Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society

Abstract

Abstract:The paper analyses the UK government's plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of 'social value'. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities, actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.

Valorised but not valued? Affective remuneration, social reproduction and feminist politics beyond the crisis

“…13 See for example Bryan and Rafferty, 2014;Dowling and Harvie, 2014;Whitfield, 2015 for a more detailed discussion of impact investing, which exceeds the scope of this paper. and 'count' in national economies have often ended up preparing the ground for its commodification and marketisation (cf.…”

“…Three core aspects can be identified of what has been termed a financialisation of social reproduction (Dowling and Harvie, 2014;Federici, 2014;Roberts, 2015).…”

“…The current interest in volunteering suggests that there is an attempt to sync neoliberal motivations for volunteering with a collective or communitarian ethic, thus exploiting social cooperation to produce a kind of 'win-win' situation to address a triple crisis of legitimation, social reproduction and economic growth (cf. Dowling and Harvie, 2014 money an individual would need to be given to increase their wellbeing by the same amount. On this evidence, you would need to be compensated around £2,400 on average per person per year for forgoing the opportunity to volunteer.…”

Furthering alternative cultures of valuation in higher education research

“…However, the reduction of the value of higher education to its 'contribution to more general economic and social redistribution' (Preston and Green, 2003, p. 4, cited in Department for Business Innovation & Skills [BIS], 2013) itself reflects embeddedness in a particular culture of valuation that might be described as financialisation (Dowling & Harvie, 2014;Haiven, 2014;Martin, 2002), but which Lilley and Papadopoulos (2014) designate as 'biofinancialisation' . They summarise biofinancialisation in the following way:…”

A note on the utility of austerity

“…To tamper with this success story (such as requiring £20 billion in efficiency savings) creates the potential at least for some of these gains to be reversed. Downing and Harvie (2014) develop a line of argument that constructs events around the 2007-2008 crisis as multi-faceted global crisis, lurching from a crisis of capital accumulation, through a crisis of social reproduction overlapping with a fiscal crisis of the state. According to Downing and Harvie, the state is withdrawing from the sphere of social reproduction; the need for hard-line economic austerity allows them to do that without provoking a legitimacy crisis.…”