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IPE Graduate Conference – Political Economy and the Crises of Capitalism: Looking Back, Moving Forward March 12, 2010 DT 2203 Keynote Speaker: Randall Germain Panel A – Capitalism, Control and Governance in South(ern) Africa Discussants: Blair Rutherford (mentor) and William Wilson Chair: Franklin Oduro Contesting Geographies of Power: Sociospatiality and the Migration-Regionalization Nexus Jessica Evans, Carleton University, Department of Political Science In Southern Africa, regional integration has received great attention as a means of promoting economic and political cooperation within the region, as well as preventing further economic and political marginalization from the international community (Gibb 2007:421). While the goal of these regional organizations has been to promote economic prosperity and development through regional cooperation (Gibb 2007:424), to date this goal is far from realized. Vast economic asymmetries continue and a general consensus exists that regional integration has failed to stimulate economic growth and development (Gibb 2007:422). This paper will argue that in attempting to understand the shortcomings and dynamics of regional integration in Southern Africa, it is necessary to denaturalize and pluralize concepts of ‘space’, and look to the ways in which it is constructed, contested, articulated and maneuvered. It is only through the denaturalization of space and the problematization of the ‘region’ as a reified and bounded, territorial, political and economic compound, that one can begin to comprehend how actors that are nonbeneficiaries to a particular spatial-economic configuration contest social, political and economic structuration through a rearticulation of sociospatiality. The movement of peoples across and within borders is one such manner, in which this restructuring of space takes place. From diasporic and transnational migrant networks, to cross-border traders, traffickers and ‘border smugglers’, civil society and non-governmental migrant rights networks, these formations depict a resistance to the privileged and disparate spatial configurations of power and capital. I will attempt to demonstrate how one might begin to theorize the migration-regionalization nexus in Southern Africa, by examining the theoretical insight to be gained from considering the scholarship of new regionalism theorists and critical political geography. Regions are not simply territorial or scalar arrangements, but are the product of intersecting, conflicting and cross-cutting scalar, territorial, networked and place-based spaces. Similarly, migrant populations cannot be viewed simply in terms of networks. It is only through viewing space as plural, complex and tangled that one can begin to address the regionalization-migration nexus. The State and Global Finance: creating narratives for domestic governance Elizabeth Cobbett, PhD student, Political Science, Carleton University South Africa’s central bank (SARB) explained that the 2008 contraction in real gross domestic product and the steep decline in imports had narrowed the country’s foreign deficit considerably. The economy contracted, less foreign goods were required for production, businesses slowed down, workers were laid off, people had less money to spend, and poverty increased. Yet, the central bank was cheered by this news. South Africa’s persistent current account deficits have to be offset with capital inflows and so a reduction in its balance of payments deficit is seen as a respite. Obviously the central bank is not pleased with a slowdown of the South African economy; it is aware of the devastation wrecked on human lives by recession. But the SARB, like all central banks, operates within a particular logic, a master narrative of global political economy that has a framing effect on what it thinks and does. The government and the central bank need to attract foreign investment. This implies building financial credibility through tight monetary policies and inflation targeting. This paper suggests revisiting this financial logic through the work of Barry Hindess. Hindess argues that the world population is partitioned into sets of subpopulations. Territorial boundaries may have been displaced in some respects but they remain at the heart of the global order. The logic of global capital operates through the international monetary system’s regulatory framework of state sovereignty and macroeconomic spaces. Borders act as organisational structures of finance. The inside/outside nature of state sovereignty enables finance to make huge amounts of money through use of different interest rates and currency rates. These borders also enable macroeconomic narratives that endeavour to manage populations within these economic spaces. States tell domestic narratives of the economic nation as a means for governing and for stabilising internal fragmentations and contestations. ‘A Degree of Control’: Corporations and the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa Jeffrey Monaghan, MA student, Legal Studies, Carleton University and DT Cochrane, PhD Candidate in Social-Political Thought, York University The movement against South African apartheid was successful through struggle on multiple fronts. In South Africa, organized resistance on the ground confronted the apartheid regime on a continual basis. Around the world, solidarity efforts by student, labour, and church groups provoked a political economic crisis that isolated the South African government. Among the targets of these efforts were transnational corporations operating in South Africa. Yet, corporations were also significant actors in this social movement. Central to their