Conference Presentations by Robert Ogman
Since 2008, crisis governance strategies have been dominated by forms of economic and political r... more Since 2008, crisis governance strategies have been dominated by forms of economic and political retrenchment, seen in the policies of fiscal austerity (Peck 2012) and through the insulation of policy decisions from popular power in a “post-democracy” (Crouch 2011; Jessop 2013a). However, this has exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction and further eroded political legitimacy. As a result, we're witnessing the growth of “active” state policy focused on “social impact”, implemented through the “inclusive” practices of cross-sector collaboration with civil society. This presentation focuses on a critical example of this development, that of the “Social Impact Bond” (SIB).
Introduced in the U.K.'s “Big Society” programme in 2009, more than 40 SIBs now exist throughout the E.U., the U.S., and in both the global North and South. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation will both describe the structure of this policy instrument, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. I will situate SIBs within a specific “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the social crises of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs discursively construct the crisis and an “imagined recovery” (Jessop 2013b), and also shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
Brand, Ulrich. 2014. “State, Context and Correspondence. Contours of a Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis.” Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 32 (4): 425–42.
Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2013a. “Finance-Dominated Accumulation and Post-Democratic Capitalism.” In Institutions and Economic Development after the Financial Crisis, edited by S. Fadda and P. Tridico, 83–105. London: Routledge. http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/finance-dominated-accumulation-and-post-democratic-capitalism/.
———. 2013b. “Recovered Imaginaries, Imagined Recoveries: A Cultural Political Economy of Crisis Construals and Crisis Management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis.” Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics, Politics and Settlement, 234.
Kannankulam, John, and Fabian Georgi. 2014. “Varieties of Capitalism or Varieties of Relationships of Forces? Outlines of a Historical Materialist Policy Analysis.” Capital & Class 38 (1): 59–71.
Peck, Jamie. 2012. “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme Economy.” City 16 (6): 626–55.
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In contrast to popular understandings of the Occupy movement as being “autonomous”, or as being s... more In contrast to popular understandings of the Occupy movement as being “autonomous”, or as being situated “outside” of the state and the political process, or as a movement without demands on public authorities, this presentation highlights Occupy's contribution to the emergence of an alternative policy agenda to neoliberal crisis governance. It is commonly recognized, that through the popular slogan “We are the 99%!”, Occupy not only increased public scrutiny of the drastic centralization of wealth, but also made a policy impact, temporarily destabilizing the dominant “debt ceiling” austerity agenda, and shifting support towards progressive taxation reform and a federal jobs program. Yet, what is less known is the fate of the movement's political significance following its eviction from the public squares in Fall 2011. This presentation explains the flowering of a multitude of local-based initiatives that arose on the front lines of the crisis, targeting particular elements of the ongoing social recession. At these sites, Occupy groups aim to halt the ongoing wave of foreclosures, to alleviate unsustainable levels of student and consumer debt, to prevent continued labor precaritization, and to reverse the trend towards the further hollowing-out of the welfare system. I argue that the calls for a moratorium on foreclosures, for increased labor protections, for consumer debt cancellation, and for a bulkier public provision system, advanced in collaboration with other civil society actors, are basic elements of the “people's bailout” or “people's recovery”, increasingly called for by different sections of the movement. And that furthermore, these specific issues coincide with a more thorough agenda of structural reform seeking increased democratic control over political and economic matters, an ecological development model, cooperative and egalitarian life practices, and more. Against the grain of dominant explanations, I will argue that, despite its many shortcomings and limitations, Occupy has nonetheless contributed to the development of policy alternatives to neoliberal crisis governance and towards a post-neoliberal exit strategy from the crisis.
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"This paper will focus on finance-based accumulation strategies in the current crisis, and social... more "This paper will focus on finance-based accumulation strategies in the current crisis, and social movements targeting personal debt. My theoretical approach is based in critical political economy (Bryan/Rafferty 2010; Harvey 2010; Demirovic 2009), and I will discuss contemporary debt-organizing initiatives amongst U.S. Occupy groups and the California student movement.
Firstly, I rely on the work of Bryan and Rafferty (2010), who highlight the centrality of labor in finance dominated accumulation strategies “as the provider of income streams for securities, to facilitate asset diversification and the search for yield.” They argue, “The rapid growth of mortgage, auto, credit card and student loans, as well as contracts on telephones, energy and health care, all provide the raw materials on which securities are built to meet the demands of global investors.”
However, the financial meltdown of 2007/08 revealed how this poorly “risk-managed” (ibid) labor produced not personal material crises for individual laborers, but a monumental effect upon global markets. As workers facing three decades of stagnant real wages failed to continue servicing increasing levels of mortgage debt, the U.S. foreclosure wave took down the global economy.
This collapse entailed a chaotic devaluation of capital, as investments in financial products could no longer be returned (Harvey 2010). New crisis management strategies emerged to control this process in the future. Drawing therefore from the “postneoliberalism” debates, I rely on Demirovic's (2009) description of new regulatory responses. These “new government technologies” are aimed at the “strategic destruction of capital.”
This means that political struggles today are defined by the question of whose capital will be destroyed: “inflation, small savings, assets for the rich, speculation against developing countries” (ibid).
As Bryan and Rafferty show, this centrality of labor in financialization also reveal its potential power, and hence I turn to current debt-organizing projects. I will look at two initiatives. First, the Strike Debt! seeks broad-scale debt cancellation for individuals suffering under unsustainable levels of personal debt. And second, I will look at the California student movement's opposition to college tuition hikes and the privatization of public education.
Framed against the background of finance-based accumulation strategies, and government technologies coordinating the “strategic destruction of capital”, we will discuss the successes, limitations, and terrain of these contemporary struggles.
Works Cited:
Bryan, Dick; Rafferty, Michael (2010): “Deriving Capital's (and Labour's) Future”, in The Crisis This Time. Socialist Register 2011, Merlin: Wales.
Harvey, David (2010): The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism, Profile: London.
Demirovic, Alex (2009): “Postneoliberalism and Post-Fordism – Is there a new Period in the Capitalist Mode of Production,” in Development Dialogue 51 (January 2009): 45-58."
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Papers by Robert Ogman
You may download books from marketbright.com. Project is a high quality resource for free ePub bo... more You may download books from marketbright.com. Project is a high quality resource for free ePub books.It is known to be world's largest free PDF resources. You have the option to browse by most popular titles, recent reviews, authors, titles, genres, languages and more.The Open Library has more than 150,000 free e-books available.Best sites for books in any format! From romance to mystery to drama, this website is a good source for all sorts of e-books.
