All posts by IKPS

Culture, Politics and the Economy

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Culture, Politics and the Economy:
From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

30th of April, 2020

Mikael Stigendal
Professor of Sociology, Malmo University

At the Albert Hall in London, the brass band from a mining town in Yorkshire has just won the national competition. The band leader is giving a speech but instead of being joyful, he turns political: “The last ten years this bloody government has destroyed an entire industry. Our industry! And not just our industry, but our communities, our homes, our lives! All in the name of progress.” The scene belongs to the film “Brassed Off” from 1996. The play at Albert Hall follows the closure, two weeks earlier, of the local pit. To understand Brexit and the historic loss of the Labour party in the December election 2019, it is necessary to go back to these times.

Before the miner’s strike in 1984, there were so many mining towns and communities across the UK. And as the film “Brassed Off” shows, they had their culture. The band in the film had existed since 1881. Music mattered. And so did the clubs, bingo nights, sausage rolls, football and a lot more. There was a richness in cultural life, supported by an economy with hard and unhealthy work, but also a high degree of labour process collectivity. By working in the pit, men became socialised into a collective which cultural life made meaningful. A social order existed implying that the class disciplined itself, which women also contributed to by, as mothers, being in control of the streets. The social order included a breeding ground for joint interests, which it was the role of politics to construct. Many of these communities were represented in parliament by miners, born and bred locally. This is what I mean with how culture, politics and the economy had a happy relationship.

The band leader in “Brassed Off” obviously knew about this. He knew that music did not matter without the pit. He understood that the closure of the pits in the 1980s and 90s destroyed not only an industry, but also communities and lives. The Thatcher government in the 1980s put in place another growth model, which made the City of London the main centre of finance capital, not by producing its own wealth but extracting it from others. People in the old working class communities did not get much of compensation, except for the gig-economy, brilliantly portrayed by Ken Loach in the recent film “Sorry we missed you”. In contrast to working in the pit, the gig-economy put workers into competition with each other. According to reports on Britain’s former mining communities, the consequences of the abandoned mining industry are still visible in the statistics of jobs, unemployment and health. The austerity policies during the last ten years have made it even much worse.

The relationship between culture, politics and the economy has thereby become awkward. Accordingly, Corbyn’s Labour could neither rely on favourable breeding grounds at the work places for the shaping of joint interests, nor a culture that could make such interests meaningful to people. Instead, those who deserted Labour acted like Joker in the Oscar award winning film from 2019 with the same title. We who in our youth got used to see Joker as the villain in the series about Batman and Robin are shown in the film how he became a villain. It is certainly not a cheerful story but characterized by poverty, violence, abuse and illness, i.e. the kind of life that many people live in today’s United Kingdom. Yet, Joker tries to follow the rules of the game but instead of getting respect, he is laughed at and mocked. That’s perhaps how many old Labour voters felt it when their own representatives, by not sticking clearly to the result of the referendum on Brexit, appeared to deprive them of the little democratic influence they believed they still had. If you are treated like a clown, why not become one, just like Joker, and vote for the biggest clown of them all, Boris Johnson?

What can be learnt from these entangled dynamics is that the Left has to get much more involved in the everyday life of ordinary people to understand their working and living conditions. This understanding should be created jointly with the people concerned, recognising their own experience, thinking and knowledge, thereby also empowering us all collectively. Such knowledge alliances [1] will be important in the development of knowledge on how contemporary wealth is produced as well as extracted, which in its turn constitutes the basis of power relations. Without that knowledge on the existing power relations and how to challenge them, we may produce long wish lists with ideas of how we would like society to be, but remain incapable of implementing them.

[1] Stigendal M and Novy A. (2018): Founding Transdisciplinary Knowledge production in critical realism. Implications and Benefits. Journal of Critical Realism 17(3): 203-220

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Habitation vs. Improvement

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics
of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’

30th of April, 2020

Matthew Watson
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick

The Conservative Party has just managed to win a general election whilst breaking the first law of British electoral politics in being unsure of what it stands for economically. For thirty years now, the commentariat has speculated whether ‘Europe’ would follow the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and tariff reform in 1903 in splitting the Conservative Parliamentary Party over free trade. Boris Johnson has avoided such a split, but only by purging his party of parliamentary candidates who dissented from his vision of a Brexit Britain beyond the European single market and the EU’s customs union. The Conservative Party might no longer know itself when viewed historically, but it has just proved that it knows how to construct an electorally successful populist appeal to a nationalist politics of habitation.