participation were the Sullivan Principles, which were administered by the International Organization for Equality of Opportunity Principles (ICEOP) and bore the name of Reverend Leon Sullivan, a well respected civil rights leader. Often cited as an example of 'corporate social responsibility' (CSR), the Sullivan Principles articulated requirements for signatories' continued presence in South Africa and were advocated as a means for corporations to apply economic pressure on the apartheid regime. The principles became enmeshed within anti-apartheid discourse, and nonsignatories were frequently targetted by North American solidarity efforts. Instead of dismissing selflaudatory claims as purely capitalist propaganda, our research asks how these corporations viewed their participation in the anti-apartheid movement. Informed by the 'capital as power' theory of Nitzan and Bichler (2009; 2002), we examine the intra-capitalist dynamics that motivated and leveraged the actions of ICEOP. Based on material from the ICEOP archive, our research indicates that, contrary to dismissal of CSR as mere marketing or a mechanism to suppress or demobilize social justice movements, the participation of the dominant corporations in the anti-apartheid movement involved a complex and conflictual effort to control possible transformative outcomes. Our analysis speaks to the motives that animate corporate engagement with social movements, especially during periods where their accumulation and legitimacy are in crisis. Panel B – Negotiating the Margins of Capitalism Discussants: Dominique Marshall (mentor) and Justin Stefanik Chair: Jess Dunkin The Governmentality of Microfinance: From the individual to the global. Vladimir Aleman Delfs, MA student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University Microfinance as a strategy for poverty reduction has found an integral role within the dominant development paradigm of the past twenty years. Its prominence during the current stage of ‘PostWashington Consensus’ or ‘development with a face’ strategies is elucidated through a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality. Through this lens, the framework and obligations that borrowers adopt through the process is more clearly seen as attempts to regulate and manage sections of society - the landless rural and urban poor – increasingly pronounced under attempts at neoliberal development. The emphasis on an ‘entrepreneurial’ potential reinforces liberal preferences for projects that emphasize the individual over the group and ‘working hard’ over collective responsibility. As the most popular and successful venture of this type, the Grameen experience in Bangladesh is most suitable for such a critical analysis of its theoretical underpinnings along with its daily operations. This is expanded upon through an examination of the popularity of microfinance options within the directives and policy frameworks of international organizations, such as the World Bank and United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations, such as CARE. no title provided (analysis of prostitution law in Canada through industrialization ) Amanda Boyce, MA student, Legal Studies, Carleton University. From the middle of the nineteenth century until approximately the early 1920s, Canada saw significant social changes centered on industrialization which drew attention to its urban centres. The demographic shifts which resulted from this change created the context for many interesting developments in Canadian national identity, gender formation, racial tension and the legal regulation of morality; all of which were debated on the terrain of public policy toward prostitution. Although popular history has described the regulation of prostitution from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth as repressive, negative and prohibitory, this neglects the concept which theorists since Foucault have discussed: “the positivity of power.”1 In order to repress prostitution, reformers first had to define what it was and, in the course of attempting to repress it, engaged in discourses which spoke to their beliefs about social life at a more general level. It is essential for the purposes of this analysis to identify and differentiate between the three “types” of prostitution at which legislation and regulation were aimed: regular/harlots, ‘occasionals’, and the white slaves. John McLaren claims that, in regards to sexual deviance, “Where intervention was undertaken, the legal expedients served purely pragmatic ends.”2 However, while one might argue that legislation merely developed in practical response to three different kinds of behaviour, it also had a hand in creating and constructing the identity of each “type” of prostitute in the social imaginary. This differentiation was the result of three separate discursive regimes and categories of popular narrative. Reformers claimed that, of all the ‘traffikers [sic] in vice’, both professional and occasional prostitutes alike required the strictest response for the police, courts and correctional system,3 and Salvation Army workers in particular did not make distinctions in their practical rescue work between techniques for saving white slaves and willing prostitutes.4 However, these general sentiments do not account for the complex discursive and legal processes through which regular prostitute, occasional prostitute, and white slave became labels to be imposed upon certain women. Instead of supplanting one another over time, these labels accumulated to form a “repertoire of clichés”5 at the disposal of those who were concerned about the socio-moral state of Canadian cities such as Toronto. 