Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life

Living in a Time of Diminishing Expectations

Gargi Bhattacharyya

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137411129
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Globale Entwicklungsstudien

Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.

1

Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity?

This is a work that tries to describe the immense changes that have been implemented in the name of austerity in the early twenty-first century across Europe and that seeks to imagine the world after austerity. This is an approach that understands that there will be a time when ‘austerity’ ends, although the repercussions of what has been enacted in its name may continue to reverberate. This work presents ‘austerity’ in the twenty-first century as a time-limited campaign that mobilises the sense of crisis in order to institute some extreme and hitherto unexpected measures within a short period. Yet this approach, reliant as it is on crisis-rhetoric, cannot continue indefinitely, and it will end at some point. However, the end of austerity is not a return to things as they were. This volume seeks to demonstrate both that austerity is a campaign to transform everyday life, including when the urgency of austerity as crisis-response has passed, and that this campaign seeks to remake the terrain of the social in such a manner that previous agreements about equality and the reach of mutuality are under threat.

This work takes as its focus the impact of early twenty-first-century austerity on European nations, both within and outside the eurozone. In this, the discussion that follows encompasses both the imposed austerity of those economies that have received bailout funding from the European Central Bank and other international financial institutions and the austerity measures introduced by national governments in the name of deficit reduction in other parts of Europe. Although I am unable to give a detailed account of the impact of so-called austerity among such a diverse range of locations, the overall argument applies to this variety of spaces where some form of welfare has been assured until recently and yet is now in the process of dismantlement in the name of austerity. Although there may be moments of resonance, this is not a discussion of austerity in North America or Australia, because the formation of welfare in these spaces has taken a different trajectory. Overall, this work suggests a general frame through which to reconsider the remaking of political terrain in a region that is learning to take a very different and less economically powerful place in the world. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that austerity operates in the same manner across Europe. However, I do want to argue that the manoeuvrings undertaken through austerity represent an attempt to defend privilege and influence for some in the face of global crisis and without regard for the divisive consequences of such strategies. These defensive measures occur both within national spaces in the form of attempts to safeguard the position and privileges of local elites and between nations in a regional battle to retain the privileges of ‘being Europe’ for a few, regardless of the consequences for less affluent European nations. Overall, this volume argues that ‘austerity’ is a choice and should be read as a particular set of policy choices in the face of apparent economic crisis. Other choices could have been made. Examining how austerity becomes the approach of European governments (and others) in this moment of rapid change and uncertainty helps us to understand what is at stake in such choices.

Although this period of austerity is a response to the 2008 financial crisis, this work tries to argue that the practices and habits of austerity build upon formations that are set before this moment of crisis. It is for this reason that we can see traces of austerity practice occurring in Germany from the beginning of the century at least, with cuts to pension rights, extensions of working life, and an overall depression of wages. Overall, this work argues that the phenomena that we know as austerity, in fact, should be regarded as an acceleration of longer running trends. The moment of the financial crisis may spark and enable the most extreme of austerity measures to be implemented, but the overall project of austerity was not formed in that moment. This work tries to identify and understand these moments of an acceleration of existing tendencies.

The impact of austerity has not been uniform, and clearly suffering has been more extreme in some places. However, the overall event of a strategy can be understood as a shared experience across Europe, and there are some constant threads across the deficit-reduction strategies of richer and poorer nations in the region. These include:

• an attack on pension rights and concerted efforts to extend the length of working life;
• a scaling back of welfare entitlements and public services, with the introduction of new bureaucratic regimes to create systems to assess ongoing entitlement or disentitlement and to embed the concept of conditionality in popular consciousness;
• greatly deregulated labour markets and an overall increase in precarious employment that echoes the precarity that has become inescapable in other areas of life;
• a depreciation of real incomes and an overall diminishment of living standards for large sections of the population, whether or not they are working.

These experiences are shared across richer and poorer parts of Europe, and the argument of this book is that, taken together, the outcomes of this period may remake life and expectations of life for large sections of the European population for years to come.

