neoliberalism

The Future of Capitalism with Wolfgang Streeck

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In this special edition of the CURA podcast we talk to Wolfgang Streeck, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, about his works “Buying Time” (2013) and “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016). You can listen and download the podcast here , on soundcloud, itunes, and most major podcast platforms.

Drawing widely on classics from Schumpeter, Polanyi and Marx, Streeck offers an account of the lineage of democracy, capitalism and the state since the post-war period, identifying the deeply de-democratising and self-destructive trajectory in contemporary capitalist development. Against liberal received wisdom, Streeck argues that democracy and capitalism are anything but natural partners or easy bedfellows, but have in fact been in constant historical tension. The post-war social democratic settlement represents an unusual “fix” to this tension that was relatively favourable to the popular classes, or “wage dependent”, parts of the population. However, this fix unravelled in the 70’s as the capitalist, or “profit-dependent”, class rediscovered its agency and, with neo-liberal globalisation and financialisation, began to shape a world in its interests.

Streeck argues that these processes are putting in danger not only the existence of democratic politics, which is increasingly circumscribed by the need for states to appease financial markets, but also the future of capitalism itself. Streeck’s vision for what is to come is gloomy. Capitalism continues to erode the social foundations necessary for its own sustenance, as well as the resources needed to collectively construct an alternative order. Institutional and policy fixes to capitalist contradictions are running out. We can expect the result to be the development of an increasingly uncertain and under-institutionalised social order, reminiscent of a Hobbesian state of nature, where individual agency and creativity becomes fundamental to meet basic needs and achieve even minimal goals. Politics offers hope of rupture, but is itself increasingly constrained and defiled by capitalist development and rationality.

In this podcast CURA‘s Adrian Bua talks to Wolfgang about his work on the trajectory of capitalism and democracy.

Popular Democracy – Rejoinder by Baiocchi and Ganuza

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In this post we bring CURA’s book debate on Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza’s book “Popular Democracy” to a close, with a rejoinder by the authors to Adrian Bua’s review, written in response to an opening post describing the main argument of the book.

We thank Adrian Bua and CURA for this invitation to reflect on this important set of issues in the contemporary debate about cities, neoliberalism, and the future of democracy.

Adrian Bua presents us with a set of interesting provocations about the challenges of participation in a neoliberal context based on two major issues: the limits of procedures, and the relations between institutions and social struggles. It is not only a question of political will, as Adrian suggests, but of concrete material struggles. And that is what we are going to try address here, knowing that the challenge is huge, touching as it does, on issues that are central to the political left.

The history of Participatory Budgeting dates to pro-democracy struggles in Brazil in the 1980s, but the jump to its becoming a global icon is inextricably linked to the alterglobalization movement. In the early 2000s the Workers Party of the city of Porto Alegre organized the World Social Forum with the alterglobalization movement.  The slogan that emerged, “Another World is Possible”, connected social struggles for a fairer world, which social movements had been claiming on a planetary scale for over ten years, with a participatory experience promoted by a government of the left, which had been implemented in Porto Alegre over the previous decade. There, the desires for a fairer world informed by social justice joined with an instrument based on the participation of the people in the political decision making. This instrument had already proven its ability to distribute wealth in a municipality in the Global South, and therefore, quickly became a global icon against neoliberal policies.

In spite of the seemingly unstoppable advances of neoliberal logics in the next decade, PB  became known as an instrument able to lead a public management in the direction of social justice than actual governance outcomes. After the first three World Social Forums, PB experiences multiplied in the world. Spanish experiences come directly from the WSF, where politicians and activists went to the first years. US  experiences arrived through an American Social Forum, a derivate of the World Social Forum, a few years later.  This is not to say that PB has been promoted by social movements, but the rhetoric surrounding PB come from the WSF and it was used by political representatives to implement this experience in Europe and the US. So, PB in global North was pregnant with ideas about social justice and the democratization of public spaces. How can neoliberalism usurp this idea?

The failure or limits of PB in the Global North, as we discuss in the book, are not due to a lack of tools, but to a political perspective. The history of capitalism that Boltanski and Chiapello outline in The New Spirit of Capitalism already announced the coexistence of artistic logics with the traditional logics of resistance. Participation offers a genuine channel to this artistic expression: more autonomy, self-management and horizontality. That the WB has changed its own way of approaching development, incorporating participation as a driving idea, may be a good example of this. But so are the manuals of new public management so widespread in European countries today. They have made it possible for all types of government, irrespective of their ideology, to see participation as a possible way. The expansion of PB in the world has much to do with this, rather than the ideals of social movements.