1 M. Valverde, Age of Light, Soap, and Water (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1991) at 24. J. McLaren, “Chasing the Social Evil: Moral Fervour and the Evolution of Canada’s Prostitution Laws, 1867-1917” (1986) 1 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 126. 3 C. Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1995) at 130. 4 Valverde, supra note 2 at 102. 5 Ibid. at102. 2 Engaging with the Fringes of Finance: Pawnbroking, Payday Lending, and the Governance of Poverty. Matthew Palmer, MA student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University This paper examines the genealogy of modern consumer finance through a discussion of the ‘fringe finance’ sector. Specifically, it illustrates the ways in which the practices of pawnbroking and payday lending, respectively, constitute their clientele in markedly different ways, thus leading to vastly different modes of poverty governance. By discussing the position of these practices during their respective eras of dominance – morally, economically and socially – as well as the specific ways in which their clientele have been constituted during these periods (through both advertising and the actual process of borrowing), the paper shows that payday lending has brought about a very contingent and peculiar understanding of the role of credit in the lives of the ‘poor’. While under the pawnbroking regime, engagement with the ‘fringe finance’ sector carried a rather dubious reputation and was in many ways hidden from the public eye, payday lending today has become normalized as a very public consumer practice. While previously, clients of the fringe finance sector were explicitly understood as economically marginalized, today these services are presented as merely a convenient alternative to mainstream financial institutions. As a result, the relationship between ‘fringe finance’ and poverty has become increasingly confused. More broadly, the paper seeks to problematize the relatively homogenous understanding within the governmentality literature of the neoliberal, risk-managing financial subject by illuminating the forms of subjectivity that exist on the margins of the sector. Panel C – Global Conversations: Critical Responses to Crisis Discussants: Justin Paulson (mentor) and Ryan Katz-Rosene Chair: Tim Fowler Sorelian myth through Gramsci and Mariátegui: Creatively engaging with crisis Matthew Hawkins, MA Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University Antonio Gramsci famously advocated for a 'modern prince' – a proletarian party – to lead society into a social transformation. The 'modern prince' was inspired by French social critic, and sometime marxist, Georges Sorel's idea of the 'myth' expressed with practical action. Gramsci argues a sorelian myth is “a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will” (1971:126). From the other side of the globe, Peruvian marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, a relatively understudied in English but dominant figure in Latin American marxism, was also inspired by Sorel to propose the social revolution as an active and animating myth to replace a 'declining order' of bourgeois society. Sorel's concept of the myth provided meaningful inspiration to two of the 20th century's most important (and successful) marxists. This paper, a chapter of a larger research project, proposes a version of the 'myth', distilled from these three writers, that provides a perfomative theoretical concept that can be used both to analyse as well as develop transformative social movements. Central components of the myth that are discussed are its unified definition through action, organization and creative inspiration, its necessity to create social divisions, and its rejection of the existing historical order of society. Reflecting on the theme of crisis, it is presented that transformative forces particularly in corecapitalist countries have yet to propose a meaningful myth and thus creatively engage with global crises. Why Nothing Happened: Responding to the Economic Crisis in a Post-Political Society Trevor Smith, MA student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University The underlying project of neoliberal economics is to replace politics with markets, to move decision making from the public sphere into the private realm. Neoliberalism can then be seen as one of the most important driving factors behind the situation we find ourselves in today; the situation of a post-political society. Understanding the depoliticizing and anti-political goal of neoliberalism then becomes crucial to understanding the context of the economic crisis and why this opportunity for change failed to produce any, both from top level international meetings and from bottom level grassroots activists. It will be argued that neoliberalism has been rather successful in eroding politics, both in thought and in practice, thus neoliberal capitalism as a global economy has insulated itself from any potential system-altering changes. Despite the economic crisis demonstrating in plain view to the world that the neoliberal formation of capitalism is a spectacular failure, the ability to mobilize for change did not, and could not occur, due to a lack of political outlet or will. This failure of a political response is precisely due to the active attack on politics by neoliberalism over the past 20 years, and will be analyzed on two levels, grassroots citizen response, and world leader response. Despite many world leaders such as Gordon Brown, Kevin Rudd, and Hu Jintao calling for a drastic reordering of the global economy, the results of international meetings produced no sweeping changes. Even though the three leaders mentioned above had interesting ideas for a reworking of the global economic