Tag Archives: austerity

Blog, Fascism, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason

Image 1: Beppe Grillo in Piazza Castello in Turin for the campaign of the 5 Stars Movement Piemonte on 14 March 2010, photo by Giorgio Brida

I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic) and contexts (at various scales) underpinning them. It is – I believe – analytically more productive to compare those, instead of sticking to what a categorical label (which is always, to an extent, arbitrarily attributed) does or does not include. Moreover, the word “fascism”, having become so morally laden in its century old history, is almost impossible to use it without falling into excessive generalizations (both moral and historical). With this in mind, my tendency towards what might or might not be classified as “fascism”, hinges on one simple principle: I use it either when referring to the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919, or when the category is used “emically” by my research participants to describe themselves.

Consistently with the above, I’d like to focus on some systemic aspects I have been concentrating on in my recent work on populism and conspiracy theory within the Italian 5 Stars Movement (5SM), and put that into relation with insights from previous research. I do not at all intend to suggest that 5SM is a phenomenon of the fascist type, albeit one might notice, historically, a few overlapping tendencies. Rather, I look at the 5SM as a political grouping that was, at its origin, populist. Fascism, too, is an historically specific form of populism. But not every populism is fascist.

My main areas of interest in political anthropology have been concerned with: 1) The ideological innovations of Spontaneismo Armato: a radical and partly clandestine neo-fascist galaxy of small armed groups, active in Italy in the late 1970’s, and deeply engaged in the political violence of those years, (Loperfido 2018, 2022). 2) The constitutive processes, and subsequent collapse, of a specific socio-economic ideology of autarchy/self-reliance in Veneto, Italy. The latter was organized around an organicist understanding of the social relations of production which had also framed the sub-nationalist discourses of Lega Nord, another populist protest party, that had seen the light in Veneto and Lombardia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Loperfido and Pusceddu, 2019, Loperfido 2020). 3) The above mentioned 5SM, with particular reference to the articulation of its early populistic functioning, and the fantasies of conspiracy against the people, very widespread in the early stages of the party formation (2005-2016). With Victor Turner, I analyze this articulation in terms of the anti-structural logics of charisma/enthusiasm, that informed the party’s constitutive process within the complex political economy of the long crisis unleashed by the financial breakdown of 2009.

All three of these political phenomena have been associated with fascism by variously distributed detractors in the media and at times in scientific discourses. Personally, I only dealt with Spontaneismo in terms of “Neo-fascism”, for the reasons listed above. However, one can notice that the three political formations shared a few ideological features with historical fascism.

Some of these features are:

1) All three – at least in their constitutional phase – claimed to represent various expressions of a third way between left and right, socialism and liberalism.

2) They all, likewise, claim(ed) to represent some form of revolt against the bourgeois world, while leaving unchallenged the system of property, market relations, and capital accumulation more generally.

3) They all were charismatic in nature, vitalistic and transgressive. One could say enthusiastic in the Durkheimian sense, or – more appropriately – anti-structural in a Turnerian perspective.

4) They all opposed action to theory and reason, giving to the former the moral edge over the latter. This created, in all four cases, a strongly anti-intellectual orientation, with attacks on rationalism, and to bourgeois idealist notions of foundational identity.

5) They all produced forms of organicist ideologies which were, more or less explicitly, obscuring class differences, and thus attempting to deny and repress class conflict.

Reflecting on similar ideological configurations, Susana Narotzky makes an important statement when saying that:

“most ‘third-way’ attempts at producing alternative social models have been of the ‘organic’ type, from the social doctrine of the church at the turn of the twentieth century through republican solidarism and fascism, to present-day third-way and social-capital proponents. They are similar in that they all aim at maintaining capitalist market-led relations of production while solving the ‘social question’, that is, the social unrest created by the necessary differentiation those very relations produce. They differ in the means employed to reach these common objectives and therefore in the procedural structures of governance developed. However, they all stress the importance of personalized relationships between agents and the specificity of community contexts” (Narotzky 2007:406, my emphasis).