However, what we argue is that, despite this, the PB carries with it a radically democratic idea: as it gives autonomy to the people and puts them at the center of the political process, something that we cannot ignore. Participants in these experiences are able to go beyond the boundaries of representation to visualize a radical democratic game, which continually compels them to try to re-connect participation to decision-making processes and social justice, which often involves conflict with the administration promoting PB.  For the Indignados in Spain, for example, PBs were always a concrete tool capable of transferring their rhetoric for social justice to a concrete institutional context. The problem is not the tool, but the political perspective with which the PB is implemented.

The dilemmas that Adrian mentions are real.  Local governments face constraints in pursuing radical policies, partly because they do not have sufficient power to condition the policies that most affect citizenship.  The scales of democracy, to rehearse an old argument of Robert Dahl, are mismatched.  Problems are felt locally, and local constituencies routinely elect more governments that are more progressive or radical, than national ones.   But local governments can do very little to impact policies, such as employment policies, that are the main concern of their constituents.  And in a globalized world, interconnections reduce the autonomy of agents even further.  National governments now find their space of maneuver reduced.

But this does not mean that nothing can be done. It does not mean that if in Europe economic decisions have a marked technocratic and neoliberal character, municipal governments can not deploy political measures with other logics. The problem, we insist, is a political one.  Nothing prevents the establishment of radical democratic mechanisms in cities.  Whether these might come into conflict down the line with policies at other levels of government, or if it might awaken political demands that are more radical than current governance allows, are different questions.   Now, the question would be whether a political project of such caliber is really desired. If the PB has always been implemented on the way that caused the least resistance in the cities, disconnecting it from the operative centers of the administrations, we need to question the political projects behind these implementations. Do rulers really want that democratic radicalism? This obviously alludes to a political issue of immense controversy for the political left. But perhaps the movements of indignados in Spain and Occupy in Us were right to stop thinking of utopian horizons, societies that had to be designed beforehand, which always requires experts and political elites, to imagine a democratic radicalization. It is this democratic radicalism that is frightening, even to many leftist militants and activists.

In Madrid and Barcelona, today’s governments, which would be impossible to understand without the protests of indignados, could assume that democratic radicalism more broadly. It is true that it is not only about techniques, but about political culture and that way is very long. This would not mean to reject experts or politicians, but to democratize political spaces. It is true that none of the governments of the two Spanish cities has a majority in their respective municipalities, which conditions their own government program. But they can undoubtedly use more democratic logics in local affairs where they have maneuverability. That will not change the world, but it would help make it more egalitarian and fairer. But above all it would generate concrete referents to follow that way.

The second great question raised by Adrian Bua has to do with the very design of the participatory experience and to what extent we could say that a participatory government can effectively favor a more just and egalitarian politics. We have already mentioned above that we understand that the problems have not to do so much with the techniques as with the political perspective. Here the question raises doubts about the ability of governments to establish democratic institutions from above, reversing the bottom-up logic that has usually been a commonplace for the political left imaginaries. We understand that doubts are more than reasonable considering past experience, but that cannot make us forget that institutions are based in society.

The problem, as we understand it, is not the institution, unless we imagine a world without them, but the type and logic that make institutions work. As the PBs have been designed, we will hardly see large institutional changes, since they are conceived outside the great political nodes in the administrations. If we say that institutional design matters, it is because we find it difficult to think of social change without changing institutions. The PB has been designed in most of the experiences at the margins of institutions, it is that peripheral character that weakens their possibilities of change. Even so, we understand that the very dynamics involved in a participatory budget activates the political imagination of the participants towards less neoliberal logics and, in many cases, leads them to challenge the limits imposed by the promoters of experiences.

Perhaps if the PB is repeated much will be able to generate a political imaginary that serves as the basis for more substantive experiences. Perhaps, also, it only serves to tarnish a new experiment that promised a lot and was unable to face the oligarchical logics of neoliberalism. In any case, participation as a tool does not pose any challenge in its development. There are innumerable techniques capable of converging the lot with participation in the assembly or in a digital environment. The problem is the political perspective that frames participation and everything that implies in a political scenario dominated by neoliberalism: autonomy and horizontality. That is the political radicalism of the project and in turn the great dilemma for political representatives, whether of the left or right. Do we want really radical democratic institutions?

Gianpolo Baiocchi is associate professor of individualized studies and sociology, as well as director of the Urban Democracy Lab and Civic Engagement at the, Gallatin School, New York University.

Ernesto Ganuza is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Social Studies, Spanish National Research Council (IESA- CSIC) in Cordoba, Spain.

Popular Democracy – Response by Adrian Bua

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In this post Adrian Bua continues CURA’s third book debate by replying to Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza’s first post outlining the argument in their recent book “Popular Democracy: the Paradox of Participation”.