Therein manifests the irony of ministers whose impulse will forever be as Thatcherite free market improvers resolutely championing anti-Thatcherite anti-free market habitation as a means of using regulatory independence to protect the interests of a native in-group. Johnson has successfully pulled the confidence trick that his Government is somehow to be seen as a habitation-oriented insurgent, as the antidote to the previous Conservative Government in whose ranks so many of its ministers also served. However, his first Cabinet appointments to the three great offices of state were all confirmed small-state Thatcherites, with two helping to co-author the infamous Britannia Unchained, a 2012 book dreaming of a Britain in which state support of everyday life is completely eliminated. During the Brexit referendum, Johnson himself argued alongside the most extreme free marketeers that the EU was a protectionist club that barred the way to the country fulfilling its laissez-faire destiny. Still the utopia exists in Conservative Party rhetoric of a buccaneering Global Britain as laissez-faire role model, where a nineteenth-century imperial throwback UK wins everyone over to its vision of universal free trade whilst it also eagerly embraces significant commercial frictions with its nearest trading partners.

If the Conservative Party no longer knows what it want to be, then it is hardly surprising that the rest of us are little the wiser. It is as if it is simultaneously planning for laissez faire and planning for planning. There is no straightforward Polanyian explanation for how it is possible to be in both camps at once. Yet that is what the Johnson Government’s chosen strategy for leaving the European Union implies. The whole world is now the Brexiteers’ economic oyster, we are told, but only above the din of them also insisting that the country must become a closed cultural space to secure from the incursions of EU membership the independence of its constitution and the sovereignty of its decision-making powers. Such a context is both clearly contradictory and also the new populist reality. It denies the left any easy Polanyian positioning in response. The Conservative Party has used Brexit as a habitation device to offer protection to communities whose currently unprotected status results directly from ten years of Conservative small-state policy.

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Brexit in The Valley of the Crow

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Brexit in the Valley of the crow

30th of April, 2020

Chris Hann
Director Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Students of economic anthropology are expected to be familiar with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But it is a long book, and some will only digest the comparative ethnographic materials in Chapter 4. For natives of Great Britain, however, the entire book is a gold mine. Polanyi derived his abstract theory of the “double movement” from the empirical details of British economic history. After leaving Red Vienna, his Christian socialism deepened during his years in England, when he lectured to workers rendered unemployed by the Great Depression. Polanyi was well aware that such workers could be mobilized for reactionary countermovements, including “jingoism” in the late nineteenth century, and Fascism in the twentieth. The “populist” mobilizations of the early twenty-first century would not surprise him at all. He would explain them with reference to renewed (neoliberal) marketization. It has become clear that major changes in the political landscape correlate closely with the loss of jobs in sectors such as mining and manufacturing (even if new jobs appear in other sectors, notably services). This pattern is common to West Virginia and postsocialist Brandenburg, to North-East France and Csepel island, Budapest. It is also manifest in Britain, where declining, deindustrialized regions voted strongly for Brexit in 2016 and then for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the General Election of 2019.

When a Labour government decided after the Second World War to establish new towns in various locations around the United Kingdom, the main aim was to mitigate the consequences of earlier capitalist dislocation. Cwmbrân was an industrial village at the eastern edge of the South Wales coalfield, a region that had boomed for the best part of a century down to the 1920s, before everything fell apart during the Depression. The name means “valley of the crow” in Welsh. All of the place names in the valley of the Afon Llwd are recognizably Welsh, though the language disappeared some 200 years ago in the early throes of industrialization. In addition to coal, iron and steel, and later tin plate, formed the basis of strong nonconformist working-class communities. They demonstrated their political consciousness in the Chartist riots of 1839. In the twentieth century, like the rest of South Wales, Cwmbrân was a stronghold of the Labour Party (the Communist Party candidate also polled respectably until the 1970s).

The new town created around Cwmbrân (the only new town in Wales) provided jobs for a generation of newcomers, who found affordable rented housing in streets such as Shakespeare Road and Keats Close. During my childhood, the prosperity and security of the “Keynesian” era were reflected in the construction of a vast new shopping complex on a green field site. Nowadays this town centre still attracts shoppers from far and wide, but like the housing stock it was privatized in the decade of Margaret Thatcher. One by one, the large factories that had guaranteed employment closed down (like most of the nonconformist chapels). Formerly an exemplar of how interventionist policies can create and sustain community, Cwmbrân has been profoundly affected by neoliberal deindustrialization.