Following in her footsteps, I would like to explore how third way postulations, and the processes of personalization/naturalization of socio-economic relations that are integral to it, could be related to the macro-context of austerity measures. Can this dynamic of personalization/naturalization be interpreted as the nexus determining a mutually constitutive relationship between austerity and charisma? The above might not give us certainties on what fascism is or is not, but could perhaps illuminate social processes, structures and constraints that elicited the emergence of fascism in its historical form, and that have – at other times – produced ideological tendencies that are – to an extent – comparable with it.

If we look at the historical context, our first realization is that all of these formations were constituted at moments of deep crisis of capital accumulation (historical fascism in the late 1910s, the Liga Veneta – then Lega Nord, then Lega – in the early 1970s, Spontaneismo in the mid 1970s, 5SM in 2009). This is not to say these political formations were reacting to economic crisis per se, rather, they all seemed to embody a reaction to what Stuart Hall has termed – with Gramsci – “a passive revolution”, a sort of reaction to a non-reaction: “when none of the social forces were able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way” (Hall and Massey 2010).

Another recurrent aspect in all of these situations is the emergency of austerity as a culturally hegemonic discourse. In a recent book Clara Mattei (2022) explores the relationship between austerity and fascism in Italy, as a process of reciprocal constitution. She sheds new light on austerity presenting it as a project elaborated by British and Italian think tanks at the dawn of the last century with the goal of liberating the forces of capital from the yoke of political control. She reminds us of how in his very first discourse as Prime Minister, Mussolini spoke the idioms of austerity, and promised to de-politicize the economy and remove all meddling of the state within it (Mattei 2022:205). Obviously, the other conjunctures in which the “idioms of austerity” were enforced as culturally hegemonic, were precisely the moments, named above, where the forces of capital appeared to be under severe threat (the 1970s and the 2010s).

Now, there are of course enormous differences, and neither Lega, Spontaneismo, or 5SM, embraced austerity the way Mussolini’s regime did. But I am not interested here in the direct relationship between these movements and austerity. Rather, I’m trying to suggest that austerity became a paradigm, powerful enough to establish a new representation of the relation between the economy and the state, where the possibility and the duty of the former to intervene in the latter and regulate the markets, disappears. This implies a set of consequences that, I shall argue, can be seen as co-responsible for the emergence and social establishment of the ideological configurations listed above.

Yesterday, like today, austerity seems to have the power to de-politicize issues, where these are “removed from the level of public accountability, and designated as ‘non-political’” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108). Integral to austerity is what Don Kalb has termed “the unstoppable rule of experts” (2011: 3), whereby economic forces are not any longer the object matter of politicians (who govern things), but of technicians, scientists and technocrats (who study and manage things). This seems to inaugurate a process whereby the necessity to govern socio-economic forces is obscured. More than that: these are divorced from their social situatedness, their rootedness in the social process, and their being integral to the unequal relationalities between power holders and the subaltern classes. We could say that – with austerity – economic processes, social facts, power relations, develop a tendency to exit the social, and enter the domain of nature. Costis Hadjimichalis (2018) has shown how the discourse of austerity seems to be endowed with the magic power of making bloody attacks on social welfare, budgetary cuts for health and education, disappear beneath the idioms of flexibility, efficiency, and modernization. The result is “a culture of fear, alongside feelings of injustice and anger” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108).

I was grappling with similar issues when faced with the problem of populism and conspiracy theories within the 5SM in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic breakdown, where not only the relation between the masses and the leader had become personalized, individualized, and as it were unmediated (Calise 2016, Comby 2014), but social and political forces were seen as personified and animated. The state had become a Vampire, the politicians were Zombies, while conspiracy theories about vaccines or organ removal during Covid-19 had come to represent the penetration of the extractive logic of capital down to the intimate sphere of the body itself.