Popular Democracy deals with an important question for contemporary debates on democratisation – what is the democratic potential of participatory governance in a context of deepening neo-liberalism? To answer this the book develops a history of changes in public administration theory and practice, and then focuses specifically on the origins and travel of Participatory Budgeting (PB) from Porto Alegre in Brazil to Cordoba in Europe and Chicago in North America. In doing so, the authors draw on years of research into participatory governance including ethnographies in the European and North American case studies.

On one hand, Popular Democracy tells a story of the neo-liberal usurpation of what was originally a radical and innovative attempt to revive the socialist project in the context of disillusionment with the pseudo-socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. However, as is clear from the author’s first post, as PB travelled the globe, it became disconnected from its original attempt to provide a collective space for the pursuit of distributive justice, to one oriented towards the individual expression of preferences (for an overview of this process of disconnection see here). On the other hand, the book also tells a more positive story about possibilities opened up by PB. In this post I invite the authors to elaborate upon the implications of their arguments for (a) the potential and limits of institutional design, and (b) the relationship between social struggle and participatory governance, and the role of the former in generating opportunities for empowerment.

First, a key argument of the book is that institutional design matters. Thus, as Ernesto and Gianpaolo argue in their initial entry, if participation is to be a genuinely democratising force, it should be clearly linked to binding decisions of state administration, which itself must adopt a participatory ‘modus operandi’  to accommodate participatory inputs. For reasons I won’t repeat here, but have summarised in another review, this was achieved in Porto Alegre – which turns minds to the claim that processes and institutions can be designed by elites to empower citizens. This is a key tenet of “top-down democratisation”.  I would like to ask the authors, firstly, to what extent is success down to the technicalities of getting the institutional design “right”, or is it more to do with politics? The second question is about how far institutional design can go – to what extent can a well-designed Participatory Budget influence fundamental questions about political economy, including how resources are distributed; where economic power lies? The challenge here might be that there is space for participatory governance in times of plenty, but it hits the buffers when resources are scarce and there is more conflict over both the size of budgets and distribution.

International research into collaborative governance led by us at CURA broaches the question of what happens to collaborative practice and ideology during capitalist busts – in times such as the present one, of low growth and austerity. Our cases vary. To give two examples, in the UK it is clear that participatory governance has lost the normative power it once had amongst local state actors. It has become a tool for the local state to manage the consequences of, and adapt to, austerity and scarcity – a far cry away from the empowering and democratising claims associated with it in earlier times. However, in Barcelona, municipal government is experimenting with radicalised forms of participatory governance. Although hopeful, this experiment is severely limited. It is a crosscurrent, even if a strong one, to a hostile Spanish state which continues to deepen neo-liberalism. Still, the fact that such experiments are taking place in various Spanish cities indicates a more generalised ambition for a more participatory democracy and an alternative, more socially just, political economy.

The experience in Barcelona, and Spain more broadly, is rooted in the oppositional and pre-figurative politics of post-crash social movements based around the 15-M demonstrations. The influence of PB upon these social movements is alluded to in the book, which argues that despite their clear limitations, the experience of US and Spanish PB ignited a radicalism which lived on in mass mobilisations such as occupy in the US and the indignados in Spain. It evoked new political subjects and expanded social imaginaries beyond the boundaries of representation in ways that contributed to the alternatives proposed by these movements. This is an interesting argument because critics of elite democracy promotion (or ‘governance-driven democratisation’ for others) argue that it forecloses, and diverts energy away from, more critical and bottom up forms of participation and struggle which have historically been perhaps the main democratising force. Given the different outcomes observed in our own research, at which point, and why, do the authors think that the demands they made translated into this substantive reform agenda within formal political institutions? At the level of direct participants this seems counter-intuitive – surely, taking part in the kinds of individualised, zero-sum processes the authors describe in their initial post must be a disappointing and disempowering experience? I would like to ask the authors to expand on how is it that more radical and democratic subjects emerge from this, particularly in light of the much-discussed diminution out of the Porto-Alegre model?

This question brings me to my final point.  Ernesto and Gianpaolo’s account points to a non-dichotomous, even complementary, relationship between top-down and bottom-up spaces of participation. Municipal governments like Barcelona en Comu and Ahora Madrid evidence this kind of relationship – they are rooted in grassroots oppositional politics, but now engage in institutional design and policy making. Their move into the state means a move “from protest to proposition”. At the end of the book the authors argue that the challenge for the future is to make the most of the critical energies summoned by participatory experiences like PB. I would like to close by asking what advice the authors have for radical administrations currently experimenting with participatory governance.  Do they think that this participatory milieu in urban governance can be shored up and avoid neo-liberal co-option – and what is the role, if any, for critical and oppositional forms of participation and social struggle in this?

