessity, and without justification. Whether or not the European Commission recognises this as an accurate depiction of European neoliberalism post-2008, this may be what has emerged.

 There is an inherent conflict in the relationship between economics and sovereignty, as explored by Foucault, which shapes the unwieldy character of the neoliberal state. The Euro crisis of 2010 can be seen as a consequence of this, in which a transnational market logic was created in place of national sovereignty, but without any political sovereignty of its own. As Peck argues, “neo-liberalism’s curse has been that it can live neither with, nor without, the state” (Peck, 2008: 39). The European monetary crisis is serving up new attempted solutions to this contradiction. The appointment of economists as unelected Prime Ministers of Greece and Italy in 2011 takes the attempted synthesis of economics and sovereign power to unprecedented heights, and casts a thoroughly more Hobbesian light upon the possible ‘performativity’ of economics. Meanwhile, whatever imbalances of European national power may once have been concealed by the liberal rhetoric of a post-national European project, are now naked as the survival of the single currency becomes predicated upon the obedience of southern European citizens to the demands of German and French national leaders. In its apparent state of exception, the European project is one of discretion and political decision, as much as one of judicial rule...

In the years that have followed the rescue of European banks, a number of scholars have questioned whether neoliberalism is alive or dead, or in some type of ‘zombie’ state (Harman, 2009; Peck et al. 2010). The unfolding of the European sovereign debt crisis over the course of 2010 and 2011 has forced constant decisions and dilemmas upon state actors, who face repeatedly unprecedented situations in which the ‘normal’ market order faces an existential threat. Senior politicians and senior bankers now negotiate face to face, to try and identify shared interests. In answer to the question of whether neoliberalism is alive or dead, it seems entirely plausible to speak of an on-going or permanent state of neoliberal exception. Agamben identifies one case of exception in the Roman institution of iustitium, in which law would go on ‘holiday’ while the republic fought for its survival. Iustitium is neither legal nor illegal; in fact it is not a legal category at all, but a juridical vacuum. The present actions of European states and European Commission are perhaps neither compatible with market-based principles and techniques of valuation, nor contrary to them, but operating in a market vacuum.

Anyway, that's quite enough. It's a paper I feel quite proud of, as it knits together a number of theoretical and empirical interests of mine of the last few years, and hopefully casts some light on the present. Any thoughts very welcome. I can't say when it will appear in print.

Erik Olin Wright lecture on Worker-owned Cooperatives - 23rd May - Oxford

I'm organising and chairing this event with Erik Olin Wright in Oxford on 23rd May. All welcome!

 

Worker-owned Cooperatives: A niche in capitalism or a pathway beyond?

A lecture by Professor Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin

5pm-6.30pm, Wednesday 23rd May, 2012

Lecture Theature, Department of Politics and International Relations, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford

Worker-owned Cooperatives have an ambiguous relationship to capitalism as an economic system. On the one hand, worker coops constitute a distinctive organizational form that occupies a small niche compatible with a well-functioning capitalist economy. On the other hand, worker-owned and managed firms violate in fundamental ways the class character of capitalism by being organized on democratic egalitarian principles. This contradictory relationship between cooperatives and capitalism poses an important question for critics of capitalism: To what extent could worker cooperatives ever constitute a significant component of an alternative to capitalism?

This lecture, hosted jointly by Oxford University's Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business, Public Policy Unit and Centre for the Study of Social Justice, will explore worker-owned cooperatives, as a case of what Wright terms 'real utopias'. It will feature a response by Prof Stuart White (Politics) and be chaired by Dr. Will Davies (Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business).

No registration is required. Please email william.davies@kellogg.ox.ac.uk for any further details about this event.

how to restore pricelessness

The inestimable Simon Hoggart, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Guardian, has a neat test which he applies to political rhetoric, to check whether or not it means anything: if it's impossible to imagine anyone demanding the opposite of what is being argued for, then you know it's hot air. Hence, much of what Tony Blair claimed to stand for - 'more money in your pocket, less crime on the streets, better public services' - wasn't actually a set of policies or political values at all, seeing as nobody could sensibly disagree with any of it.

I feel that the same may be true of David Cameron's 'Big Society'. It's not that the idea is too bad to be helpful, but that it's too good to be helpful. Everybody already wants to live in neighbourhoods that are thriving, where people look after each other, where the state is not relied upon. There's nothing remotely controversial about this aspiration. It's why house prices in Stoke Newington are more than double what they are a few miles east in Leyton. Of course the state would rather let us look after one another, as would we. This doesn't go any way to explaining why it is that we don't.

