Global Social Work in a Political Context

Radical Perspectives

Ferguson, Iain, Ioakimidis, Vasilios

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447322696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

How is social work shaped by global issues and international problems and how should it address them? This book employs a radical perspective to examine international social work. Globalisation had opened up many issues for social work, including how to address global inequalities, the impact of global economic problems and trends towards neoliberalism. By examining the origins of modern social work, problematising its definition and addressing the care/control dichotomy the book reveals what we can learn from different approaches and projects across the globe. Case studies from the UK, the US, Canada, Spain, Latin America, Australia, Hungary and Greece bring the text to life and allow both students and practitioners to apply theory to practice.

Part One
The political context of contemporary social work

ONE

The political economy of social work

Introduction: ‘the 1930s in slow motion’

Writing in the early 1990s, the veteran British-Palestinian Marxist Tony Cliff described the new decade as being like ‘a film of the 1930s in slow motion’. As in the 1930s, Cliff argued, there was a global recession that had resulted in millions of people becoming unemployed. Also, as in the 1930s, accompanying that recession was the emergence of fascist movements such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France. Cliff’s conclusion, however, was far from fatalistic: ‘The 1930s was a decade of extremes…. The fact that the film of the 1930s returns, but in slow motion, means there is much greater opportunity to stop the film and direct it in the way we want’ (Cliff, 2000: 81). Like the Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin some 60 years previously, Cliff was sounding a kind of ‘fire alarm’ to his contemporaries, ‘a warning bell attempting to draw attention to the imminent dangers threatening them, to the new catastrophes looming on the horizon’ (Löwy, 2005: 16). More than two decades on and some 10 years after the onset of a global recession that began in the US sub-prime housing market before morphing into an economic and political crisis in the Eurozone area, there is a sense that the film has sped up, both economically and politically.

Economically, the recovery from the crisis of 2008 has been very weak indeed. Commenting on separate reports from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) issued in autumn 2016, an editorial in The Guardian newspaper described them as being ‘thick with cloud and short on silver lining’. Despite promises from politicians and policymakers across the globe that, following the crash, things would change:

nearly a decade later, what is most striking is how little has changed. In the US, the UK and the rest of the developed world, policymakers talk of the ‘new mediocre’, so tepid is economic performance. And in the developing world things look even worse. (The Guardian, 21 September 2016)

Echoing that theme in a speech in December 2016, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, described the past 10 years as having been ‘a lost decade’ for the British economy; one would have to go back to the 1860s, Carney argued, to find a comparable period (Carney, 2016).

The effects of that ‘long depression’ (Roberts, 2016) have, of course, been experienced very differently by different sections of the global population. An Oxfam report published in early 2016 showed that 1% of the world’s population now own more than the rest combined. Even more starkly, 62 people own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population. ‘An economy for the 1%’ (Oxfam, 2016) showed that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 billion people – has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010. This 38% drop has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half-a-trillion US dollars to US$1.76 trillion (Oxfam, 2016).

That inequality, coupled with the fact that the neoliberal promise that wealth would ‘trickle down’ has proved hollow for millions of people, has been one factor fuelling the political polarisation that has been a feature of the second decade of the 21st century. While rising racism and xenophobia have undoubtedly been contributory factors to a range of mid-decade political developments, including the ‘Brexit’ vote for Britain to leave the European Union (EU), the election of Donald Trump as President of the US and the rise of Far Right and neo-Nazi parties across Europe, most notably, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France. At least as important has been a sense of despair on the part of millions of people regarding their own future and that of their children and grandchildren. The polarisation, of course, has not all gone in one direction: the past few years have also seen the emergence of new social movements and political parties of the Left, for example, around presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the US and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, as well as around Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (though the extent to which the latter can still be described as a left-wing party is more questionable) (Watkins, 2016).

That economic instability both shapes and is shaped by wider political developments. Indeed, exploring the relationship between these two dimensions is at the heart of contemporary analyses of ‘the new imperialism’ (Harvey, 2004, 2005; Callinicos, 2009). At the time of writing, some of the more obvious features of the current situation include: war and counter-revolution in the Middle East; the biggest movement of refugees since the Second World War; and the emergence of a new Cold War, with ‘hotspots’ in areas like Ukraine.