One respondent from the fieldwork in Barcelona (see p. 17 here), put the contextual challenges faced by this project well:

“The tools are very tiny and the expectations are great. How can the City Council of a city that is globally located on the map of the relevant cities in the world, which attracts migratory flows, capital flows… how can it manage a power that it does not have? The City Council does not have the power of the city. It is a very small portion of power”.

Adrian Bua is a researcher and a core member of CURA.

Patterns of Neoliberalisation and Resistance

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Professor Jonathan Davies introduces a new paper “Austerity Urbanism: Patterns of Neoliberalisation and Resistance in Six Cities of Spain and the UK”. The paper is co-authored with Ismael Blanco and published in Environment and Planning A. The article is fully open access and can be downloaded at the link above.

The relationship between austerity, neoliberalism and the governance of cities has been the source of intense debate since the 2008 crash. We develop a fresh perspective, through a six-case comparative analysis of austerity urbanism in Spain (Barcelona, Donostia, Lleida and Madrid) and the UK (Cardiff and Leicester).

We begin by looking at a continuum of perspectives on neoliberalism, from thinkers like Perry Anderson who see it as a globalising hegemonic strategy of historically unprecedented influence, to urbanists, who see it as infinitely variegated and even disappearing when studied under a fine-grain analytical lens. Our argument is that if, in the spirit of critical realism, we treat social life as stratified and scaled, then these analytical polarities are not mutually exclusive. Divergence at one level of analysis can underpin convergence at another – and indeed vice-versa.  Convergence and divergence should therefore be understood in relational terms.

Following this intuition, our central argument is – perhaps unsurprisingly – that culturally, politically and economically diverse austerity regimes tend to strengthen neoliberalism in both Spain and the UK.  Urban austerity regimes are far more strongly embedded in UK cities than in Spain, bearing witness to the enduring shadow cast over local politics by the Thatcherite shock of the 1980s.  Yet, in cities where anti-austerity struggles are highly developed, as in Barcelona and Madrid, the potential for urban transformations is both tantalizing and fraught with difficulties.  At the same time, the breadth of regional variation in Spain leads us to follow Patrick Le Gales (2016) in asking where “neoliberalism” begins and ends. Donostia, for example, retains a strong commitment to public welfare, made possible by the relative economic strength and autonomy of the Basque region and the durability of local welfarist traditions across the electoral divide. Hence, while explaining how local varieties of neoliberalism strengthen neoliberalism as a global project, we also recognize limits to the concept and the potential for overcoming it through resistance grounded in urban politics.

Theoretically, we follow a regime approach, developing a heuristic analysis based on Clarence N. Stone’s “iron law”. Stone (2015) states that for any governing regime to succeed, resources must be commensurate with the agenda pursued. This simple formulation provides a helpful lens for bringing our diverse case studies into a meaningful conversation with one another, around the question of what alliances are forged among which actors, mobilizing what resources in pursuit of which goals – and with what limitations?  Applying this lens allows us to develop an inductive comparison around a thematically structured discussion of austerity governance and resistance in our six cities. Through this approach we benchmark the powers and limitations of neoliberal austerity regimes.

We finally consider the implications of our study for conceptualizing neoliberalism and for further developing urban regime analysis in the spirit of Stone’s iron law. The paper concludes with eight propositions to inform future studies of austerity urbanism.  We hope readers find them useful and stimulating.

Jonathan Davies is Director of CURA and Professor of Critical Policy Studies at De Montfort University

Popular Democracy by Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza

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In this post Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpaolo Baiocchi begin our third instalment of CURA’s Book Debates series by outlining the main argument in their recently co-authored book “Popular Democracy: the Paradox of Participation” – where they trace the development of participatory governance, focusing specifically on the paradigmatic process of Participatory Budgeting, its origins in the Southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, and its subsequent globalization as it travelled to European and North American cities. In a forthcoming post, CURA’s Adrian Bua will write a response and Ernesto and Gianpaolo will close the debate with a reply.

No one can escape the fact that we live in an era where calls for participation are ubiquitous. Participation is seen as the solution to the failings of democracy and a weakened civic spirit. Today, political actors, from specialists to politicians and administrators, compete to bear the heraldry of participation. We are talking about a new political hegemony.

This participatory era rests on new kinds of participatory processes that are different in spirit to those in the 70’s. Participation nowadays focusses on the public in general, in the form of deliberative spaces in which individuals, rather than civic associations, are invited to reflect on public affairs, and, in many cases to make policy decisions.  A direct form of participation is invoked that breaks with the tradition of relegating participation to a mere measure of public opinion.

However, viewed historically, this expansion of participation is somewhat paradoxical. Participation has ceased to be a counter-power like that of the 1970’s, and has become part of the functioning of administration and formal political power. It is a process of top-down democratization. Beginning with the revolts of the seventies against centralized bureaucracies, public administration has found in participation a faithful ally in its attempt to become more proximate to society, and realise the need for the public legitimation of politics. Participatory rhetoric has changed the hallmark with which it was usually presented – from prostesting, to proposing. Participation in the new spaces is not a matter of oppositional reclamation, but of constructive proposition.

