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Sustainability and the political economy of welfare
Welfare is commonly understood in socio-economic terms of equity, highlighting distributive issues within growing capitalist economies. In times when the unequal distribution of wealth in the ‘advanced’ capitalist world has returned to levels of the 19th century, the question of whether we can and should ‘afford the rich’ is indeed central. The traditional response of welfare researchers – that issues of inequality can be solved by redistributing the primary incomes of capital and labour within economically growing economies – however, is not only difficult to achieve in an increasingly unfettered global capitalism but is also controversial. While GDP, income growth and rising material standards of living are normally not questioned as political priorities, there is growing evidence that Western production and consumption patterns and the associated welfare standards are not generalizable to the rest of the planet if environmental concerns are to be considered. For that to happen we would indeed need four to five Earths.
In an attempt to take planetary boundaries such as climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss seriously, our new book Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare discusses the implications for ‘the’ economy and associated welfare standards. It raises the issue of what would be required to make welfare societies ecologically sustainable. In doing so, we regard the current financial, economic and political crisis and the corresponding recalibrations in Western welfare state institutions as an impetus to also considering environmental concerns. We are furthermore concerned with the main institutional obstacles to the achievement of sustainable welfare and wellbeing (especially the social structures of global finance-driven capitalism), how these could feasibly be overcome, and how researchers can assist policy-makers and activists in promoting synergy between economic, social and environmental policies that are conducive to globally sustainable welfare systems.
These are complex issues that tend to overstretch the terms of reference of single disciplines. My co-editor Oksana Mont and I felt accordingly privileged to have the opportunity to assemble an interdisciplinary team of researchers from five Lund University faculties as well as Kate Soper, Hubert Buch-Hansen and Ian Gough, who wrote the preface, and to work together for eight months at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies. We subdivided the book into three parts: conceptual issues of sustainable welfare, policies towards the establishment of sustainable welfare and emerging practices of sustainable welfare in countries such as France, the US, Sweden and China.
Our concept of sustainable welfare attempts to integrate the two previously separate disciplines of welfare and sustainability research. Taking environmental limits seriously in welfare theorising means, first of all, to ask whose welfare should be met. Distributive principles underlying existing welfare systems would need to be extended to include ‘non-citizens’, those affected in other countries and future human beings. Hence, sustainable welfare is oriented towards the satisfaction of human needs within ecological limits, from the intergenerational and global perspective. It is only at global level that thresholds for matter and energy throughput as well as for greenhouse gas emissions can be determined in order to effectively mitigate global environmental challenges such as climate change. At the same time, these biophysical conditions and global thresholds delineate the room for manoeuvre within which national and local economies can evolve and within which welfare can be provided. This suggests a new mix of private, state, commons and individual property forms with a much lesser steering role for the market than at present.
In the policy-oriented second part of the book, several authors place emphasis on the detrimental effects of the financial system within the international political economy and highlight various degrowth visions of practical transformation strategies that could frame more specific policy packages. Here, research has a potentially vital role to play but can only do so in close dialogue with diverse societal actors – particularly if it produces insights into the mechanisms, groupings of actors and their institutional embedding as well as into the ways in which governments and governance networks may support voluntary and civic bottom-up initiatives. If sustainable welfare is going to be practiced at all, then it will most likely be in different ways in different countries due to their diverse points of departure in terms of the institutional particulars of market coordination and welfare systems. While research on the potential diversity of future welfare systems is still in its infancy, it is important to explore the opportunities and potentials that exist within current welfare systems since these must be built upon in any move towards sustainable welfare.
Part III of the book argues that a potential opportunity for the establishment of sustainable welfare lies in the diversity of perceptions about the ‘good life’ and the relationship between individuals and governments in initiating transformative processes and legitimizing sustainable lifestyles. People are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the consumer culture due to its growing negative side effects such as time scarcity, high levels of stress, traffic congestion and the increasing displacement of other pleasures of life and wellbeing through the shopping mall culture. We may already find seeds of alternative visions and practices in craft movements, the service economy, socio-ecological enterprises and forms of collaborative consumption. A ‘slower’ life and more free time should not be seen as a threat to the ‘Western way of life’ but as sources of individual and communitarian wellbeing, genuine individual fulfilment and opportunities for greater involvement with various social networks that have the potential of improving social relations and creating trust. This could also facilitate to breaking the link between resource-intensive economic growth and hegemonic perceptions of societal ‘progress’ – and to ending the monopoly of the prevalent consumer culture over alternative definitions of wellbeing and the ‘good life’.
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Revisiting the Debate on Open Marxist Perspectives
Opening Pandora’s Box?
In a recent article co-authored with Pınar Donmez and published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, we seek to reassess a debate between a heterogeneous body of scholarship, referred to as ‘open Marxism’, and its critics. While we generally prefer the term open Marxist perspectives (OMPs) to highlight the variety of scholarship in this approach, the common factor among them is an emphasis on openness: the idea that the content and form of class struggle is not pre-determined and a commitment to the continuous (self-) examination of theoretical foundations of approaches in the quest to grasp the dynamics of the former.
However, its critics generally consider this broad group of authors a cohesive whole and treat the analytical sin of an individual as a sin of the church. Responses from within OMPs have similarly upheld the divisive tone that has led to the current impasse. As such, the debate has become deeply unproductive, bordering on acrimonious. This debate, which could provide a vehicle for the assessment and advancement of critical social inquiry across all its strands, we argue, can be helped by the inclusion of the theoretical constructs offered by OMPs, particularly the emphasis placed on openness.
We do not suggest that criticisms/disagreements directed to individual perspectives on either side should be sidelined or neglected. If anything, their continued presence moves the debate forward. But we propose that they should not overshadow the common basis on which these radical perspectives stand. In this vein, we make a defence of OMPs and hope to encourage a spirit of solidarity within the debate – one that radical approaches in International Political Economy/International Relations scholarship, as well as actual practices and struggles of emancipation, so urgently need in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism.
In Defence of Openness
In the paper, we engage with four criticisms directed at OMPs:
- A reluctance to offer a historicised account of the emergence of capitalism
- The rejection of historical periodisation
- State-centrism based on a functionalist account of the state
- A deterministic account of revolutionary change
These criticisms, which have strong historical antecedents, found their most recent iteration in the works of Andreas Bieler, Ian Bruff and Adam David Morton. The origins of the debate can be traced back to the 1970s, and the state derivation debate, particularly Colin Barker’s critique of John Holloway and Sol Picciotto’s form-analysis, so crucial to OMP accounts of the state.
The four criticisms made against OMPs need to be taken seriously as they identify the potential pitfalls within Marxist theorising on state and social relations and indeed offer insights in enhancing the explanatory power of OMPs. Yet they also rely on a number of problematic assumptions and uncharitable interpretations in our view. In the first instance, for example, we argue that the critics of OMPs have presented a shared challenge within Marxist theorising of state and social relations as a problem particular to open Marxist perspectives. The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a peculiar blind spot that not only raises historical questions about highly contingent social developments but also problematises when one mode of production became another. For open Marxism’s critics, OMPs have a totalising ontology through which everything is reducible to capitalist social relations and, as such, nothing can be explained with reference to events that historically preceded capitalist social relations.
