nav-icons nav-icons
Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Progress in Political Economy (PPE)
LOGIN REGISTER
LOGIN
REGISTER
linklink
  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
Book Launch on Neoliberalism: Key Concepts
Previous
In Defense of Old Materialism
Next

Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting Neoliberal Europe

by Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton on October 16, 2017

Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting Neoliberal Europe

Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton | October 16, 2017

Tags: dialectics
dialectics
| 0 515

Despite increasing inequality and social deprivation in Europe since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007-8, right-wing parties, such as the French Front National and the German Alternative for Deutschland, have benefited the most in recent elections. Does the electoral failure of the Left indicate that there is no progressive resistance against austerity and neo-liberal restructuring in Europe? Not so say the authors of Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting (the Critical Political Economy of) Neoliberal Europe. In this blog post we provide a critical review of the book and some pointers as to wider debates that it may inform.

In this path-breaking book David J. Bailey, Mònica Clua-Losada, Nikolai Huke and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz have developed what they describe as a disruption-oriented approach to resistance, which overcomes a negative assessment of the state of the Left. There is a danger, these authors argue, that a focus solely on the electoral terrain obscures ongoing contestation of neoliberal restructuring.

This current round of crises, we argue, has not only led to a “hardening” of European and national state structures, but has also witnessed novel forms of organising from below, and resistant subjectivities that – albeit sometimes having the appearance of being both fragile and temporary in nature – nevertheless opened potential avenues for radical social change (pp. 2-3).

A disruption-oriented approach is able to reveal that neoliberalisation is anything but stable and assured in and beyond Europe. It ‘should instead be viewed as a fragile, troubled and hard-fought development’ (p. 238). In order to analyse the ongoing disruption of neoliberalism, these authors suggest moving beyond a focus only on the struggle for state power and also widening the optic to encompass different territories in resistance and radical ruptures. Focusing on the agency of contestation opens up new avenues towards a potential transformation of the current situation. ‘Disruption-oriented accounts highlight the creative capacity of labour, the new forms of activity it undertakes, and its endless ability to adapt to and create new social contexts. Capital is thus considered secondary and reactive’ (p. 26). In our thinking the disruption-oriented perspective sits well alongside a focus on radicalised dialectics proposed by George Ciccariello-Maher that addresses the contested nature of all identities, such that division and rupture have to be foregrounded and combatively insisted upon as part of the violent, antagonistic, and contradictory open-ended dimensions of class struggle.

In contrast with the focus on decolonising dialectics, though, the sphere of social reproduction including housing, education and health services are especially identified and treated in detail by the authors of Beyond Defeat and Austerity as locations of ongoing radical disruption and contestation. When the housing bubble burst in Spain in 2008 due to the global financial market crisis, the socio-spatial political economy of Spain went into crisis. In 2012, in order to secure the country’s financial sector, the Spanish government had ‘to borrow from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) of the so-called “Troika”, and in turn to sign a Memorandum of Understanding which brought with it draconian austerity measures’ (p. 147). As a result, the health sector in Madrid was earmarked for privatisation. ‘After the plans became public, employees enclosed themselves in the hospitals (encierros) and organised assemblies with a massive participation of the workforce. This represented the birth of the marea blanca. Regular assemblies took place in every one of the affected hospitals that quickly expanded to include users of health services’ (p. 150). In short, a broad alliance – in this case militant workers and public health users – came together to protect health care as a public good and ultimately were successful in halting privatisation.

Austerity has not only affected crisis countries in Continental Europe. In the UK, for example, Conservative-led governments have passed one austerity budget after another since 2010. And yet, here too, we can identify ongoing ruptures, new movements challenging austerity. In the country’s housing crisis, especially in London, students have been highly active. In 2015 and 2016, students at University College London engaged in large-scale rent strikes in protest over increasingly unaffordable student accommodation. ‘The final outcome saw the Cut the Rent group herald a victory, as UCL agreed to make available £350,000 for the academic year 2016-17, to fund accommodation bursaries for those students in most need of financial support, and £500,000 for the following year, as well as agreeing to freeze rent for 2016/17’ (p. 224).

As with any book, though, one may point to some gaps in the volume. First, the focus on progressive disruptions might be in danger of leading to an over optimistic picture about the potential of transformation towards a different political economy. One quibble could be that there is little acknowledgement of the structuring conditions of capitalism, which constrain the room of manoeuvre for agencies of resistance. Equally, while contestation is ongoing, can substantial change actually be obtained without taking state power, be it at the local, regional or national level? Second, the contestation around Brexit is mentioned in the last chapter, but the current challenge of the extreme right, racialised politics, and its xenophobic policies in the UK and elsewhere and what this may imply for disruption-oriented struggles by the Left is little discussed.

Nevertheless, these small points of criticism should not distract from the excellent contributions by this book. This volume successfully debunks the idea that neoliberalism and austerity are firmly established in Europe. In fact, austerity is constantly contested by a new, disruptive form of agency at the workplace and across society.

This volume is a contribution of utmost importance to understanding exploitation and resistance in Europe, a must-read for everyone interested in progressive ways out of the crisis!

Share this post

  • Tweet
  • Share Post:

Author: Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton

Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton are joint authors of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Globalisation and Enlargement of the European Union: Austrian and Swedish Social Forces in the Struggle over Membership (Routledge, 2000) and The Struggle for a Social Europe: Trade Unions and EMU in Times of Global Restructuring (Manchester University Press, 2006) as well as co-editor (with Bruno Ciccaglione, Ingemar Lindberg and John Hilary) of Free Trade and Transnational Labour (Routledge, 2015) and (with Chun-Yi Lee) of Chinese Labour in the Global Economy (Routledge, 2017). Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (Pluto Press, 2007) and Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), which was awarded the 2012 Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG). He is the founding editor of the blog Progress in Political Economy (PPE) that is a central forum for political economy debates and was awarded the 2017 International Studies Association (ISA) Online Media Caucus Award for the Best Blog (Group) and the 2018 International Studies Association (ISA) Online Media Caucus Award for Special Achievement in International Studies Online Media.

Related Posts

 

Special Workshop on ‘Negative Ontology’

During the Past & Present Reading Group's progress through Kohei Saito's volume Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Month...

 

Dancing the Dialectic in the Neoliberal University

This week I watched Andrei Rublev, the black and white masterpiece created in 1965 by Russian auteur, Andrei Tarkovsky. The film depicts a series of vignettes featuring Rublev, ...

 

Rupturing the Dialectic

In his latest book Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money and Financialization, Harry Cleaver makes an emphatic case for the im...

 

Can Recognition be Decolonised?

Europe’s colonial encounter with the Americas has profoundly influenced modern conceptualisations of the political subject. As argued in an article ‘Amazonian Struggles ...

Comments

Leave a Response Cancel reply


Join our mailing list

© Progress in Political Economy (PPE)

Privacy | Designed by Nucleo | Terms and Conditions

  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
 

Loading Comments...