Criticisms of this historical process have by no means been delayed. Both the content and context of this new political hegemony have been linked to the predatory spirit of neoliberalism. After all, participation’s logic is close to neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial spirit – do it yourself! This criticism is most forceful in a context in which the political impact of participation in cities is doubted. Just when there is no city in the world that does not invite citizens to participate, participation has lost its social justice focus, and provides spaces for consumerist disputes instead.

Faced with this all-engulfing neoliberal wave, the book explores the birth and journey of one of the most emblematic participatory processes; that of participatory budgeting. As a metaphor for this new political hegemony, we have seen how the travel of participation leads to its trivialization and disengagement from political processes as it lands on new shores. In this process, full of contradictions and popular struggles between lay citizens and elites such as experts, bureaucrats and politicians, the dilemma of participation’s neo-liberalization comes into view.

The problem of participation lies in thinking about the link between opinion and power only in terms of the relationship between citizens and representatives, without taking into account how political institutions work. Participation then becomes limited to a process for revealing public preferences. As good as that may be for some, it forgets all the second-order issues involved in politics: priorities must be defined in a (democratic) setting characterised by the equality of all and the existence of finite resources. It is therefore not enough to count proposals, nor to turn participation into a zero-sum game. You win, I lose. Information and debate are needed before deciding. A practical and material concept of the equality that offers everybody a real voice is needed. Therefore, it is not surprising that if we understand participation as an expression of individual preferences, in this context of finite resources, participatory processes become platforms for the selfish pursuit of individual interests.

Participation aims to build bridges between politics and society, but when it is disconnected from institutions it can degenerate into fatuous disputes. In other words, if participation is to claim a legitimate presence in contemporary society it will need to be linked to the workings of public administration. To achieve this, it is necessary to develop administrative reforms that envisage a participatory modus operandi. Otherwise participation will always be peripheral to both politics and social developments – and will thus fail to resolve democracy’s problems and the need for the public legitimation of political decisions.

Gianpolo Baiocchi is associate professor of individualized studies and sociology, as well as director of the Urban Democracy Lab and Civic Engagement at the, Gallatin School, New York University.

Ernesto Ganuza is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Social Studies, Spanish National Research Council (IESA- CSIC) in Cordoba, Spain.

Urban Futures Podcast – the Grounded City with Karel Williams

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We are delighted to launch CURA’s “Urban Futures” podcast series with this edition on the “Grounded Citymanhattan-67474_960_720” with Karel Williams, Professor of Accounting and Political Economy at the University of Manchester.

If you use iTunes click here to listen and download the podcast, otherwise you can use soundcloud – and remember to leave a rating / comments!

Some more information below.

In his and his colleagues work on the “Grounded City” Karel argues that the dominance of theories of urban agglomeration in urban policy making reflect a belated recognition of “the urban” by neo-liberal economists. However, Karel and his colleagues argue that there are fundamental deficiencies in the agglomeration approach which rise from the imperialism, and hubris, of classical economics in social science. The “Grounded City” offers an alternative policy imaginary which is interdisciplinary in nature but draws principally on the urban historiography of Fernand Braudel and other scholars such as Charles Tilly – literatures which agglomeration theories simply fail to recognise.

 

Why network governance won’t stop climate change

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In today’s post Professor Jonathan Davies draws on Gramscian theory to argue that network governance ideology fails to engage with real power structures, and that state-society partnerships cannot stop climate change. This post was originally published on the Innovations in Climate Governance (INOGOV) website and republished with their permission

The idea of “network governance” began to grip academics and policy makers as part of the turn to the “third way” in the 1990s. Enthusiasm for networks arose from a particularly influential reading of social change.  Confronted by dramatic processes of globalisation and de-traditionalisation, often associated with the passing of modernity, many thinkers reasoned that states could no longer exercise sovereign power and instead have to involve a multitude of other actors to govern successfully.  Governing systems, in other words, have to become de-centred, or polycentric.  As INOGOV research demonstrates, climate change governance has been strongly influenced by these ideas.

At the same time, with the decline of trade unionism in many countries, the language of “working class” disappeared from mainstream political discourse, to be replaced by “civil society”.  Civil society with its networks of voluntary and community organisations is a far more palatable partner for neoliberalising states than the unions. It can be incorporated into state projects, and provide links into dispossessed and alienated communities that are abandoning the institutions of representative democracy. Working through “civil society”, state-organised networks could focus on the practical business of problem solving within the parameters of neoliberalism: trying to balance competitiveness with social cohesion, while setting aside the structural foundations of inequality and injustice. Urban living labs seeking to innovate around smart cities and sustainability are a good example of this ideology in practice.  For the most idealistic thinkers, network governance ushers in a new, cooperative and communicative form of sociability capable of replacing the crumbling hierarchical edifice of modernity.

