David Bailey, Mònica Clua-Losada, Nikolai Huke and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz, Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting the (Critical Political Economy of) Neoliberal Europe, Routledge 2018; hbk £105.
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RATING: 68
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The authors of this book (for brevity I designate them as BCHR) have produced an academic monograph which is also a political and intellectual manifesto, drawing on interviews with over 65 activists in Spain and the UK to present a critique of the critical political economy literature on European integration, and a proposed basis for renewed resistance to the European neoliberal project. As such it is timely, not least because many in the UK who voted to remain within the EU insisted that one should fight to reform it from within rather than leave it.
BCHR define their position in relation to the critical political economy (CPE) literature on European integration (Apeldoorn, Bieling, Bieler, Bonefeld, Cafruny, Gill, Jessop, Morton, Overbeek, Reiner, Van der Pijl, Wigger and others), arguing that it dwells too much on the power of capital, exhibiting ‘a tendency to focus on macro-analyses that depict forebodingly powerful structures of inequality and domination’, proving as a consequence ‘largely unable to address or inform those seeking political strategies that are able to oppose and challenge the devastating effects of neoliberal European integration’, and inadvertently promoting ‘left melancholy’ (1-2). They agree with the CPE account of the EU as pro-market, anti-welfare and pro-inequality, with an anti-democratic neoliberal project ‘inscribed into its very core’, but they are ‘concerned with the conclusion towards which this analysis appears to lead: which is that neoliberalism has been successfully and smoothly imposed upon European society’ (9). They insist not, drawing attention to the successive failures of the Lisbon Agenda and related efforts to achieve increased productivity and competitiveness, and the continual contestation and disruption to which it has been subject.
Underpinning their argument is the theoretical position that if capitalism is viewed from the perspective of labour rather than capital (an approach they call ‘minor Marxism’, taking the term from Holland, 2011), it becomes apparent that ‘the agency of labour (broadly defined) always-already acts to disrupt attempts to secure relations of domination’; domination ‘never quite exists and never quite manages to stabilize itself’ (4). In this perspective, the pursuit of marketized European integration ‘is itself an attempt to achieve a broader goal; the unattainable, but necessary pacification of labour’ (8); workers have a ‘disruptive form of agency’ that capital can never entirely suppress. It may be ‘imperceptible’ from a macro (‘major Marxist’) perspective that looks at capital, the state, and civil society (the latter suspect as it reflects ‘institutionalized attempts to secure domination’, p. 26), but it is revealed in ‘obstinate everyday practice’ that ‘not only reproduces structures, but continuously shapes and influences relations of force, social struggles or historical structures’ (20). Crucially, this entails a broad definition of ‘the worker’ that includes the so-called ‘private’ sphere of social reproduction, in which whilst ‘many actions that occur … are necessary for the reproduction of broader structures, and indeed for the reproduction of capitalist relations of domination and production; likewise, many are not’ (19).
In short, they mostly look away from the state, political parties, trade unions and the conventional ‘world of work’ towards a broader conception of disruption, and a focus on ‘disruptive subjectivities in general, and the subjectivity of the ‘pragmatically prefigurative worker’, broadly defined:
‘her work might be waged and in the formal workplace, but it might also be unwaged and in the home, the school, or the university. Her status as a worker might be defined by her inability to find paid work, but also by her unwillingness to do so. What defines her as a worker is her inability to join the ranks of those who can afford to live by virtue of their exploitation of others, alongside her vulnerability to being one of those exploited in order for others to afford to live’ (3).
This focus on ‘novel forms of organizing from below and resistant subjectivities’ (2-3) is addressed through the identification of four ‘ideal types’ of disruptive subjectivity: the disengaged, disaffected, disinterested [i.e: uninterested] political (non-)actor; the vocal agent of political representation; the refusal-prone materialist; and the prefigurative radical (28-31). This covers a spectrum of behaviour from foot-dragging and non-compliance, demands to be heard through conventional or innovative political channels and collective actions of refusal such as striking and civil disobedience to attempts to create new, alternative and radically egalitarian social relations that assert what Dinerstein (2014: 369) calls ‘a dignified life beyond capitalism’. They do not discount any of these, but their preference clearly lies with the last: ‘She actively attempts to create new, alternative social relations, or what we might term autonomous forms of social reproduction (Federici, 2012). By posing and working towards the creation of alternative and radically egalitarian social relations, the prefigurative radical actively and directly disrupts established relations of domination through her existence and activity’ (30-31).
BCHR focus on Spain and the UK as case studies in a ‘most different system approach to paired comparison’ in relation to ‘four key spheres of contestation in contemporary European capitalism: the workplace, welfare, education, and housing’ (32). Chapter Two, which addresses the background from 1914 to the 1980s, highlights the labour militancy, radicalism and social unrest that followed each World War, and places European integration after 1945 in the context of ‘a concerted effort by Europe’s political and economic elite (under the tutelage of the United States) to secure a class compromise that would achieve as full an eradication of social unrest as possible’ (41). European integration, through both the European Coal and Steel Community and the 1957 Treaty of Rome, was intended to promote a market-based social order by providing a supranational framework, shielded from democratic contestation, that would discipline and control labour and heighten market competition by imposing external constraints on domestic actors. From the start, ‘the construction of a freer market … created pressure for conformity to wage and productivity norms across the market’ (43); and when this strategy began to falter in the late 1960s and 1970s, in a new period of industrial unrest and disruption, European elites responded by relaunching the integration project to intensify market pressures on workers and states and restore capitalist class power over labour. With the European Monetary System (1979) member countries deliberately imposed constraints upon themselves to lock in low inflation ‘in an attempt to impose tighter discipline upon their respective national workforces’ and justify subsequent attempts to impose austerity measures and wage restraints (53); and the Single European Act and the single market it created intensified this disciplinary effort. Financial liberalization at the end of the 1980s locked in further pressure for market competition, and all of this prepared the ground for the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, economic and monetary union, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the introduction of the euro. The introduction of ‘convergence criteria’ in this context ‘represented a further step towards the use of European integration in an attempt to pre-emptively discipline potentially recalcitrant economic actors and thereby seek to ensure the discipline of the market across European society’ (57). Finally, accession protocols for new members required adoption of all such disciplines, imposing adjustment as a price of entry.