This criticism takes the form of the development of the modern state system. Open Marxism’s critics take the view that capitalism was born into a state-system that already existed; however, OMPs, relying on form-analysis, offer the view that capitalist social relations necessarily transformed the state(s). While a political entity we might recognise as a state existed prior to capitalism, it is not the state we know today. The problem in communication here leads to OMPs’ critics claiming that OMPs deny the existence of the state prior to capitalism.
From our perspective OMPs do not deny the existence of the state prior to the development of capitalism, nor do they argue that the state exists independently of social relations, but instead that the state only exists in and through temporally and spatially conditioned social relations. The value of an open Marxist perspective derives from understanding such contingent social developments in terms of the inherent contradictions of capitalist social relations. This criticism also connects to the absence of the historical periodisation of capitalism in open Marxist analyses; a criticism that derives from open Marxist authors’ desire to emphasise historical contingency rather than abstracting it as a period of time. We wish to emphasise that OMPs as well as their critics discuss and engage with the forms and functions of the state and assess these dynamics across historical periods in their conceptual frameworks and social empirical enquiry. Speaking of forms, functions, periods, however, does not necessarily entail functionalism, historicism or periodisation.
We link these four criticisms to the value of openness within open Marxism, which derives from a reliance on historical enquiry: an acknowledgement that only the study of history can reveal to students of social relations the ways in which class struggle, unfolding in unexpected and challenging ways, can and has manifested. This aspect of open Marxist thought can be seen as clearly grounded upon Marx’s own writings on historical materialism and therefore a shared starting point for both perspectives under discussion here.
Judean People’s Front? We’re the People’s Front of Judea!
Ultimately, the paper argues that OMPs and their critics have a lot to gain from constructive engagement with each other. Previously, however, this debate took the form of an at-best uncharitable or at-worst vicious engagement that merely led to loss of dialogue among radical scholars whose goals were the same: critical social inquiry, the demystification of social relations and the promotion of struggles/strategies of emancipation. We retain the hope that this paper goes some way towards restoring a previously productive discussion.
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Prizes in Political Economy
Last month the School of Social and Political Sciences (SSPS) within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney hosted its annual Prizes Ceremony for 2016.
This is always a key event in the calendar when the Departments of Anthropology; Sociology and Social Policy; Government and International Relations; and Political Economy award prizes to the most outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate students within SSPS.
It is a major occasion for the students and their wider family members to celebrate their achievements and this year the event was hosted in Maclaurin Hall with the address given by Emeritus Professor Dick Bryan, from the Department of Political Economy.
Below is a carousel of images from the evening while more photographs from the night are available HERE. All the images are courtesy of Nena Serafimovska.
The complete list of prize winners from the Department of Political Economy were:
- Matthew Ryan – Frank Stilwell Award in Political Economy
- Ruth Fesseha – The Geelum Simpson-Lee Prize
- Domenico Leonello – The J.K Galbraith Prize (Shared)
- Amy Fairall – The J.K Galbraith Prize (Shared)
- Llewellyn Williams-Brooks – The Paul M. Sweezy Prize
- Nicholas Peterson – The Gunnar Myrdal Prize
- David Gardiner – E. L. Wheelwright Prize
- Fiona Alamyar – Sir Hermann Black Prize
- Emma Penzo – Jo. Martins Prize in Political Economy
Emeritus Professor Dick Bryan
Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell
Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell and scholarship recipient Matthew Ryan
Professor Adam Morton and Ruth Fesseha
Professor Adam Morton and Domenico Leonello
Professor Adam Morton and Nicholas Peterson
Professor Adam Morton and David Gardiner
Professor Adam Morton and Fiona Alamyar
Professor Adam Morton and Emma Penzo
Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell, Professor Adam Morton, Matthew Ryan and family
Professor Adam Morton and Matthew Ryan
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Cuban Communist Party to launch post-Congress debate
In the wake of Obama’s historic visit, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) held its 7th Congress on April 16-19 in the Havana Convention Centre. Beneath a backdrop featuring a huge likeness of Fidel Castro, PCC secretary Raul Castro delivered the main report on behalf of the Central Committee.
Fidel being Fidel, many Cubans would have been reassured by his surprise appearance at the closing session on the eve of his 90th birthday. Traditionally, PCC congresses are the culmination of a months-long process of consultation with the Party’s activist base and the wider Cuban society.
By contrast, an air of secrecy and anticlimax hung over the 7th Congress. Fidel’s brief valedictory address, which moved some in the audience to tears and was received with a thunderous and prolonged ovation, served to stamp the Congress with a legitimacy that only Fidel can confer.
While Fidel’s appearance at the Congress and the content of Raul’s report may have unruffled some feathers, the PCC’s central leadership must now strive to reconnect with the Party’s grassroots so that a disconnect doesn’t harden into a dangerous rift. Having received a sharp rebuke from the party base, it seems the leadership has got the message.
Fidel (left) and Raul (centre) at the 7th Congress
Controversy
The disconnect between the Central Committee and the PCC base is evident in the preparatory process for the 7th Congress. The 6th Congress, held in April 2011, was preceded by a three month process of PCC-wide and public consultations on the draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines.
While critics have noted the democratic deficiencies of that consultation—such as the fragmentary nature of the local debates, which hindered the emergence of possible alternative platforms for the election of delegates—the Guidelines adopted by the Congress bore the imprint of public opinion.
Initially, the PCC leadership gave every indication that there would be a comparable consultation prior to the 7th Congress. Soon after the 6th Congress, the Central Committee began work—behind closed doors—on two strategic and programmatic documents to be presented to the 7th Congress.
These two documents, the 2016-30 Plan and the ‘Conceptualisation of the Cuban socio-economic socialist development model’, would complement the Guidelines. As a set of concrete objectives based on certain principles, the Guidelines are neither a programmatic vision nor a socialist plan.
As the 7th Congress approached, it became apparent that the drafting process was well behind schedule. Either the anticipated public consultation would have to be abandoned, or the Congress would have to be postponed. As late as February 23, the Central Committee’s Tenth Plenum reiterated its commitment to a public consultation on the draft documents prior to the Congress.
On February 14, Esteban Morales, a prestigious and outspoken Cuban intellectual whose party loyalty is beyond reproach, circulated an acerbic commentary on the Congress process. In 2010, Morales’ PCC membership was suspended—one step short of expulsion—for warning that high-level corruption (and not US-sponsored ‘dissident’ grouplets) was “the real counterrevolution” in Cuba. He was eventually reinstated after receiving numerous public gestures of solidarity.
Morales complained that “for months” he’d been asking for the Congress documents, to no avail. This would be a congress of party functionaries rather than the grassroots “which I consider to be the real party”, he added. He suggested the PCC was regressing in terms of party democracy, and described the mood among the party base as justifiably “indignant”. That perception was anchored in his “broad and continuous contact with Cuban society” as an intellectual and an ordinary citizen.
In a similar vein, on March 27, PCC activist Francisco ‘Paquito’ Rodriguez published an Open Letter to Raul Castro on his personal blog. Rodriguez is an academic, a journalist for the Cuban trade union confederation’s Trabajadores newspaper and a prominent gay rights activist. As a gay rights activist he is said to be close to Mariela Castro, Raul Castro’s daughter.
Rodriguez objected to “the lack of discussion of the key Congress documents—which are still shrouded in secrecy—in both the grassroots Party committees and among the rest of the citizenry”.