Much of my work has been concerned with the critique of this exaggerated and normatively charged theory of change (see [1], [2], [3], [4]). I argue that the idea of network governance as an “innovation” transforming the way we are governed is hopelessly idealistic. At best it is the vague premonition of a post-capitalist society incubating within the bowels of a nasty, authoritarian neoliberal conjuncture.  There are multiple reasons for skepticism about “network governance”.  First, there is nothing new about it.  Any brief survey of early 20th century literatures show that the kinds of institutions considered “innovative” by network enthusiasts have been around for a very long time. Second, when studied close-up, “networks” look very much like the “hierarchies” they are supposed to replace.  Participatory networks, like urban living labs, tend to be cosmetic.  States and corporations are by far the biggest drivers of climate change, and they determine how it is governed through duplicitous practices like carbon trading.  Moreover, networks entrench inequalities of wealth and power – the very reason they are attractive to elites.  They leave the dispossessions and human disasters of climate change untouched and require us to think about injustice in de-politicized vernaculars of “innovation”, “adaptivity”, “inclusion” and “sustainability”.  They promise relentless “change”, but always within the parameters of the present.  Like a washing machine, we are in continuous motion but never move.

To try and put network governance in its place, and situate it in a better understanding of historical continuity and change, I turned to the work of Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci (see [1], [2]).  Gramsci developed a theory of politics, in which state and civil society are deeply enmeshed.  He argued that the coercive and consensus-building tactics and strategies of government play out on the terrain of civil society.  Gramsci’s definition of civil society was much broader than the rather benign world of voluntary organisations depicted in democratic theory.  He included the media and education systems, while today’s Gramscian scholars also point to the power of charitable foundations. Much of what we call “civil society” is either closely linked to corporations and the state, or depends on them for donations, grants and contracts.  Swathes of civil society are hierarchical, predatory and conservative. Gramsci called this deep web of entanglements and inter-dependencies “the integral state”, Lo Stato Integrale.  He argued that government “educates” civil society through a myriad of coercive and consensus-building techniques.  When states are threatened with revolution, he said, a well-organised civil society turns out to be their best protection.

Studied through the lens of the integral state, what we call “network governance” looks very conventional and not at all “innovative”.  States may be shedding their postwar welfare and redistributive functions, but its coercive functions have not disappeared.  On the contrary, they are coming to the fore. When we look at the anatomy of state-organised governing networks, we find coercive managerialism everywhere.  In participatory mechanisms state managers control agendas, while those seeking to politicize an issue are often quickly marginalized.  Informal networks, on the other hand, reinforce the power of governing elites and corporate interests, which dominate climate change decisions.  Under austerity, participatory mechanisms are either set aside or tasked with advising on where the state should make its cuts. Even the much-vaunted participatory budgeting mechanisms of Latin America are widely recognized to be in decline.  And, in hindsight, they didn’t exercise that much control over the governing apparatus to start with.

The point is not that public participation is bad, or that polycentric systems do not exist in some circumstances.  It is rather that branding unremarkable practices as new, radical or innovative can be dangerous because it conceals deep continuities and asymmetries in the structures of power.  In the age of authoritarian neoliberalism, network governance is little more than a sticking plaster for the gaping wounds of late capitalism, of which climate change is among the worst.

Jonathan S. Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The EU Referendum and the ailings of contemporary democracy

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In this post Adrian Bua argues that Brexit highlights fundamental failures in contemporary British democracy.

Democracy was a key element of the debate around whether the UK should exit or remain in the EU. One of the main criticisms of the EU from both right and left is the distant and unaccountable nature of its institutions. And now, calls for the referendum to be repeated by those shocked by the actual and potential future consequences of ‘Brexit’ are increasingly popular. This move is condemned by Brexiteers as an affront to democracy. On the face of it, they make a valid point. The referendum result gave a clear, if narrow, mandate to leave. Ignoring it would further underline the reality of a pro-EU elite that has lost touch with those ‘ordinary people’ that politicians such as Farage argue have been oppressed by migration.

However, contemporary democratic theory places serious doubts on plebiscitary forms of decision making. In deliberative models it is not only the process of aggregating votes that matters, but also the processes of opinion formation preceding the vote. Leaving aside the widely debated, complex and unresolved issue of whether, and when, direct democratic processes are appropriate to make complex decisions – the phenomenon of the EU referendum highlighted clear deficits and inconsistencies in our representative democracy. In characteristically opportunistic fashion, David Cameron called a referendum to avoid a Tory split that could have been fatal for his 2015 election ambitions.  Martin Lodge and Will Jennings argue that this reflects a broader phenomenon whereby referenda are used not to advance democracy but for political leaders to control divisions in their own parties.