Understanding the nature of these developments is important for all concerned with the future of social work and social care, for three reasons. First, while the response of national governments to the ‘long depression’ has varied to some degree from country to country and from continent to continent, the dominant policy response has been to shift the costs of bailing out the global banking system in 2008 onto the poorest sections of the working class (pensioners, the disabled, the low paid and the unemployed), in the now universally recognised term ‘austerity’. These are also the sections of the population who are most likely to come into contact with social work services.

Second, as we shall argue later, while the roots of the current crisis lie in the inability of the neoliberal project of the last three decades to overcome deep-rooted structural problems within the global capitalist economy, the dominant political and ideological response to that crisis has been more of the same in the form of increased privatisation and public sector cuts, leading one writer to speak of ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’ (Crouch, 2011). It is also clear that for some governments, the crisis has provided them with a golden political opportunity to shrink the welfare state to levels not seen for decades, not least in Britain, where the percentage of spending on welfare is now at its lowest level since the 1930s. Again, this poses a real existential threat to social work – a profession that is, in the Western world at least, a child of the welfare state – a threat that needs to be understood and challenged.

Third, the unprecedented assault on the lives and living standards of disabled people and people on benefits throws up major questions of how to respond, particularly for social workers and social work organisations in countries such as Greece and Spain, where the cuts have gone deepest. Should the main emphasis be on defending the post-war welfare state or do the new forms of social support that have been thrown up in the course of the crisis, such as the Solidarity Committees in Greece, prefigure more popular forms of social work that should be nurtured and developed? Moreover, how should social workers respond to the growth of new forms of racism such as Islamophobia and anti-Roma racism?

These are some of the key questions that we will seek to address in this book. The focus of this chapter, however, will be a narrower one. One factor that has facilitated the imposition of austerity policies across Europe – and, in the process, undermined potential resistance to these policies – has been the widespread acceptance of the neoliberal argument that ‘there is no alternative’ to austerity. Acceptance of that view, albeit reluctant, has led a majority of the population in many countries to tolerate as inevitable cuts to services, cuts to benefits and, more generally, levels of hardship (eg including the return of food banks on a mass scale) that would have been unthinkable prior to the crisis. It is a view that we unequivocally reject. Providing a basis for that rejection, however, requires us to do what social work texts rarely do and attempt to engage with some of the economic arguments that have been put forward to explain the crisis and to suggest how it might be resolved. Unless social work academics and practitioners seek to critically engage with these dominant analyses, there is a danger that they will also be persuaded to accept – and collude with – policies that are profoundly harmful to some of the most disadvantaged sections of society, including users of social work services, but that, in reality, are neither theoretically nor morally justifiable. The remainder of this chapter will therefore address what we will call the political economy of social work.

Explaining the crisis

In October 2013, a group of undergraduate students studying economics at the University of Manchester set up a Post-Crisis Economics Society (see: http://www.post-crasheconomics.com). The students’ main demand was for a complete overhaul of the curriculum to include economic theories other than the neoclassical theories that made up the content of their teaching at Manchester (as at many other British universities). These theories, which have dominated mainstream economics for more than a century, assume that the capitalist system will always return to equilibrium – that goods will always find buyers – providing prices and wages are allowed to adjust without hindrance.

Not only, the students argued, had these theories failed to predict the great crash of 2008 (and had, in fact, even denied the very possibility of such a crash), but leading economics academics had played a key role in acting as cheerleaders for the policies and practices that had led to that crash. According to a spokesperson for the group, academic departments were ‘ignoring the crisis’ and by neglecting global developments and critics of the free market such as Keynes and Marx, the study of economics was ‘in danger of losing its broader relevance’. Within a matter of months, similar groups had been formed in Cambridge and London, and by mid-2014, 41 groups had been set up in 19 different countries and had issued a common manifesto.

The post-crisis economics manifesto

Our critics have attempted to caricature our society as demanding “more Keynes and Marx”. However, our argument is far broader: we are calling for an evidence based, pluralistic economics education…. The key point is that any reference to Marx is compartmentalised from the economic theory proper and his contribution is judged to be historical and now superseded. We argue that it would be far more valuable to use Marx’s theories of crisis, exploitation, class struggle and the reserve army of unemployed as a lens through which to understand business cycles, income distribution and the labour market.… Teaching of Keynes in mainstream economics is not really Keynes…. Students at Manchester are not exposed to Keynes’ theories first hand and are definitely not exposed to modern post-Keynesianism, which has developed and built on Keynes’ framework substantially. Some would argue that poring over old texts is not the proper way to do a social science, and we agree to an extent. We only wish that particular thinkers’ theories be taught insofar as they are relevant, and we think that these theories should be presented in their historical context where possible. It may be wise to teach thinkers from original texts if one wants to access their ideas rather than relying on watered-down impressions. (Post-Crash Economics Society, 2014)

