From financial crisis to social change towards alternative horizons

FROM FINANCIAL CRISIS TO SOCIAL CHANGE Towards Alternative Horizons Edited by Torsten Geelan, Marcos González Hernando, and Peter William Walsh From Financial Crisis to Social Change Torsten Geelan Marcos González Hernando Peter William Walsh Editors From Financial Crisis to Social Change Towards Alternative Horizons Editors Torsten Geelan Department of Sociology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Marcos González Hernando Department of Sociology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Peter William Walsh Department of Sociology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK ISBN 978-3-319-70599-6    ISBN 978-3-319-70600-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70600-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934989 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Cover illustration: Richard Mehtälä #explainartist www.explainartist.org Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface: The Labyrinths and the Layers of Social Change Over the longer run, social change may take the form of trend lines, and sometimes even appear as human evolution But in the short run of some years or a decade, it is more often than not unexpected and surprising This might be said of the financial crisis of 2008 onwards, though it did have some expected consequences Chief among these was popular indignation: against soaring economic inequality; against the recklessness of the speculators who caused the crisis; and against the prophets of austerity who said we must pay the price for the errors of greedy elites However, nowhere has there been any public measures aimed at reining in this galloping inequality Rather, looking back from 2016, the main social change since 2008 has gone in a completely different direction, delivering a reinforcement of nationalism and xenophobia Eastern Europe is full of increasingly shrill, chauvinistic and xenophobic governments, already ahead of Donald Trump in banning Muslims from entry Similarly, the new regime in the Ukraine is resurrecting from its dark past the “heroes” of ethnic hatred and unrestrained mass violence—Stepan Bandera, Symon Petliura and their kind—while oligarchic corruption is doing its business as usual In western Europe, xenophobic parties form part of the governments of Denmark, Finland and Norway and are re-defining the political agenda in Austria, Belgium (Flanders in particular), the Netherlands and Switzerland In France, the Front National has become the prime v vi  Preface: The Labyrinths and the Layers of Social Change working class party In Sweden, only half of the working class now sympathise with the labour parties, the Social Democrats and the Left party Most notable, though, has been the election of Donald Trump, a living caricature of both the bragging US businessman and the bigoted, provincial White American His rise is due to the appeal of his nationalist phobias, in the same way that the campaign for Britain to leave the EU became a major force thanks to anti-immigration opinion Mass jingoism and hatred of the unfamiliar not just sprout from evil minds—although the latter may safely be assumed to exist They have their social reasons Obviously, there is the challenge of vast flows of refugees to Europe This is largely if not exclusively the result of destruction across a vast area—from north-western Pakistan and Afghanistan to Libya—by United States and allied invasions and bombardments The stream of refugees is not accepted into the United States; nor by its admirers in Eastern Europe; and only a few are allowed into the United Kingdom and France, its closest allies The brunt has had to be borne by less warring countries of the western sub-continent However, more interesting from the perspective of the authors of this book is that racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia often function as what late-nineteenth century Marxists, referring to popular anti-­Semitism in Tsarist Russia, called a “socialism of idiots”: an expression of anger at exploitation and exclusion that is diverted—with the help of evil masterminds—into fear and hatred of another exploited or vulnerable group There is no doubt that a great deal of the popular anger at the 2008 financial crisis and its consequences has been successfully re-directed against immigrants It is for this reason that many American working class Whites support a ruthless, narcissistic billionaire Frustration that is diverted into scapegoating feeds on the abandonment of the populace by Social Democratic and Liberal elites When this is not blatantly the case, however, bigotry meets its limits Consider the May 2016 mayoral election in London, where a Conservative barrage of Islamophobic innuendos and anti-Semitism-smearing fell flat against the Labour candidate Sadiq Khan The surge of chauvinism and xenophobia is only part of the story of recent social and political developments, albeit a major part In point of fact, the political landscape of the North Atlantic area has shown a   Preface: The Labyrinths and the Layers of Social Change     vii remarkable overall stability, though with some shifts inside the establishment The only country where it has radically changed is Greece Under German orchestration, the whole Eurozone apparatus and, more reluctantly for once, the IMF were mobilised to castrate it By contrast, in Iceland the governing cartel was ousted, but only temporarily, returning to office in time to face the revelations of the Panama Papers Similarly, although the Spanish and the Italian establishments have been shaken up, the Spanish protest movement-cum-party, Podemos, has so far been largely neutralised by national issues in increasingly multi-national Spain; while the real social meaning of the Italian Five Stars movement-cum-­ party remains to be revealed As a direct effect of the crisis, some hot new blood has been pumped into the establishment Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership and the