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Abstract
The article analyses the UK government’s plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of ‘social value’. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.
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Emma Dowling is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Middlesex University, London. She has edited a research thread on Mobilisations, Interventions and Cultural Policy for the journal Lateral (2012) and co-edited a special issue of the journal Ephemera on Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored (2007). Recent publications include ‘The waitress – on affect, method and (re)presentation’ in Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies (2012) and ‘Pedagogies of cognitive capitalism – challenging the critical subject’ in E. Bulut and M. Peters (eds) Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labour (Peter Lang, 2011).
David Harvie is a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, Leicester. Recent publications include (with Keir Milburn) ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the twenty-first century’, South Atlantic Quarterly (2013); (with Gareth Brown, Emma Dowling and Keir Milburn) ‘Careless talk: Social reproduction and fault-lines of the crisis in the UK’, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order (2013); and (with The Free Association) Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life (PM Press, 2011). Most of his writing is available at academia.edu.