These inconsistencies reflect deep rooted problems in our political system. During the post-war consensus, the institutional landscape of British democracy was enriched by collective mass-membership organisations that had close relationships with political parties and kept them grounded in people’s lives. However, the current turmoil is arguably symptomatic of what Colin Crouch termed the UK’s condition of ‘post-democracy’.  The institutions of the social democratic consensus remain, but have been hollowed out by the de-politicising consequences of neo-liberalism and the dominance of politics by privileged individuals and big business. For citizens, elections have become a spectator sport, managed by experts and reported on by private media monopolies. The rise of single-issue politics has been a salutary development, but in no way has it matched the capacity for the institutions of collective action that heralded the social democratic era to channel demands into the political system.

I would argue that the vote in favour of Brexit is a symptom of Britain’s ‘post-democratic’ condition. It is no secret that it is the constituency that suffered the most from the economic re-structuring over the past few decades that favoured ‘Brexit’. The faith that neoliberal policy makers had for entrepreneurial private sector activity to replace the gutting on manufacturing and heavy industry never materialised in peripheral regions. Instead, what Colin Hay has termed an “anglo-liberal growth model” emerged – based on a service industry concentrated in London and consumption fuelled by private credit and a housing boom in the South East. Gordon Brown’s infamous declaration that boom and bust had been abolished revealed the institutionalisation what Colin Crouch termed an “unacknowledged policy regime”. The election-winning machine that was New Labour contributed to the post-democratic condition. Its obsession with “scientific” approaches to evidence based policy making cohered with Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis – politics becomes a managerial and technical endeavour. Citizen participation becomes limited to focus group and survey research designed to optimise the party’s chances to reflect public opinion and thus win elections. Importantly, this left behind the concerns of those working class constituencies that “have nowhere else to go”, as New Labour architect Peter Mandelson put it.

But the chickens have come home to roost. The financial crash, and ensuing recession, deepened the economic woes of peripheral regions. Public sector employment and redistribution from the proceeds of the economy in the South East reduced through austerity. This was compounded by the deepening of the, already established, ‘beggar thy neighbour’ politics that generated contempt for a dependency culture. The Brexit campaign deepened a discourse which was already well developed and increasingly propagated by corporate media empires, that blamed immigrants for economic woes – as well as a lack of ‘control’ over our borders and burdensome EU regulation. At the time of writing, the Labour Party which had given hope to so many people that this situation might change with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, is ripping itself apart with internal struggles between its left and right. It is unclear what the outcome will be, that is a debate for another day, but – regardless of whether Brexit materialises – it will certainly be of great importance in the struggle to shape a fairer, more inclusive and democratic Britain. Should the right win, we can expect even more tea mugs and headstones promising to control immigration than in the campaign ran by Ed Milliband.

Inside and outside the Labour Party, the left should counter this discourse by finding improved ways of communicating the message that the difficulties faced by many supporters of Brexit are not due to immigration, EU regulation of lax border controls, but by a deliberate, and by no means irreversible, re-shaping of the UK political economy since the late 1970’s.  An integral part of this is to articulate a left politics based on democratic participation, empowerment and investment in social services. As Adam Przeworski pithily stated “to discuss democracy without considering the economy in which that democracy must operate is an endeavour worthy of an ostrich”. The left needs to develop a coherent and convincing vision for an alternative political economy that delivers genuine equality of opportunity, and meaningfully redistributes wealth and power. In this vein, Jonathan Davies has called for the UK and European nations to develop a “Marshall Plan for the 21st Century”. It is imperative to put flesh on the bones of this idea, and organise for its fulfilment. Social democracy should end its flirtation with neo-liberalism and regain the necessary confidence to regenerate itself on its own grounds. There is a rich legacy of thinking on participatory forms of socialism to draw on here. EU elites seem keen to make an example of Britain through a painful divorce, and the disposition of the likely UK post-Brexit leadership will be to turn the UK (or what remains of it) into some sort of libertarian utopia and international tax haven – “a free-wheeling island nation” as put by one article outlining a terrifying blueprint for a post Brexit Britain. This “scorched earth plan” is the way we are currently headed, and it is not pretty.

Dr Adrian Bua researches for the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity and the New Economics Foundation.

Brexit: the Need for a “21st Century Marshall Plan”

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2000px-marshall_plan-svgProfessor Jonathan Davies argues for a new “Marshall Plan” to fix the broken political economy of the UK, and of Europe.

