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Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders. The Case of Contemporary Spain
Abstract
Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders develops a novel political economy approach by establishing a dialogue between the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) theory and Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism theory. Using this synthesis, it provides an in-depth analysis of Spain’s recent socio-economic evolution since the early 1990s.
The book develops a theoretical framework capable of appraising capitalist dynamics together with their relationship to the institutional environment surrounding and structuring them. This is in order to explore the interrelation between the historical development of the capitalist mode of production, on the one hand, and the various co-existing social processes, social consensuses and political identities, on the other. Contemporary Spain provides an interesting case study: until the onset of the Great Recession, Spain had an impressive macroeconomic record supported by several contradictory social processes, such as a massive real estate bubble, an upsurge in private indebtedness and a deteriorating manufacturing sector. However, the accumulation of internal imbalances during those years led inevitably to the sudden disintegration of this institutional and social environment in the years after 2008, thus resulting into a breakdown of capitalist activity accompanied by widespread social contestation. The book also explores the ensuing political scenario, including the emergence of the ‘indignados’ movement and the anti-austerity party Podemos.
This work is of significant interest to critical political economy and discourse-theory scholars, critical theorists in general, and social scientists concerned with the recent Spanish experience
... Prior to the Great Recession, the apparent success of Spanish capitalism gained worldwide attention (Buendía 2020, Rey-Araújo 2021. While booming employment opportunities, soaring private investment, rising consumption levels and sound public finances all merited widespread approval, the onset of the Great Recession suddenly revealed the precarious foundations upon which those dynamics had been grounded. ...
This article deploys the notion of ‘employable femininity’, by which we refer to the mystification along postfeminist lines of an idealized womanhood suitable to be employed and worked upon, in order to explore how women’s relation to employment is currently being articulated and contested in contemporary Spain. Structural transformations during neoliberalism have promoted women’s rising involvement into labor markets while, simultaneously, reinforcing the systemic relevance of women’s unpaid work in the domestic arena. A hegemonic, media-constructed model of femininity has thus emerged where participation into paid employment is presented as a path towards liberation and economic independence for certain women who, nonetheless, cannot do away with the care-related responsibilities traditionally allotted to them. The current Spanish conjuncture provides a paradigmatic case in point to observe how women’s relation to employment is being reconfigured, insofar as attempts to ‘re-domesticate’ women in the aftermath of the Great Recession have been confronted by a resurgent feminist movement which, nowadays, figures as the main vector of social contention in contemporary Spain.
Radical democracy informs contemporary social movements both as critique of existing liberal democratic social orders and as inspiration for collective action to challenge power structures. However, existing approaches on the relationship between radical democracy and social movements often truncate complex socio-political issues, constraining political imagination and stifling 'truly radical' alternatives. This Element offers an analysis of contemporary social movements in Colombia and Turkey to show the limits and potential of radical democracy to reimagine new expressions of citizenship and non-capitalist alternatives. It argues that there is a mismatch between the radical democratic paradigm as it is formulated within Eurocentric purview, and the ways it has been articulated and practised by anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements of the twenty-first century. We propose that radical democracy should be rethought in light of novel forms of political activism and visions emerging from these social movements as a response to the failures of liberal democracy.
Encouraged by the popularization of the feminisms and the essentiality of care in the face of the increasing precarity of the living conditions, popular women’s culture in the global North has been showing signs of a growing interest in self-care practices. Given this new visibility, the present work proposes a critical approach to the discursive representation of self-care from a transdisciplinary and feminist theoretical-interpretative perspective, located at the nexus of political economy and cultural studies. For this purpose, we undertake a critical discourse analysis—from a feminist perspective—of the cultural articulation of self-care in women’s magazines Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Elle (Spanish editions). Among our main findings, we can highlight the hyperfeminization of self-care; the re-politicization of young women’s discomfort and wellbeing in postfeminist neoliberal terms; the identification of self-care with consumption practices, especially aesthetic ones, which, in turn, are related to the financialization and indebtedness of everyday life; and the signification of self-care as utilitarian and productive, i.e., as a tool for women to constantly work on ourselves and transform ourselves to optimize ourselves in line with the feminization of the neoliberal subject and the maximization of their human/social/erotic capital.