We have known at least since Weber that “the social relationships directly involved in charisma are strictly personal, based on the validity and practice based on charismatic personal qualities” (1964 [1947]: 363-364). Yet, we can perhaps enrich this idea further by exposing a relationship that might connect personalized logics of charisma, 3rd way attempts, attacks on rationalism, with the larger systemic shift to hegemonic austerity. As we have seen, austerity deliberately dis-empowers the state as an abstract mechanism of social-economic regulation: a normative centre immanent over social relations, overseeing, governing, and intermediating social, economic and political interactions between actual persons, groupings, and different orders of institutions. The power of abstraction with which we endow the state, is key to that socially regulating function, tasked with emancipating social relations from their situated imbalances of power and their hierarchical relationalities. It is via these abstracting properties that the socially equalizing function of the state can be implemented via the establishment of a normative order. Obviously, when that function is removed not only is the field open again to the re-embedment of power relations into the given social hierarchy, but also to the general essentialization of social characters and social forces. It seems to me that this is the kind of context Gramsci alluded to, precisely when talking about fascism in austerity ridden Italy, when he saw, between the old that is dying and the new that cannot be born, an interregnum where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Giacomo Loperfido is an ERC researcher in social and political anthropology for the PACT (Populism and Conspiracy Theory) Project, at the University of Tübingen. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global systemic crisis. He edited the volume “Extremism, Society and the State” (Berghahn Books, 2022).

References

Calise, Mauro. 2016. La Democrazia del Leader. Roma, Bari: Laterza.

Comby, Jean-Baptiste. 2014. “L’individualisation des Problèmes Collectifs: une Dépolitisation Politiquement Située.” Savoir/Agir:2: 45-50.

Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis Spaces. Structures, Struggles, and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey. 2010. “Interpreting the crisis.” Soundings 44.44: 57-71.

Kalb, Don. 2011. “Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe, Introduction”, inKalb Don and Gabor Halmai, Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe. New York, Oxford : Berghan Books.

Loperfido, Giacomo. 2018. “Neither Left nor RIght. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, in Kalb, Don and Mollona, Mao, Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 118-141.

–. 2020. “The entrepreneur’s other: Small entrepreneurial identity and the collapse of life structures in the ‘Third Italy’”, in Narotzky, Susana, Grassroots Economies, Living With Austerity in Southern Europe. Pluto Press, 173-191.

–. 2022. “The Empire and the Barbarians: Cosmological Laceration and the Social Establishment of Extremism”, in Loperfido, Giacomo, Extremism, Society, and the State, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 87-108.

Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu. 2019. “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy.” Dialectical Anthropology 43:4, 417-436.

Mattei, Clara. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Narotzky, Susana. 2007. “The Project in the Model. Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Cultural Anthropology, 48:3, 403-424.

Weber, Max. 1964 [1947]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2024. “Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason” Focaalblog, 1 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/01/giacomo-loperfido-austerity-charisma-and-the-attacks-on-reason/

Blog

Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece

On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls of the headquarters amidst clashes with the police.

On the morning of that day, Greece had woken up to devastating news. During the night, a passenger train headed to Thessaloniki from Athens, mostly carrying students, collided with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction. The collision was so fierce that the first two wagons were literarily pulverized, leaving 57 dead. As it turned out, an inexperienced Stationmaster with limited equipment at his disposal had manually put the two trains on the same track by mistake. For a full twelve minutes, passengers and personnel on both trains were on collision course without any human or non-human intelligence detecting it. In the following days much more serious and larger rallies and riots followed.

 ‘Mitsotakis, fuck you!’ – the original condition

The crowd, amongst others, was chanting a melodic slogan ‘Mitsotakis, fuck yοu!’. This vulgar slogan had first emerged during the big forest fires of 2021 when the wooded northern region of Evia Island and the forests of Parnitha mountain in the north of Athens had been abandoned to burn due to a peculiar “general evacuation” policy. New Democracy, the conservative governing party, had won the elections of 2019 to an extent by utilizing another horrible catastrophe, the fires of Eastern Attica in 2018. At that time, New Democracy blamed the governing SYRIZA party for failing to save the lives of the 103 who died in the fire. However, instead of trying to reinforce the civil protection infrastructures and increase the budget for fire brigades and forestry service, New Democracy has preferred to recruit a few thousand new police officers and thus enforce a heavy policing of forest fires. With the new policy, entire municipalities are evacuated by force so as to avoid deaths by all means in order to come out with a lower body count than the previous government.

The consequence of this policy of evacuation and abandonment was not only the destruction of forests, but also of agricultural land, flocks of animals, bees and entire villages that burned to ashes as nobody was there to protect them (on the fires and the archaeological heritage see Poulimenakos & Dalakoglou 2021 in FocaalBlog). As TV channels sent their crews to report from the evacuated towns and villages of Evia, someone videobombed a live broadcast and stood behind the reporter shouting, ‘Mitsotaki, fuck you!’, in a spontaneous expression of anger towards the evacuation policy that had destroyed his livelihood. Soon, “Mitsotakis, fuck you!”, became a slogan with a melody, chanted by football fans during games and by audiences at music concerts. To understand the rapid nationwide spread and popularity of this anthem, we now take a closer look at the New Democracy government record.

The Mitsotakis government had applied the same principle of minimum death tolls at any cost during the Covid-19 pandemic by enforcing one of the hardest lockdowns in the western world with curfews and severely restricted mobility under state surveillance. For many months, every citizen had to send a text message to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and give a “valid” reason before leaving their house. Defectors were heavily fined by the police. As with the forest fires, now the systematic destruction of health care infrastructures under the austerity regime imposed after the financial crash was offset by calling in the police as a civil protection mechanisms and the government’s main tool for controlling the pandemic.

“Mitsotakis, fuck you!” – the current condition

These structural continuities of policing (rather than resolving) an infrastructural crisis explain why one week after the train crash tragedy, on March 8th, Greece saw the biggest popular mobilization since the 2010-2015 era of insurrections against the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the IMF-EU-ECB troika. The main rallying cry of the protests was the phrase “text me when you get there”, a reference to the overprotective Greek family relations symbolized by frequent parental requests to send messages when travelling (even for over-30s). Now used by the protesters, the phrase is a tragic and powerful reference to mourning parents who will never receive a reply from their children who were on the train.

Image 1: Photo from one of the many demonstrations on the 8th of March. The sign reads: “text me when you get there”. Source: alphavita blogspot

The protests were so massive and persistent that they forced the Prime Minister to postpone the upcoming elections for an undetermined period. Meanwhile, the government’s political communication experts massively underestimated the train tragedy’s impact on Greek public opinion. Mitsotakis’ initial government statement blamed the accident on the stationmaster and omitted any reference to years of chronic under-investment in traffic infrastructures during the privatization of the railway company. This only increased public anger. An alliance of trade unions declared a general strike, whilst pupils occupied their schools and students their universities. Within five days, the government’s public relations experts advised Mitsotakis to accept partial responsibility to calm things down. Yet again the obnoxiousness and arrogance of the PM and his cabinet led to another PR catastrophe when Mitsotakis stated that the 57 victims of the train crash had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in order to improve national railways, flanked by the Minister for Development who called the 57 deaths ‘an opportunity’ for the country. With no time left for the government or the railway company to come up with another damage control strategy, people on social media, in neighborhoods and work places saw the train crash as an emblem of the precarization of everyday life after more than 13 years of extreme neoliberal government budget cuts.

“Don’t you dare to put the blame on an isolated human error”, or, “we live by chance in this country”, and, “this was not an accident but a murder”, were popular expressions that linked mourning and anger with a demand for exposure of underlying causes of the incident such as chronic degradation of railway infrastructures, budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of automated security systems that could correct human errors and prevent accidents. The poor state of other hard infrastructures came to light, contradicting the neoliberal mantra that service standard would skyrocket after privatizations. The German-owned airports in Greece’s peripheral cities suffer from staff and electronic equipment shortages while foreign equity investment in the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus never reached the promised level. The carefully crafted hegemonic narrative of private sector supremacy over the old state-controlled economy that had gradually gained control of hearts and minds (Mavris 2017) since the Greek crisis fell apart like a house of cards. Recent opinion polls show a reversal of political preferences with the ruling party losing significant ground amongst a general decline of trust in capitalist democracy.

