Decoupling: A Key Fantasy of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda

Abstract

Central to the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals is the notion of ‘decoupling’: the need to divorce economic growth from its ecological impact. For proponents, decoupling entails increasing the efficiency with which value is derived from natural resources in order to reconcile indefinite economic growth with environmental sustainability. However, even advocates admit that the idea of decoupling remains poorly conceptualized and subject to scant empirical investigation. This persistent commitment to a highly questionable idea suggests the possibility of a deeper psychological dynamic at work here. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in this article we therefore analyze decoupling as a ‘fantasy’ that functions to obfuscate fundamental tensions among the goals of poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and profitable enterprise that it is intended to reconcile. In this way, decoupling serves to sustain faith in the possibility of attaining sustainable development within the context of a neoliberal capitalist economy that necessitates continual growth to confront inherent contradictions.     

Young adults and the tuning of the entrepreneurial mindset in neoliberal capitalism

Enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of young people is a means by which their employability and future potential as well as economic growth, the core goal of national policies, are incubated. Consequently, individuals performing entrepreneurial mindset are seen to possess the most future potential. We sketch the contours of this mindset and develop the idea of ‘tuning’ the entrepreneurial mindset with other discursive elements, or ‘ingredients’, available in society in order to make the overarching idea of entrepreneurialism more manageable, bearable, and even enjoyable at the individual level. The ingredients with which the mindset is tuned are non-depressiveness, happiness, and gratefulness. This tuning of the mindset is itself necessary and difficult mental work, even though it is invisible. Our analysis is based on 40 interviews with 18–30-year-old women and men from Tampere, Finland.     

Introduction: social movements and forums in times of authoritarian capitalism

ABSTRACT

On all continents the enormity of the violence and danger of the times gives rise to multiple new practices of struggle and to conceptual innovations, which seek to serve justice, solidarity, and dignity for all. We explore the possibilities and different worlds intended in the main slogan of the World Social Forum ‘Another world is possible’. During its early years the World Social Forum was characterized by a fair amount of optimism. We know now that most of the high hopes of the movements have not been adequately materialized. The rise of authoritarian leaders and the nexus between capitalism and populism emerging in different parts of the world has created a new context for the attempts to create democratic futures. This collection presents and interrogates a variety of diagnoses of the present and of new strategies for transformative change that are emerging out of the forum process.     

Samir Amin and the challenges of socialist transformation in senile capitalism

ABSTRACT

This article intends to point out strategic dimensions of the thought of Samir Amin. It highlights his analysis of capitalism, of the world system in which it is articulated, and of ways to overcome them in the twenty-first century. He also approaches his reflections on the construction of a V international and his criticisms of those that preceded it.     

Roma and the politics of double discourse in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the politics of ‘double discourse’ in relation to Roma that has evolved in contemporary neoliberal Europe. On the one hand, the double discourse promotes the integration, rights and equal opportunities of Roma, on the other, it denies recognition of, and ways to address, enduring structural violence and rising social insecurity. The article argues that the politics of ‘double discourse’, as a neoliberal approach towards Roma, is structured by two contradictory discourses that speak to different audiences, using duplicitous approaches to create anti-Roma consensus and maintain the critical difference and subordinated position of the racialised Romani populations in Europe. By studying the representation of Roma in the cases of so-called 'child theft' in Greece and Ireland, and in the recent ‘refugee crisis’, the paper identifies and discusses three dimensions of contemporary neoliberal double discourse: racialised de-Europeanisation, neoliberal undeservingness and (dis)articulation of citizenship.     

Social mobilizations and the question of social justice in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding stereotypes of Russian apathy, long-term field research reveals that there have always been grassroots and labour protests in post-Soviet Russia, even as the shock of ultraliberal reforms led to mass precariousness and social disorientation. However, the social mobilizations that do occur are scattered, weakly publicized and mostly small-scale. This paper conceptualizes them as ‘everyday activism’, that is, an activism embedded in everyday life experience and pragmatic sense. Only recently, and in a paradoxical relation to the populist and patriotic Kremlin discourse, some new trends have emerged towards other popular variants of the new discourse that includes social equality claims and what the paper calls ‘social critical’ populism. However, this populism from below does not automatically lead to mass mobilization, although it provides the necessary background for it.     

Unrest and Change: Dispatches from the Frontline of a Class War in Egypt

The story told in much of the mass media and the rhetoric of US and European officials is that the popular uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab spring have primarily been a struggle to overthrow individual tyrants and establish democracy. But this paper argues that the anti-democratic character of so many of the regimes in the Arab world is the political form of capitalism in the region, and that the popular uprising in Egypt and the struggle to depose Mubarak from state power is in essence a class struggle against Egyptian capitalism and its dynamics.