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Journal of Urban Affairs
ABSTRACT This paper offers a cultural political economy approach to efforts to advance the “socia... more ABSTRACT This paper offers a cultural political economy approach to efforts to advance the “social investment market” as a specific crisis management strategy in response to the economic crisis of 2008. Analyzing social impact bonds (SIBs), it looks at efforts to combine market mechanisms with new notions of public responsibility, and structures of accountability often described as “ethical capitalism” today. Three central claims are interrogated, both as forms of framing and resolving the crisis. First, the paper is concerned with SIBs’ approach to socio-economic polarization through the development of preventative services focused on creating “social impact.” Second, it focuses on their efforts to avoid exacerbating the state’s fiscal crisis by allowing for private investment in public services. Third, the analysis shows how SIBs intend to counter the economic problem of slow and uneven growth with its idea of creating “shared value” between society and investors. The text is based on empirical case research into two of the world’s first two SIBs, seeking to reduce prisoner re-incarceration in New York City and Peterborough, UK. It analyzes policy papers and 30 interviews conducted with policy actors, to reconstruct the SIB as an asymmetrical, contradictory, and provisional compromise between actors holding divergent policy agendas. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of “progressive neoliberalism,” it shows how SIBs combine notions of public responsibility with market-based structures of a profit-oriented economy, thereby limiting the effort to re-embed the economy in society. Connecting empirical research to theory, it describes a complex process of negotiation on the conflicted terrain of city politics, between efforts to extend market governance on the one hand, and those initiatives seeking to overcome it, on the other.
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Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around th... more The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around the device of a social investment market. At the heart of this social investment market is an innovative new financial instrument, the social impact bond (SIB). In this paper we argue that the SIB promises (partial) solutions to four aspects of the present multifaceted crisis: the crisis of social reproduction; the crisis of capital accumulation; the fiscal crisis of the state; and the crisis of political legitimacy. In this sense, we conceive the social investment market as a crisis management strategy. We draw on evidence from the world’s first SIB, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another....
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Environement and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2019
The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around th... more The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around the device of a social investment market. At the heart of this social investment market is an innovative new financial instrument, the social impact bond (SIB). In this paper we argue that the SIB promises (partial) solutions to four aspects of the present multi-faceted crisis: the crisis of social reproduction; the crisis of capital accumulation; the fiscal crisis of the state; and, the crisis of political legitimacy. In this sense, we conceive the social investment market as a crisis management strategy.
We draw on evidence from the world’s first social impact bond, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another. In developing this argument, this paper contributes to contemporary theories of neoliberalism by investigating how concrete state developments and societal restructuring is being advanced around the idea of linking marketisation with progressive social change. It also supports critical practitioners by offering a theoretical lens to identify the contradictions of this increasingly popular policy approach.
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Urban Austerity. Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Cities in Europe. Sebastian Schipper und Barbara Schönig (eds.), 2016
This text provides a critical inquiry into the increasingly popular policy experiment of “Social ... more This text provides a critical inquiry into the increasingly popular policy experiment of “Social Impact Bonds” (SIBs). It looks into the way SIBs are advanced in response to the multifaceted crisis of neoliberal hegemony and to the problems associated with the predominant austerity paradigm. SIBs are being promoted as a way of “counter(act)ing austerity” (JP Morgan, 2011) by “us[ing] private capital for public good.” (US National Advisory Board on Impact Investing, 2014: 4) This rejuvenated Third Way project seeks to incentivize non-governmental investment in social service provision in the face of a fiscal-cum-social crisis, by offering a new financial product based on the performance of social policy outcomes.
I approach this topic from a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) perspective (Sum & Jessop, 2013). This means analyzing the political significance of SIBs as a response to the current crisis and as part of a process of reproducing and reworking neoliberal hegemony. In this analysis, CPE combines critical political economy and critical discourse analysis to investigate both the material and symbolic causes and implications behind the variation, selection and retention of specific policies and policy discourses in this particular historical conjuncture (ibid.: 184–187).
The next section recounts the emergence of SIBs, which occurred in three stages. It begins with the intellectual origins of SIBs, approximately two decades ago as part of the move towards a post-Washington Consensus. Here, I address both the discursive and institutional aspects. This involves a Third Way discourse about “responsible capitalism” in connection with a “neo-corporatist” (Jessop, 2002: 461) practice involving a “negotiated approach” between market actors, governments and civil society. Next, I move on to the stage of policy selection during which SIBs go from being an idea to an agenda within policy think tanks and state institutions. This occurred during and immediately following the implosion of the financial markets in 2007-08. It shows how SIBs first became framed as an ethical market response to the problems of the financial crisis and, later, as a way to respond to negative social effects caused by public sector budget cuts. The third stage focuses on the implementation of SIBs as a policy experiment as well as their retention in state institutions. This provides some examples of state restructuring measures by which SIBs are implemented.
Following the description of the three stages of SIB emergence, I introduce the case of the Peterborough Social Impact Bond, which was presented as an effort to reduce recidivism among inmates released from the municipal jail. Here, I present the theory of SIBs and use the specific case to illustrate how the SIB is expected to play out in reality. A focus on a core strand of the SIBs discourse, especially the idea of reducing public expenditure follows.
Afterwards, I describe SIB implementation and reveal the contradictions between theory and practice: While the intervention successfully reduced reoffending, it failed to reduce public expenditures. As a result, the state was not able to create savings from which it could share these with investors. Instead, it was compelled to increase expenditure in spite of its supposed fiscal problems, forming special “outcome funds” to pay investor returns. Furthermore, these contradictions did not prevent the government from hailing it as a success or using it to justify the further expansion of SIB projects across the country.
In conclusion, I present the implications of this case for the analysis of policy experimentation as part of the reproduction of hegemony. I argue that this ability of neoliberalism to “fail forward” (Peck, 2012: 6) has much to do with the political blockage preventing genuine alternatives from arising. But these alternatives are not completely eliminated, but rather, their elements are partially and selectively integrated into existing structures. In this case, the popular desire for the economy to make a positive societal contribution is incorporated into existing modes of neoliberal governance through new market-based public responsibility initiatives. These processes are shaped by relations of discursive, technological, structural and agential power (Sum & Jessop, 2013: 218–219), by which economic and profit imperatives over-determine the aspirations that seek to constrain or transcend them. Hence, I describe SIBs as part of a “social neoliberal” strategy or “hegemony project” (Kannankulam & Georgi, 2014: 63) that forges a compromise between “leftist” concerns over the deepening social crisis and the desire for a moral economy, with “rightist” goals of reducing social expenditures and expanding marketisation.
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This text analyses the U.S. Occupy movement as a particular societal response to the crisis of ne... more This text analyses the U.S. Occupy movement as a particular societal response to the crisis of neoliberal hegemony, and as the initial stirrings of a counter-hegemonic project. Here, the movement is situated within the context of a blocked transformation, in which the finance-dominated accumulation regime, despite falling into a deep structural crisis, nonetheless remains dominant. Instead of a post-neoliberal transformation, we are experiencing a resurgent neoliberalism. [...]
