“Austerity is a class project that disproportionately targets and affects working class households and communities and, in so doing, protects concentrations of elite wealth and power.” – The Violence of Austerity, Edited by Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, p. 11.
“Austerity is not necessary. Today’s debt crisis is a political result of relinquishing regulatory and tax power to the financial sector. Its lobbyists are now trying to use this crisis, (The Great Financial Crisis), to their advantage, as an opportunity to lock in their gains and rewrite the social contract. Governments hence forth are to serve high finance not labour and industry.” – Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents, Michael Hudson, p. 41
In their excellent introduction to this anthology, its editors – Vickie Cooper and David Whyte – trace a wide spectrum of social ills such as ruthless evictions and community violence, to cuts in public sector funding.
Their primary goal is to show how the consequences of the politics of austerity, “[have] left none but the most privileged in the UK untouched,” and how that is, “simply part of the price that has been paid to maintain the basic structure of social inequality, whether measured by politicians as ‘collateral damage’ or by economists as ‘externalities’” (p. 2).
They define austerity as, “a period of fiscal discipline in which governments make significant cuts to public expenditure as a means of reducing public debt” (p. 4).
They soundly refute, “three deceptions that have led to the ‘logic’ of austerity that legitimizes fiscal consolidation” (p. 5):
- The public sector is to blame for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC);
- Austerity is necessary;
- We’re all in this together.
They argue that, “If one fact stands above all others as an indication that austerity is not all it claims to be, it is that the UK’s national debt has risen by at least 50 percent since the austerity programme began in 2010. It is this fact that demonstrates most clearly that the politics of austerity is less concerned with reducing the deficit than it is with preserving the wealth of those at the top.”
They point out that this is not new, and quote John McMurtry, (The Cancer Stage of Capitalism), who noted – a decade before the GFC – that cuts to public services were attacking the “life-serving systems of social bodies” in order to ensure public resources are “re-channelled to the expansion of money-to-more money circuits with no commitment to life function.” “The pattern of redistributing sources from public to private hands is so aggressive, he argued, that the signifiers of its agents do not disguise the underlying violence of the appropriation – ‘axing social programs, slashing public services, subjecting societies to shock treatments’” (p. 17).
They go on to quote geographer, David Harvey, “who introduced the widely cited concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Harvey claims that the transfer of state assets to private ownership always implies a process of dispossession and general loss of rights. Thus, aspects of neoliberal reform that we are all now familiar with – privatization, commodification, financialisation and the recalibration of people’s entitlement to state services and funds – result in the redistribution and accumulation of wealth for some, while ensuring the loss of rights for others. Harvey claims that accumulation by dispossession is the driving force of contemporary capitalism, and that this process of capital accumulation has become more predatory and violent under austerity programmes” (David Harvey, The New Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 148).
They then quote economist Paul Krugman: “The austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs…the drive for austerity was about [using] the crisis, not [solving] it” (p. 20).
They identify as “the standout beneficiary of austerity,” the system of financialization.
They define the violence of austerity as “institutional violence…a form of violence organized and administered through legitimate means” (p. 23).
They quote Hannah Arendt, “whose essay, On Violence, sought to dissect the relation between political power and the organization of violence, [and] argued that the use of force to achieve political ends had become so normalized that the ‘enormous role that violence plays in human affairs’ had become ‘taken for granted and therefore neglected.’”
The Violence of Austerity is a catalogue of “institutional violence.” “It is about the life-shattering violence caused by decisions that are made in parliamentary chambers and government offices. This book is about the violence of politics” (p. 1).
They “focus attention on the assemblage of bureaucracies and institutions through which austerity policies are made real. Not only do institutions help to convert policies from an abstract level to a material one, they are the very sites through which highly political strategies like austerity, are depoliticized and their harmful effect made to appear moral and mundane” (p. 3).
Cooper and Whyte view austerity as being a “much more naked form of class politics,” and observe that “rapidly growing levels of inequality have produced some ugly political phenomena.” They report that, for example, “hate crimes against people with disabilities more than doubled between 2008 and 2014. This trend has been widely attributed to ‘benefits propaganda’” (p. 15).
They denounce austerity as “a political strategy based on myth, deception and misinformation…a moralizing discourse that supports a viciously immoral politics… a cruel and violent strategy of class domination” (p. 22).
They emphasize that, “the various forms of violence detailed in this book (destitution, homelessness…having electricity or gas cut off ), have become a very real possibility for a fast-growing section of the population and, as a number of chapters in this book document, it is the [threat] of violence that has become absolutely central to the power that institutional violence wields over its targets” (p. 23).
It is, in their opinion, “imperative that we reverse the effects of the crisis” and they “hope that one contribution made by this book is to show that there is no shortage of opportunity of building solidarity around resistance to the violence of austerity” (p. 25).
They list “activist groups and campaigns that have directly confronted the government in the courts and on the streets,” and promise that “some of the chapters in this book help to shine a light on those antiausterity strategies of resistance” (p. 25).
In the twenty-four chapters that follow, an impressive roster of accomplished academics, researchers, activists and journalists present well documented articles that chronicle the catastrophic assault on planet and people perpetrated through neoliberal austerity politics.
The contributors represent a wide range of perspectives – sociology, criminology, environmental politics and policy, law, geography – and expose a shocking spectrum of disaster.
The result is a treasury of reliable information and ideas, and a compelling case for the urgent need to design and implement a new economic system that will meet the needs of the twenty-first century.
Throughout the slavish commitment to the same globally dominant ideology in Canada, COMER has consistently worked to refute the neoliberal ‘logic’ and to record and condemn its practice and its consequences.
We are so distracted by endless reports of sensational and obvious crime, that the legal crime behind the failing society that generates such acts of violence either escapes our detection altogether, or is dismissed as being hopelessly beyond our control. Ironically, we leave it, instead, to ‘the strong arm of the law’ to protect us.
We would do well to share informative and encouraging resources like The Violence of Austerity and, thus fortified, to join the growing global movement for fundamental change.
“The true criticism of market society is not that it was based on economics – in a sense, every and any society must be based on it – but that its economy was based on self-interest.” The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi.
Vickie Cooper is Lecturer in Social Policy Criminology at The Open University. David Whyte is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool and the editor of How Corrupt is Britain?
Ann Emmett