However, in the closing section of this chapter (58-62), BCHR identify two key disruptive trends that reflected the ‘obstinate agency of the working class’. The first was heightened disengagement, brought about by the ‘dismantling of working class and solidaristic institutions, various forms of managerialism, and increasingly flexible labour markets’ facilitated ‘through a range of mechanisms, but a central one of which was the temporary increase in living standards achieved through the process of financialization, and especially the increase in wealth achieved through rising house prices that this financialization produced’: ‘Put simply, in exchange for disengaging from organized and visibly disruptive forms of class struggle, important sections of the working class were increasingly compensated through an increase in wealth produced by a finance-led inflation of their personal assets, especially in the form of housing’ (58). This in turn facilitated asset-based borrowing and increased consumption, at the price of indebtedness, and laid the basis for the subsequent crisis. Second, policies to promote increased productivity and competitiveness were not working (ECB Director General Christian Thimann is quoted on this), especially in countries where worker militancy was succeeding in blocking efforts to reduce wages and reform labour markets, so ‘the Eurozone crisis was caused by an inability to sufficiently discipline European workers, to channel their efforts towards that of productivity in a form that is subordinate to the demands of capital, and to reform labour market laws to a sufficient degree that such a disciplining might be possible’ (60).
In neither of these instances is the appeal to the ‘obstinate agency of the working class’ persuasive. In the first case, debt-led expansion of working-class assets and consumption in order to facilitate welfare retrenchment can be seen as a ‘second-best’ elite strategy in the absence of sufficient gains from productivity and increased competitiveness. It does illustrate the relative failure of neoliberal reform, but not obstinate agency – rather, workers accepted this new and unstable form of anti-welfare finance-based class compromise, either in an effort to maintain a standard of living to which they aspired and had become accustomed, or more often because in circumstances of falling wages, higher unemployment and low job security they could not otherwise survive. The politics of labelling involuntary indebtedness as disruptive agency are questionable, to say the least, and the weakness of the argument is underlined further at few pages later, where the same personal indebtedness is represented as ‘a form of imperceptible or everyday dissent, at least in the sense that people were willing to take on more debt than they could afford to repay’ (64). On this logic, resort in desperation to pay-day loans and loan sharks would represent the height of rebellion, rather than entrapment in the snares of petty financial capital. In the second case, BCHR concede that ‘this is not to say that a real and successful assault on wages did not occur as a result of the moves from the mid-1980s to impose greater market discipline through European integration, even in those countries (especially in Southern Europe) that experienced a relatively high frequency of strikes’ (62); and as they go on to report, another sustained assault on the militancy of workers resisting wage compression and labour market restructuring was to follow. In fact, the claim that integration-based strategies to boost productivity and competitiveness were failing is the one thing on which everyone – from the Commission itself to the CPE authors whom BCHR charge with implying that liberalism has been smoothly and successfully imposed – is entirely in agreement. But resistance on the part of labour is only one side of it. Capital has followed a strategy of investing elsewhere in the global value chain, with the consequence that the EU share of world GDP has been falling steadily for three decades. And while workers do seek to resist speeding-up and ‘shirk on the job’ where they can, no doubt, as they always have, it is increasingly difficult in the face of contemporary advances in on-the-job monitoring and surveillance down to the level of the individual worker, especially in the context of casualization, precarity and high unemployment.
There is a question mark, then, over the treatment of 'obstinate agency'. How is the theme pursued, then, in the sequence of chapters on work, welfare, education and housing? The first (Chapter Three) details the latest round of disciplinary mechanisms introduced by the EU (initially, the Euro Plus pact, the ‘Six-Pack’, and the Fiscal Compact), notes that at the national level, ‘the hardening of the state and the shift in power relations between capital and labour have prompted resignation and defensive individual efforts of "muddling through" in the context of deteriorating everyday living conditions’ (66-7), and reports that days lost to strikes have not risen from previous low levels during the crisis. The case studies that follow reflect what we might call this ‘labour melancholy’ as much as they illustrate ‘new resistant subjectivities that were able to deepen the legitimacy crisis of the state, develop and reinvent forms of disruptive action and thereby at least temporarily challenge capital within the production process’ (68): in the UK, defensive responses to bringing in other EU workers through the European Posted Workers Directive (Lindsay Oil Refinery), the threatened closure of a factory on the Isle of Wight (Vestas), and a ‘living wage campaign’ waged by cinema workers in London (Brixton Ritzy and Picturehouse) ended in compromise or failure; in Spain, attempts to resist the restructuring of a manufacturing company (Panrico) sold first to a hedge fund and then to a private equity firm, and out-sourcing and dramatically inferior terms and conditions at a formerly state-owned telecommunication company (Teléfonica/Movistar) both ended in failure, despite the range of ‘innovative’ methods employed.