He proposed that the Congress be postponed till late July to allow for a PCC base and public consultation during April and May. He noted that Raul Castro himself had often insisted that the reform process underway in Cuba must proceed ‘without haste’, and “I see no reason to rush so decisive a political process … if its preparation has not yet reached maturity”.
Granma responds
Also on March 27, the PCC daily, Granma, acknowledged the controversy in an editorial: “The Granma editorial board has received, through various means, concerns of Party activists (and non-members) who question the reasons why, on this occasion, no public discussion process has been planned, such as that carried out five years ago on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines.”
Granma made no mention of the Central Committee’s earlier commitment to a public consultation. Its core justification for not holding such a consultation was that only 21% of the 2011 Congress Guidelines had been fully implemented, so the 7th Congress would be effectively a continuation of the 6th. The implication is that this is for the Central Committee, not the party as a whole, to decide.
The Granma editorial, which expressed the opinion of the Central Committee, did not discuss the possibility that that same statistic (21%) might call into question the viability of the course set at the 6th Congress, or the party leadership’s approach to its implementation. It suggested the leadership can assume an indefinite popular mandate until it decides a new course is desirable:
[R]ather than launch a new society-wide debate process in the throes of implementation, we need to finish what we have begun, continuing to carry out the popular will expressed five years ago and advancing along the course set by the Sixth Congress.
The 1000 Congress delegates elected by the Party base, the 612 National Assembly deputies and some 3500 other selected consultants had contributed to the elaboration of the two key documents, Granma stressed. Put another way, less than 0.05% of Cuban citizens had access to them prior to the Congress. No timeframe has been announced for their wider availability.
As usual, readers submitted comments to the online version of the Granma editorial. Most touched on the controversy. A reader identifying themselves as ‘Leandro’ argued that a dangerous precedent is being set: a new generation of PCC leaders that lack the legitimacy of the historical leadership “would feel they have the right to hold Congresses without popular participation”.
Cuban philosopher Jose Ramon Fabelo opined that the Conceptualisation of the Cuban socialist model aspired to “is not a task for experts and social scientists alone”. The most important congress “is that which takes place in the streets and workplaces of revolutionary Cuba. Let’s not pass up the opportunity to give another lesson in democracy—genuine democracy, Cuban style—to Obama and all those who want to throw their discredited models in our faces”.
Ernesto Estevez stressed the question of representation. How, he asked, can Congress delegates be said to represent the PCC membership when the vast majority of party members are unaware of the content of the draft documents? Delegates’ opinions and votes should “reflect the consensus of those that elected them from the grassroots”. For that, the membership must have the documents.
Estevez urged his party to “learn from the errors of the former Soviet Union”. All party members “should zealously uphold the democratic side of centralism, so that democracy operates in the right way and doesn’t end up being held hostage to centralism, albeit with the best of intentions”. The lack of consultation is a regression, and “there should be no attempt to compensate after the fact”.
Congress shift
Clearly in response to the rumblings of discontent from the party base, Raul proposed in his Congress report that the documents be adopted by the Congress only “in principle” rather than definitively. They would then be the basis for a “profound and democratic process of analysis by the membership of the Party and the Communist Youth, as well as by broad sectors of our society.”
This wider consultation would be aimed at “improving and enriching” the documents. Raul further proposed that the incoming Central Committee be empowered to approve the final versions, which would be subsequently submitted to the National Assembly. Both proposals were adopted.
Like the Granma editorial, Raul’s report did not acknowledge the leadership’s earlier commitment to a broad consultative process. It merely stated that there was no such process “given that what is involved is the confirmation and continuity of the line adopted five years ago”. Incongruously, it also said that given the theoretical intricacy of the draft Conceptualisation of the socialist model “and its importance for the future”, it should not be adopted by the Congress.
What’s missing from Raul’s report is a logically consistent and persuasive explanation for the leadership’s abandonment of the foreshadowed pre-Congress PCC base and public consultation process. That explanation can be inferred from Raul’s account of the drafting process.
Raul reported that the Conceptualisation document had been drafted no less than eight times. Work on the 2016-2030 Plan began four years ago. It was initially hoped a complete draft would be ready for the Congress, but due to its “great technical complexity” only its bases have been elaborated. A complete, final version is not expected till 2017.
In December and January, the Central Committee redrafted the Congress documents on the basis of some 900 opinions and suggestions submitted by Central Committee members, Raul reported. If, as the Granma editorial claims, “the basis of these [two] documents is the content of the Guidelines”, why has it taken the Central Committee five years to draft them?
Divergent visions
In reality, the Guidelines and their implementation open the door to not one, but several distinctly different socialist models and corresponding medium-term plans. They leave unresolved the vital question posed in 2011 by Havana University planning specialist Oscar Fernandez:
From the traditional state socialism that characterises Cuba today, is it moving towards a more decentralised state socialism? An Asian-style market socialism? A self-managed socialism of the Yugoslav variety? To the so-called participatory socialism of the 21st century? There is an urgent need for a debate aimed at a consensus on the key features of the vision of the future society.
Cuba’s Marxist intelligentsia perceives competing poles of socialist thought in Cuba today. Each polarity corresponds to divergent conceptions of the socialist transitional society in general and in Cuba’s conditions. Each is seen as influencing the evolution of Cuba’s emerging socialist model, and each polarity is reflected to some degree in the content of the Guidelines.
Veteran Cuban sociologist Juan Valdes and Cuban cooperatives proponent Camila Piñero both perceive essentially three such polarities: state socialism, market socialism and ‘socialisation’.
The first pole tends to view the socialist transition through the prism of state power; the second, through the lens of economic development, i.e. GDP growth; the third views progress towards socialism in terms of the socialisation (i.e. democratisation) of party-state power and property.
The Central Committee’s glacial progress in drafting the two key documents suggests that it has tried to reconcile, behind closed doors, divergent conceptions of the new Cuban socialist model that is aspired to. They had to be reconciled if the leadership were to present a more or less coherent programmatic vision to the party as a whole—rather than strive to involve the party as a whole in developing that vision from the outset over the five years since the 6th Congress.
Leaving the realm of speculation, opting for secrecy over transparency relegated the vast majority of the PCC’s 680,000 members to the role of spectators rather than participants in the 7th Party Congress. Having won the right to be consulted on the socialist model that is aspired to, the party base has—consciously or instinctively—shifted the balance of forces a little towards the socialisation pole.
***
This commentary was written for Australia’s Green Left Weekly. It draws together the threads of my previous blog posts on the Cuban Communist Party’s 7th Congress and also appeared on Cuba’s Socialist Renewal.
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Canadian Election Shows Neoliberals CAN be Defeated
Australian progressive movements know that this federal election will be a crucial marker for many core issues: climate, jobs, inequality, fair taxation, globalisation, and more. The re-election of the Turnbull government, which has kept intact the harsh agenda of Tony Abbott but put a new face on it, would mark a setback for all of these campaigns. Yet while mobilising as energetically as possible during the campaign, and welcoming the visible erosion in public support for Coalition trickle-down policies, activists naturally worry that the government may be re-elected anyway.
Canada held a federal election on October 19 last year, and the results – while far from perfect – confirm that activist movements really can affect electoral outcomes. Moreover, the results prove that the influence of progressive movements is felt in ways that go beyond the traditional “horse race” between parties, and can reach more deeply into political culture and “common sense” values. This post will briefly review the Canadian result, and consider several lessons arising from that experience for Australian progressives.