This article explores the evolution of Spain’s capitalism during the last decades in order to unveil the factors underlying the harshness with which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spain. We present a twofold thesis. On the one hand, we argue that Spanish capitalism has harbored certain internal vulnerabilities, relative to its productive specialization, its labor market, its welfare institutions, and indebtedness levels, which successive boom and busts have reproduced and ultimately exacerbated. On the other hand, we contend that these various vulnerabilities have abruptly come to the fore with the irruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus accounting for its singularly dramatic consequences. In order to substantiate our hypotheses, we provide a political economy analysis of the recent trajectory of Spanish capitalism. The economic boom initiated in the 1990s developed various vulnerabilities, which the years following the onset of the Great Recession did not attenuate and to which various others were added during the last expansion phase, all coming to the fore with the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Este trabajo plantea un comentario crítico del relato popular de la Gran Recesión en el Estado español. Desde el marco teórico-interpretativo feminista de los estudios culturales y la economía, se identifican y analizan tres tropos de esta narrativa en/de crisis: la privatización de la culpa, la promesa de un futuro mejor frente a la normalización de la precariedad y la caracterización de la recesión como una "mancession". Palabras clave Gran Recesión; crisis; culpa; precariedad; desigualdad; estudios culturales feministas.
Under the pressure of work's devaluation and the state's retrenchment, men and women in Spain manage their extended family resources in a struggle to provide for their dependents. These resources have become the main axis of inequality in Spain's financialized economy. Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I show that men and women understand themselves in terms of this responsibility, internalizing capitalist pressures on social reproduction as a family matter. This self‐identification cuts through the solidarities that exploited waged work and gendered domestic work might generate, and it makes family one's ultimate reference point. Instead of the refusal of a responsibility that used to be socialized being a principled and political stance, then, it is dismissed as selfish.
Open Acces at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12798
Underlying the idea of the middle classes there is a contradictory positionality, the relations of which ultimately enhance capital accumulation. By opening Marxist critique to Weberian approaches to class, we explain how the self-ascription of short-term rental (STR) suppliers to the middle-class idea boosts exploitation and accumulation. Housing income, and recently that originating in STRs, has been used to maintain the symbolic and material status of the so-called middle classes in Spain, and specifically in Palma. Based on statistical data analysis and interviews with STR suppliers, managers and workers, we analyse the contradictory class positionality of STR suppliers in Palma (Majorca, Spain). First, we argue, that STR suppliers are part of the middle classes since they bear attributes of rent, labour and also capital, as they employ workers to produce a tourism commodity. Second, we contend that STR overnight stays should not only be considered as land rent payments, but also as the sale of a tourism commodity. Third, we claim that the contradictory positionality of the middle classes fuels self-exploitation, for STR suppliers misalign their interests with those of capital.
El descontento movilizador. Cultura y discursos sobre la política en un marco de crisis (2011-2013) María Jesús Funes, Ernesto Ganuza y Patricia García-Espín (eds.). Madrid: CSIC, 2020, 230 pp. Existen momentos en los que el tiempo histórico se acelera; creencias y agencias que parecían inmutables se transforman a gran velocidad sin que causas y consecuencias puedan ser metabolizadas de manera reflexiva. Hace años que el sistema político español vive un período acelerado, pero calibrar la magnitud de las transformaciones que se han producido es una tarea ardua, dificultada por la necesidad coyuntural de instituciones, partidos y medios de presentar todos los cambios como trascendentes. El descontento movilizador es un freno de emergencia, una vuelta al inicio en forma de cápsula en el tiempo que pretende reflejar de manera concentrada los discursos de la ciudadanía sobre la política antes y después de las movilizaciones que comenzaron el 15 de mayo de 2011.
In this paper, I provide a short reply to Jacobs’s critical appraisal of my previous article, “Ernesto Laclau’s Oblivion of Political Economy,” published in this journal, volume 32, number 2 (2020). There, I had argued that Laclau’s post-Marxism suffered from a marked incapacity to theorize the extent to which capitalist dynamics affect ongoing hegemonic struggles. In this regard, Jacobs argues that I implicitly resort to an ontological dualism at odds with post-Marxism’s ontological stance, from which an essentialist account of capitalist dynamics ensues. I argue that, while remaining firmly within post-Marxism's core ontological assumptions, further theoretical integration of political economy approaches is a promising path for enhancing post-Marxism’s usefulness for strategic reflection, as both of us ultimately aim to do.
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