Chapter Four then reviews the constraints placed on the national welfare strategies of EU member states by ‘the European institutional architecture [including the increasingly neoliberal and competition-oriented European Court of Justice] and the increased structural dynamics of competition under capitalism’ (111), but suggests that the erosion of welfare has been disrupted in two important ways: ‘Firstly, [these processes] led to an erosion of the legitimation of the European project, creating a “constraining dissensus” that acted to limit any further reforms (Hooghe and Marks, 2009). Secondly, they met the open resistance of significant sections of labour, hindering their full implementation’ (112). The following section concentrates heavily on the 1990s and early years of this century, noting episodes in which negative reform was hindered by opposition, and the concerns expressed in the 2004 Kok Report regarding failing competitiveness. BCHR then turn to the heightened attempt after 2008 to ‘reform, restructure and reduce the generosity of Europe’s welfare states’ (122; see also 125-6), before profiling cases of resistance to it. The UK Uncut campaign (131-8) exposed tax avoidance by high street retailers, and contributed to the Coalition government’s decision to address this in 2013, while Boycott Workfare and related initiatives severely hampered the provision of unpaid six-month mandatory ‘work experience’ by retail stores and charities who were shamed into leaving the scheme. In Spain, a welfare state that was markedly less generous to begin with was comprehensively restructured with the decision of the government to sign a Memorandum of Understanding in return for loans from the European Financial Stability Facility, and to go further in some respects than the ‘Troika’ demanded. Popular resistance blocked some proposed health service reforms (the privatization of public hospitals in Madrid, and the exclusion of undocumented migrants from treatment), while the Iai@flautas movement of ‘senior citizens’ (152-7) protested in local assemblies across the country, and occupied such buildings as the Barcelona Stock Exchange, drawing on tactics and historical memories of protest against the France regime which remind us that ‘innovative’ methods of the kind profiled have a long pedigree. But in both countries, further decisive steps were taken nevertheless in the rolling back of the welfare state.
Chapter Five is more problematic. It addresses education, and after a weak introductory section the focus is on the post-1979 skills-based accumulation strategy, which is said to be ‘somewhat contradictory … in that it has also been accompanied by a flexibilization of the labour market’:
‘On the one hand, therefore, firms increasingly demand higher skilled labour, but on the other hand the increased fluidity of the labour market has disincentivized firms from providing the necessary training and instead encouraged them to ‘poach’ trained workers away from other firms (Albo, 1994: 151). This has therefore created a requirement for states to gear labour market and social policy towards improved competitiveness (Jessop: 1993: 9, cited p.166).
This is a contradiction, all right, just as it is that individual capitalists will work workers to death and imperil their reproduction from one generation to the next, despite the fact that the interest of capital itself requires workers to be available for exploitation. But it is emergent from the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and is intrinsic to it in its most developed form, as Marx brilliantly explicates in insisting that the possibility of varying labour (the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labour) must become a general law of social production’ (Capital, I, Penguin, 1976: 618).
From the point of view of capital, then, the battle to introduce ‘self-financed skills-based training’, placing the burden on the individual worker, is a crucial one. Its European aspect is the ‘Bologna process’ inaugurated in 1999 (broadly but not strictly coterminous with the EU), which was intended precisely to produce workers who exhibited ‘variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility … in all directions’ (ibid: 617), or at least, mobility in all directions within the European space. Citing Fejes (2008) on the aim of the process being to produce European citizens who are ‘flexible, autonomous, and self-regulating’ (172), BCHR note that its objectives ‘were directly linked to the aim of securing economic gains through the creation of a common education area and the establishment of innovation, entrepreneurship and market orientation as key guidelines for universities’ (169). It facilitated reforms that were fiercely contested, as it was intended to do, and gave rise to the European Credit Transfer System and the European Higher Education Area – a region-wide market provided with its own currency. In short, higher education, tied in to the Lisbon and post-Lisbon agenda, has been ‘put to the service of ensuring the increased and improved competitiveness of the European Union, especially by improving “human capital”’ (170). As BCHR summarize it, ‘the Bologna process aims to produce neoliberal subjectivity and a neoliberal rationality of governance’ (172). Anyone in higher education in the EU should read these illuminating sections (168-79) with care and concern – de te fabula narratur. But they should discount the notion that the strategy described is inconsistent with the interest of capital itself.
BCHR go on here to detail a new push to advance the agenda after 2008, taking advantage of the crisis, along with the development of national ownership of its neoliberal objectives and internalisation within universities themselves (177-8). All this is very well done, but the closing sections of the chapter fail to convince – for all that one would like it to be otherwise – that resistance has outweighed conformity. BCHR reflect this themselves in claiming to detect ‘the defence of public education and also the emergence of fragile (utopian) horizons that point towards education as a common’ (179); but the episodes of spirited resistance documented in their brief case study of the anti-tuition fee movement in the UK (179-85) did not prevent the tripling of fees from £3,000 to £9,000, a level unthinkable a decade ago. It remains a fundamentally flawed ‘second-best’ policy on its own terms though, further weakened by compromise, and subject to modification in the future, perhaps under a new Labour government, given that proposals made in the 2017 general election that came too late to be considered by the authors. On Spain, they document the devastating effects of austerity and neoliberal reform on education across the board, but the struggles around it remain unresolved. Despite the appeal to everyday practice, BCHR do not give sufficient weight in this chapter to the understandable everyday practice of conformity to the designs of the neoliberal model, reluctant or not, by the great majority of students and staff, which they witness every day of their working lives.
Housing, the fourth topic investigated, has been ‘a sphere of continuous struggle around issues of social inequality and marketization’ (198), and BCHR document widespread squatters’ movements across Europe from the 1970s, then examine the consequences of the subsequent switch away from public housing and the post-2007 crisis. In the UK, public housing had become residual over three decades, housing benefits had been stripped back, and many on lower incomes priced out of the market. BCHR detail protests over the ‘Bedroom Tax’, the lack of affordable housing, and the Housing and Planning Act 2016, which ended lifetime tenancies and opened housing association stock to the right to buy (a plan to raise rents for high-earning tenants was dropped after the book went to press), and they give a good account of the successful but relatively context-specific UCL rent strike of 2015-16. But their strongest example comes from Spain, where housing struggles ‘witnessed a qualitative and quantitative leap in the context of the European crisis’ (226): the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH – Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca) formed in Barcelona in 2009 in the context of mass evictions, with millions of properties standing empty across the country as a whole. Growing from the ground up, it has developed effective and continuing forms of resistance – both conventional and novel – to foreclosures and evictions, and played a major part in the transformation of the politics of the city, with one of its prominent activists, Ada Colau, elected as mayor in 2015 (Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2017). PAH ‘acted to transform individual suffering into collective demands’, and was able to ‘create strong feelings of solidarity and affection that paved the way for new activist subjectivities’ (236). It is by far the most significant example in the book.