Greece’s Inverted Shock Doctrine

What is happening in Greece today seems to be the exact opposite of what Naomi Klein argued in her stellar book on the “Shock doctrine” (2007). According to Klein, the severity of an immense collective trauma leads to numbness and disorientation that freezes collective action and presents excellent opportunities for the ruling classes to impose otherwise highly unpopular policies. In Greece, disorientation and numbness characterized society during the long period of inflation, privatizations, budget cuts, and impoverishment since 2008. Yet, these processes seemed abstract, confusingly linked to both local and global economic processes, and, hence, difficult to pinpoint in space and time. That vagueness certainly ended with the collective trauma of the train crash. The tragic crumble of a very material and tangible element of public transport infrastructure, similar to the earlier case of the Evia Island forest fires, turned into a metonymy for the crumbling relations between the Greek public, society, on the one hand, and the alliance of private capital and the state apparatus on the other hand. As we know from ethnographic research, “infrastructures are a principle materialization of the relationship between people (citizens and non-citizens alike) and otherwise abstract state and supra-state authorities” (Dalakoglou 2016:823). Infrastructures consist of the realm where the social contract between a state and its citizenry is taking tangible forms and is felt in the everyday life. It is the realm where the game of hegemony is most likely to be gained or challenged (Srnicek 2014).

Another crucial dimension of the conjuncture within which the massive mobilizations against the state-capital ruling class alliance now take place is that in recent weeks Greeks learned that for the first time in history residential properties are no longer protected by law from dispossession even at rather insignificant household debt levels. The Greek Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of private equity funds, allowing property auctions to redeem household loans purchased from banks as initial lenders, leaving hundreds of thousands who have struggled to repay their mortgages in despair about their future and another crucial aspect of the national social fabric in distress.

The residential house in Greece is more than bricks and mortar that put a roof over one’s head. It represents intra-generational solidarity and strong family bonds, with parents struggling to buy a house to provide economic security for their children. In other words, the house represents a form of informal social security provided by the family rather than the state. Typical to the substitution of an absent welfare state with informal family solidarity in Mediterranean societies, Greece never had significant numbers of council housing like the UK for example. Family solidarity provided a safety net in difficult times and certainly so during the recent 13-years long crisis with people in their 30s or even 40s living with their parents or grandparents.

Infinite density and the specificity of neoliberal austerity

We argue that the tragic train crash made visible the specific and tangible failure of public infrastructure and thus gave austerity specificity in time and space. The disaster encapsulates an “infinite density” of societal deadlock between the protagonists of privatization and austerity on the one hand and the very fabric of the social contract in Greece on the other hand, in which every form of social consensus is collapsing. With the neoliberal state’s privatized public services failing to fulfill the promises of upgraded public infrastructures to the benefit all and the informal forms of social reproduction gradually dismantled, the Greek nation-state moves towards a power vacuum. It is no coincidence that the majority of protesters are young people from the so-called generation z. This generations feels that all aspects of the social contract are expiring and they will not enjoy the benefits and stability of the public sector that their parents had. Instead, they will have low-paid jobs in the private sector and will probably not inherit a house to live in because they cannot afford to pay the increased inheritance taxes (Knight 2018) or because their parent’s house will be disposed by private equity funds. The train accident made shockingly evident that in today’s Greece even a routine train journey is not safe, that nobody “is there” for the people. “We live by chance in this country”, one of the protest slogans states.

Yet, a careful observer of public transport users after the train disaster sees this realization of state negligence turn into an increased care for each other. People now help older passengers and others in need on and off busses in the absence of special ramps. They talk to each other and give courage to each other for the day ahead while ranting against the government (perhaps even using the public slogans discussed in this article). “We are the infrastructures” is what we are often told during recent ethnographic research. Maybe this new confidence will create a vision of new social organization beyond the state, capital and also beyond the family. One new slogan points in this direction; “Mono o laos tha sosei ton lao” (“only people can save the people”).