large rallies of Bernie Sanders’s campaign in the Democratic primaries were very impressive mobilisations, against all (smug Liberal) odds At the same time, the Portuguese elite has had to accommodate a leftward move, with its Socialist government forming a pact of support with the Communist party Nevertheless, the 2008 financial crisis did not have the effects that great optimists like Manuel Castells and Paul Mason imagined However, beneath the layers of institutions with their inherent inertia, and beyond electoral mobilisations and their ephemerality, there exists another layer of social change: that of generational experience Generational experience deserves its own recognition and respect; and this book is de facto about this layer Moreover, it is my duty, as an old scholar, to place this particular layer in its broad context Firstly, as an old ’68-er, I learned the hard way Our political movements were all defeated, some deservedly so Yet, in retrospect, “1968” appears to be a cultural watershed in western Europe-North America, with major, enduring effects on gender and generational relations and on social hierarchies in general Whether 2008 will have a similar impact remains to be seen But what is important is that the critical perspectives on society and the protest movements reported in this book constitute defining generational experiences of young people, born in the late twentieth century and growing up with the crisis Allegiances and identities can change over time, but viii  Preface: The Labyrinths and the Layers of Social Change youthful experiences tend to set their life-marks Even without victories in the short run, the 2008 crisis has produced a new generation of critical thinkers and practitioners, who refuse to take the existing world for granted That is a significant contribution to future social change Social and political commitment should be seen and reflected upon as a learning experience Thinking about post-2008, what lessons are there? Very tentatively, I would suggest a few First of all, social change is best viewed as layers of non-synchronised processes How many layers we should distinguish depends on the purpose of our analysis and is not fixable a priori But important ones include governmental, politico-social and cultural change Because of this complexity and the ever-present contingency of social events, social change—in the midst of struggles—is rarely straightforward Rather, it is usually labyrinthine Second, trans-border migration is unquestionably a major phenomenon of our time; and through xenophobia it is adding a new dimension to politics However, such intolerance cannot be defeated simply by levelling charges of “racism” or “fascism” The associated fears and frustrations of ordinary people must be recognised and addressed, by developing and showing means to tackle them, other than bashing foreigners, and by demonstrating the hypocrisy and hollowness of the programmes of the xenophobic ideologues Third, while a protest movement might sometimes manage to stop a specific, tangible measure, such as the construction of a motorway, movements aiming at social change must develop a political form Post-2008 has seen several successful examples of this: Syriza in Greece, Cinque Stelle (Five Stars) in Italy and Podemos in Spain Crucial to their success seems to have been two factors, both of which operate on a fertile ground of official corruption, as well as anti-popular and ineffective crisis management In tension with each other, they have been, first, a charismatic, telegenic leader and, second, direct participatory democracy The former does not fit very well with an anarchistic movementalist ideology and self-perception Yet, for the crystallisation of heterogeneous mass protests into a forceful politico-social movement, the respective roles of Alexis Tsipras, Beppe Grillo and Pablo Iglesias seem to have been decisive The second component of success is that the political formation preserved its   Preface: The Labyrinths and the Layers of Social Change     ix movement’s participative character—primarily by online voting—and did not try to revive the well-structured hierarchy of the classical labour parties This can be compared to the flop of a more traditional attempt at a new left alternative, the French Parti de Gauche A fourth lesson is that when you achieve some substantial political weight, you have to study your hostile context very carefully, always thinking “if we this, what will others do, and how can we respond to that?” Hence, although the defeat of the Syriza government in Greece might have been unavoidable, its last referendum-cum-surrender should nevertheless serve as a textbook example of the disastrous effects of neglecting strategic thinking What lessons on social change, then, will our authors offer, informed by their experiences as young people growing up during the crisis of 2008? As our new generation of critical thinkers and practitioners, what will be their contribution to future social change? Cambridge, UK Göran Therborn Contents I ntroduction   1 Torsten Geelan, Marcos González Hernando, and Peter William Walsh  onsecrating the Elite: Culturally Embedding the Financial C Market in the City of London  13 Alex Simpson Section I  Reclaiming Universities   31  he Never-Ending Crisis in British Higher Education  33 T Mike Finn  he Coming Crisis of Academic Authority  53 T Eric R Lybeck Consuming Education  67 Alice Pearson xi .. .From Financial Crisis to Social Change Torsten Geelan Marcos González Hernando Peter William Walsh Editors From Financial Crisis to Social Change Towards Alternative Horizons Editors Torsten... production of alternative futures From diagnosis to treatment From deconstruction to reconstruction From negation to vision From crisis to progress Such is the responsibility of our age, from which... its main title: Crisis and Social Change The subtitle— Towards Alternative Horizons was the idea of our colleague, Kusha Sefat, which placed an emphasis on exploring alternative social imaginaries