Overall, there is valuable evidence here of various hybrid forms of disruption and resistance, and the book is certainly one to read. I can’t recommend purchase of the hardback, but a paperback edition would be welcome.
However, I have some points of difference with BCHR. First, they do not need to caricature the CPE literature as they do, ignoring the extent to which it dwells on both contradictions and strategies of resistance, and conspicuously providing no evidence for the claim that it presents neoliberal integration as smooth and successful: in one glaring example, they make no reference Gill’s notion of the ‘post modern Prince’, despite its prefigurative radical content. Second, a focus on ‘everyday practice’ should be on everyday practice as a whole, rather than selected aspects that reflect disruption and resistance; and due weight should be given to the everyday practices of capitalists, as what may appear as macro-structural forces – uninterrupted division of labour, constant revolutions in production, competition on the scale of the world market, and the crises that periodically beset them – are simply the outcomes of such practices. Then, third, it is fine to say that the pacification of labour by capital is ‘impossible’, but in terms of everyday political practice it is a matter of degree, and as a theoretical position it doesn’t help to decide whether one or another particular national or supranational political-institutional arrangement is more or less conducive to disruption and resistance. Fourth, and in relation to this, the strongest conclusion I take from the book, supported by consistent and compelling evidence at every stage, is that the commitment of the EC/EU to neoliberal reform has been strong and unrelenting, gathering pace from period to period, doubled down upon in every crisis, and more comprehensive and pervasive today than it has ever been. Fifth, although some significant evidence is given over successful disruption/resistance in relation to tax avoidance, specific welfare cuts and forms of gentrification, it is only the PAH case that fully meets illustrates the claims advanced. Sixth, though, even this case is presented with barely any discussion of the political economy of Barcelona as a ‘city of rents’ and its implications for strategies of competitiveness (Charnock et al, 2014). Seventh, in this case as in others the positing of a positive hybrid relationship between conventional representational politics and prefigurative radicalism is persuasive, but it is a mistake to regard it as at all new. I would suggest, on the contrary, that practically every significant step of social or political progress has reflected such a mix, and offer women’s suffrage as a case in point.
All of this bears on BCHR’s evaluation of four potential trajectories to European integration in the conclusion: the continuation of a system of fragile government without consent, including a continuation of technocratic rule and the hardening of the European ensemble of state apparatuses; a reform of the EU, with concessions aimed at re-including excluded sections of the European population into the European project, along the lines of a re-emboldened Social Europe agenda; the construction of an alternative European socio-economic formation from below, perhaps by the pragmatically prefigurative disruptive agents that have been developing during the crisis era; and ‘a disintegration of the European project as a result of rising right-wing populism and authoritarianism' (246). They regard the first as unsustainable in the long term, recklessly discounting altogether at the same time the possibility that the Commission and its allies will succeed in reshaping the subjectivities of their citizens along lines conducive to its relative stabilization, and prompting the question of how long in any case they imagine the long term to be, given their account of its record to date. The deem the second outcome unlikely, ‘due to the deeply enshrined neoliberal tendencies of the EU’ (247), but the third somehow is not, though no reasons are given. On the contrary: ‘The third route, in our view, therefore represents the necessary precondition for preventing the fourth, which is the most dismal of them all’ (ibid). As must be apparent, this whole conclusion is entirely over-determined by the unexpected outcome of the UK referendum on membership of the EU, which is clearly the most disruptive act of resistance in defiance of elite guidance in the history of the EU, but one that causes BCHR some difficulty. They seem unable even to imagine, despite the overwhelming evidence they present, that it is the EU itself that is the problem: mass opposition to a supranational neoliberal organisation that not only seeks to impose austerity in response to crisis, but as they are at pains to show, is constitutionally committed through and through and has been from the outset to disciplining and controlling labour and heightening market competition by imposing external constraints on domestic actors is bound to take a nationalistic form, whatever other attributes it may have. BCHR surely do not intend to essentialise workers across the EU in the UK or elsewhere as racist. If opposition to neoliberalism can be 'channelled into xenophobia, nationalism, and a populist conviction that it is migrants, as well as the political mainstream, that represents the cause of the current malaise' (246), it is in large part because its principal disciplinary components are devised and developed by an anti-democratic supranational authority. There clearly are limits, given the current state of the world market, to a re-emboldened social democratic project anywhere in Europe. But there would be far fewer limits outside the EU than within it, and it is symptomatic of their inability to see the EU as the problem that BCHR can identify Labour under Corbyn as reflecting their desired hybridity of pragmatically prefigurative politics, but do not even consider the possibility that its chances of success would be greater outside the EU than in. As the EU is neoliberalism, defeat and austerity, the path beyond them must lie outside it.
References
Albo, Greg (1994) ‘”Competitive austerity” and the impasse of capitalist employment policy’, Socialist Register, 30, pp. 144-170.
Charnock, Greig, Thomas F. Purcell and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (2014), ‘City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 1, 198-217.
Charnock, Greig, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (2017), 'Barcelona en Comú: Urban Democracy and the "Common Good"', Socialist Register 2018: Rethinking Democracy, 188-201.
Dinerstein, Ana (2014), ‘Too bad for the facts: Confronting value with hope (Notes on the Argentine Uprising of 2001)’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113, 2, 367-78.
Federici, Silvia (2012), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, PM Press.
Holland, Eugene (2011), Nomad Citizenship: Free Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks (2009), ‘A postfunctionalist theory of European Integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus’, British Journal of Political Science, 39, 1, 1-23.
Jessop, Bob (1993), Towards a Schumpeterian workfare state? Preliminary remarks on post-Fordist political economy’, Studies in Political Economy, 40, 7-39.
BCHR define their position in relation to the critical political economy (CPE) literature on European integration (Apeldoorn, Bieling, Bieler, Bonefeld, Cafruny, Gill, Jessop, Morton, Overbeek, Reiner, Van der Pijl, Wigger and others), arguing that it dwells too much on the power of capital, exhibiting ‘a tendency to focus on macro-analyses that depict forebodingly powerful structures of inequality and domination’, proving as a consequence ‘largely unable to address or inform those seeking political strategies that are able to oppose and challenge the devastating effects of neoliberal European integration’, and inadvertently promoting ‘left melancholy’ (1-2). They agree with the CPE account of the EU as pro-market, anti-welfare and pro-inequality, with an anti-democratic neoliberal project ‘inscribed into its very core’, but they are ‘concerned with the conclusion towards which this analysis appears to lead: which is that neoliberalism has been successfully and smoothly imposed upon European society’ (9). They insist not, drawing attention to the successive failures of the Lisbon Agenda and related efforts to achieve increased productivity and competitiveness, and the continual contestation and disruption to which it has been subject.
Underpinning their argument is the theoretical position that if capitalism is viewed from the perspective of labour rather than capital (an approach they call ‘minor Marxism’, taking the term from Holland, 2011), it becomes apparent that ‘the agency of labour (broadly defined) always-already acts to disrupt attempts to secure relations of domination’; domination ‘never quite exists and never quite manages to stabilize itself’ (4). In this perspective, the pursuit of marketized European integration ‘is itself an attempt to achieve a broader goal; the unattainable, but necessary pacification of labour’ (8); workers have a ‘disruptive form of agency’ that capital can never entirely suppress. It may be ‘imperceptible’ from a macro (‘major Marxist’) perspective that looks at capital, the state, and civil society (the latter suspect as it reflects ‘institutionalized attempts to secure domination’, p. 26), but it is revealed in ‘obstinate everyday practice’ that ‘not only reproduces structures, but continuously shapes and influences relations of force, social struggles or historical structures’ (20). Crucially, this entails a broad definition of ‘the worker’ that includes the so-called ‘private’ sphere of social reproduction, in which whilst ‘many actions that occur … are necessary for the reproduction of broader structures, and indeed for the reproduction of capitalist relations of domination and production; likewise, many are not’ (19).
In short, they mostly look away from the state, political parties, trade unions and the conventional ‘world of work’ towards a broader conception of disruption, and a focus on ‘disruptive subjectivities in general, and the subjectivity of the ‘pragmatically prefigurative worker’, broadly defined:
‘her work might be waged and in the formal workplace, but it might also be unwaged and in the home, the school, or the university. Her status as a worker might be defined by her inability to find paid work, but also by her unwillingness to do so. What defines her as a worker is her inability to join the ranks of those who can afford to live by virtue of their exploitation of others, alongside her vulnerability to being one of those exploited in order for others to afford to live’ (3).
This focus on ‘novel forms of organizing from below and resistant subjectivities’ (2-3) is addressed through the identification of four ‘ideal types’ of disruptive subjectivity: the disengaged, disaffected, disinterested [i.e: uninterested] political (non-)actor; the vocal agent of political representation; the refusal-prone materialist; and the prefigurative radical (28-31). This covers a spectrum of behaviour from foot-dragging and non-compliance, demands to be heard through conventional or innovative political channels and collective actions of refusal such as striking and civil disobedience to attempts to create new, alternative and radically egalitarian social relations that assert what Dinerstein (2014: 369) calls ‘a dignified life beyond capitalism’. They do not discount any of these, but their preference clearly lies with the last: ‘She actively attempts to create new, alternative social relations, or what we might term autonomous forms of social reproduction (Federici, 2012). By posing and working towards the creation of alternative and radically egalitarian social relations, the prefigurative radical actively and directly disrupts established relations of domination through her existence and activity’ (30-31).
BCHR focus on Spain and the UK as case studies in a ‘most different system approach to paired comparison’ in relation to ‘four key spheres of contestation in contemporary European capitalism: the workplace, welfare, education, and housing’ (32). Chapter Two, which addresses the background from 1914 to the 1980s, highlights the labour militancy, radicalism and social unrest that followed each World War, and places European integration after 1945 in the context of ‘a concerted effort by Europe’s political and economic elite (under the tutelage of the United States) to secure a class compromise that would achieve as full an eradication of social unrest as possible’ (41). European integration, through both the European Coal and Steel Community and the 1957 Treaty of Rome, was intended to promote a market-based social order by providing a supranational framework, shielded from democratic contestation, that would discipline and control labour and heighten market competition by imposing external constraints on domestic actors. From the start, ‘the construction of a freer market … created pressure for conformity to wage and productivity norms across the market’ (43); and when this strategy began to falter in the late 1960s and 1970s, in a new period of industrial unrest and disruption, European elites responded by relaunching the integration project to intensify market pressures on workers and states and restore capitalist class power over labour. With the European Monetary System (1979) member countries deliberately imposed constraints upon themselves to lock in low inflation ‘in an attempt to impose tighter discipline upon their respective national workforces’ and justify subsequent attempts to impose austerity measures and wage restraints (53); and the Single European Act and the single market it created intensified this disciplinary effort. Financial liberalization at the end of the 1980s locked in further pressure for market competition, and all of this prepared the ground for the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, economic and monetary union, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the introduction of the euro. The introduction of ‘convergence criteria’ in this context ‘represented a further step towards the use of European integration in an attempt to pre-emptively discipline potentially recalcitrant economic actors and thereby seek to ensure the discipline of the market across European society’ (57). Finally, accession protocols for new members required adoption of all such disciplines, imposing adjustment as a price of entry.