In this text, I focus on four specific interventions of the movement at the front line of the crisis to show how it responded to the eviction from the public squares and regrouped, and how it navigated these tensions. My aim is, on the one hand, to provide a historical picture of the post-eviction state of the movement and, on the other hand, to provide an analysis of the movement’s developments and current blockages. The four examples are as follows:
‘Occupy Our Homes’, a multi-city network opposing home foreclosures and evictions. Using direct action along with affected home-owners, this intervention brings the movement into direct confrontation with the process of accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey).
Occupy Labor describes the connections between Occupy and the labour movement. I will try to show how this relationship contributed to the growth of the new movement, on the one side, and to the emergence of a new round of labour struggles against precaritisation, privatisation, and wage dumping, on the other. Here the movement has connected and supported struggles against a ‘recovery’ based on further class polarisation.
Mobilisations of the ‘graduates without a future’ in multiple campaigns against student and consumer debt. In these struggles for debt relief, we see state-interventionist strategies, attempts to build an autonomous debtors’ movement, and mutual aid initiatives. Seeking debt relief, these new subjects are attempting to protect themselves from financial ruin and shift the burden of the crisis of over-accumulation onto the ‘1 %’.
‘Occupy Sandy’, a rapid mutual aid network developed to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy, who were left unprotected by the eroded state safety net, and to defend them against debt-based, personal recovery strategies. In this example, we see the attempts to develop an alternative to a ‘disaster capitalism’ based on the dispossession of low-income urban populations and debt-based recovery, through the formulation of a holistic alternative recovery called ‘the people’s recovery’.
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This paper aims to bring into dialogue three perspectives about the current crisis. Arranged as l... more This paper aims to bring into dialogue three perspectives about the current crisis. Arranged as links in a chain, Section I presents an argument about financalization, that strongly contrasts with popular misconceptions about labor's supposed independence from finance. Here I present the argument of Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2011), who argue that labor was both central to the crisis, and remains central to the frontiers of capital accumulation in the processes of financialization.
From this perspective, where labor occupies a structurally central position, there lies the question of its potential political agency in the current conjuncture, an issue that is then taken up in the second and third sections of this paper.
In Section II, I present in abbreviated form, a theoretical account of the political response to the financial meltdown of 2007/08. Here, I rely on the argument made by Alex Demirovic and Thomas Sablowski (2011), who explain how new forms of crisis governance are emerging, to prevent repeating the chaotic processes of capital devaluation like that experienced in 2007/08. Here, “governmental technologies” are being developed for the “strategic destruction of capital” (Demirovic 2009: 56). This brings to light not only the forms of political regulation, but also the class and power relations behind them. With this insight into the content of the political struggles, comes the question of potential political agency from below, touched on in the first section in terms of labor's strategic positions in processes of finance-based accumulation. But this question becomes the central focus of the final section, when I move to social movements organizing against consumer debt.
In Section III, the third link in the chain is made, focusing on movements of the subaltern which are intervening in the social, political and economic processes described in the previous sections. Here, I focus on student and other debtors, and their calls for debt cancellation, and with it their objectives towards shifting the broad political trajectory. Here I will focus on the Occupy spin-off group, “Strike Debt!”.
These three sections therefore, each focus on different aspects of a dialogue that I've arranged in order to think about the connection between the financialization, crisis governance, and the potential agency of the indebted.
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In Jan Rehmann's presentation, he demonstrated the impact of the Occupy movement on the current p... more In Jan Rehmann's presentation, he demonstrated the impact of the Occupy movement on the current political terrain, concentrating most closely on the “symbolic level of the hegemonic apparatus”.
He is:
“most interested in how OWS effectively intervene[d] in the symbolic order, and stir[red] up – at least temporarily – the power relations in people's common sense.”
Rehmann is concerned with “the way the economic crisis is translated into popular common sense.” Yet, he not only sketches out this dominant narrative; he also explains the alternative narrative developed by the Occupy movement.
My commentary will focus firstly on this symbolic level, inquiring into the content of both the dominant and alternative narratives of the crisis. Then I will raise questions regarding the relationship between the symbolic and other levels of the hegemonic apparatus, concluding with a closer look at the movement's embeddedness in the current crisis, a consideration that remains in my view underdeveloped.
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Talks by Robert Ogman
This presentation focuses on Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) as part of an emerging crisis governance ... more This presentation focuses on Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) as part of an emerging crisis governance strategy. Against many expectations, post-2008 developments did not follow a “postneoliberal” trajectory (Brand and Sekler 2009), but rather deepened modes of market governance through the policies of fiscal austerity (Peck 2012) and the associated insulation of public authority in a “post-democracy” (Jessop 2013; Crouch 2011). However, this has exacerbated the social crisis and further eroded political legitimacy. As a result, we’re witnessing the growth of policy focused on “social impact” and “public responsibility”, yet, not through the roll-back of markets, but through the development of a “social investment market”. This presentation focuses on a critical example of this, the “Social Impact Bond” (SIB), as a “new [initiative] of ‘public responsibility’ within market modes of governance” (Sprague 2010).
Introduced in 2010, more than 100 SIBs now exist across the globe, concentrated mostly in the U.S. and U.K. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation takes a Cultural Political Economy approach (Sum and Jessop 2014) to situate SIBs within the processes by which hegemony is restored and reshaped. I will describe therefore both institutional structure of this policy instrument and its associated discursive repertoire, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. SIBs will be situated as part of a “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the problems of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution and decommodification. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs construct “crisis narratives” and “imagined recoveries” (Sum and Jessop 2014), and shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
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This workshop will provide an understanding of the U.S. Occupy movement as a societal response to... more This workshop will provide an understanding of the U.S. Occupy movement as a societal response to the neoliberal crisis. In contrast to explanations enamored by the movement's use of internet technologies, which focus on the spontaneous character of the "swarm", of a societal "flash movement" which arose out of nowhere, this workshop challenges the view that Occupy is wholly unique, that it possesses its own "truth" and real knowledge about power, or that it marks a break out of history. Instead, this presentation focuses on the social, political and economic roots of the movement in the crisis of social reproduction -- of deeply indebted students facing a sluggish job market, by homeowners threatened by foreclosure and eviction, and by workers facing deepening precaritization -- and in the corresponding crisis of political representation, in which civil society groups, unions and political parties fail to defend the interests of broad sections of the population.
In response to these material crises, Occupy will here be viewed as a counter-hegemonic force, coalescing a constellation of social forces not only occupying public squares, but also intervening in labor and community struggles, around class conflict, material redistribution, and democratization, situated in the local, regional and national levels of politics. We will discuss the movement's struggles to prevent house foreclosures, to defend and relieve student and other debtors, to support precarious workers against further precaritization in the recession, and to relieve people suffering under the eroded welfare state.
The workshop will also discuss two of the movement's most recent initiatives, including the Rolling Jubilee, aimed at challenging the (personal) debt crisis from below, and Occupy Sandy, a hurricane relief project filling the vacuum of a hollowed out social safety net following 3 decades of neoliberalization, and the two projects' common efforts towards a "people's bailout". The aim is to show how Occupy represents a counter-neoliberal mobilization within the current crisis conjuncture.