There are long decades when history barely moves.  And there are times when decades or even centuries fly by in weeks.  Political history in the UK is suddenly moving at breakneck speed.  Our relationship with the EU is sundered, the UK itself fractured along a bewildering tangle of lines.  The possibility of Scottish secession looms once more.  Friends are at each other’s throats.  Terrified remain supporters – and a good few remorseful leave supporters – call for the government to set aside or ignore the referendum.  The Parliamentary Labour Party has turned all its fire on Jeremy Corbyn, while the Liberal Democrats court redemption by making a play for enraged middle class progressives.  The Conservative Party is in turmoil as is the repentant architect of Brexit, Boris Johnson.

In this febrile atmosphere, the battered, embittered and disenfranchised working classes forming the backbone of Brexit has been chosen as the chief villain of the piece – although almost half of them did not vote at all.  Stuck between the rock of racism and the hard place of “progressive” middle class contempt there is, as always, nothing on the table for them.  We must be clear that the grind, hectoring, dispossession and punishment of austerity and several decades of neoliberalism before that lie at the root of these fractures, themselves symptoms of the long durée of economic decline.  The exuberant junketing of our elites cannot disguise the feebleness of British economic growth, the illusion of shared prosperity sustained through astronomical levels of personal and private debt. The costs of this model have been imposed – quite ruthlessly – on those least able to bear them.  The realities of UK PLC for millions of people are, structural unemployment, zero hours contracts, sweat-shop labour, benefit cuts and sanctions and food banks. Brexit is the blowback.  Even so, conditions are far worse in Greece and Spain.

If Britain and Europe’s elites were serious about keeping the ship afloat, they would recognise the appalling vista they have created, abandon neoliberal ideology and austerity wholesale and embark on a massive programme of redistribution and investment in working class towns and cities. Britain and Europe would move to initiate a 21st century Marshall Plan – the post-war reconstruction programme led by the USA after WW2.  We live in very rich societies, but with ever-greater concentrations of wealth and poverty.  The very existence of the United Kingdom and European Union could now depend on the political will to reverse that trend.  Enormous ideological and political resources have been expended on neoliberalism, and such a step looks vanishingly unlikely.  It is much more likely that the reverse will happen and an even heavier price will be exacted from the working class.  Moreover, it is a moot point whether such a programme would be enough reverse the decline of late Western capitalism.  Either way, Britain and Europe can certainly afford it.  If they want the genie back in its bottle, they will have to pay the price.

Jonathan Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University

Brexit – A Nation Divided

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CURAs Jonathan Payne reflects on Brexit its causes and its consequences for UK progressives

The people of Britain woke up this morning to a Brexit vote and a country deeply divided and ill at ease with itself and its place in the world.  Democracy, the will of the people, had spoken, but no one was quite sure what the consequences would be.

Cameron’s decision to put the question of Britain’s membership of the EU to the people was less about democracy, however, and more about appeasing the right-wing Euro-sceptic elements within his own party, that have been festering for decades, and heading-off splits in the Conservative vote from UKIP. The people, albeit by a slender majority, have now given their decision, rejecting the views of the  ‘experts’, such as the OECD and IMF, who said this would be bad for the economy and jobs. It was Michael Gove who said, ‘People in this country have had enough of experts’, and it would seem, on that score at least, he was more than half right. Like so much of politics, this has been about feeling and sentiment as much as facts and argument.

There is no doubt that some in the Leave campaign, with immigration its strongest suit, played on many people’s fears and anxieties. Right-wing populism thrives by blaming the ‘outsider’ for problems, the roots of which lie elsewhere: in the lack of investment in housing and public services wrought by austerity and in a neo-liberal growth model that generates profound social inequalities and deprivation. Such populism is a cancer that tears at the very heart of an open, tolerant society, one which history teaches us we should all be deeply afraid of.

Perhaps this is why many are so worried about the visceral tone of the debate and what has been unleashed in the process. And what has been unleashed? If the Brexit vote illustrates anything, it is perhaps the deep sense of alienation and abandonment felt among the most deprived and marginalised sections of the white working class, abandoned for decades by the Conservative and New Labour projects. Some deprived neighbourhoods were, it would seem, literally no-go areas for Labour campaigners for Remain. The argument had been lost a long time ago. Many were fed up with ‘establishment politics’, and who could blame them?

And so a process of healing a divided nation begins. How will such anger and despair, unleashed by this referendum, be dealt with? If one question remains, when all the dust has settled, it is this: can Britain, outside of the European Union, forge a progressive growth model that can reduce inequality and work for all its people, in particular those who feel their voice has been marginalised for too long?  We can only hope that such anger can be channelled into progressive politics and there is the intellectual capacity, will and optimism to do so.

Jonathan Payne is Reader in Employment Studies at De Montfort University and a member of CURA (Centre for Urban Research on Austerity) as well as CROWE (Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment.