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- Convenors:
-
Dimitra Kofti
(Panteion University, Athens)
Theodora Vetta (Universitat de Barcelona)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E420
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore ideologies and practices of dispossession. It asks why failed paradigms to tackle economic decline, built around a public/private controversy, endure; how dispossessions are implemented and justified and what political expressions their ideologies take.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore the ideological work that goes into the practices and policies of dispossession taking place in recent decades of deindustrialisation and financialization. Mapping the uneven geographies of global capitalism in settings as disparate as "structural adjustment" in Latin America, "transitions" in the post-communist world or the current "crisis" in Europe since the late 2000s, one is struck by the recurrence of austerity measures as nominal responses to economic decline and indebtedness. More often than not, they play out in the form of a public/private controversy, attacking one end of the continuum to reinforce claims or demands on the other. From bailouts of insolvent banks, through privatization of public assets, demands to restore protective welfare regimes, to the collapse of citizenship entitlements: working classes have navigated contradictory ideological alternatives. Strong beliefs in the corporate sector, private property and enterprise often go hand in hand with desires for security, regulation and protectionism.
We invite papers that reflect on the following questions:
• Why do failed paradigms and ideologies endure? How are particular policies that have led to economic turmoil still presented as pertinent solutions for prosperity?
• How are ideologies of dispossession intertwined with public/private debates? How are they produced/contested in the everyday practice of social reproduction?
• How are dispossessions justified and legitimised? To what extent are people's practices driven by ideological convictions and to what extent by need or constraint?
• What are the political manifestations of ideologies of dispossessions?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Current policies of public good provisioning in urbanising China rest on an ideological reinvigoration of socialist values at the same time as a principle of territorial-based entitlements and a logic of maximization of real-estate generated value. They continue to sustain wide inequalities.
Paper long abstract:
Current policies of public good provisioning in urbanising China display many contradictions. Although they rest on an ideological reinvigoration of socialist values, they are fundamentally based on territorial-based entitlements and a logic of maximization of real-estate generated value. They therefore continue to sustain wide inequalities.
This paper examines the contradictory processes and unequal consequences of public goods provisioning in Chinese urban villages, former rural communities that have been engulfed by the expansion of cities. Being the main recipients of the massive inflow of migrants workers from China's provinces, they crystallise the challenges posed by the sweeping economic transformations and rapid urbanisation that China is undergoing. In Shenzhen, village collectives have until very recently been largely left to their own devices in providing public goods, and they've restricted them to the small minority of native villagers. In recent years, urban villagers have been partly dispossessed of their land-use rights as part of a policy that is meant to transform them into proper 'civilized' urban neighbourhoods and generate fiscal revenue. This has been accompanied by a notable increase in government-funded provision of public goods (such as public squares, transportation, education, elderly and child-care). However, even if outsiders (migrant workers) have gained some access to them, many of these goods remain largely out of reach. Their very provision actually rests on their cheap labour and volunteering, another kind of dispossession.
Paper short abstract:
As deindustrialization and financialization gain pace in China's coal-rich Shanxi Province, residents resist dispossession through three coal-dependent spheres of social reproduction: household cooking, domestic heating, and industrial mining.
Paper long abstract:
This paper compares industrial and post-industrial transformations underwriting the Chinese economy, as current state policy shifts from securing fossil fuels to concern over carbon emissions. State discourses in the People's Republic adhere to a dichotomy between public service and private interest, thereby obscuring the developmentalist agenda of perpetual growth to fill state and corporate coffers. In the post-Mao Era, this ideology of balancing public and private commitments has taken a specific form of clarifying property rights, sometimes shorthand for dispossession in the interest of the greater good of capital accumulation. Even recent efforts to create a low carbon economy have become subject to these renewed forms of dispossession, as the right to pollute became an object of market exchange and financial speculation, with an ensuing scramble to invest in renewable energy. This effort to wean, even jolt, the Chinese economy off of its coal dependency has prominently included trailblazing efforts by the state-dominated banking and corporate-led service sector.