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Die Entstehung der Occupy-Bewegung in den USA ist Teil eines neuen Zyklus sozialer Bewegungen in ... more Die Entstehung der Occupy-Bewegung in den USA ist Teil eines neuen Zyklus sozialer Bewegungen in der Krise des neoliberalen Kapitalismus. Mit basisdemokratischen Organisationsformen, der Ablehnung von Repräsentation und dem Slogan der "99%" hat sie die Diskussion um neue politische Formen und Strategien für linke Bewegungen befeuert.
Jan Rehmann und Robert Ogman gehen vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Erfahrungen mit und in Occupy Wallstreet auf politische Deutungskämpfe ein: Handelt es sich bei Occupy wirklich um eine Bewegung ohne Führung? Ist Occupy eine Klassenbewegung? Wie ist mit der "Machtfrage", den Gefahren von Vereinnahmung und Marginalisierung umzugehen?
Jan Rehmann knüpft für seine Analyse von Occupy an Antonio Gramscis Perspektive der Hegemonie an: wie kann es gelingen, ausgehend von der Anrufung der 99%, auch zu einem gesellschaftlichen Bündnis der heterogenen subalternen Gruppen zu kommen? Auf der Grundlage einer kritischen Wiederaneignung Gramscis können das Verhältnis von Repräsentation(skritik) und demokratischer Führung, von Occupy, Gewerkschaften und anderen Formen politischer Organisierung neu diskutiert werden.
Teil 1 des Veranstaltungsdoppels
«Theoretische Annäherungen an den Arabischen Frühling und Occupy Wallstreet»:
4.7., 16:30 Uhr
Autoritärer Korporatismus: Zur politische Ökonomie des arabischen Frühlings
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Journal Articles by Robert Ogman
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2019
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Environment and Planning A, 2019
The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around th... more The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around the device of a social investment market. At the heart of this social investment market is an innovative new financial instrument, the social impact bond (SIB). In this paper we argue that the SIB promises (partial) solutions to four aspects of the present multifaceted crisis: the crisis of social reproduction; the crisis of capital accumulation; the fiscal crisis of the state; and the crisis of political legitimacy. In this sense, we conceive the social investment market as a crisis management strategy. We draw on evidence from the world’s first SIB, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another. In developing this argument, this paper contributes to contemporary theories of neoliberalism by investigating how concrete state developments and societal restructuring is being advanced around the idea of linking marketization with progressive social change. It also supports critical practitioners by offering a theoretical lens to identify the contradictions of this increasingly popular policy approach.
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Online Articles by Robert Ogman
In today’s blog, Robert Ogman argues that success stories on the social investment market are hid... more In today’s blog, Robert Ogman argues that success stories on the social investment market are hiding inconvenient truths, and require honest rethink about such risky and expensive policy experiments.
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Global Research & The Bullet No. 895, Nov 6, 2013
Three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Occupy movement opened the possibility... more Three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Occupy movement opened the possibility for a left regroupment against resurgent neoliberalism. Yet the forceful eviction from the squares just two months after the movement emerged, cut short the development of such a constituting power, of a historic bloc of the “99%.”
Suddenly dispossessed of the “spatial centers of its hegemonic apparatus,” it was robbed of its basis for “(counter)hegemonic practices and functions.”[1] As Jan Rehmann explains, it lost the space for the convergence and democratic, integrative practices of the diverse social forces and individuals (both organized sections of the Left, labour, social justice groups, etc.). Nor did it now have a place for its expressive practices of communal life and political education. Gone too was the space for deliberation and collaborative decision-making, as well as for developing relationships of solidarity.
The repression disrupted the nascent mosaic-left,[2] that had began to be constructed out of the fragmented Left and progressive forces. Yet, like the mobilizations abroad, Occupy did not immediately disappear, but rather regrouped in community and labour struggles at the local and trans-local levels, fighting on the front lines of the crisis, from which it in many ways initially emerged.
Since the evictions, multiple initiatives were formed to carry forward the struggles: The “Occupy Our Homes” network combats foreclosures; campaigns to support workers’ struggles against precaritization; projects push for debt relief; and “Occupy Sandy” provided grassroots relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, neglected by a hollowed out federal safety net. All of these post-eviction projects intervene into the broken circuits of a precarious social reproduction.
But these new projects also bring new challenges with them. Occupy had already been struggling to negotiate the tension between horizontal and vertical coordination, between strategies of rupture and those of political reform, between autonomous activity and coalition-work, and between struggles situated in civil society and those within the state. But now Occupy has a new dynamic to negotiate. How will it on the one hand, repair the broken circuits of social reproduction, while simultaneously forging a political opposition to transform the societal foundations underpinning them?
With these questions, I looked at the movement’s interventions into four specific areas.
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Conference Presentations by Robert Ogman
Introduced in the U.K.'s “Big Society” programme in 2009, more than 40 SIBs now exist throughout the E.U., the U.S., and in both the global North and South. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation will both describe the structure of this policy instrument, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. I will situate SIBs within a specific “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the social crises of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs discursively construct the crisis and an “imagined recovery” (Jessop 2013b), and also shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
Brand, Ulrich. 2014. “State, Context and Correspondence. Contours of a Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis.” Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 32 (4): 425–42.
Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2013a. “Finance-Dominated Accumulation and Post-Democratic Capitalism.” In Institutions and Economic Development after the Financial Crisis, edited by S. Fadda and P. Tridico, 83–105. London: Routledge. http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/finance-dominated-accumulation-and-post-democratic-capitalism/.
———. 2013b. “Recovered Imaginaries, Imagined Recoveries: A Cultural Political Economy of Crisis Construals and Crisis Management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis.” Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics, Politics and Settlement, 234.
Kannankulam, John, and Fabian Georgi. 2014. “Varieties of Capitalism or Varieties of Relationships of Forces? Outlines of a Historical Materialist Policy Analysis.” Capital & Class 38 (1): 59–71.
Peck, Jamie. 2012. “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme Economy.” City 16 (6): 626–55.
Firstly, I rely on the work of Bryan and Rafferty (2010), who highlight the centrality of labor in finance dominated accumulation strategies “as the provider of income streams for securities, to facilitate asset diversification and the search for yield.” They argue, “The rapid growth of mortgage, auto, credit card and student loans, as well as contracts on telephones, energy and health care, all provide the raw materials on which securities are built to meet the demands of global investors.”
However, the financial meltdown of 2007/08 revealed how this poorly “risk-managed” (ibid) labor produced not personal material crises for individual laborers, but a monumental effect upon global markets. As workers facing three decades of stagnant real wages failed to continue servicing increasing levels of mortgage debt, the U.S. foreclosure wave took down the global economy.