I was minded of this when I saw this advert for the P&G Capital Cleanup on the tube earlier:

Down the right-hand side are the logos of various household cleaning product brands and Procter and Gamble itself. In case you can't read the text, it says the following:

You know when your mum's coming round to your flat and you give the place a quick tidy? Well that's exactly what we're doing. Except our "flat" is London and our "mum" is the rest of the world coming round. So we're cleaning London in time for the London 2012 Olympic Games. But that's a big job so we're asking people like you to lend us a hand. We have litter to pick [sic], graffiti to scrub, and flowers to plant. To help London look its best go to P&GCapitalcleanup.com. Come on. Make your mum proud.

This isn't going to turn into another curmudgeonly anti-Olympics rant (read this if that's what you're after). Nor do I have any objection whatsoever to people donating their time for free to cleaning up London, which strikes me as an excellent idea, rather like having "more money in your pocket, less crime on the streets, better public services". The problem with this advert is the huge vacuum of justification at its heart. When Procter & Gamble invites ordinary members of the public to clean up a viciously unequal financialised city, where services of this nature are typically outsourced to private contractors, to prepare the ground for a vast splurge of securitised and brand-controlled two-week corporate entertainment, we might be entitled to respond to our 'mum' with a somewhat adolescent response: why the hell should I?

This response is far from inevitable, universal or praise-worthy, but it has a logic to it in this context that shouldn't be ignored. If, for example, the advert had appeared without the very prominent backing of a large corporate sponsor, or was not linked directly to an extremely complex and expensive act of megaproject management, then it might appear merely as a 'nudge' towards greater public spiritedness. I'm always rather charmed by the ads that London buses have, in which a cartoon teenager says "I won't play my music loud" next to a cartoon old woman saying "and I won't put my bag on the seat", in an effort to encourage slightly greater conviviality on public transport. But the fact that those ads are innocent of any strategic economic interests (beyond the 'consumer satisfaction' of bus users), and are simply branded with the reassuring Edwardian logo of London Transport, surely contributes to their efficacy. By contrast, the P&G Capital Cleanup is demanding uncalculated acts of generosity in pursuit of private profit. This is clean-up work that would otherwise be paid for.

The central problem of voluntary or community action in a neoliberal society is this: it is far easier to move from the realm of gift exchange to the realm of calculated exchange than it is to do the opposite. Where calculation and a calculating mindset is pushed further into the realm of informal social relationships, via audit, managerialism and social media, it becomes extremely difficult to suddenly appeal to the power of 'society' to reverse this or alleviate its malign effects. Simply arguing that it would be nice for people to act decently and public-spiritedly is not enough of a response, to a 30-year policy and management project built specifically on the claim that people can not be trusted to act decently or public-spiritedly unless kept under audit and surveillance.

This isn't to say that economisation and calculation are inevitable, irreversible or irresistable. Relationships and exchange surely can be returned to the realm of uncalculated gift-giving. But this won't come about by simply demanding that we all stop counting the costs or calculating the price, especially not in a society where cost-counting and pricing are still such dominant forces in public life. Right now, being nice does not appear to pay, either in a monetary or a non-monetary sense. To change this requires some form of strategy, which must firstly be built on a more sophisticated understanding of the problem.

The economistic fallacy, which only dates back to the late 19th century and not the whole way back to Adam Smith, is that 'social' uncalculated exchange is a derivative or even deficient variety of 'economic' calculated exchange. This assumption is present in the term 'externality', as employed by welfare economists since Pigou (1912), which treats the public as an accidental side-effect of the market, rather than vice versa. Economic anthropologists, dating back to Marcel Mauss, have challenged this very successfully, by demonstrating that gift exchange is primary, and market exchange is secondary. Georges Bataille's work on 'general' and 'restricted' economy also explores it brilliantly, starting with the recognition that all value originates in the immeasurable force of the sun. The same critique of calculated exchange has been made more recently by David Graeber in relation to credit relations.

Neo-classical economics therefore turns the world upside down, by assuming that calculation is 'normal' and that altruism is unusual. Game theory develops this problem and tests it experimentally. But eventually, as I argued in relation to the riots last summer, this inverted worldview becomes realised as a normal way to think and to interpret relationships. Once prices have been put on certain goods, they cannot simply be removed simply because it would be nice to remove them. But that seems to be the extent of the Big Society's logic.

The only alternative is to develop new practices, norms and techniques of valuation, to replace those of price. Time-banking and alternative currencies are clear examples of this. New types of credit, which are not entirely fungible (in strong contrast to credit securitisation) can be developed, in which norms of reputation, trust and shame are actively involved in how they bind people. This needn't simply be a form of conservatism, if new instruments can be invented. There is both a modernising and a conserving spirit to how something like the Big Society might actually be pursued. 

Finally, this would also require the deliberate dismantling of corrupt forms of market exchange and calculation. If prices are to be removed from certain areas of public and social life, then there must be a clear political strategy to undermine those institutions which benefit from such pricing. This includes much of the current banking system. It also includes FTSE100 companies urging us to donate our time for the benefit of their media circus and shareholders.