The Canadian Electoral Landscape
Canada was ruled from 2006 through 2015 by a hard-right Conservative government led by Stephen Harper. There were numerous parallels between the Harper agenda and Australia’s conservative leaders (first John Howard, then Tony Abbott). Indeed, the Conservatives borrowed liberally from the calculated, opportunistic electoral strategies of their Australian counterparts – right down to contracting the services of Lynton Crosby (the so-called “Wizard of Oz,” architect of several Australian Liberal campaigns) as a key advisor.
Harper was limited to a minority mandate during his first two terms (in 2006-2008 and 2008-2011), and hence his legislative power was constrained accordingly. But in 2011 he prevailed with a majority, and that is when the full force of his harsh agenda was imposed on Canadians. Under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, majority governments can be attained with a surprisingly small share of the vote: Harper won his in 2011 with only 39% popular support. Vote-splitting and harsh competition among the opposition parties (including the centrist Liberals, the social-democratic NDP, and the Greens) helped facilitate this perverse outcome. Harper’s majority tenure was marked by a sharp pro-business shift in economic policy (especially favouring the petroleum industry), fierce attacks on union rights and labour standards, regressive tax changes (including lower corporate taxes, huge loopholes for financial investors, and tax subsidies for stay-at-home parents), and great damage to Canada’s once-respected international reputation (including teaming up with Abbott to sabotage global climate negotiations).
Anyone with a progressive bone in their body knew that if Harper was re-elected (especially with another majority), these painful changes would be cemented for decades. Harper’s growing arrogance and corruption within Conservative ranks undermined his political momentum going into the election. But his carefully calculated platform, strong campaign skills, and the siren call of further regressive tax cuts, still posed a dangerous threat. Progressives agreed that preventing another Conservative victory was a political priority of historic proportions. And for most, that goal superseded any loyalties to a particular political party.
Activist strategies were further influenced by a continuing no-holds-barred battle among the opposition parties. The NDP was emboldened by strong performance in 2011 under the charismatic Jack Layton (who tragically died shortly after the election), and had its sights set (not very realistically) on forming government for the first time. New leader Thomas Mulcair engineered a substantial move to the centre, hoping to further cement the party’s credibility as a “government in waiting.” Meanwhile, the Liberals, consistent with their own history, portrayed themselves as more progressive than they actually are (“run from the left, rule from the right,” is the slogan that sums up Liberal strategy!). The Greens have never held more than two seats in Parliament, but often attract enough votes (high single digits) to prevent riding victories by the other parties. Amidst this continuing and unrepentant in-fighting between the opposition parties, activist movements understandably tried to rise above this battle of party logos. Most focused their electoral efforts on exposing and damaging Harper, and mobilising an “anything but Conservative” sentiment.
The Economic Context
The Conservatives’ chances were further damaged by the poor performance of Canada’s economy in the period leading into the election. The much-vaunted oil boom, led by enormous bitumen projects in northern Alberta, went bust along with global commodity prices. Where Harper had once boasted of Canada as a new “energy superpower,” by 2014 the costs of Canada’s unthinking extractivism (including painful de-industrialisation, an overvalued currency, and terrible environmental performance) were increasingly apparent. Canada’s economy actually slipped into an official recession in the first half of 2015 (defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking real GDP), due primarily to the sharp contraction in energy-related business investment.
Poor economic numbers posed a sharp contrast to the traditional assumption (promoted so loyally by the commercial media) that Conservatives are “naturally” the best economic managers. Progressive campaigns pounced with strong arguments that a change in direction (emphasising job creation, physical and social infrastructure, environmental investments, and more) would strengthen Canada’s economy. This helped voters break out of the traditional “economy versus values” frame that has traditionally benefited Conservatives. (One example of this work was a major project by Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector trade union, proving that Canada’s economy in fact performed worse under Stephen Harper than any other government in the postwar era.)
The Union Movement and the Election
Canada’s union movement also played an important role in defeating the Harper Conservatives. They directed major resources into educating and mobilising union members, tying their campaign to key union and labour issues. Here, too, the strategy was nuanced, influenced by recognition that defeating Harper was the top priority. Most union campaigns focused on the ideas and issues at stake, rather than explicitly instructing their members to vote for a particular party. (A few unions still advocated voting for the NDP as their main message.) By linking Harper’s rule to attacks on unions, the rise of inequality, and the failure to create jobs, unions were able to maximise their credibility as a genuine but largely non-partisan voice for workers’ interests during the election. (In this regard, the unions’ campaign was reminiscent of the successful “Your Rights at Work” campaign run in Australia by the ACTU and its affiliates in 2006-07.)
A Stinging Defeat
Lasting nearly 12 weeks, the official campaign was the longest in modern Canadian history (Harper hoped a long campaign would benefit the Conservatives, who had the strongest financial base of any party). After many twists and turns (all 3 major parties led the polls at some point during the campaign), momentum shifted decisively to the Liberals in the last days. This was because anti-Harper voters eventually decided the Liberals had the best chance of unseating the government, and hence shifted their support there – causing a self-reinforcing snowball effect. Mulcair’s conservative economic platform (he consciously positioned the NDP to the right of the Liberals on several key issues, including balancing the budget and rejecting higher taxes on rich Canadians) squandered the NDP’s chance to capitalise on Canadians’ strong desire for change. The Liberals won a majority (with 39% of the vote, almost exactly as Harper did in 2011), the NDP lost over half its seats and a third of its vote, and the Conservatives remain a strong, unapologetic opposition (winning over 30% of the vote despite negative anti-Harper sentiment across the country).
The new Liberal government, under the charismatic Justin Trudeau (son of Pierre Trudeau, perhaps Canada’s most progressive Prime Minister), acted quickly on several high-profile issues: including appointing a cabinet with full gender equity, dramatically shifting Canada’s stance at the Paris climate talks, and fully revoking two of Harper’s anti-union bills. However, after picking that low-hanging fruit and cementing its aura as an agent of “change,” the longer-run character of this government remains unclear and contested. Liberals have strong connections with big business, and are not likely to fundamentally shift the direction of Canadian policy without strong active pressure from the same movements and campaigns that made such a difference in the election. Nevertheless, the defeat of Harper is a huge positive step for Canadian politics and policy, and opens the door to further issue-based activism and further victories.
Lessons for Australia
Some key lessons from the Canadian experience, that may be relevant in the Australian campaign, include:
- It is essential to challenge the economic credibility of the neoliberal government, and show concretely that most Australians would be materially better off with a change in direction. This undermines the traditional assumption that neoliberals know best how to “manage” the economy, and that any change in direction would risk Australians’ jobs and prosperity. The failures of neoliberal policy are abundant, and provide plenty of ammunition for this effort; these arguments work best when described in concrete material terms (jobs, incomes, security, equality), not in economic jargon (“confidence,” “rationalism,” “efficiency”).
- The ongoing battle of ideas in society is not synonymous with, and in many ways more important than, the electoral competition between parties. If progressive campaigns succeed in shifting the goalposts of received “common sense” around key issues and values, they can force politicians of all stripes to change their orientation accordingly to keep up. The Coalition government’s enactment of limits on tax preferences for high-income superannuation funds is an example of this effect.
- And by making an independent, non-partisan appeal to core values, and emphasising the importance of those values to the future quality of life and cohesiveness of society, activist movements can do great damage to the credibility and appeal of the ruling agenda.
This is not to deny the importance of partisan activism in successful election campaigns. Of course we need principled progressive parties to support the demands of the activist movements, assemble composite platforms, and meaningfully challenge the right to govern of the existing government. But parties will naturally be guided by their own immediate interests and calculations. That’s where the ongoing activism of issue-oriented campaigns and movements is essential if we are indeed to create “losing conditions” for a conservative government.
This article originally appeared in Australian Options magazine, and is reprinted with permission. Jim Stanford has a longer commentary on the “battle of economic ideas” during the 2015 Canadian election, at http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2015/11/03/election-2015-and-the-battle-of-economic-ideas/ .
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Precarious work and the organisation of workers
The issue of precarious work and of the organisation of precarious workers is becoming one of the core themes of research not just within the sociology of work and labour but also across the whole social sciences’ spectrum. Conditions of precariousness or precarity at work are in fact directly connected with discussions on the models of global capital accumulation, on life conditions in urbanised environments, on the emergence of new subjectivities and the politics of representation, on the reconfiguration of the working class and its organisations, on social justice and civil rights and on migrations and borders’ regulations. Discussions on precarity are thus profoundly interdisciplinary, transnational in their reach and critical of the status quo, interrogating the present in search of a more equal future.
In this sense, research on precarity, both as a work and material life condition, is highly political almost by its own nature and this is a fundamental point to stress for research aiming to social change. In the context of the worldwide crisis of the traditional labour movement and the erosion of workers’ rights, two open questions directly interrogate the political dimension of precarity. Can precarity be seen as the new common ground, the new common condition around which different and newly emerging subjectivities can mobilise? Is precarity reconfiguring the organisational and political forms of working class representation?
Many have rightly questioned that precarity is something new. Developing countries have always had and continue to have informal, low paid, insecure and thus precarious workforces. Similarly, Western countries’ early industrial development has been based on the exploitation of a mass of poorly paid workers, often living in appalling conditions, something similar to what is experienced today by Chinese workers. Despite ameliorations and protective legislation gained through decades of worldwide working class struggles for political representation, 2.8 billion people, the majority of the working people in the world, still live with less than two dollars a day, an income for their work sufficient enough just to live in barely sustainable conditions. Moreover, two centuries after the formal abolition of slavery, millions of workers, continue to be victims of various forms of forced and bonded labour, particularly in the apparel and food industries serving the world consumers’ market. Thus, when we take this broader historical and geographical perspective, not just precarious work appears as the norm within capitalism, following Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, and, on the contrary, Fordism the exception but also the same idea of the ideal-typical, formal, protected, Fordist industrial worker. The latter has for more than a century been the epitome of the working class but it clearly becomes partial and one-sided. As Michael Denning rightly argued in his attempt to ‘decentre wage labour’, it is not necessarily the wage as formal contract of exchange that creates proletarians but ‘the imperative to earn a living’.
Precarity is not new. Differences of conditions in different parts of the world and economic sectors make precarity as a general mobilising concept difficult to use. Organising workers to struggle against precarious working conditions is further complicated by the autonomy and geographical dispersion that characterise many precarious jobs today. But a series of technological, organisational and socio-economical changes, simultaneously affecting the world system, have led to new reconfigurations of work and labour centred one way or another on conditions of precarity. Western urban labour markets have been transformed into post-industrial, service oriented precarious environments inhabited by a growing mass of unprotected migrant workers; the consolidation of cities across the globe as centres of value creation and realisation, led by financial and real estate speculation, has produced an increase in the global urban population, with profound inequalities both in terms of living and working conditions and access to consumption goods; the development of distribution, logistics, transport and services provision across the global value chain has allowed corporations to extract value across the whole chain using existing countries differentials; the spread of information technology, the lowering costs of sea and land transportation and the speed of capital’s mobility have facilitated processes of delocalisation and a ‘race to the bottom’, in terms of salaries and working conditions. Services based on digital platforms such as the one provided by Uber or Amazon’s Mechanical Turks further flexibilise and deregulate work, penalising particularly women and young people that remain trapped by the possibility of an easy economic return with flexible work hours.
Differences among the various forms of precariousness exist and theoretically a ‘multiplication of labour’, made up by a variegated range of ‘subaltern’ workers’ is enlarging the concept of the working class beyond the model industrial workers of the twentieth-century. However, all these technological, organisational and socio-political changes are creating to a certain extent, especially in urbanised areas of the world, common conditions of precarious work and life for many. Precarity as a material condition is today crossing the divide between previously clear demarcations: the formal/informal; citizens/no citizens; North/South; workplace/community. Similarly, the creation of new geographical spaces of capital accumulation such as special economic zones, land and maritime industrial and commercial corridors, logistic hubs, or border industrial zones, produce a potentially critical mass of precarious, mainly migrant, workers located often at strategic points of global capitalism’s productive chains.
From a political point of view, the sharing of similar working and living conditions and of experiences of struggle against precarity can open the room for a new common language of dispossession and oppression of a new working class in the making. However, the passage from an understanding of the common materialities and differences composing today’s living labour to the composition of a political subject promoting the interests of the working class majority, as Marxist autonomists would probably phrase it, is constantly obstructed by ideological and material conditions.
As social scientists committed to the production of socially relevant research there is much we can do in the ideological sphere to raise social awareness and produce a counter-hegemonic knowledge. We can establish connections between specific models of accumulations/institutional frameworks and workers’ material conditions and show how these models are actively produced and reproduced, creating simultaneously solidarity and fragmentation among workers and thus explaining the difficulties experienced by these in terms of organisation. We can produce new knowledge on unexplored and invisible sections of the working class or map capital and living labour composition in geographically defined and strategic areas, such as cities or logistic hubs. We can study precarious workers and their political alliances, their organisational forms and their links with state institutions and power. We can investigate how new class identities and organisations are increasingly built across space, in the workplace, in the community, in the household, connecting the spheres of work and life. We should, following David Harvey, understand consumerism and the lifestyles dictated by the form that urbanisation takes and how they are important in creating new needs, new demands and new interests on the part of workers and thus how ‘to get around with forms of organising that actually recognise this change in the dynamics of class struggle’.
All these are existing and potential lines of research that can help to link the issue of precarious work to a broader political economic dimension and to ground debates on the perspectives of precarious workers’ organisation within the context of currently and locally existing capitalist relations, rather than in more abstracted trade unions’ strategies and responses. In fact, the mayor problem that the ‘rediscovery’ of precarious work as an area of research within the field of labour studies has created is that it has not been accompanied, in general, by a serious reflection on the problem of organisation. Studies have generally focused on top-down, trade union-centred experiences and strategies of organising precarious workers and even when other configurations and alliances have been considered, as with the case of community unionism, this has always been done from a trade unions’ point of view. This narrow approach does not allow us to delve deep into the complexity and richness of the social processes and mediations conducive to collective organisations and to identify the contextual structural factors, material circumstances and concrete possibilities affecting precarious workers’ daily reality.