This collapse entailed a chaotic devaluation of capital, as investments in financial products could no longer be returned (Harvey 2010). New crisis management strategies emerged to control this process in the future. Drawing therefore from the “postneoliberalism” debates, I rely on Demirovic's (2009) description of new regulatory responses. These “new government technologies” are aimed at the “strategic destruction of capital.”
This means that political struggles today are defined by the question of whose capital will be destroyed: “inflation, small savings, assets for the rich, speculation against developing countries” (ibid).
As Bryan and Rafferty show, this centrality of labor in financialization also reveal its potential power, and hence I turn to current debt-organizing projects. I will look at two initiatives. First, the Strike Debt! seeks broad-scale debt cancellation for individuals suffering under unsustainable levels of personal debt. And second, I will look at the California student movement's opposition to college tuition hikes and the privatization of public education.
Framed against the background of finance-based accumulation strategies, and government technologies coordinating the “strategic destruction of capital”, we will discuss the successes, limitations, and terrain of these contemporary struggles.
Works Cited:
Bryan, Dick; Rafferty, Michael (2010): “Deriving Capital's (and Labour's) Future”, in The Crisis This Time. Socialist Register 2011, Merlin: Wales.
Harvey, David (2010): The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism, Profile: London.
Demirovic, Alex (2009): “Postneoliberalism and Post-Fordism – Is there a new Period in the Capitalist Mode of Production,” in Development Dialogue 51 (January 2009): 45-58."
Papers by Robert Ogman
We draw on evidence from the world’s first social impact bond, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another. In developing this argument, this paper contributes to contemporary theories of neoliberalism by investigating how concrete state developments and societal restructuring is being advanced around the idea of linking marketisation with progressive social change. It also supports critical practitioners by offering a theoretical lens to identify the contradictions of this increasingly popular policy approach.
I approach this topic from a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) perspective (Sum & Jessop, 2013). This means analyzing the political significance of SIBs as a response to the current crisis and as part of a process of reproducing and reworking neoliberal hegemony. In this analysis, CPE combines critical political economy and critical discourse analysis to investigate both the material and symbolic causes and implications behind the variation, selection and retention of specific policies and policy discourses in this particular historical conjuncture (ibid.: 184–187).
The next section recounts the emergence of SIBs, which occurred in three stages. It begins with the intellectual origins of SIBs, approximately two decades ago as part of the move towards a post-Washington Consensus. Here, I address both the discursive and institutional aspects. This involves a Third Way discourse about “responsible capitalism” in connection with a “neo-corporatist” (Jessop, 2002: 461) practice involving a “negotiated approach” between market actors, governments and civil society. Next, I move on to the stage of policy selection during which SIBs go from being an idea to an agenda within policy think tanks and state institutions. This occurred during and immediately following the implosion of the financial markets in 2007-08. It shows how SIBs first became framed as an ethical market response to the problems of the financial crisis and, later, as a way to respond to negative social effects caused by public sector budget cuts. The third stage focuses on the implementation of SIBs as a policy experiment as well as their retention in state institutions. This provides some examples of state restructuring measures by which SIBs are implemented.
Following the description of the three stages of SIB emergence, I introduce the case of the Peterborough Social Impact Bond, which was presented as an effort to reduce recidivism among inmates released from the municipal jail. Here, I present the theory of SIBs and use the specific case to illustrate how the SIB is expected to play out in reality. A focus on a core strand of the SIBs discourse, especially the idea of reducing public expenditure follows.
Afterwards, I describe SIB implementation and reveal the contradictions between theory and practice: While the intervention successfully reduced reoffending, it failed to reduce public expenditures. As a result, the state was not able to create savings from which it could share these with investors. Instead, it was compelled to increase expenditure in spite of its supposed fiscal problems, forming special “outcome funds” to pay investor returns. Furthermore, these contradictions did not prevent the government from hailing it as a success or using it to justify the further expansion of SIB projects across the country.
In conclusion, I present the implications of this case for the analysis of policy experimentation as part of the reproduction of hegemony. I argue that this ability of neoliberalism to “fail forward” (Peck, 2012: 6) has much to do with the political blockage preventing genuine alternatives from arising. But these alternatives are not completely eliminated, but rather, their elements are partially and selectively integrated into existing structures. In this case, the popular desire for the economy to make a positive societal contribution is incorporated into existing modes of neoliberal governance through new market-based public responsibility initiatives. These processes are shaped by relations of discursive, technological, structural and agential power (Sum & Jessop, 2013: 218–219), by which economic and profit imperatives over-determine the aspirations that seek to constrain or transcend them. Hence, I describe SIBs as part of a “social neoliberal” strategy or “hegemony project” (Kannankulam & Georgi, 2014: 63) that forges a compromise between “leftist” concerns over the deepening social crisis and the desire for a moral economy, with “rightist” goals of reducing social expenditures and expanding marketisation.
In this text, I focus on four specific interventions of the movement at the front line of the crisis to show how it responded to the eviction from the public squares and regrouped, and how it navigated these tensions. My aim is, on the one hand, to provide a historical picture of the post-eviction state of the movement and, on the other hand, to provide an analysis of the movement’s developments and current blockages. The four examples are as follows:
‘Occupy Our Homes’, a multi-city network opposing home foreclosures and evictions. Using direct action along with affected home-owners, this intervention brings the movement into direct confrontation with the process of accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey).
Occupy Labor describes the connections between Occupy and the labour movement. I will try to show how this relationship contributed to the growth of the new movement, on the one side, and to the emergence of a new round of labour struggles against precaritisation, privatisation, and wage dumping, on the other. Here the movement has connected and supported struggles against a ‘recovery’ based on further class polarisation.
Mobilisations of the ‘graduates without a future’ in multiple campaigns against student and consumer debt. In these struggles for debt relief, we see state-interventionist strategies, attempts to build an autonomous debtors’ movement, and mutual aid initiatives. Seeking debt relief, these new subjects are attempting to protect themselves from financial ruin and shift the burden of the crisis of over-accumulation onto the ‘1 %’.
‘Occupy Sandy’, a rapid mutual aid network developed to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy, who were left unprotected by the eroded state safety net, and to defend them against debt-based, personal recovery strategies. In this example, we see the attempts to develop an alternative to a ‘disaster capitalism’ based on the dispossession of low-income urban populations and debt-based recovery, through the formulation of a holistic alternative recovery called ‘the people’s recovery’.
From this perspective, where labor occupies a structurally central position, there lies the question of its potential political agency in the current conjuncture, an issue that is then taken up in the second and third sections of this paper.
In Section II, I present in abbreviated form, a theoretical account of the political response to the financial meltdown of 2007/08. Here, I rely on the argument made by Alex Demirovic and Thomas Sablowski (2011), who explain how new forms of crisis governance are emerging, to prevent repeating the chaotic processes of capital devaluation like that experienced in 2007/08. Here, “governmental technologies” are being developed for the “strategic destruction of capital” (Demirovic 2009: 56). This brings to light not only the forms of political regulation, but also the class and power relations behind them. With this insight into the content of the political struggles, comes the question of potential political agency from below, touched on in the first section in terms of labor's strategic positions in processes of finance-based accumulation. But this question becomes the central focus of the final section, when I move to social movements organizing against consumer debt.
