The elimination of political demands: Ordoliberalism, the big society and the depoliticization of co-operatives

Abstract

This paper focuses on the British state’s attitude towards co-operatives, focusing mainly on the Thatcher (1979–1990) and Cameron (2010–2015) governments. After the 2008 crisis, the Cameron-led government, under the umbrella of its Big Society project, developed measures to shift responsibility on British society for the development of the co-operative model as a contribution to self-help, the pursuit of economic growth and the rebuilding of social bonds. We trace the origins of these efforts to the Thatcher governments, where these attitudes towards workers’ cooperatives were consolidated. In so doing, we find the concept of ordoliberalism rather than neo-liberalism alone, particularly useful for explaining the nuances of the governments’ relationship with the cooperatives; including the symbolic backing of co-operatives for their perfect embodiment of self-help and the entrepreneurial spirit, integrating them into a social policy of total competition and economic growth and the constant legislative and financial control of state support. This exemplified and operationalized a larger governmentality later also pursued by the coalition, aimed at entrenching a competitive order and the bourgeois spirit of self-sufficiency through the deployment of the agenda of popular capitalism. Both the Thatcher and Cameron governments, in the spirit of ordoliberalism, instrumentalized cooperatives as part of a project that sought to govern through society to reshape and depoliticize it. This was an attempt to simultaneously eliminate British society’s political demands while recasting the role that the state is expected to play in social and economic policy.

‘In time, every worker a capitalist’: Accumulation by legitimation and authoritarian neoliberalism in Thatcher’s Britain

“…The relevance of analysing this period lies with the observation that this kind of accumulation by legitimation project may be continuing since 2008 (with different degrees of success and resistance from below). Indeed in the UK, the 2010-2015 government led by David Cameron also advanced popular capitalism as a programme of accumulation by legitimation, notably through the continued development of share ownership, mutuals and co-operatives, to simultaneously justify and fill the void left by welfare retrenchment and wage suppression (Bonefeld 2015;Da Costa Vieira and Foster, 2022). But similar undertakings can also be seen elsewhere.…”

“…Neoliberal governments however do realize that citizens must be made to behave in this specific way, because marketcompatible behaviour is not an entirely natural inclination (Dardot and Laval, 2014). The neoliberal state is thus central to the process: it attempts to directly govern through society, in order to create a depoliticized order of self-sufficient subjects who engage with the market individually as opposed to formulating collective political demands (Da Costa Vieira and Foster, 2022;Bonefeld, 2015Bonefeld, , 2017. The state does so through interventions in social spheres that try to instil the social conditions necessary for competition, growth and order (Foucault, 2008).…”

Sidney Pollard’s ‘Nineteenth Century Co-operation’ revisited: Periodisation, utopianism and realism in the British co-operative movement

“…Decades later, under the leadership of David Cameron, the Conservatives proposed that the "welfare state" was holding back community action of all kinds, but particularly "the most virtuous models of association: mutuals, friendly societies, and co-operatives" (Da Costa Vieira & Foster, 2021, p. 299). The values of the Rochdale Pioneers -courage, self-help, vitality, and entrepreneurship -would support a further act of depoliticisation, as self-help assumed the removal of state-support for co-operatives and thus a shrinking of the concept of what the state should be expected to offer as support (Da Costa Vieira & Foster, 2021).…”