system, there was no means for change. The neoliberal capitalist economy is global, and lacks a corresponding global political sphere. An international political system is rendered futile to bring about change to a global economic system that operates above its head. The grassroots citizen response was much more disappointing for its lack of imagination and motivation for change. The general response from both the right and the left was a surprising call for the deepening of neoliberalism which came in the form of opposition to government intervention in the economy which was needed in order to bail out and nationalize banks, as well as to bring about the stimulus plans. What this grassroots hostility to politics and political action displayed was that neoliberalism has again been successful in not only eliminating and preventing political space from existing but in making politics a dirty word in the minds of the people. Despite this rather critical/pessimistic assessment, suggestions on new ways to bring about change will be proposed. Resolving Crises of Accumulation: political risk and the production of ‘global’ territoriality Aaron Henry, MA student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University Throughout the late 1980’s to present a series of institutions such as export credit agencies, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and organization such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) began to deploy different projects of calculating political risk and providing political risk insurance with the intent of “pushing the project of globalization forward” (WEF, Global Risk, 2009). Through calculating political risk these institutions were able to inform transnational corporations (TNCs) of the probability that they would encounter civil disobedience, nationalization, obstruction of contract and political violence, in the host states in which they operated. These projects of calculating political risk gradually discursively produced the object of the ‘emerging market’ as a space within the global economy that was socially and politically insecure and existed outside the territory of the economic grid of the nation-state; and, therein, could be subject to globally competitive spatial-temporal fixes (i.e labour laws, tax regimes, and environmental policies). In this paper, I argue that we must approach the calculation of political risk and the process of constituting the emerging market, as technologies of power that have become key in attenuating and absorbing the structural crises within the processes of capital accumulation. I will interrogate how the calculation of political risk has intersected with, what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as, the process of refinancialization(1994). Refinancialization is a process whereby capital is produced through selling off the industrial infrastructure of society so as to produce an abundance of surplus capital that can be employed in new spatial-temporal fixes of accumulation. I argue that the calculation of political risk has been deployed to remap the economic space of developing states into global economic space on which surplus capital, produced through refinancialization, can be absorbed by new spatial-temporal regimes of capital accumulation. By using Export Development Canada as a case-study, I will illuminate how over the last two decades the calculation of political risk has been key in producing new ‘global’ spaces of accumulation to resolve the internal crises of a neoliberal period of capital typified by an overabundance of surplus capital. Governing Transition, Bargaining Nature: eco-governance in post communist settings. Alda Kokallaj, PhD Candidate, Political Science/Political Economy An overview of political science literature on governance indicates that governance is underpinned by democratic principles and is mainly concerned with the activities of people within a territory or of population(s). The starting point of this paper is that the current crises of capitalism has reminded us (once again) of the need for rethinking our theoretical constructs. In this paper I tackle the issue of environmental governance within the framework of post-communist transition in a two-layered argument. First, I argue that our conceptual challenge is to come to terms with theorizing ‘governance’ not as an anthropocentric realm, but as the realm where ‘nature’ is seen as constitutive. Such conceptualization of governance is tightly interwoven with the notion of ecological democracy. By engaging with these two concepts I aim to unpack their significance within the postcommunist settings. The second layer of the argument draws on two energy projects in the postcommunist context: a Thermo Power Plant and an Oil Pipeline. Almost twenty years from the collapse of the soviet style communism, an event that was celebrated as “the end of history” with the “triumph” of capitalism and liberal democracy, the civil society reaction/resistance to these energy projects reminds us of the shortcomings of conventional approaches to sustainable development and (eco)governance, where market liberalization and economic growth get prioritized while ecological concerns are postponed only to be considered when the market economy is fully operational. The significance of these cases is particularly important in the context of the recent crises in the way in which they point at the need to rethink democracy even in settings where its liberal offspring was considered to have triumphed. Also, they warn against employing our conceptual tools in a universalistic manner without considering intersubjectivities, particularities, and motives that urge lay people to demand partaking in (eco)governance.