People used to joke that you could nominate a donkey to represent this valley and, if it had the endorsement of the Labour Party, it would be elected. When Harold Wilson called an election in 1966, local support for Labour was 77%. But in the election of December 2019, the Labour candidate (a graduate of Oxford University called Nicholas Thomas-Symonds) polled below 42%. Had a candidate of the Brexit Party not divided the anti-EU vote, a Conservative might have been elected. The election manifesto of which Jeremy Corbyn was so proud did not earn him much credibility in the valley of the crow. Scurrilous reporting in newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail resonated better as an anti-establishment countermovement than Labour’s educated cosmopolitanism. As Samuel Strong has shown in his study of the neighbouring valley of Blainau Gwent, EU membership has done nothing to improve the poverty statistics; non-productive investments decorated with the EU flag are emblematic of the disconnect.[1] Blaenau Gwent used to be represented in Westminster by Neil Kinnock, the last Labour Party leader of working-class origin (who was trounced at the polls by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, when the lurch to neoliberalism was already in full swing).

[1] Samuel Robert Strong: The Production of Poverty: Politics, Place and Social Abandonment in Blaenau Gwent, Wales. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University (2017).

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Post Pandemic Brexit

April 30, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Post Pandemic Brexit

30th of April, 2020

Kevin Morgan
Professor of Governance and Development, School of Geography ans Planning, Cardiff University

Having dominated British politics ad nauseam for nearly 4 years, Brexit has suddenly disappeared from public life. The issues which brought it political success – first in the 2016 EU referendum and then in the 2019 General Election that propelled Boris Johnson into office – have also largely vanished from the public agenda, particularly the issue of immigration.

Although the UK is still scheduled to quit the EU at the end of this year, COVID-19 has totally displaced Brexit in the public mind. So much so that the most important political question in the UK right now – apart from when the societal lockdown will be lifted – is what kind of legacy will the pandemic bequeath.

Will it be a return to neoliberal “normality”, the hallmarks of which were austerity, outsourcing public sector activity and shrinking the state, or will it be a tipping point for society to view and value things anew and embed the new habits of solidarity acquired during the crisis?

Past experience suggests that the powers-that-be will strive to return to some form of “normality” as soon as possible, which is precisely what happened after the 2008 financial crisis. Many things need to come together to prevent a return to neoliberal “normality”.

Let’s mention two of these things: (a) the Conservative government needs to be exposed for its astonishingly inept handling of the pandemic and (b) progressive forces need a compelling vision to show that another world is possible and the alliances, in civil society and among political parties, to enact that vision.

Even before the pandemic struck, the Johnson government was forced to adopt some very unusual policies for a Conservative government. It was forced to nationalise some railways and it felt compelled to adopt a new regional policy to support the former Labour areas in the north and midlands. Its COVID-19 rescue plan shocked its supporters, such was the scale of state financial support.

Launching the rescue package, the new Chancellor famously said that “this is not a time for ideology”; but what he meant was not a time for neoliberal ideology. The Johnson government was seen to be adopting the language of the left – by calling for social solidarity and extolling the need for an agile public sector, a sector that had been eviscerated by a decade of Tory austerity. While these things are necessary, they may be outweighed in the public mind by the inept handling of the pandemic, the most poignant sign of which is that health workers have to work without enough protective equipment.

Turning to the progressive forces, the key questions are do they have a compelling vision and do they have the necessary alliances for change? A core part of the vision now exists in the form of the Foundational Economy, arguably the most important spatial development strategy to have emerged in the UK in the past fifty years. In contrast to traditional spatial policies like Foreign Direct Investment, which are zero sum games between places, the Foundational Economy concept signals a positive sum game in the sense that foundational flourishing in one place does not preclude other places from also flourishing (see https://foundationaleconomy.com for details).

Post-pandemic Britain may look and feel very different to the political environment which spawned Brexit. Social solidarity, civic activism and key workers – many of them based in the Foundational sectors of health, social care and food provisioning – are the qualities helping the country to cope with the ravages of the pandemic. One hopes that progressive forces can ensure that these qualities and habits are part of the enduring legacy of the pandemic and not the ephemera of the crisis.

Kevin Morgan
Professor of Governance and Development
School of Geography and Planning
Cardiff University
MorganKJ@cardiff.ac.uk

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

Polanyi in Brazil

March 24, 2020Media, PAOTWIKPS

Polanyi all over the World

The importance of Polanyi for the world peripheries:
Brazil and Latinamerica

In this first part of our series 'Polanyi all over the world', Patricia Villen and Bruno de Conti talk about the importance of Polanyi's work in Brazil and Latin America. Patricia Villen works as a researcher in sociology, Bruno de Conti is professor at the institute of economics, both at University of Campinas in Brazil. 'Polanyi all over the world' is a column initiated by the IKPS which aims at strengthening our ties with other Polanyi-related institutes, communities and organizations around the globe.