References

Dalakoglou, D. (2016) “Infrastructural gap: Commons, State and Anthropology. City, 20:6, 822-831, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524.

Dalakoglou, D. and Poulimenakos, G. (2021). “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

Klein, N. (2007) The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Knight , D M 2018 , “The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece “, Focaal , vol. 80 , pp. 30-42 . https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.800103

Mavris, G. (2017) “The Rise of Conservatism: Political Ideologies in Greece after the Memorandum” (in Greek), available online at https://www.mavris.gr/4943/political-ideology/.

Srnicek, N. (2014) “Infrastructures and Hegemony: The Matter of Struggle” in Fall Semester. Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56ec53dc9f7266dd86057f72/t/581f3f704402439b560ff0b4/1478442864809/BookletNS.pdf

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He is investigating the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.

Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris & Poulimenakos, Giorgos 2023. “Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece” Focaalblog 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/14/giorgos-poulimenakos-dimitris-dalakoglou-disaster-infrastructures-and-the-inverted-shock-doctrine-in-greece/

Features, Urban Struggles

Janne Heederik: The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet and match the still-growing demand on their services. Local councils and the voluntary sector have both suffered cuts. The former are increasingly looking to the voluntary sector for help, while the latter used to rely heavily on grants from statutory bodies and suffers from increased funding restrictions. In the context of welfare reform, a model of active citizenship and participation has emerged. This model focuses on decreasing citizen dependence on welfare and social services while encouraging the ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013). This policy agenda, supported by successive UK governments, has painted a picture of the ‘active citizen’ as a solution and improvement to the budget cuts in the voluntary sector. Citizens are encouraged to ‘take more responsibility’ instead of ‘depending on remote and impersonal bureaucracies’. As part of this responsibilisation, volunteers have taken center stage and their positive impact on communities is emphasized and celebrated (Schinkel & Van Houdt, 2010). Volunteers play an increasingly crucial role in welfare provision and the welfare system relies heavily on their work.

The extent of this reliance became clear during my fieldwork in Manchester in 2018 – 2019. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester for 16 months, during which I worked with several advice centers in Greater Manchester. In November 2018, I attended a ‘Volunteer Day’ organized by the advice center I had been volunteering at for the past year. This annual event celebrates volunteers and gives paid staff and management a chance to thank volunteers for their work and commitment. The day was opened by a speech from Jack Puller, member of the charity Manchester Alliance for Community Care (MACC), who ‘supports and encourages local people to be active citizens through volunteering and other forms of participation’. His speech focused on impact and how to measure it. In numbers, he states that more than 110,000 people in Manchester volunteer, putting in a total of 278,000 hours of work each week, and having a total worth of 252 million pounds. Puller also mentioned that impact cannot be measured in numbers alone. Volunteers are vital to social services, arguing that they reflect the spirit of Manchester and are crucial to the existence of places like the advice center.

While this still presents a positive image of the impact of volunteering, the reality is that many advice centers can no longer survive without volunteers and there is a constant need for more volunteers to fill the gaps in advice services. Advice centers, along with other social services, have suffered from a ‘double squeeze’:  a withdrawal of public services has led to an increase in demand, while they simultaneously have to work with shrinking budgets (Evans, 2017). As a result, many depend on the work of volunteers more than before and even then, many fail to meet the demand and have to send people looking for their help away on a daily basis, as I experienced during fieldwork. Voluntarism in British welfare provision is thus not as straightforward and romantic as Puller depicted it, and both volunteers and paid advisers often struggle to navigate their workload and the relationship between them. The double squeeze on advice centers has not only made them more dependent on volunteers but has also changed the role of volunteers, who have become central more in the advice centers. In this contribution, I further analyze how the dependence on volunteers has changed their role within advice centers, showing how this affects the relationships between paid advisers and volunteers and analyzing how narratives of active citizenship often translate into different realities. Specifically, I lay bare how a politics of austerity has resulted in a paradoxical relationship with volunteers, where they are perceived as both a blessing and a burden.