The students were not alone in their critique of the neoclassical orthodoxy that had played such a major role in shaping the events of 2008. In a study of the financial crisis published in 2014, Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times and one of the UK’s most respected economic spokespersons, acknowledged his own failure to predict the crash. This failing, he argued, was not because he was unaware of tensions developing within the global economy, but rather, he suggested, because:

I lacked the imagination to anticipate a meltdown of the Western financial system. I was guilty of working with a mental model of the economy that did not allow for the possibility of another Great Depression or even a ‘Great Recession’ in the world’s most advanced economies. (Wolf, 2014: xvi)

Even more remarkable was the admission before a Congressional Committee by Alan Greenspan, chair of the US Federal Reserve for two decades and arguably therefore the most powerful player in the global economic establishment, that the slump had left him in ‘a state of shocked disbelief’:

He was questioned: ‘In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right, it was not working’ (House Oversight Committee Chair, Henry Waxman). ‘Absolutely, precisely, you know that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.’ (Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve being questioned in the US Senate, cited in Roberts, 2012)

Despite this collapse of confidence and the inability of leading economists to explain the crisis, it is a remarkable fact that by 2016, eight years after the crisis began, the very same market fundamentalist policies that resulted in the 2008 slump continued to be vigorously promoted and enforced by bodies such as the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a fact that requires some explanation. In reality, it is the product of two factors, one theoretical and the other political.

The first reason for the continuing hegemony of neoliberal economic policies is quite simply that neither those in charge of national and global policy nor their academic advisers can envisage a theoretical alternative. When, for example, 60 leading US economists were asked in a 2012 survey ‘If we are ever going to get out of this slump, what will it take?’, the general view was ‘don’t know’ (see https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/the-dilemma-of-the-mainstream/). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, despite the fact that austerity policies have manifestly failed in countries such as Greece (by 2015, Greek debt was higher and the economy smaller than when the policies were first implemented), not a single one of the other 27 EU members was prepared to support the Syriza government against the ‘Troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund in its bid to end these policies in February 2015.

Second, the level of political resistance across Europe to the implementation of austerity measures has been uneven at best. In Southern countries, especially Greece and Spain, popular resistance has been at a relatively high level, whether through social movements, such as the Indignados movement and the Orange Tide social work organisation in Spain, or through the organised trade union movement in Greece, where 32 general strikes between 2010 and 2013 were an important contributory factor to the election of the left-wing Syriza party in January 2015. In Northern Europe, by contrast, resistance to austerity and to neoliberal policies has been more muted. This is not to say that there has been no resistance. Britain, for example, saw a 2-million strong strike in defence of retirement pensions on 30 November 2011. That struggle, however, like many others, ended abruptly in a shoddy climbdown by the official trade union leadership, a climbdown that British rank-and-file trade unionists lacked the confidence and the independent organisation to challenge.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that there has been no questioning or criticism of the dominant orthodoxy. The depth of the crisis has prompted even some mainstream commentators and economists to revisit macroeconomic theories that look beyond the behaviours of individual ‘rational consumers’ and seek to make sense of the system as a whole, including the possibility that crises are an integral part of the workings of a capitalist economy. Martin Wolf, for example, has queried the neoclassical view that free-market economies always tend to equilibrium and that crises can only occur as a consequence of some external (or ‘exogenous’) shock:

Depressions are indeed one of the states that a capitalist economy can fall into. An economic theory that does not incorporate that possibility is as relevant as a theory of biology that excludes the risk of extinctions, a theory of the body that excludes the risk of heart attacks, or a theory of bridge-building that excludes the risk of collapse. (Wolf, 2014: xvii)

Such criticisms of neoclassical economics tend to be informed by the theories of one or other of the two great economic thinkers referred to earlier: Keynes and Marx. It is to a consideration of these theories that we shall now turn.

Marx and Keynes: saving capitalism or ending capitalism?

The idea that crises are a feature of capitalist economies was one shared by the two giants of economic thought referred to by the Manchester students, namely, Marx and Keynes. While, however, Keynes believed – and earnestly desired – tha...