However, in the closing section of this chapter (58-62), BCHR identify two key disruptive trends that reflected the ‘obstinate agency of the working class’. The first was heightened disengagement, brought about by the ‘dismantling of working class and solidaristic institutions, various forms of managerialism, and increasingly flexible labour markets’ facilitated ‘through a range of mechanisms, but a central one of which was the temporary increase in living standards achieved through the process of financialization, and especially the increase in wealth achieved through rising house prices that this financialization produced’: ‘Put simply, in exchange for disengaging from organized and visibly disruptive forms of class struggle, important sections of the working class were increasingly compensated through an increase in wealth produced by a finance-led inflation of their personal assets, especially in the form of housing’ (58). This in turn facilitated asset-based borrowing and increased consumption, at the price of indebtedness, and laid the basis for the subsequent crisis. Second, policies to promote increased productivity and competitiveness were not working (ECB Director General Christian Thimann is quoted on this), especially in countries where worker militancy was succeeding in blocking efforts to reduce wages and reform labour markets, so ‘the Eurozone crisis was caused by an inability to sufficiently discipline European workers, to channel their efforts towards that of productivity in a form that is subordinate to the demands of capital, and to reform labour market laws to a sufficient degree that such a disciplining might be possible’ (60).
In neither of these instances is the appeal to the ‘obstinate agency of the working class’ persuasive. In the first case, debt-led expansion of working-class assets and consumption in order to facilitate welfare retrenchment can be seen as a ‘second-best’ elite strategy in the absence of sufficient gains from productivity and increased competitiveness. It does illustrate the relative failure of neoliberal reform, but not obstinate agency – rather, workers accepted this new and unstable form of anti-welfare finance-based class compromise, either in an effort to maintain a standard of living to which they aspired and had become accustomed, or more often because in circumstances of falling wages, higher unemployment and low job security they could not otherwise survive. The politics of labelling involuntary indebtedness as disruptive agency are questionable, to say the least, and the weakness of the argument is underlined further at few pages later, where the same personal indebtedness is represented as ‘a form of imperceptible or everyday dissent, at least in the sense that people were willing to take on more debt than they could afford to repay’ (64). On this logic, resort in desperation to pay-day loans and loan sharks would represent the height of rebellion, rather than entrapment in the snares of petty financial capital. In the second case, BCHR concede that ‘this is not to say that a real and successful assault on wages did not occur as a result of the moves from the mid-1980s to impose greater market discipline through European integration, even in those countries (especially in Southern Europe) that experienced a relatively high frequency of strikes’ (62); and as they go on to report, another sustained assault on the militancy of workers resisting wage compression and labour market restructuring was to follow. In fact, the claim that integration-based strategies to boost productivity and competitiveness were failing is the one thing on which everyone – from the Commission itself to the CPE authors whom BCHR charge with implying that liberalism has been smoothly and successfully imposed – is entirely in agreement. But resistance on the part of labour is only one side of it. Capital has followed a strategy of investing elsewhere in the global value chain, with the consequence that the EU share of world GDP has been falling steadily for three decades. And while workers do seek to resist speeding-up and ‘shirk on the job’ where they can, no doubt, as they always have, it is increasingly difficult in the face of contemporary advances in on-the-job monitoring and surveillance down to the level of the individual worker, especially in the context of casualization, precarity and high unemployment.
There is a question mark, then, over the treatment of 'obstinate agency'. How is the theme pursued, then, in the sequence of chapters on work, welfare, education and housing? The first (Chapter Three) details the latest round of disciplinary mechanisms introduced by the EU (initially, the Euro Plus pact, the ‘Six-Pack’, and the Fiscal Compact), notes that at the national level, ‘the hardening of the state and the shift in power relations between capital and labour have prompted resignation and defensive individual efforts of "muddling through" in the context of deteriorating everyday living conditions’ (66-7), and reports that days lost to strikes have not risen from previous low levels during the crisis. The case studies that follow reflect what we might call this ‘labour melancholy’ as much as they illustrate ‘new resistant subjectivities that were able to deepen the legitimacy crisis of the state, develop and reinvent forms of disruptive action and thereby at least temporarily challenge capital within the production process’ (68): in the UK, defensive responses to bringing in other EU workers through the European Posted Workers Directive (Lindsay Oil Refinery), the threatened closure of a factory on the Isle of Wight (Vestas), and a ‘living wage campaign’ waged by cinema workers in London (Brixton Ritzy and Picturehouse) ended in compromise or failure; in Spain, attempts to resist the restructuring of a manufacturing company (Panrico) sold first to a hedge fund and then to a private equity firm, and out-sourcing and dramatically inferior terms and conditions at a formerly state-owned telecommunication company (Teléfonica/Movistar) both ended in failure, despite the range of ‘innovative’ methods employed.
