Commodification and ‘the commons’: The politics of privatising public water in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone crisis

Bieler, Andreas; Jordan, Jamie

doi:10.1177/1354066117728383

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Be it Vio.me, a large metallurgy factory in the north of Greece occupied and run by its workers, be it the social health‐care clinics across Greece (Daskalaki and Kokkinidis, ; Jordan, , pp. 215–220), be it ongoing resistance against water privatization in Thessaloniki combined with attempts at transforming water into a commons (Bieler and Jordan, ), or be it the fight back for housing in Spain (Bailey et al, , p. 210), it is through such counter‐spaces of class struggle that, ultimately, the way towards a different future may emerge.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis? Engaging the Post‐Keynesian Critique

Bieler

Jordan

Morton

2019

J of Common Market Studies

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Post‐Keynesians have delivered an important advance in providing explanations of the Eurozone crisis, not the least in demonstrating how the formation of the European integration project lacked the means to manage effectively the macroeconomic imbalances between core and peripheral spaces across the region. Through a critical engagement with such descriptions, this article argues that to account more adequately for the formation of the asymmetrical and crisis‐ridden forms of development across the Eurozone it is necessary to focus on the uneven and combined development of Europe's peripheral spaces and their integration into an expanded free trade regime since the 1980s. It is through a focus on the structuring condition of uneven and combined development shaped by capitalist social relations of production and attendant class struggles that we can locate the origins of the present crisis.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis? Engaging the Post‐Keynesian Critique

Bieler

Jordan

Morton

2019

J of Common Market Studies

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“…Ideally, democratic or consensual decision-making should take centre-stage. However, as there is and cannot be a 'one size fits all' solution, free experimentation of different formats, evolving from bottom-up grassroots initiatives, should prevail, leading to a coexistence of multiple laboratories for the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, as well as the reproduction of the wider 'social factory' beyond the workplace (see Cleaver, 2000in Bieler & Jordan, 2017.…”

Section: Discussion: An Alternative Eu Industrial Policy Fostering Somentioning

confidence: 99%

The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives

Wigger

2018

Globalizations

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In 2017, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared the reindustrialization of the European Union (EU) a top priority. The new EU industrial policy seeks to boost industrial competitiveness and leverage investments into manufacturing, thereby increasing industry's share of EU Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 20% by 2020. What may appear to be a Keynesian industrial policy and thus a move away from the EU's previous neoliberal agenda, however, seeks to calibrate a further neoliberal structural adjustment in a highly authoritarian fashion. Internal devaluation through devaluing labour, intensifying competition and reducing corporate taxes takes centre-stage. As an auxiliary to the European Semester, national productivity boards have been established to monitor wage developments alongside labour productivity and to suggest policy adjustments when cost competitiveness lags behind the Eurozone average and that of the main trading partners. Not only have formal democratic institutions and organized labour been circumvented in the decision-making process regarding such boards, they will have little voice in the future, and this an area that hitherto fell largely within the scope of member states: wage bargaining. Hence, the new EU industrial policy needs to be discredited, de-legitimized and thus, politicized. A political counter-project, rooted in an alternative industrial policy geared towards fostering horizontal and democratic solidarity economy initiatives which have proliferated since 2008, is discussed in the article's closing pages.

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“…Remunicipalisation, as a concrete phenomenon of reclaiming public organisations from privatised forms, does play a part in this imaginary as both a tool to relocate power and decision-making, as well as a potential starting point to envision related transformations, such as a politics of the commons or experiments with participatory democracy at local and regional scales (cf. Bieler and Jordan 2018). While many of the remunicipalisations that have taken place to date have some radical motivations (such as economic democracy, worker control, or zero carbon goals), few actors involved would explicitly regard themselves as "anticapitalist" per se (see Cumbers and Paul 2020).…”

Section: Interrogating Remunicipalisation: Between Political Advocacy and Critical Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Remunicipalisation, Mutating Neoliberalism, and the Conjuncture

Cumbers

Paul

2021

Antipode

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There is a growing interest in the progressive potential of remunicipalisation, a global trend for towns, cities, and even subnational regions to take formerly privatised assets and services back into public ownership. In this paper, we offer a novel conceptualisation of remunicipalisation, developing a spatialised conjunctural perspective through critical engagement with the work of Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, and recent geographical scholarship on political economy transitions. This draws attention to the open, dynamic, political, and spatially diverse aspects of remunicipalisation as part of a mutating process of neoliberalism. Emphasising the conjunctural insight of neoliberalism's shifting and variegated terrain on which progressive forces have to mobilise, our theorisation has implications for left political strategy and broader transformative projects against a backdrop of global economic, social, and ecological crisis. Resumen: Existe un creciente inter es en el potencial progresista de las remunicipalizaciones, una tendencia a nivel global por la cual ciudades, e incluso regiones subnacionales, recuperan la propiedad p ublica de recursos y servicios previamente privatizados. En este art ıculo presentamos una conceptualizaci on novedosa sobre el fen omeno de las remunicipalizaciones. Desarrollamos una perspectiva atenta al an alisis de las coyunturas y los espacios, a partir de un di alogo cr ıtico con los trabajos de Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, y con estudios provenientes de la geograf ıa sobre las transiciones en la econom ıa pol ıtica. Esto implica prestar atenci on al car acter abierto y din amico y a la diversidad pol ıtica y espacial de las remunicipalizaciones como parte de los procesos de mutaci on del neoliberalismo. Colocamos enfasis en comprender el aspecto coyuntural del terreno cambiante y variado en el que se mueve el neoliberalismo, en donde las fuerzas progresistas deben movilizarse. En tal sentido, nuestra teorizaci on tiene implicancias para pensar estrategias pol ıticas de izquierda y proyectos de transformaci on m as amplios contra el trasfondo de la crisis econ omica, social, y ecol ogica a nivel global.

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Commodification and ‘the commons’: The politics of privatising public water in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone crisis

Cited by 26 publications

References 39 publications

EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis? Engaging the Post‐Keynesian Critique

EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis? Engaging the Post‐Keynesian Critique

The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives

Remunicipalisation, Mutating Neoliberalism, and the Conjuncture

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