The issue of precarity and precarious work is central to any emancipatory discussions within current capitalist dynamics. But we have to be able to move from a still dominant trade union-centred approach to a truly working class analysis and do this by reconnecting the precarity affecting the sphere of work with that affecting the other spheres of life. This can be done, for instance, by looking at how the precaritisation of work and life has been supported by the unpaid work women have continued to supply within the sphere of social reproduction and how this has created different strategies of resistance and survival beyond the workplaces. Similarly, we can look at the experiences of self-management and the solidarity economy in neighbourhoods as forms of people resistance to the precaritisation of work and life that simultaneously prefigure alternatives to working arrangements and economics.
In a recent intervention on building working class power, David Harvey argued that organising territories around the difficulties of everyday life is what would help the leftists to get out of the ‘symbiotic relationship’ of organising ‘themselves in the same way capital accumulation is reorganised’. Footprints of labour studies’ ‘symbiotic relationship’ with a trade union-represented working class continue to be dominant across social sciences disciplines. Trade unions can still play a powerful role in organising workers worldwide, but an analysis of today’s work through the lens of precarious work and the forms of organisation that converge around this can emerge, to offer a ‘tipping point’, in Saskia Sassen’s definition, through which we understand broader changes in working class conditions and issues, opening up new hope and possibilities for emancipation from capitalist work. This is important for critical social sciences.
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Ten Questions to Bertell Ollman
As part of my teaching duties this year, I have had the pleasure of designing and delivering a unit of study tailored to the Political Economy Honours students. My contribution to ECOP4001 has entailed teaching this unit, which I have called ‘Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism’.
Principally the philosophy of internal relations is introduced to the unit as a hallmark of historical materialist analysis. In so doing, students are introduced to the contested foundations of historical materialism as a way of building knowledge about their own theories and concepts. As a result, issues of ontology, epistemology and methodology are addressed so that students are able to deploy and develop these terms in their own research projects.
The philosophy of internal relations has become a central feature of Bertell Ollman’s work. He addresses a processual approach to concepts as the first step in understanding their internal relation. Rather than positing the external interaction of entities (e.g. states vs. markets or state vs. civil society or forces and relations of production), historical materialism understands the world as a complex of internal relations. This is a dialectical ontology that avoids fetishising concepts or abstracting them from their alienated forms of appearance.
It is this internal relations perspective that Derek Sayer also develops in The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytical Foundations of Historical Materialism to avoid what he refers to as the violence of abstraction. One can see this philosophy of internal relations perspective across inter alia the political economy analyses of figures such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, Nicos Poulantzas, E.P. Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, or David McNally.
In finishing the unit, Bertell Ollman was very generous with his time, enthusiasm and energy to respond to these ten questions, which were formulated by the students themselves, which included Katie Dickson, Isla Pawson; Holly McMath; Jarrod Avila; Hugh Sturgess; Ilya Bonch-Osmolovskiy; Joel Griggs; Tom Irvine; Andrei Bilic; Llewellyn Williams-Brooks; John Di Ciaccio; and Aron Fernandez. In the Skype interview we covered all ten questions and more. Unfortunately, on this occasion, the screen capture software failed us (!). But there are plans in the future to repeat the format with a different theorist of internal relations.
For now, here are the ten questions we enjoyed putting to Bertell Ollman:
- Besides Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, of course, what register of classical historical materialist thinkers would you consider to be philosophers of internal relations?
- With a view to contemporary thinkers, who else—besides yourself—is accomplished in dancing the dialectic of the philosophy of internal relations?
- Assuming you are familiar with Philip McMichael’s methodological arguments, to what extent do you consider his method of incorporated comparison a further development of the philosophy of internal relations?
- In Alienation you indicate that there are many vantage points from which to work out the intricacies of capitalism (e.g. capital, labour, value). What vantage point is the best place to jump off from in grasping the essential connections of capitalism?
- In your recent Capital & Class article you identify five levels of abstractions of generality within Marx’s work: 1) unique historic events; 2) the current stage of modern capitalism in a particular country; 3) capitalism in general; 4) class society; and 5) the human condition. Within the philosophy of internal relations, is it possible to abstract on a greater number of levels without committing to a philosophy of external relations? That is, does abstraction of generality have fixed levels?
- What is the place of critical realism with regard to the dichotomy of the philosophy of internal and external relations? Would you consider the philosophy of internal relations as the hallmark of historical materialism to be a closed- or open-system ontology?
- For David McNally, the social relations of race, gender, and sexuality are internally constitutive of class, rather than external to it. The further claim is that this moves beyond intersectionality and its tendency to present different forms of social oppression as separate and autonomous social relations. What are the potential pitfalls of this view on the co-constitution of the social relations of class, race, sexuality and gender?
- How far is the dispute over productive forces constituting capitalism (G. A. Cohen), on one hand, and class struggle over the relations of production (Ellen Meiksins Wood), on the other hand, largely a difference of vantage point?
- A “common-sense view” contends that things cannot be perpetually reduced to internal relations, while abstracting is the necessary work of the human mind sensing the distinct qualities that make up the whole. Considering these extremes and with Derek Sayer’s The Violence of Abstraction in our thinking, can abstracting or individuating from the “formless multiplicity” of social relations avoid violent abstraction?
- Returning to one of your own questions in Dance of the Dialectic, does a philosophy of internal relations offer no possibility to decide on where a relation begins or ends, with the analysis in danger of continuing indefinitely?
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Workplace polices must change to reflect 21st century realities
It’s 2016 and we are moving backwards on work, care and family policies. Governments focused on balanced budgets rather than balanced lives have stymied support for workers with caring responsibilities – mostly women. This is at a time of increased global attention on gender, inequality and care.
At the G20 meeting in Brisbane in 2014, Australia signed on to a global compact to reduce the gender gap in workplace participation by 25 per cent by 2025. But who will care for the kids, the frail aged, the ill and people with a disability? In order to increase women’s workforce participation and build a fair Australia, governments will need to invest in a basic universal system of social care that supports all workers with caring responsibilities.
Those performing paid care must also be recognised and remunerated appropriately. But recent changes to work, care and family policies do not reflect the research evidence about how to build a national system of social care infrastructure that is attuned to the needs of Australian households and the economy.
This month’s budget retained radical cuts to Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme which will leave many new mothers with less paid time at home with their baby, contradicting research evidence and World Health Organisation recommendations. Plans to restructure and enhance Early Childhood Education and Care funding by $3.5 billion have also been deferred until 2018. Complex implementation rules, reduced access for children from disadvantaged households and changes to funding rules for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services raise serious doubts about the reform package.
The demographic and research evidence tells us we need to be heading in a different direction.
Managing work and care is being cast, increasingly, as a private matter that individual households need to sort out for themselves. But research evidence on the total (paid and unpaid) working time of Australian women and men, and the associated time pressure, shows the current approach is unsustainable. Building a more effective system of social care services has become urgent.
Our workforce is increasingly feminised and ageing, with the formal retirement age set to increase to 70 by 2035. Workplaces will need to change to manage the needs of an older workforce. An ageing population also means more workers will have responsibility for aged relatives and friends – especially as the aged-care system increasingly relies on unpaid “informal” care.
At the same time, the paid care workforce is expected to grow to meet Australians’ demand for affordable and high-quality childcare, aged care and disability care services. These must be decent jobs that provide workers with the adequate wages and conditions essential for the delivery of high-quality care infrastructure.
A new report released by the Australian Work and Family Policy Roundtable, of which I am co-convenor, makes a series of policy recommendations for a care infrastructure to meet the needs of 21st-century Australia. Drawing on the research and expertise of more than 30 academics from 16 Australian universities, the report urges the next government to provide a minimum two days per week of subsidised early childhood education and care for all children, regardless of their parents’ workforce participation.
We call for the extension of the parental leave pay and dad and partner pay schemes to 26 weeks in the near term, and eventually to 52 weeks, alongside raising the payment level from the minimum wage and including superannuation. The report also urges a liveable aged pension as a cornerstone of Australia’s retirement system. This must be delivered at a level that allows those eligible to live with dignity in their old age, by continuing to index pensions to increases in average earnings.
We are not alone in calling for improved work, care and family policies. The OECD’s 2016 Going for Growth report urged Australia to increase government spending on high-quality early childhood education and care in order to meet the Prime Minister’s national productivity and innovation agenda. Earlier this year, the IMF advocated for the use of public debt to finance investment in key productive inputs such as education.
Right now, an erratic policy environment and absence of a predictable, affordable system of social care compromises the wellbeing of Australian households and our economy. We need to do much better if we are to ensure a good society where work and care can be combined with benefits for all. It is high time we got this right.
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This post originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (30 May 2016)
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Corporations and climate change
Global businesses, many of them now larger and more powerful than nation states, exhibit enormous sway on humanity’s response to the climate crisis. Indeed, during the Paris climate talks in December last year, growing media focus centred on business “leadership” on climate change. For instance, Royal Dutch Shell, General Electric, BHP Billiton and management consultancy McKinsey & Co. announced the establishment of a committee to advise governments on how to combat global warming while strengthening economic growth. This follows other announcements such as Unilever’s chief executive officer, Paul Polman, emphasising the need for private sector mobilisation to close the shortfall in emission commitments made by governments, as well as Virgin’s CEO Richard Branson who has argued that “our only hope to stop climate change is for industry to make money from it.”
These proclamations need to be viewed in the broader context of business opposition to the fundamental economic change necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. A good example of the duality of this corporate engagement has been the revelation that oil-giant Exxon, for decades a leading opponent of carbon regulation and funder of climate change denial, has since the early-1980s been well aware of the disastrous implications of fossil fuel use for the Earth’s climate. This self-serving logic parallels other well-known examples of business obfuscation such as BP’s infamous ‘Beyond Petroleum’ greenwashing in the early 2000s, and more recently Peabody Energy’s marketing of coal as a response to “energy poverty” in the developing world.
How then to make sense of the mixed messages from corporations on climate change?
In our new book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction, Daniel Nyberg and I explore the role of corporations and corporate capitalism within the climate crisis. We argue that while many global businesses promote a message of “action” and “leadership”, this ignores the deeper problem 0f how corporate capitalism is locked into a cycle of promoting ever more creative ways of exploiting nature and destroying a habitable climate.
While the last two centuries of industrialisation and capitalist expansion have promoted a mythology that economic development leads to environmental improvement (the so-called ecological modernisation thesis), climate change fundamentally challenges these beliefs. Despite the growing uptake of the language and practices of “sustainability”, “corporate environmentalism” and “green growth”, humanity’s degradation of the environment has in fact accelerated. We can see this not only in the physical manifestations of climate change – the melting Arctic, record-breaking droughts and floods, rising sea levels and ocean acidification – but also in the destruction of habitat and declining biodiversity.
Humans have become a force of nature and scientists argue we are now entering a new geological epoch, the so-called “Anthropocene”. One of the defining features of this new age of humans is the loss of vast numbers of animal and plant species – what writer Elizabeth Kolbert has termed the “Sixth Great Extinction”. As a result, in a relatively short period of time, global capitalism, powered by fossil fuel-based energy, has changed the very chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans with devastating consequences.
In our book we argue that global capitalism is now locked into a process of what we term “creative self-destruction”. By this we mean our economies are now reliant upon ever-more ingenious ways of exploiting the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves and consuming the very life-support systems we rely on for our survival. This is evident in the rush by the world’s largest companies to develop new sources of fossil fuels such as deep-water and Arctic oil drilling, tar-sands processing, new mega-coalmines, and the “fracking” of shale and coal-seam gas. This is occurring at the same time as crucial carbon sinks such as the world’s forests and oceans are being ever further denuded (witness for example the massive forest fires that recently raged across Indonesia aimed at converting rainforest into plantations for palm oil and paper).
We argue that as the folly of our fossil fuel path has become ever more evident, so the corporate response has reinforced the grip of creative self-destruction. A great example of this fossil fuel lock-in was the significant portion of funding provided to last year’s Paris climate talks by major fossil fuel companies and carbon emitters. This was a situation that French climate officials admitted was unfortunate but financially unavoidable if the talks were to proceed!
Indeed, Plan B for climate response has involved growing discussion by businesses and technocrats of “geoengineering”. This includes proposals such as the dispersal of sulphate particles in the atmosphere to dim incoming solar radiation, increasing the reflectivity of clouds or even “fertilising” the oceans through encouraging algal blooms. Despite the likely catastrophic side effects (these plans have after all been compared to chemotherapy for a dying planet!), money and resources are being swiftly mobilised around these technocratic “innovations”.
These examples highlight both the inventive genius of corporate capitalism, and the blindness of industry and government to the ecological catastrophe they are fashioning. We argue this is how we have arrived at a political discourse whereby blocking out the sun or seeding the oceans are somehow seen as sensible options in responding to climate change. This framing allows us to accept that corporate capitalism is able not only to solve the climate crisis it has created, but to actually engineer a new climate.
Of course, a key question is how large corporations are able to continue engaging in increasingly environmentally destructive behaviour despite the disastrous consequences for human society and a habitable climate? In our book we argue that corporations and their spokespeople are able to achieve this by incorporating criticism and reinventing the daily ritual of “business as usual” as a perfectly normal and ecologically sound process.
For instance, through the narrative of “green” capitalism, corporations and markets are portrayed as the best means of responding to the climate crisis. Underpinning this view is the, as yet unproven, claim that new technologies and markets can decouple economic growth from environmental impacts. So as we document at length in the book, many large companies have established new roles and practices aimed at improving their eco-efficiency, greening their supply chains, producing new green products and services, marketing and branding their environmental worthiness, and reporting on their “sustainability” upon a range of industry metrics.
This sparkling image of corporate environmentalism and business sustainability falsely promises no conflicts and no trade-offs. Here, it is seen as possible to address climate change while continuing the current global expansion of consumption. In contrast to the blinding evidence of ever-escalating greenhouse gas emissions, this comforting political myth promises no contradiction between material affluence and environmental well-being. We can have it all and, according to the myth of corporate environmentalism, avoid climate catastrophe!
Moreover, we point out that citizens are increasingly called upon to enrol in this mythology as active constituents in corporate campaigns against improved emissions standards or carbon taxes, as well as consumers and “ecopreneurs” in the quest for “green consumption”. We have thus become the brands we wear, the cars we drive, the products we buy; and we are comforted to find the future portrayed as “safely” in the hands of the market.
The supremacy of “business as usual” thus exacts a powerful grip on our daily thinking and actions. It is a grip strengthened by the promotion of every new “green” product, a grip tightened through the establishment of sustainability functions in business and government, and a grip defended with every “offset” we purchase for a flight to a holiday destination.