25th of March, 2020

Bruno de Conti and Patricia Villen

“My work is devoted to serve to Asia, to Africa, to the new people”
– Karl Polanyi, letter to Bé de Waard, Jan. 6^th 1958

In inaugurating the new column “Polanyi all over the world”, it is pertinent to discuss the importance of Polanyi´s thoughts not only for Europe and the USA, but also for the periphery of our capitalist world economy. Being based in Brazil, our aim will be to examine the relevance of the Polanyian discussions for our country and Latin America in general, particularly in this moment of humanitarian crises.

Polanyi’s core contribution to a deep understanding of capitalism lies in his critical analysis of economic liberalism and its contradictions. This is a key-element for studies on Latin America, because these contradictions are much stronger in peripheral countries, resulting in tragic consequences for its population. For instance: Economic liberalism forces countries, that mainly (or exclusively) rely on the export of natural resources, to maintain the same marginal role in the international division of labour forever. In countries, which had a colonial past or a past including a slave-system, economic liberalism deepens the inequalities in the labour market and in society; in countries with peripheral currencies, economic liberalism stimulates speculation and thereby intensifies the volatility of capital flows, exchange and interest rate.

In spite of all that, economic liberalism has been violently imposed in Latin America. Not surprisingly, the region has suffered several financial crises in recent decades, there has been a re-primarization of the production structure and the labour market has become increasingly precarious. Nevertheless, the countries of the capitalist centre and the multilateral institutions, represented by the dominant classes at the local level, are calling for a further deepening of liberal reforms. As denounced by Polanyi, the argument is monotonous, claiming that the process has yet been insufficient and there is still room for further liberal reforms. Consequently, the reaction in many Latin American countries has historically been within the frame of liberalism, and in the last decades neoliberalism.

During the so-called “pink tide”, in the first fifteen years of the 21st century, some governments have tried to stop or at least refrain the pace of the reforms. Yet, even if most of these governments were far from radical – some even being neoliberal in some aspects –, they evoked brutal reactions from the local dominant classes and external forces (notably the USA), which resulted in a series of coups d’états all over the region (Honduras, 2009; Paraguay, 2012; Brazil, 2016; Bolivia, 2019) and strong pressures over Venezuela, including an economic boycott which is very harmful for the population, and a permanent threat of a real war.

After all, in most parts of the region the mantra of a “neoliberalism with steroids” remains. In Brazil, this neoliberalism currently manifests itself in the form of a military and pseudo-nationalist government. Bolsonaro carries out reforms (eg. of the pension system, the labour market and the public sector) that have devastating consequences for the rights and living conditions of the working class. Hit by the economic challenges imposed by COVID-19, the reaction of the Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes (a former member of the “Chicago school”, who has worked for Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile) was the most foreseeable: “We have to accelerate the liberal reforms”. With an attitude of hideous opportunism, it does not even occur to him to face reality. He wants to take advantage of the fear and vulnerability of the population to impose new reforms without any dialogue. As a consequence, the worst is yet to come: Not due to Coronavirus, but due to the neoliberal virus that contaminated Latin America and the world years ago. The harsh reality is that precarious worker will have a terrible year in which they will run the risk of getting into desperate situations or even having to starve.

Nevertheless, as brilliantly stated by Polanyi, this move towards economic liberalism has a limit, namely the destruction of nature and human life. In this context of a global pandemic, diverse governments all over the world are realizing that strong interventions are needed, both for health and economic reasons. In Brazil, the belated action of Bolsonaro and Guedes in dealing with Corona has led to massive recurring “social distancing” demonstrations of unsatisfaction, in which people are hitting pans from their windows or balconies in a predetermined time. Let’s hope that these movements will last and get stronger, combatting Bolsonaro’s government and its neoliberal furor. Associatively, let’s keep up the struggle for a new economy, an alternative to the (neo)liberal utopia which is said to be the only solution for all problems – most of all in the peripheral countries. In the words of Polanyi, let’s search for “a way of life that consciously embraces the cause of the survival of the human being”.

More ‘Polanyi all over the World’:

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Debate on Brexit

Culture, Politics and the Economy: From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

Mikael Stigendal

Debate on Brexit

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’

Matthew Watson

Debate on Brexit

Brexit in the Valley of the crow

Chris Hann

Debate on Brexit

Post Pandemic Brexit

Polanyi all over the World

The importance of Polanyi for the world peripheries: Brazil and Latinamerica

Bruno de Conti

Patricia Villen

Culture, Politics and the Economy:
From a Happy to an Awkward Relationship

The Conservative Party’s Impossible Brexit Politics
of ‘Habitation versus Improvement’

The importance of Polanyi for the world peripheries:
Brazil and Latinamerica