La historia que se ha relatado en la mayoría de los medios y la retórica de los altos funcionarios estadounidenses y europeos consiste en que las famosas insurrecciones en Egipto y demás lugares de ‘La primavera árabe’, han sido fundamentalmente una lucha para derrocar a los tiranos individuales y establecer una democracia. Pero este artículo sostiene que el carácter antidemocrático de tantos de los regímenes en el mundo árabe es la forma capitalista en la región, y que la famosa insurrección de Egipto y la lucha para derrocar a Mubarack del poder estatal es esencialmente una lucha de clases contra el capitalismo egipcio y su dinámica.

多数大众传媒讲述的故事和美欧官员的言辞是：埃及以及“阿拉伯之春”中其他地方的民众起义主要是一场推翻个人暴政、建立民主的斗争。但本文认为,阿拉伯世界中如此之多政体的反民主属性是该地区资本主义的政治形式,埃及的民众起义和把穆巴拉克赶下台的斗争本质上是反对埃及资本主义及其原动力的一场阶级斗争。     

Limited liability and its moral hazard implications: the systemic inscription of instability in contemporary capitalism

The principle of limited liability is one of the defining characteristics of modern corporate capitalism. It is also, we argue in this article, a powerful structural source of moral hazard. Engaging in a double conceptual genealogy, we investigate how the concepts of moral hazard and limited liability have evolved and diffused over time. We highlight two parallel but unconnected paths of construction, diffusion, moral contestation, and eventual institutionalization. We bring to the fore clear elective affinities between both concepts and their respective evolution. Going one step further, we suggest that both concepts have come to be connected through time. In the context of contemporary capitalism, limited liability has to be understood, we argue, as a powerful structural source of moral hazard. In conclusion, we propose that this structural link between limited liability and moral hazard is an important explanatory factor of the systemic instability of contemporary capitalism and, as a consequence, of a pattern of recurrent crises that are regularly disrupting our economies and societies.     

Creating Happier Children and More Fulfilled Social Workers: Neoliberalism,Privatization and the Reframing of Leftist Critiques in Britain

To differing degrees, governments in Europe, North America, and Australasia have, over recent years, given particular attention to the reform of services for children and families. However, the aim of this article is to focus on Britain and to examine plans to transform social-work services for children and young people who are “looked after,” that is to say, in public care. It is argued that these plans, focused on the introduction of what are termed social work practices, are best grounded and interpreted within an analytical framework that recognizes the centrality of neoliberalism. Furthermore, social workers and others working in related areas of human services provision should take account of how the plan to install social work practices is being discursively constructed and organized. Important here, it is maintained, is how this strategy seeks to deploy selectively leftist critiques of social work that have emerged over the past two decades.     

Think rich,feel hurt: the critique of capitalism and the production of affect in the making of financial subjects in South Korea

This article describes the process of financial subjectification by observing a private educational programme on financial self-management in South Korea. ‘Wealth-tech’ is a popular Korean term that refers to techniques of personal finance and money-management. Ethnographic research on a private educational programme on the subject of wealth-tech brings to light justifying mechanisms of financial investments and moral foundations for the pursuit of wealth whereby laypeople’s engagement with, and attachment to, financial markets are (re-)vitalized. In particular, this study highlights the role of critiques about capitalism as well as the production of affect in the making of financial subjects. By re-appropriating critiques of capitalism and employing therapeutic narratives, the wealth-tech pedagogy redefines financial investment as an act of resistance against the ills of capitalism and foreign capital. Moreover, this case study shows that wealth-tech is legitimized not solely by risk calculations per se, but also by feelings of hurt. Participants tend to transform themselves into active wealth-tech practitioners by cultivating the kind of affect that I call here ‘thinking rich, feeling hurt’. Therefore, the financial subjects configured in this wealth-tech pedagogy are those who feel hurt, and in this emotive state are led to think from the perspective of the rich. Moreover, they are configured not only as self-governing individuals but also as collective beings who resist foreign capital through their own engagement with financial markets. In this process of financial subjectification, the beliefs that finance can make them rich become consolidated. By illustrating these Korean experiences, this article calls attention to critical and affective practices in the process of financial subjectification, in particular those that take shape at the encounter between market rationality and ordinary experiences, memories, and feelings whereby laypeople translate discourses and techniques of financial capitalism into their own values and judgments.     

Culture, state and varieties of capitalism: a comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan

This article examines the interplay between local culture, the state, and economic actors' agency in producing variation across markets. I adopt a political-cultural approach to examining why life insurance has been far more popular in Taiwan than Hong Kong, despite the presence of a cultural taboo on the topic of premature death in both societies. Based on interview data and documentary references, the findings reveal that as an independent state, the Taiwanese government heavily protected domestic insurance firms during their emergence. These domestic firms adopted a market-share approach by re-defining the concept of life insurance to accommodate the local cultural taboo. The colonial Hong Kong government, on the other hand, adopted laissez-faire policies that essentially favoured foreign insurance firms. When faced with the tension between local adaptation and the profitability of the business, these foreign firms chose the latter. Their reluctance to accommodate local cultures, however, resulted in a smaller market. I argue that state actions mediate who the dominant economic players are and that the nature of the dominant players affects the extent of localization. Specifically, the presence of competitive domestic players alongside transnational corporations is more likely to produce varieties of capitalism.     

Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

The composition of precarity: ‘emerging’ composers’ experiences of opportunity culture in contemporary classical music

This paper examines the precarious working lives of ‘emerging’ composers attempting to build a career in the world of new classical music in the UK. This topic is approached by considering the ‘composition opportunity’, success in which is seen as an important element in ‘making it’ in this sphere. We argue that such schemes in fact manifest a crucial tension in the nature of artistic labour, and are, at the very least, problematic in their function as conduits towards full professional identity. They may instead act to maintain the precarious working situation of composers in a neoliberal age. The working lives of artists are all too rarely illuminated, and new music composers are no exception; this survey of 47 emerging composers is the largest study of such individuals in the UK.     

Wind,coal, and copper: the politics of land grabbing,counterinsurgency, and the social engineering of extraction

ABSTRACT

The multiplicity of violent techniques employed to impose land control and extraction remains under acknowledged. This article reviews research conducted between the years 2014 and 2018 and draws on three case studies: wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany, and copper mining in Peru. The idea of 'engineering extraction' is advanced through counterinsurgency to acknowledge the extent of extractive violence, arguing that the term ‘land grabbing’ is indeed a more appropriate term than ‘land deals’. Engaging with the land grabbing literature, the three cases seek to advance discussions around ‘the political reactions “from below”’ by emphasizing ‘insurrectionary’ positions with resistance movements fighting land deals and extractive projects. This is followed by offering a typology of ‘hard’ coercive techniques and ‘soft’ technologies of social pacification that surfaced in each case. The conclusion reflects on the social technologies of resource extraction, recognizing how social discord, ecological and climate crises are engineered and enforced.     

Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation: A Critical Appreciation of Perry Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State

Perry Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State uses a comparative and narrative historical method to reconceive the social dynamic of late feudalism. Anderson explains differences in economic development among European countries by comparing class dynamics within a single social formation: the absolutist state. This article makes explicit the factorial analysis implicit in Anderson's case studies, and highlights the ways in which Lineages overcomes the logical flaws in much previous work. Anderson's inability to explain why some absolutist states ended in bourgeois revolutions exposes the ultimate limitations of Marxian categories for explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Anderson fails to take full advantage of the analytical possibilities opened by his reconceptualization of absolutism. His schema allows for complexity within absolutism. This article concludes by showing that such complexity can be understood better in terms of a double dynamic of elite and class conflict rather than with just the class categories employed by Anderson.     

On The Face It: the cultural construction of gender in contemporary Australian society

In the past in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, specialised practices, such as the construction of canoes or traditional slit-drums (garamuts), were the property of patrilineal descent groups. Today, processes of objectification of traditions have generated new cultural identifications and redefined the ways skills are perceived as resources and can be claimed as property. The present article traces contemporary developments of notions of tradition and culture in Manus and discusses these in the light of empirical material obtained in connection with the preparations for an ethnographic exhibition on Manus. The argument is that cultural practices classified as kastam are part of local interpretations of cultural differences in ways that seem contingent with precolonial ‘cultural totemism’ but, as knowledge, cultural practices can also be transacted.     

Transitional compass: anti-capitalist pathways in the interstitial spaces of capitalism*

ABSTRACT

The focus of the special issue explores the forms of power used, engendered, and (re)produced to challenge structures of economic, social and political power that produce inequality as well as concrete empirical examples of movements, workers’ struggles, and initiatives in challenging inequality. The idea of ‘transitional compass’ looks beyond protest politics to what we call ‘generative’ politics that builds the alternatives in the interstitial spaces of capitalism. Resistance to power emerges through engendering counter-hegemonic projects that are intertwined with alternative everyday practices. To concretize the conceptual framing, we focus on the emancipatory possibilities of a universal basic income, the use of law in tackling inequality in health and education, creative initiatives to establish a people-centred food system, new forms of organizing by precarious workers, democratic possibilities in local state delivery, and reconceptualizing the good life by looking at issues of happiness and ecosocialism.     

Social Workers and Social Justice During a Period of Intensive Neoliberalization: A Preliminary Investigation From the Republic of Ireland

Despite the championing of social justice within the discourse of social work, some express concern that there has been a dilution in the profession’s practical commitment to seeking a more just society. The article begins by defining social justice and then refers to a number of studies that have endeavored to identify whether or not social justice is being pursued by practitioners. It is argued that renewing efforts to achieve social justice is particularly relevant in times of intensive neoliberalization. In this context, we discuss the comments of a small number of Irish practitioners. This preliminary study indicates that social workers are struggling to achieve limited social justice gains in organizationally difficult and fraught situations. The findings suggest that some practitioners, located in stultifying working environments, are blunted in their capacities to pursue social justice demands for their clients and for themselves. However, a more wide-ranging research project, composed of a more substantial and diverse sample of respondents, would need to be formulated to further explore this theme.