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2 Mainstreaming co-operatives after the global financial crisis Mainstreaming after the financial crisis Claudia Sanchez Bajo and Bruno Roelants The following discussion is mainly based on our presentation at the Mainstreaming Co-operation conference on 3 July 2012, organised by the Co-operative College UK in Manchester, and on our book Capital and the Debt Trap: Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis.1 This chapter brings in an institutional focus: it discusses the mainstreaming of co-operatives against the background of the global financial crisis
14.1 Introduction The global financial crisis of 2007–8 was a hugely significant event that had profound implications for the regulation of banks as well as for the wider financial system. It also changed the way banks are viewed by the public and may have far-reaching implications for the way banks operate. It is therefore worthy of its own
6 Targeting skills during the global financial crisis, 2007–13: gendered winners and losers? The hallmark of a quality skilled migration programme is the ability to target those applicants who have skills in need. The imperative to do has become a lot sharper … as Australia got drawn into the whirlpool of the Global Financial Crisis. (Senator Chris Evans, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, 8 February 2010) Introduction With the onset of the global financial crisis, governments in both Australia and Canada undertook major reforms of their points tests. In
When Britain left the European Union in January 2021, it set out on a new journey. Shorn of empire and now the EU too, Britain’s economy is as national as it has ever been. A decade or so since globalisation seemed inevitable, this is a remarkable reversal. How did this happen?
Britain alone argues that this ‘nationalisation’ – aligning the boundaries of the state with the boundaries of the nation – emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis. The book analyses how austerity and scarcity intensified and created new conflicts over who gets what. This extends to struggle over what the British nation is for, who it represents, and who it values.
Drawing on a range of cultural, economic, and political themes – immigration and the hostile environment, nostalgia and Second World War mythology, race and the ‘left behind’, the clap for carers and furloughing, as well as SuperScrimpers and stand-up comedy – the book traces the complex nationalist path Britain took after the crash, demonstrating how we cannot explain nationalism without reference to the economy, and vice versa.
In analysing the thread that ties the fallout of the crash and austerity, through Brexit, and to the shape of lockdown politics, Britain alone provides an incisive and original history of the last decade of Britain and its relationship to the global economy.
The ‘globalisation’ concept has become ubiquitous in British politics, as it has in many countries of the world. This book examines discourse on foreign economic policy to determine the impact of globalisation across the ideological landscape of British politics. It critically interrogates the assumption that the idea of globalisation is derivative solely of neo-liberal ideology by profiling the discourse on globalisation of five political groups involved in making and contesting British foreign economic policy between 1997 and 2009: New Labour, International Financial Services London, the Liberal Democrats, Oxfam and the Socialist Workers Party. In addition to the relationship between neo-liberalism and globalisation, the book also explores the core meaning of the idea of globalisation, the implications for the principle of free trade, the impact on notions of the state, nation-state and global governance, and whether globalisation means different things across the ideological spectrum. Topically, it examines how the responses to the global financial crisis have been shaped by globalisation discourse and the value of ideology as an analytical concept able to mitigate debates on the primacy of material and ideational explanations in political economy.
Drawing on the rich history of social reproduction theory (SRT), the book situates struggles over water within an account of capitalism that emphasises the continuing relevance of expropriation. Via an engagement with the Irish water charges protests and resistance to unconventional gas in Australia, the work explores the tension between life-making and profit-making that defines the new water commodity frontier. Struggles over water, as Moore shows, are about more than access or management of a resource. What is at stake are the social relations and institutions that allow water grabs to occur. Taking up David Harvey’s conception of a spatial fix and reading it through SRT, Moore develops the notion of a spherical fix to show how crises move through the conditions that make capitalist accumulation possible. The spherical fix highlights the dependency of accumulation on the expropriation of nature and socially reproductive labour, key dynamics of the global water crisis. The depletion of capital’s conditions of possibility are, however, only one part of the story. A central question raised is how class emerges in and beyond the points of contradiction that mark water’s commodification. What Moore finds are multiple labour powers that contain the potential to be world-making. Working at the points of contradiction, struggles over water both interrupt processes of capitalist reproduction and open a space for subversive rationalities. In Australia and Ireland, what has emerged is a time of reproductive unrest.
adversely affect the aid experience. Consequently, these biases also need to be considered in project design. Typical of many policy pronouncements following the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the World Bank finds it necessary to reject the need for significant political change or social redistribution ( World Bank, 2015 : 80). This is at a time when global inequality is at record levels and new forms of post-social servitude and abjection are appearing ( Lebaron and Ayers, 2013 ). As a practical illustration of the ontopolitics of
labour markets, and its acceptance of rising social inequalities.2 Miliband’s epiphany seems to have been inspired by what political scientists call ‘critical junctures’ or ‘external shocks’; that is, periods in history when crises open ‘windows of opportunity’ for change to occur. When those moments arrive, political actors look for new ideas and solutions to address new policy problems that can no longer be addressed by old recipes.3 The global financial crisis that started in the United States in 2007 as a credit crunch raised fundamental questions about the
3 Labour and the economy Reforming capitalism As we emerge from the global economic crisis we face a choice: we can return to business as usual or we can challenge old thinking to build the new economy we need. Ed Miliband1 For a brief moment the global financial crisis offered European social democrats the opportunity to reframe the political debate about the state of the global economy and refashion a new ‘social democratic moment’. Like other European social democratic parties, Labour under Ed Miliband tried to develop an alternative to n eoliberalism and
popularity ratings in the stratosphere. In a poll conducted by the Datafolha agency in December 2010, 83 per cent of interviewees considered he had done “a good or excellent” job. 3 During the summer of 2008, when the bankruptcy of the giant US investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered a global financial crisis, Brazil’s economy – like those of other emerging market countries – stumbled. But buoyed by the resilience of China, by then one of its largest trading partners, Brazil was soon back on track. Lula minimised the impact, claiming at a time when many Europeans and