Of course, this is also a vision that fits well within the dominant economic ideology of our time; neoliberalism. Alternatives, such as state regulation and mandatory restrictions on fossil fuel use, are viewed as counterproductive and even harmful. For instance, in response to a call to ban new coal mines, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull invoked the so-called “drug-dealer’s defence” in rejecting calls for restrictions on our massive coal exports. That is, if we don’t sell it someone else will! In this view, there is no alternative to the market. And so echoing Fredric Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
Taken together these discourses and practices conceal the environmental destruction that is built into our economic system. Actually dealing with climate change as perhaps the ultimate contradiction of capitalism would require material trade-offs that challenge basic identities and interests.
This is why the alternative to “business as usual” is much harder to imagine and easier to dismiss as the enemy of social well-being – what critics so often characterise as going back to living in caves or a return to the “dark ages”. Indeed, those environmentally aware citizens who argue that we need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels “in the ground” are demonised as extremists, green terrorists, and a threat to national prosperity. As we saw last year in the Federal Government’s much satirised “radicalisation awareness program” (#Freekaren), ordinary citizens that question our economic madness are now subversives of the highest order!
Ultimately the “success” or otherwise of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to threaten the fundamental dynamics underlying the climate crisis. Dramatic decarbonisation based around mandatory limits upon consumption, economic growth, and corporate influence are not on the agenda nor open for discussion. Rather, global elites have framed the response to climate change around an accentuation of the very causes of the crisis.
In essence, the prevailing corporate view is that capitalism should be seen not as a cause of climate change but as an answer to it. Thus a problem brought about by overconsumption, the logic goes, should be addressed through more consumption.
This capitalist imaginary of unending growth, prosperity and mastery over the natural world is central to our undoing. Unfortunately, until this changes, the dominance of corporate capitalism will ensure the continued and rapid decline of our once-bountiful and habitable planet. As we conclude in our book, changing this world-view is perhaps the most profound challenge we face in responding to the existential crisis that is climate change.
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On the survival of non-capitalism: from nowhere to now here
My latest article in Environment and Planning D examines the issue of non-capitalist space within the global political economy. Why is this important? A common starting point for radical critiques of our present society is to focus on the dynamics of capitalism. The rationale for this is simple: capitalism remains the dominant mode of production of our epoch and in order to move beyond this system you first have to get people to recognise the nature of its exploitation and contradictions. This argument is perhaps most eloquently framed by Ellen Meikins Wood who stressed that, ‘At a time when a critique of capitalism is more urgent than ever, the dominant theoretical trends on the left are busy conceptualising away the very idea of capitalism’.
However, an alternative view, associated largely with J.K Gibson-Graham and others linked to Rethinking Marxism, argues that focusing our attention solely on the dynamics of capitalism – what is termed ‘capitalocentrism’ – can become a highly disempowering political project. It is this type of thinking that I label ‘the assumption of subsumption’ whereby all forms of political economy, all other forms of cultural life, and all sites of socio-political activity are portrayed as being overwhelmed by – subsumed into – the dynamics of capitalism. No space is left (quite literally) for alternatives. Such capitalocentism elides the fact that multiple forms of economy – and therefore alternative development trajectories – 
exist contemporaneously with capitalism (and not just in a possible future). Gibson-Graham’s view holds that if theory is to play an emancipatory role in must ‘proliferate possibility, not foreclose it’.
Although recognising the structural power that capital is able to wield, the main focus of my recent article is therefore on the survival and re-creation of non-capitalist spaces within the global political economy. The example of Oaxaca in southern Mexico is the primary basis for making these claims, linked to fieldwork that was carried out in 2008, 2009 and 2015. Rather than examining how it has been that capitalism has managed to survive, grow and prosper, the article explores how non-capitalist spaces remain and why they should be considered important for transformative activity. This is to ensure that capital does not become the main subject of our inquiry and that subsequently the human beings at the heart of our analysis are not rendered as people without history. Beyond the issue of their mere survival however, I argue that non-capitalist spaces persist and can be learned from. They are thus both figurative and prefigurative spaces offering sites of opening for enacting different kinds of political economy.
A key contention is that the survival and reinvention of non-capitalist social practices and spaces have created a barrier to the further expansion of capital, and are now providing inspiration for alternative developmental trajectories. This has presaged intensified forms of social conflict, notably between the Mexican state and indigenous peoples (as the state claims rights to the subsoil within indigenous territories).
An important intellectual inspiration for this work was Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. He recognised that the driving force of Peru’s development had clearly come from colonisation and then global capitalism. Nevertheless, distinct spaces of economic activity, characterised by diverse social relations of production remained. Moreover, Mariátegui asserted that the survival of certain elements of the Indian communities could provide the basis for revolutionary transformation owing to the existence of what he called ‘practical socialism’. In similar fashion, it is asserted in my article that although Oaxaca is clearly enmeshed, or at least influenced by, the wider capitalist mode of production, distinct forms of non-capitalist social relations remain prevalent, especially within indigenous communities.
In a pamphlet issued by 3 prominent activist NGOs
that form the basis of Colectivo Oaxaqueño en Defensa de los Territorios, it is stated that ‘it is precisely in Oaxacan territory where one can observe and study the survival of ancient agrarian structures’. Unlike other regions of Mexico, haciendas never expanded to displace communal property with such force. Unpacking this further, if we examine patterns of land tenure in Oaxaca we can see that over 70% of land to this day remains non-privatised and instead is held as forms of collective property (both ejidos and tierras communales) according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). This matters considerably for the analysis for two interrelated reasons. Not only does it provide the empirical backdrop of uneven development which capital seeks to exploit, by expanding into this ‘spatial target’ and thereby transforming space and social relations to further the accumulation process, but it also implies that the region has, and continues to maintain a set of alternative institutional arrangements that exist alongside capitalism and that are in the present conjuncture antithetical to capitalist expansion. These communal arrangements include community assemblies, tequios (collective work) and political obligations in the form of cargos (political posts) that community members are expected to participate it.
In recent years the community assembly has been recovered as a vital tool with which to enact a collective form of power over land and reject the advancement of capital. This has been most visibly manifested through opposition to wind farm projects and mining. To focus just on the latter, under the Presidency of Filipe Calderón, mining concessions increased by 53% in Mexico, and in Oaxaca 20% of the surface area of the state has been given over to mining concessions. These concessions have not simply been meekly accepted however. Rather, in numerous cases, the authority of the community assembly has been invoked to challenge not only the legitimacy of the concession (based on the legal appeal to ILO Convention 169) but furthermore the legitimacy of the Mexican state. Communities such as Capulalpam de Méndez and Magdalena Teitipac represent stories of success in restricting mining activities and demonstrating that other paths to development may be possible.
This obviously raises an important question about scale. Whilst we may applaud and support the resistance of a community against a powerful TNC, this alone does not challenge the structural power of capital. The conjuncture in 2006 in Oaxaca when the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) was formed in response to the repressive governorship of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, demonstrates the limits of action restricted to one particular locale. What I contend rather more modestly in the article, therefore, is that these sites demonstrate the starting points for action, and questions that we need to pose rather than end points in themselves. It would be easy to dismiss them as marginal, but what happens in the periphery does not have to stay peripheral. Highlighting the continuation of non-capitalism offers an opening to reimagining how alternative socio-economic models could develop.
In contrast to what is sometimes the dominant imagery, resistance and transformative action is thereby moved from nowhere to now here.
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