This paper interrogates the ensuing shift in livelihoods in China's 'coal province' of Shanxi, where rich veins of the black sediment form the carbon-based backbone of the local economy. As livelihoods in Shanxi buckle under the dual pressures of deindustrialization and financialization, residents resist dispossession through everyday practices of social reproduction in three overlapping, coal-dependent spheres: household cooking, domestic heating, and industrial mining. The paper argues that China's current low carbon transition distributes the spoils and costs of de-industrialization in highly uneven forms, not unlike the previous upheavals of accelerated industrialization.
Paper short abstract:
The lecture will deal with economic dispossession and accumulation carried out by new settlers in Miztpe-Ramon, a small town in southern Israel. This process is executed through the practices of agro-ecological tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Mitzpe Ramon entrepreneurial economy began to develop in the 1980s following an agricultural-tourism project called "Sfat-Midbar"(the Desert's Threshold). This project brought privileged Jewish-Ashkenazi population from center Israel for the purpose of establishing farms on lands leased by the state. Those new comers developed a tourism and ecology based economy that excludes veteran populations (Oriental Jews and Bedouins) living in the area. My talk concentrates on "Sfat-Midbar" as a project that transformed the urban space of Mitzpe-Ramon. It was part of a larger process of selection and exclusion. It enabled privileges populations an access to the town and its natural resources, while spewing the underprivileged out. This process is signified by the transformation of Mitzpe-Ramon from a development-desert town to a gated community settlemen as part of gentrification process in the town.
Paper short abstract:
The paper traces how mortgage debtors' struggles around housing as private property relate to multiple scales of exploitative relations mediated by a newly nationalizing financial regime in Hungary.
Paper long abstract:
Instead of a direct relationship between transnational financialization and local neoliberal regimes, post-crisis forms of extraction and dispossession in Hungary are happening under a new conservative regime, which combines an ideological agenda on "taking back" Hungarian wealth from international capital with a state-based program for the development of national capital. The paper analyzes the role of finance in this political economic assemblage which struggles to broaden national capital's maneuver space within hierarchical relations of dependent world-market integration. We point out how this assemblage relates to the production of new meanings of public/private ownership in the regime's communication apparatus, with a focus on the relation between housing mortgage policies and nationalizations in the banking sphere. Against that background, the paper addresses the way debtors' struggles maneuver relations of material, legal and symbolic hegemony in their struggle against dispossession. Tracing the ambivalent relations through which capacities for symbolic, legal and material struggles are produced around the issue of housing as private property, vis-a-vis multiple scales of exploitative relations mediated and represented by the legal and symbolic facade of the Hungarian state, we develop a conceptualization of the public/private controversy in its relation to the role of national political hegemony in the contemporary transnational capitalist process.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on ideological debates and practices of dispossession in Greece by looking at legal transformations and political contestations on property protection and confiscation and the changing meanings of public/private property in relation to national/foreign capital and debt.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses meanings of public and private in Greece in relation to housing and company property confiscations. Indebtedness and foreclosures opened up debates raising moral and political concerns about the types of property to be under protection. Housing property and small-scale company property, commonly described as "property of the people" and "peoples' housing" is supported by a wide range of the political spectrum, as part of a national property threatened by banks' policies and by foreign capital investment. By looking at court cases on indebted households, cases of foreclosures and political debates about confiscations, this paper will discuss the relation of public/private property in its intertwinement with the national/foreign capital conundrum.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the case of day labourers arrested during work to question how the dispossession of their means to livelihood is rendered legitimate in the wake of austerity restructurings.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates how the erosion citizenship rights is rendered legitimate in the wake of austerity restructurings. Building on the ethnographic case of day-labourers arrested during their work, I display what they conceive of as legitimate practices of livelihood, such as untaxed employment off the books. During arrests, labourers frequently referred to probable cause and their right to an unbiased hearing, while the arresting officers responded with "you lost your rights when you broke the law", essentially implying that only law-abiding citizens are entitled to due process before a court of law. From this case, I 'scale up' to question the bizarre reversal of the elementary judicial presumption of innocence that austerity's ideological backdrop seems to have rendered acceptable. How did public discourse portray day-labourers as tax-avoiders deserving the harassment and dispossession they received? Moreover, how does subjecting a group of citizens to general suspicion produce a situation in which they routinely presumed guilty, even fined, without trial? By investigating what I term "the presumption of guilt rather than innocence", this paper displays how, what to my informants is an unalienable right and the state's duty to protect them, increasingly appears as a type of privilege that must be earned before it can be had: a process akin to "conditional citizenship" (Gibney, 2011). In the case at hand, dispossessing day labourers of their means of livelihood then seems to become ideologically legitimate, because their failure to engage in formalized employment apparently excludes them a priori from basic citizenship and its rights and protections.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, we tackle the dialectics between the political meanings attached to "private" and "public", while recording their transformations throughout the event of economic turmoil
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we look at the formation of ideologies around the economy in two regions based on production models that could be described as opposed. More precisely, we tackle the dialectics between the political meanings attached to "private" and "public", while recording their transformations throughout the event of economic turmoil. Public sector energy industry has been Kozani's (Greece) main employer for several decades. However, the current crisis appears to have shattered expectations of secure employment, while intra class competition over shrinking welfare resources is dis-integrating long established class solidarities. Here, the seemingly unstoppable decline of the energy industry seems to be transforming frameworks of meaning around the economy. Entrepreneurial projects seem to have become a thaumaturgical solution to the crisis, while state intervention and public enterprise are utterly criticized.
Veneto (Italy), tells an almost inverse story. Intra class competition, individualism, and entrepreneurial ideologies, took shape during the 80's and 90's not in relation to crisis or recession, but as both causes and effects of economic expansion. Competition, conspicuous consumption, and individualism were all attributed a positive moral value as "the engine of growth", while class action, unionization, collectivisation were often defined as morally bad. Today, suggested solutions to the crisis seem to trigger an unforeseen process of rediscovering "the public" and public institutions.
The paper articulates these contradictory ethnographic records while trying to solve the conundrum of the mutually constitutive relationships between the economic and the political within the specific social contexts in which they emerge.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores ideologies and practices of dispossession in modern food factories in western Nepal. It suggests a reading of dispossession processes in industrial environments that goes beyond the public/private dichotomy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores processes of dispossession in modern, private industrial food-factories in western Nepal. It makes a twofold argument: Firstly, the paper lays out how the dispossession of a certain segment of Nepal's industrial working class is related to recent developments in the political economy of the country. More specifically, the paper shows how in western Nepal Maoist unions both empowered the ‚right' ethnic segment of Nepal's industrial working classes while simultaneously facilitated the dispossession of another ethnic segment of the working classes. Secondly, the paper puts forward the argument that such complex processes of dispossessions are often also justified and legitimized by referring to religious beliefs and practices. Those at the top and mid-ranks of the industrial hierarchy are using religious practices and discourses to justify the dispossession of other less fortunate workers. The paper concludes by suggesting a reading of dispossession processes in industrial environments that goes beyond the logics of the public/private dichotomy.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the interrupted quest for conspicuous commodification of young adults in Volos, Greece and their ambivalent critiques resulting from it. The aim is to contrast their experience with austerity and recession and their abstract thoughts, and longings for others' dispossessions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores ambivalence towards dispossessions through an analysis of young adults' social critiques in Volos, Greece. It focuses on interlocutors born around 1990 to show how they grew up in a political climate in which alternatives to market fundamentalism seemed neither attainable nor desirable. When "crisis" hit Greece, these young adults had just finished school and were about to transition to the conspicuous commodification of their labor power to acquire necessary income, find recognition, and to live a good life in capitalism.
Throughout 2014 to 2017, I followed their increasingly exhausted efforts to find jobs, hunt for certificates, teach themselves foreign languages and countless days practicing job interviews in a "cruel optimism" (Berlant 2011) for their inclusion into capitalist labor markets. I aim to analyse how, in this condition of ambivalence and exhaustion, the Market (Carrier 1997) functioned as an idealized conception that justified the dispossession of others, the slashing of public service jobs, and the expropriation of debtors. Yet, as their hopes for jobs waned, their parents lost their jobs, friends went abroad, and their grand-parents could not afford hospital treatments, they were confronted with the contradictions of their thoughts, experiences and longings.
The aim of the paper is to analyse these three dimensions of "dispossession" as 1) feelings of being dispossessed by earlier generations living "beyond their means", 2) the wish for their dispossession and the public arrangements around them, and 3) the ambivalent confrontation between such abstract wish and the concrete harm experienced by significant others.