In Section III, the third link in the chain is made, focusing on movements of the subaltern which are intervening in the social, political and economic processes described in the previous sections. Here, I focus on student and other debtors, and their calls for debt cancellation, and with it their objectives towards shifting the broad political trajectory. Here I will focus on the Occupy spin-off group, “Strike Debt!”.
These three sections therefore, each focus on different aspects of a dialogue that I've arranged in order to think about the connection between the financialization, crisis governance, and the potential agency of the indebted.
He is:
“most interested in how OWS effectively intervene[d] in the symbolic order, and stir[red] up – at least temporarily – the power relations in people's common sense.”
Rehmann is concerned with “the way the economic crisis is translated into popular common sense.” Yet, he not only sketches out this dominant narrative; he also explains the alternative narrative developed by the Occupy movement.
My commentary will focus firstly on this symbolic level, inquiring into the content of both the dominant and alternative narratives of the crisis. Then I will raise questions regarding the relationship between the symbolic and other levels of the hegemonic apparatus, concluding with a closer look at the movement's embeddedness in the current crisis, a consideration that remains in my view underdeveloped.
Talks by Robert Ogman
Introduced in 2010, more than 100 SIBs now exist across the globe, concentrated mostly in the U.S. and U.K. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation takes a Cultural Political Economy approach (Sum and Jessop 2014) to situate SIBs within the processes by which hegemony is restored and reshaped. I will describe therefore both institutional structure of this policy instrument and its associated discursive repertoire, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. SIBs will be situated as part of a “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the problems of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution and decommodification. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs construct “crisis narratives” and “imagined recoveries” (Sum and Jessop 2014), and shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
In response to these material crises, Occupy will here be viewed as a counter-hegemonic force, coalescing a constellation of social forces not only occupying public squares, but also intervening in labor and community struggles, around class conflict, material redistribution, and democratization, situated in the local, regional and national levels of politics. We will discuss the movement's struggles to prevent house foreclosures, to defend and relieve student and other debtors, to support precarious workers against further precaritization in the recession, and to relieve people suffering under the eroded welfare state.
The workshop will also discuss two of the movement's most recent initiatives, including the Rolling Jubilee, aimed at challenging the (personal) debt crisis from below, and Occupy Sandy, a hurricane relief project filling the vacuum of a hollowed out social safety net following 3 decades of neoliberalization, and the two projects' common efforts towards a "people's bailout". The aim is to show how Occupy represents a counter-neoliberal mobilization within the current crisis conjuncture.
Jan Rehmann und Robert Ogman gehen vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Erfahrungen mit und in Occupy Wallstreet auf politische Deutungskämpfe ein: Handelt es sich bei Occupy wirklich um eine Bewegung ohne Führung? Ist Occupy eine Klassenbewegung? Wie ist mit der "Machtfrage", den Gefahren von Vereinnahmung und Marginalisierung umzugehen?
Jan Rehmann knüpft für seine Analyse von Occupy an Antonio Gramscis Perspektive der Hegemonie an: wie kann es gelingen, ausgehend von der Anrufung der 99%, auch zu einem gesellschaftlichen Bündnis der heterogenen subalternen Gruppen zu kommen? Auf der Grundlage einer kritischen Wiederaneignung Gramscis können das Verhältnis von Repräsentation(skritik) und demokratischer Führung, von Occupy, Gewerkschaften und anderen Formen politischer Organisierung neu diskutiert werden.
Teil 1 des Veranstaltungsdoppels
«Theoretische Annäherungen an den Arabischen Frühling und Occupy Wallstreet»:
4.7., 16:30 Uhr
Autoritärer Korporatismus: Zur politische Ökonomie des arabischen Frühlings
Journal Articles by Robert Ogman
Online Articles by Robert Ogman
Suddenly dispossessed of the “spatial centers of its hegemonic apparatus,” it was robbed of its basis for “(counter)hegemonic practices and functions.”[1] As Jan Rehmann explains, it lost the space for the convergence and democratic, integrative practices of the diverse social forces and individuals (both organized sections of the Left, labour, social justice groups, etc.). Nor did it now have a place for its expressive practices of communal life and political education. Gone too was the space for deliberation and collaborative decision-making, as well as for developing relationships of solidarity.
The repression disrupted the nascent mosaic-left,[2] that had began to be constructed out of the fragmented Left and progressive forces. Yet, like the mobilizations abroad, Occupy did not immediately disappear, but rather regrouped in community and labour struggles at the local and trans-local levels, fighting on the front lines of the crisis, from which it in many ways initially emerged.
Since the evictions, multiple initiatives were formed to carry forward the struggles: The “Occupy Our Homes” network combats foreclosures; campaigns to support workers’ struggles against precaritization; projects push for debt relief; and “Occupy Sandy” provided grassroots relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, neglected by a hollowed out federal safety net. All of these post-eviction projects intervene into the broken circuits of a precarious social reproduction.
But these new projects also bring new challenges with them. Occupy had already been struggling to negotiate the tension between horizontal and vertical coordination, between strategies of rupture and those of political reform, between autonomous activity and coalition-work, and between struggles situated in civil society and those within the state. But now Occupy has a new dynamic to negotiate. How will it on the one hand, repair the broken circuits of social reproduction, while simultaneously forging a political opposition to transform the societal foundations underpinning them?
With these questions, I looked at the movement’s interventions into four specific areas.
Introduced in the U.K.'s “Big Society” programme in 2009, more than 40 SIBs now exist throughout the E.U., the U.S., and in both the global North and South. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation will both describe the structure of this policy instrument, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. I will situate SIBs within a specific “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the social crises of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs discursively construct the crisis and an “imagined recovery” (Jessop 2013b), and also shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
Brand, Ulrich. 2014. “State, Context and Correspondence. Contours of a Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis.” Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 32 (4): 425–42.
Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2013a. “Finance-Dominated Accumulation and Post-Democratic Capitalism.” In Institutions and Economic Development after the Financial Crisis, edited by S. Fadda and P. Tridico, 83–105. London: Routledge. http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/finance-dominated-accumulation-and-post-democratic-capitalism/.
———. 2013b. “Recovered Imaginaries, Imagined Recoveries: A Cultural Political Economy of Crisis Construals and Crisis Management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis.” Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics, Politics and Settlement, 234.
Kannankulam, John, and Fabian Georgi. 2014. “Varieties of Capitalism or Varieties of Relationships of Forces? Outlines of a Historical Materialist Policy Analysis.” Capital & Class 38 (1): 59–71.
Peck, Jamie. 2012. “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme Economy.” City 16 (6): 626–55.