This is an attempt to outline the impact of the project of austerity on these areas of life and to identify the challenges that these impacts have brought about. It is also an attempt to forgo the nostalgia that seeks to remake the world before austerity, not least because the pre-austerity world was also divided, unequal, and unliveable for many.

This is not to say that nothing has been lost. Perhaps there was a moment when the lives of working people in some regions were more stable, allowing some sense of security, some leisure, and some expectation of a comfortable old age. These benefits arose from the ability of class organisation to negotiate gains – and also from the historical moment where such gains appeared affordable within a particular regime of profit (for a discussion of such accommodations, see De Angelis, 2000). Even then, others paid the price for such security for some, with colonies and recent post-colonies providing the precarious and hyper-exploited labour and living conditions that enabled a temporary rapprochement between workers and capital in the imperial homelands (for the seminal account of this process, see Nkrumah, 1965).

Instead of longing for a return to this displaced inequality, where social suffering takes place elsewhere, beyond the boundaries of the contract of national belonging, better that we try to imagine what a liveable life might be for all of us in the wake of austere times.

This demands an attention to the techniques that have been employed to unravel social bonds and to destroy a sensibility of mutuality, in order that we might create methods of reconnection that work for the world we find ourselves in now.

This work is an attempt to map the key moments of the project that we know as austerity and to learn how these actions become both possible and credible. In order to do this, I try to outline the longer context that has changed the terms of political culture in our time and to identify the characteristics of our moment that seem to have taken decisions about public policy out of the hands of the majority of the population. This is not an account of our fall from the grace of a functioning democracy, but it is an attempt to understand what the particular detail of democratic crisis might be in our time.

In order to make this argument about the context that has enabled austerity, I chart four key trends that have come to prominence. These are the primacy of the economic, the degradation of politics, the institutionalisation of despair, and diminishing expectations. Each of these trends bleeds into the others and all are interconnected. As we will go on to discuss, instances of each reference the others, often explicitly, so that politics is empty because we must attend to the demands of the global economy; attending to the global economy deforms public policy, so that issues of need are downgraded and despair enters; politics has limited influence and the economy is beyond human influence, so we must all temper our expectations to attune with this knowledge.

Broadly, the trends refer to the following:

• The primacy of the economic: the manner in which a particular model of economic management and implied understanding of the term ‘the economy’ has come to override all other considerations in the assessment of government policy and priorities;
• The degradation of politics: the resulting emptying of political influence in the face of the allegedly larger and unstoppable force of the global economy and the strange distortions of political institutions and discourse that arise from this;
• The institutionalisation of despair: the reconstruction of institutions and workplaces to reflect the prioritising of a version of economic outcomes above all else and the accompanying hollowing out of accountability or redress, all combined to develop practices that persuade people that little or nothing can change for them;
• Diminishing expectations: the combined techniques that arise from the previous three configurations that work to limit claims and train us all to expect less and less.

After charting the emergence and workings of these four processes, I go on to consider the ramifications of such events for shared conceptions of entitlement and the administration of entitlement through public institutions and for contemporary understandings of the place and character of reproductive labour. The overall conclusion leads us back to a consideration of the shifting balance in the global economy and suggestions of how best to understand austerity as a symptom of this waning power for some locations. Despite my view that much of what is imposed in the name of austerity is irrational in economic terms and is not designed to address the key issues of deficit or instability, I also argue that we may be destined to live with the uncomfortable innovations of austerity practices for the foreseeable future.

This is in contradiction to the murmurs, at the time of writing, about the approaching end of the time of crisis. This imminent return to ‘pre-crisis levels of GDP’ is presented as a reward and justification for the years of painful constraint. Now, after the drought, there will be plenty again.

For some, at least.