Chapter Four then reviews the constraints placed on the national welfare strategies of EU member states by ‘the European institutional architecture [including the increasingly neoliberal and competition-oriented European Court of Justice] and the increased structural dynamics of competition under capitalism’ (111), but suggests that the erosion of welfare has been disrupted in two important ways: ‘Firstly, [these processes] led to an erosion of the legitimation of the European project, creating a “constraining dissensus” that acted to limit any further reforms (Hooghe and Marks, 2009). Secondly, they met the open resistance of significant sections of labour, hindering their full implementation’ (112). The following section concentrates heavily on the 1990s and early years of this century, noting episodes in which negative reform was hindered by opposition, and the concerns expressed in the 2004 Kok Report regarding failing competitiveness. BCHR then turn to the heightened attempt after 2008 to ‘reform, restructure and reduce the generosity of Europe’s welfare states’ (122; see also 125-6), before profiling cases of resistance to it. The UK Uncut campaign (131-8) exposed tax avoidance by high street retailers, and contributed to the Coalition government’s decision to address this in 2013, while Boycott Workfare and related initiatives severely hampered the provision of unpaid six-month mandatory ‘work experience’ by retail stores and charities who were shamed into leaving the scheme. In Spain, a welfare state that was markedly less generous to begin with was comprehensively restructured with the decision of the government to sign a Memorandum of Understanding in return for loans from the European Financial Stability Facility, and to go further in some respects than the ‘Troika’ demanded. Popular resistance blocked some proposed health service reforms (the privatization of public hospitals in Madrid, and the exclusion of undocumented migrants from treatment), while the Iai@flautas movement of ‘senior citizens’ (152-7) protested in local assemblies across the country, and occupied such buildings as the Barcelona Stock Exchange, drawing on tactics and historical memories of protest against the France regime which remind us that ‘innovative’ methods of the kind profiled have a long pedigree. But in both countries, further decisive steps were taken nevertheless in the rolling back of the welfare state.
Chapter Five is more problematic. It addresses education, and after a weak introductory section the focus is on the post-1979 skills-based accumulation strategy, which is said to be ‘somewhat contradictory … in that it has also been accompanied by a flexibilization of the labour market’:
‘On the one hand, therefore, firms increasingly demand higher skilled labour, but on the other hand the increased fluidity of the labour market has disincentivized firms from providing the necessary training and instead encouraged them to ‘poach’ trained workers away from other firms (Albo, 1994: 151). This has therefore created a requirement for states to gear labour market and social policy towards improved competitiveness (Jessop: 1993: 9, cited p.166).
This is a contradiction, all right, just as it is that individual capitalists will work workers to death and imperil their reproduction from one generation to the next, despite the fact that the interest of capital itself requires workers to be available for exploitation. But it is emergent from the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and is intrinsic to it in its most developed form, as Marx brilliantly explicates in insisting that the possibility of varying labour (the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labour) must become a general law of social production’ (Capital, I, Penguin, 1976: 618).
From the point of view of capital, then, the battle to introduce ‘self-financed skills-based training’, placing the burden on the individual worker, is a crucial one. Its European aspect is the ‘Bologna process’ inaugurated in 1999 (broadly but not strictly coterminous with the EU), which was intended precisely to produce workers who exhibited ‘variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility … in all directions’ (ibid: 617), or at least, mobility in all directions within the European space. Citing Fejes (2008) on the aim of the process being to produce European citizens who are ‘flexible, autonomous, and self-regulating’ (172), BCHR note that its objectives ‘were directly linked to the aim of securing economic gains through the creation of a common education area and the establishment of innovation, entrepreneurship and market orientation as key guidelines for universities’ (169). It facilitated reforms that were fiercely contested, as it was intended to do, and gave rise to the European Credit Transfer System and the European Higher Education Area – a region-wide market provided with its own currency. In short, higher education, tied in to the Lisbon and post-Lisbon agenda, has been ‘put to the service of ensuring the increased and improved competitiveness of the European Union, especially by improving “human capital”’ (170). As BCHR summarize it, ‘the Bologna process aims to produce neoliberal subjectivity and a neoliberal rationality of governance’ (172). Anyone in higher education in the EU should read these illuminating sections (168-79) with care and concern – de te fabula narratur. But they should discount the notion that the strategy described is inconsistent with the interest of capital itself.
BCHR go on here to detail a new push to advance the agenda after 2008, taking advantage of the crisis, along with the development of national ownership of its neoliberal objectives and internalisation within universities themselves (177-8). All this is very well done, but the closing sections of the chapter fail to convince – for all that one would like it to be otherwise – that resistance has outweighed conformity. BCHR reflect this themselves in claiming to detect ‘the defence of public education and also the emergence of fragile (utopian) horizons that point towards education as a common’ (179); but the episodes of spirited resistance documented in their brief case study of the anti-tuition fee movement in the UK (179-85) did not prevent the tripling of fees from £3,000 to £9,000, a level unthinkable a decade ago. It remains a fundamentally flawed ‘second-best’ policy on its own terms though, further weakened by compromise, and subject to modification in the future, perhaps under a new Labour government, given that proposals made in the 2017 general election that came too late to be considered by the authors. On Spain, they document the devastating effects of austerity and neoliberal reform on education across the board, but the struggles around it remain unresolved. Despite the appeal to everyday practice, BCHR do not give sufficient weight in this chapter to the understandable everyday practice of conformity to the designs of the neoliberal model, reluctant or not, by the great majority of students and staff, which they witness every day of their working lives.
Housing, the fourth topic investigated, has been ‘a sphere of continuous struggle around issues of social inequality and marketization’ (198), and BCHR document widespread squatters’ movements across Europe from the 1970s, then examine the consequences of the subsequent switch away from public housing and the post-2007 crisis. In the UK, public housing had become residual over three decades, housing benefits had been stripped back, and many on lower incomes priced out of the market. BCHR detail protests over the ‘Bedroom Tax’, the lack of affordable housing, and the Housing and Planning Act 2016, which ended lifetime tenancies and opened housing association stock to the right to buy (a plan to raise rents for high-earning tenants was dropped after the book went to press), and they give a good account of the successful but relatively context-specific UCL rent strike of 2015-16. But their strongest example comes from Spain, where housing struggles ‘witnessed a qualitative and quantitative leap in the context of the European crisis’ (226): the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH – Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca) formed in Barcelona in 2009 in the context of mass evictions, with millions of properties standing empty across the country as a whole. Growing from the ground up, it has developed effective and continuing forms of resistance – both conventional and novel – to foreclosures and evictions, and played a major part in the transformation of the politics of the city, with one of its prominent activists, Ada Colau, elected as mayor in 2015 (Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2017). PAH ‘acted to transform individual suffering into collective demands’, and was able to ‘create strong feelings of solidarity and affection that paved the way for new activist subjectivities’ (236). It is by far the most significant example in the book.
Overall, there is valuable evidence here of various hybrid forms of disruption and resistance, and the book is certainly one to read. I can’t recommend purchase of the hardback, but a paperback edition would be welcome.
However, I have some points of difference with BCHR. First, they do not need to caricature the CPE literature as they do, ignoring the extent to which it dwells on both contradictions and strategies of resistance, and conspicuously providing no evidence for the claim that it presents neoliberal integration as smooth and successful: in one glaring example, they make no reference Gill’s notion of the ‘post modern Prince’, despite its prefigurative radical content. Second, a focus on ‘everyday practice’ should be on everyday practice as a whole, rather than selected aspects that reflect disruption and resistance; and due weight should be given to the everyday practices of capitalists, as what may appear as macro-structural forces – uninterrupted division of labour, constant revolutions in production, competition on the scale of the world market, and the crises that periodically beset them – are simply the outcomes of such practices. Then, third, it is fine to say that the pacification of labour by capital is ‘impossible’, but in terms of everyday political practice it is a matter of degree, and as a theoretical position it doesn’t help to decide whether one or another particular national or supranational political-institutional arrangement is more or less conducive to disruption and resistance. Fourth, and in relation to this, the strongest conclusion I take from the book, supported by consistent and compelling evidence at every stage, is that the commitment of the EC/EU to neoliberal reform has been strong and unrelenting, gathering pace from period to period, doubled down upon in every crisis, and more comprehensive and pervasive today than it has ever been. Fifth, although some significant evidence is given over successful disruption/resistance in relation to tax avoidance, specific welfare cuts and forms of gentrification, it is only the PAH case that fully meets illustrates the claims advanced. Sixth, though, even this case is presented with barely any discussion of the political economy of Barcelona as a ‘city of rents’ and its implications for strategies of competitiveness (Charnock et al, 2014). Seventh, in this case as in others the positing of a positive hybrid relationship between conventional representational politics and prefigurative radicalism is persuasive, but it is a mistake to regard it as at all new. I would suggest, on the contrary, that practically every significant step of social or political progress has reflected such a mix, and offer women’s suffrage as a case in point.
All of this bears on BCHR’s evaluation of four potential trajectories to European integration in the conclusion: the continuation of a system of fragile government without consent, including a continuation of technocratic rule and the hardening of the European ensemble of state apparatuses; a reform of the EU, with concessions aimed at re-including excluded sections of the European population into the European project, along the lines of a re-emboldened Social Europe agenda; the construction of an alternative European socio-economic formation from below, perhaps by the pragmatically prefigurative disruptive agents that have been developing during the crisis era; and ‘a disintegration of the European project as a result of rising right-wing populism and authoritarianism' (246). They regard the first as unsustainable in the long term, recklessly discounting altogether at the same time the possibility that the Commission and its allies will succeed in reshaping the subjectivities of their citizens along lines conducive to its relative stabilization, and prompting the question of how long in any case they imagine the long term to be, given their account of its record to date. The deem the second outcome unlikely, ‘due to the deeply enshrined neoliberal tendencies of the EU’ (247), but the third somehow is not, though no reasons are given. On the contrary: ‘The third route, in our view, therefore represents the necessary precondition for preventing the fourth, which is the most dismal of them all’ (ibid). As must be apparent, this whole conclusion is entirely over-determined by the unexpected outcome of the UK referendum on membership of the EU, which is clearly the most disruptive act of resistance in defiance of elite guidance in the history of the EU, but one that causes BCHR some difficulty. They seem unable even to imagine, despite the overwhelming evidence they present, that it is the EU itself that is the problem: mass opposition to a supranational neoliberal organisation that not only seeks to impose austerity in response to crisis, but as they are at pains to show, is constitutionally committed through and through and has been from the outset to disciplining and controlling labour and heightening market competition by imposing external constraints on domestic actors is bound to take a nationalistic form, whatever other attributes it may have. BCHR surely do not intend to essentialise workers across the EU in the UK or elsewhere as racist. If opposition to neoliberalism can be 'channelled into xenophobia, nationalism, and a populist conviction that it is migrants, as well as the political mainstream, that represents the cause of the current malaise' (246), it is in large part because its principal disciplinary components are devised and developed by an anti-democratic supranational authority. There clearly are limits, given the current state of the world market, to a re-emboldened social democratic project anywhere in Europe. But there would be far fewer limits outside the EU than within it, and it is symptomatic of their inability to see the EU as the problem that BCHR can identify Labour under Corbyn as reflecting their desired hybridity of pragmatically prefigurative politics, but do not even consider the possibility that its chances of success would be greater outside the EU than in. As the EU is neoliberalism, defeat and austerity, the path beyond them must lie outside it.
References
Albo, Greg (1994) ‘”Competitive austerity” and the impasse of capitalist employment policy’, Socialist Register, 30, pp. 144-170.
Charnock, Greig, Thomas F. Purcell and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (2014), ‘City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 1, 198-217.
Charnock, Greig, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (2017), 'Barcelona en Comú: Urban Democracy and the "Common Good"', Socialist Register 2018: Rethinking Democracy, 188-201.
Dinerstein, Ana (2014), ‘Too bad for the facts: Confronting value with hope (Notes on the Argentine Uprising of 2001)’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113, 2, 367-78.
Federici, Silvia (2012), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, PM Press.
Holland, Eugene (2011), Nomad Citizenship: Free Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks (2009), ‘A postfunctionalist theory of European Integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus’, British Journal of Political Science, 39, 1, 1-23.
Jessop, Bob (1993), Towards a Schumpeterian workfare state? Preliminary remarks on post-Fordist political economy’, Studies in Political Economy, 40, 7-39.