Firstly, I rely on the work of Bryan and Rafferty (2010), who highlight the centrality of labor in finance dominated accumulation strategies “as the provider of income streams for securities, to facilitate asset diversification and the search for yield.” They argue, “The rapid growth of mortgage, auto, credit card and student loans, as well as contracts on telephones, energy and health care, all provide the raw materials on which securities are built to meet the demands of global investors.”
However, the financial meltdown of 2007/08 revealed how this poorly “risk-managed” (ibid) labor produced not personal material crises for individual laborers, but a monumental effect upon global markets. As workers facing three decades of stagnant real wages failed to continue servicing increasing levels of mortgage debt, the U.S. foreclosure wave took down the global economy.
This collapse entailed a chaotic devaluation of capital, as investments in financial products could no longer be returned (Harvey 2010). New crisis management strategies emerged to control this process in the future. Drawing therefore from the “postneoliberalism” debates, I rely on Demirovic's (2009) description of new regulatory responses. These “new government technologies” are aimed at the “strategic destruction of capital.”
This means that political struggles today are defined by the question of whose capital will be destroyed: “inflation, small savings, assets for the rich, speculation against developing countries” (ibid).
As Bryan and Rafferty show, this centrality of labor in financialization also reveal its potential power, and hence I turn to current debt-organizing projects. I will look at two initiatives. First, the Strike Debt! seeks broad-scale debt cancellation for individuals suffering under unsustainable levels of personal debt. And second, I will look at the California student movement's opposition to college tuition hikes and the privatization of public education.
Framed against the background of finance-based accumulation strategies, and government technologies coordinating the “strategic destruction of capital”, we will discuss the successes, limitations, and terrain of these contemporary struggles.
Works Cited:
Bryan, Dick; Rafferty, Michael (2010): “Deriving Capital's (and Labour's) Future”, in The Crisis This Time. Socialist Register 2011, Merlin: Wales.
Harvey, David (2010): The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism, Profile: London.
Demirovic, Alex (2009): “Postneoliberalism and Post-Fordism – Is there a new Period in the Capitalist Mode of Production,” in Development Dialogue 51 (January 2009): 45-58."
We draw on evidence from the world’s first social impact bond, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another. In developing this argument, this paper contributes to contemporary theories of neoliberalism by investigating how concrete state developments and societal restructuring is being advanced around the idea of linking marketisation with progressive social change. It also supports critical practitioners by offering a theoretical lens to identify the contradictions of this increasingly popular policy approach.
I approach this topic from a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) perspective (Sum & Jessop, 2013). This means analyzing the political significance of SIBs as a response to the current crisis and as part of a process of reproducing and reworking neoliberal hegemony. In this analysis, CPE combines critical political economy and critical discourse analysis to investigate both the material and symbolic causes and implications behind the variation, selection and retention of specific policies and policy discourses in this particular historical conjuncture (ibid.: 184–187).
The next section recounts the emergence of SIBs, which occurred in three stages. It begins with the intellectual origins of SIBs, approximately two decades ago as part of the move towards a post-Washington Consensus. Here, I address both the discursive and institutional aspects. This involves a Third Way discourse about “responsible capitalism” in connection with a “neo-corporatist” (Jessop, 2002: 461) practice involving a “negotiated approach” between market actors, governments and civil society. Next, I move on to the stage of policy selection during which SIBs go from being an idea to an agenda within policy think tanks and state institutions. This occurred during and immediately following the implosion of the financial markets in 2007-08. It shows how SIBs first became framed as an ethical market response to the problems of the financial crisis and, later, as a way to respond to negative social effects caused by public sector budget cuts. The third stage focuses on the implementation of SIBs as a policy experiment as well as their retention in state institutions. This provides some examples of state restructuring measures by which SIBs are implemented.
Following the description of the three stages of SIB emergence, I introduce the case of the Peterborough Social Impact Bond, which was presented as an effort to reduce recidivism among inmates released from the municipal jail. Here, I present the theory of SIBs and use the specific case to illustrate how the SIB is expected to play out in reality. A focus on a core strand of the SIBs discourse, especially the idea of reducing public expenditure follows.
Afterwards, I describe SIB implementation and reveal the contradictions between theory and practice: While the intervention successfully reduced reoffending, it failed to reduce public expenditures. As a result, the state was not able to create savings from which it could share these with investors. Instead, it was compelled to increase expenditure in spite of its supposed fiscal problems, forming special “outcome funds” to pay investor returns. Furthermore, these contradictions did not prevent the government from hailing it as a success or using it to justify the further expansion of SIB projects across the country.
In conclusion, I present the implications of this case for the analysis of policy experimentation as part of the reproduction of hegemony. I argue that this ability of neoliberalism to “fail forward” (Peck, 2012: 6) has much to do with the political blockage preventing genuine alternatives from arising. But these alternatives are not completely eliminated, but rather, their elements are partially and selectively integrated into existing structures. In this case, the popular desire for the economy to make a positive societal contribution is incorporated into existing modes of neoliberal governance through new market-based public responsibility initiatives. These processes are shaped by relations of discursive, technological, structural and agential power (Sum & Jessop, 2013: 218–219), by which economic and profit imperatives over-determine the aspirations that seek to constrain or transcend them. Hence, I describe SIBs as part of a “social neoliberal” strategy or “hegemony project” (Kannankulam & Georgi, 2014: 63) that forges a compromise between “leftist” concerns over the deepening social crisis and the desire for a moral economy, with “rightist” goals of reducing social expenditures and expanding marketisation.
In this text, I focus on four specific interventions of the movement at the front line of the crisis to show how it responded to the eviction from the public squares and regrouped, and how it navigated these tensions. My aim is, on the one hand, to provide a historical picture of the post-eviction state of the movement and, on the other hand, to provide an analysis of the movement’s developments and current blockages. The four examples are as follows:
‘Occupy Our Homes’, a multi-city network opposing home foreclosures and evictions. Using direct action along with affected home-owners, this intervention brings the movement into direct confrontation with the process of accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey).
Occupy Labor describes the connections between Occupy and the labour movement. I will try to show how this relationship contributed to the growth of the new movement, on the one side, and to the emergence of a new round of labour struggles against precaritisation, privatisation, and wage dumping, on the other. Here the movement has connected and supported struggles against a ‘recovery’ based on further class polarisation.
Mobilisations of the ‘graduates without a future’ in multiple campaigns against student and consumer debt. In these struggles for debt relief, we see state-interventionist strategies, attempts to build an autonomous debtors’ movement, and mutual aid initiatives. Seeking debt relief, these new subjects are attempting to protect themselves from financial ruin and shift the burden of the crisis of over-accumulation onto the ‘1 %’.
‘Occupy Sandy’, a rapid mutual aid network developed to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy, who were left unprotected by the eroded state safety net, and to defend them against debt-based, personal recovery strategies. In this example, we see the attempts to develop an alternative to a ‘disaster capitalism’ based on the dispossession of low-income urban populations and debt-based recovery, through the formulation of a holistic alternative recovery called ‘the people’s recovery’.
From this perspective, where labor occupies a structurally central position, there lies the question of its potential political agency in the current conjuncture, an issue that is then taken up in the second and third sections of this paper.
In Section II, I present in abbreviated form, a theoretical account of the political response to the financial meltdown of 2007/08. Here, I rely on the argument made by Alex Demirovic and Thomas Sablowski (2011), who explain how new forms of crisis governance are emerging, to prevent repeating the chaotic processes of capital devaluation like that experienced in 2007/08. Here, “governmental technologies” are being developed for the “strategic destruction of capital” (Demirovic 2009: 56). This brings to light not only the forms of political regulation, but also the class and power relations behind them. With this insight into the content of the political struggles, comes the question of potential political agency from below, touched on in the first section in terms of labor's strategic positions in processes of finance-based accumulation. But this question becomes the central focus of the final section, when I move to social movements organizing against consumer debt.
In Section III, the third link in the chain is made, focusing on movements of the subaltern which are intervening in the social, political and economic processes described in the previous sections. Here, I focus on student and other debtors, and their calls for debt cancellation, and with it their objectives towards shifting the broad political trajectory. Here I will focus on the Occupy spin-off group, “Strike Debt!”.
These three sections therefore, each focus on different aspects of a dialogue that I've arranged in order to think about the connection between the financialization, crisis governance, and the potential agency of the indebted.
He is:
“most interested in how OWS effectively intervene[d] in the symbolic order, and stir[red] up – at least temporarily – the power relations in people's common sense.”
Rehmann is concerned with “the way the economic crisis is translated into popular common sense.” Yet, he not only sketches out this dominant narrative; he also explains the alternative narrative developed by the Occupy movement.
My commentary will focus firstly on this symbolic level, inquiring into the content of both the dominant and alternative narratives of the crisis. Then I will raise questions regarding the relationship between the symbolic and other levels of the hegemonic apparatus, concluding with a closer look at the movement's embeddedness in the current crisis, a consideration that remains in my view underdeveloped.
Introduced in 2010, more than 100 SIBs now exist across the globe, concentrated mostly in the U.S. and U.K. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation takes a Cultural Political Economy approach (Sum and Jessop 2014) to situate SIBs within the processes by which hegemony is restored and reshaped. I will describe therefore both institutional structure of this policy instrument and its associated discursive repertoire, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. SIBs will be situated as part of a “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the problems of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution and decommodification. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs construct “crisis narratives” and “imagined recoveries” (Sum and Jessop 2014), and shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).
In response to these material crises, Occupy will here be viewed as a counter-hegemonic force, coalescing a constellation of social forces not only occupying public squares, but also intervening in labor and community struggles, around class conflict, material redistribution, and democratization, situated in the local, regional and national levels of politics. We will discuss the movement's struggles to prevent house foreclosures, to defend and relieve student and other debtors, to support precarious workers against further precaritization in the recession, and to relieve people suffering under the eroded welfare state.
The workshop will also discuss two of the movement's most recent initiatives, including the Rolling Jubilee, aimed at challenging the (personal) debt crisis from below, and Occupy Sandy, a hurricane relief project filling the vacuum of a hollowed out social safety net following 3 decades of neoliberalization, and the two projects' common efforts towards a "people's bailout". The aim is to show how Occupy represents a counter-neoliberal mobilization within the current crisis conjuncture.
Jan Rehmann und Robert Ogman gehen vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Erfahrungen mit und in Occupy Wallstreet auf politische Deutungskämpfe ein: Handelt es sich bei Occupy wirklich um eine Bewegung ohne Führung? Ist Occupy eine Klassenbewegung? Wie ist mit der "Machtfrage", den Gefahren von Vereinnahmung und Marginalisierung umzugehen?
Jan Rehmann knüpft für seine Analyse von Occupy an Antonio Gramscis Perspektive der Hegemonie an: wie kann es gelingen, ausgehend von der Anrufung der 99%, auch zu einem gesellschaftlichen Bündnis der heterogenen subalternen Gruppen zu kommen? Auf der Grundlage einer kritischen Wiederaneignung Gramscis können das Verhältnis von Repräsentation(skritik) und demokratischer Führung, von Occupy, Gewerkschaften und anderen Formen politischer Organisierung neu diskutiert werden.
Teil 1 des Veranstaltungsdoppels
«Theoretische Annäherungen an den Arabischen Frühling und Occupy Wallstreet»:
4.7., 16:30 Uhr
Autoritärer Korporatismus: Zur politische Ökonomie des arabischen Frühlings
Suddenly dispossessed of the “spatial centers of its hegemonic apparatus,” it was robbed of its basis for “(counter)hegemonic practices and functions.”[1] As Jan Rehmann explains, it lost the space for the convergence and democratic, integrative practices of the diverse social forces and individuals (both organized sections of the Left, labour, social justice groups, etc.). Nor did it now have a place for its expressive practices of communal life and political education. Gone too was the space for deliberation and collaborative decision-making, as well as for developing relationships of solidarity.
The repression disrupted the nascent mosaic-left,[2] that had began to be constructed out of the fragmented Left and progressive forces. Yet, like the mobilizations abroad, Occupy did not immediately disappear, but rather regrouped in community and labour struggles at the local and trans-local levels, fighting on the front lines of the crisis, from which it in many ways initially emerged.
Since the evictions, multiple initiatives were formed to carry forward the struggles: The “Occupy Our Homes” network combats foreclosures; campaigns to support workers’ struggles against precaritization; projects push for debt relief; and “Occupy Sandy” provided grassroots relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, neglected by a hollowed out federal safety net. All of these post-eviction projects intervene into the broken circuits of a precarious social reproduction.
But these new projects also bring new challenges with them. Occupy had already been struggling to negotiate the tension between horizontal and vertical coordination, between strategies of rupture and those of political reform, between autonomous activity and coalition-work, and between struggles situated in civil society and those within the state. But now Occupy has a new dynamic to negotiate. How will it on the one hand, repair the broken circuits of social reproduction, while simultaneously forging a political opposition to transform the societal foundations underpinning them?
With these questions, I looked at the movement’s interventions into four specific areas.
Plätze sichern!
ReOrganisierung der Linken in der Krise
Zur Lernfähigkeit des Mosaiks in den USA, Spanien und Griechenland
Eine Veröffentlichung der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
240 Seiten | unter Mitwirkung von Lara Hernández und Robert Ogman
Seit 2011 hat in Europa und den USA mit den »Empörten« und »Occupy Wall Street« ein neuer, transnationaler Bewegungszyklus eingesetzt. Doch die Regierungen setzen ihre Politik eines neoliberalen Autoritarismus und der perspektivlosen Kürzungen fort. Die alternativen Bewegungen müssen sich strategisch reorientieren – mit Blick auf die »Hauptquartiere« der Macht.