One notable occurrence that arises from years of austerity across Europe and beyond is the emerging popular discourse critiquing the use of GDP or other measures of national income as proxies for prosperity (for an overview of arguments against using GDP as an indicator of policy outcomes, see Van Der Bergh, 2007). As I will go on to discuss, this can be regarded as another unforeseen outcome of the institutionalisation of despair. While we are persuaded to understand that the narratives of incremental progress and increasing wealth and health that made life feel liveable for some previous generations cannot apply to us, we also come to learn that these promises of a rapid return to business as usual mean precisely that, a return to the world where wealth and well-being are for others.

These processes that unravel the terms of equality and social inclusion also give rise to this possibility of another avenue of critique. As a result, the abstract measures that served as the commonly accepted shorthand for changing levels of prosperity no longer resonate with populations who have come only recently to comprehend the extent of the divide between themselves and the super-rich (for an influential account, see Sayer, 2014). GDP and other indicators of ‘growth’ do not lead to improved living standards for many, and the many have been finding ways to voice their suspicion of such measures (for a discussion of scepticism towards the usefulness of the measure of GDP, see Pilling, 2014; for an overview of the concept and history of GDP, see Coyle, 2014). Official talk about the overall state of the economy becomes no more than another fiction of the political elite. The other side of this understandable scepticism towards official accounts of economic growth and its consequences is that distrust of political elites can melt into a belief that there is no end to austerity for us.

In the discussion that follows, I try to outline the fault lines that have been utilised to create accounts of austerity and its associated processes that appear to speak to long-standing popular concerns. By this, I mean the various ways in which austerity has been presented as a forcing of the terms of political debate and an occasion to act on issues that had remained at the fringes of political debate previously.

In the process, the terms of concern are expanded, to show that such concerns might combine worries about failures of equality with worries about an excess of equality. Austerity has been deployed as a way of suggesting that the misfortunes of some of the most disadvantaged arise as a result of previous attempts to address systematic inequality. At its most blunt, this is the suggestion that poverty has been overlooked due to an institutional focus on discrimination (for an example of how such a contention has influenced research agendas, see Stone and Kuperberg, 2005, and their discussion of the importance of anti-discrimination initiatives alongside anti-poverty initiatives in any attempt to address the poverty of low-paid workers).

Justifications of austerity have sought to foreground the second theme – presenting welfare reform of the most punitive kind as a necessary corrective to habits of waste. However, an attention to a wider range of utterances reveals that dissatisfaction with the implementation of welfare is far more complicated (for a discussion of the factors that lead to different interpretations of welfare cuts by the electorate, see Giger and Nelson, 2011). The extensive debates about the desirability or not of welfare reform are beyond the scope of this volume. My interest is the narrower theme of how austerity has been presented as evidence of the urgent need for welfare reform and the manner in which welfare reform has been presented as a solution to this new monster, the deficit. In the process, austerity measures are presented as ‘correctives’ to long-standing unfairness in the welfare system (for an assessment of the impact of the financial crisis on ongoing processes of welfare reform, see Vis et al., 2011). In a world of increasingly precarious and low-paid work, low-income households live similarly hand-to-mouth existences, whether working, claiming benefits, or both (for a global account of in-work poverty, see Kapsos, 2004). The widespread dissatisfaction with this framework cuts many ways, from frustration at the ‘penalties’ tied to taking up paid work to resentment from the working poor towards those who survive without engaging in paid work to the belief that the habits of welfare deskill and demotivate recipients.

The mobilisation of these legitimate and complicated dissatisfactions shapes the manner in which welfare provision is dismantled and, importantly, how such dismantling is made sense of. In particular, later chapters will go on to discuss the failures and limitations of state-sponsored initiatives against racism and the gap between official rhetoric regarding gender equality and the day-to-day experiences of gendering and brushes with state authority. ...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity?
• 2 The Primacy of the Economic and the Degradation of Politics
• 3 The Institutionalisation of Despair and Diminishing Expectations
• 4 Austerity and Extending the Racial State
• 5 Reproductive Labour in Austere Times
• 6 Ending – Surplus Populations and Austerity Forever?
• Bibliography
• Index