Many social services, including advice centers, have aimed to bridge the growing gap between demand and capacity by relying more heavily on the work of volunteers, with some advice centers I worked with even being completely volunteer-run. This gap is usually characterized as a gap in more professional work, where paid advisers can no longer cover all their tasks due to lack of time and resources. As a result, the growing reliance on volunteers in the provision of social services is also characterized by the increasingly professional nature of the work volunteers do. As Verhoeven and Bochove note, volunteers are now expected to do more than provide complimentary work to the work paid advisers do, they are increasingly expected to take over parts of the paid advisers’ responsibilities, referred to as the ‘volunteer responsibilisation’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). However, my fieldwork showed that many volunteers are underprepared when they first start their work and are not able to carry out those responsibilities, which complicates the working dynamics at the center. At an advice center in the North of Manchester, where about two thirds of staff members are volunteers, all prospective volunteers must attend a training program to prepare them for volunteer responsibilities. I volunteered here as well and attended the 9-week training program, with one training day a week. The training aimed to prepare volunteers for both the practical and emotional labor ahead of them, but often proved insufficient once volunteers started their voluntary activities at the advice center. The large majority of volunteers felt underprepared for the complexities and intensities of advice work. For example, a former volunteer named Susan told me that she enjoyed helping clients with more straightforward form-filling, but struggled with more complex cases. For her, it resulted in high levels of anxiety and guilt, to the extent that she eventually stopped volunteering as an adviser. ‘It felt like I was just sitting there with my hands cut off, watching someone in front of me die’, she told me.

Figure 1: Volunteers during their weekly training on the welfare system and advice sector (photo: Janne Heederik, 2018)

Welfare advisers often have to deal with difficult and complex situations, with their clients struggling to make ends meet and often coming to the advice center feeling desperate and upset. It is the task of advisers to guide their clients through the welfare system, approach authorities on their behalf, and manage benefit outcomes to their best ability. However, the welfare system has grown increasingly complex, and advisers often have to engage in a ‘complex web of relations’ to assist their client (Forbess & James, 2014:80). For volunteers like Susan, the practical skills and emotional labor required to do good advice work, often feel like too big a responsibility to carry. Similarly, during my time as a volunteer at this advice center, I had to help clients who were about to be evicted, clients who had lost all their income, clients who had escaped abusive relationships, and clients who were depressed and sometimes even suicidal. While the training program provides basic information on how the welfare system operates and how advisers navigate it, these intricacies of advice-giving are too complex to teach in a course. Many volunteers, like Susan, are in need of more guidance, but more often than not volunteers are thrown into the deep-end and have to cover tasks previously done by professionals. Unlike their paid colleagues, however, they have to do without the financial or practical support: they do not receive monetary pay, nor do they receive the proper training to teach them how to deal with the complex client cases and the emotional labor that comes with it. In addition, the high demand and the lack of space, time, and resources, means that there is little time to process such events. Volunteers I spoke to often felt alone in dealing with some of the hardship they were faced with when seeing clients. One volunteer described how he often felt inadequate and how this resulted in him researching ongoing developments and policy changes at home:

I feel like I am always at the limits of my knowledge, and I already know a lot more than the average person. Volunteers like me have to put in a lot of time. You don’t just do your hours here. I often have to research stuff at home too.

Whilst active citizenship is thus envisioned as an enriching and fulfilling experience, for many volunteers this is only part of the story. The work they take on is more intense and demanding then initially anticipated and some volunteers struggle with the pressure they feel to respond to the demand adequately. These high expectations of volunteer work and the contradictory lack of training and preparation imply that volunteers can no longer be seen as amateurs supporting social services, but as professionals who deliver unpaid yet essential work (Coule & Bennett, 2018; Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). It is an attempt for voluntarism to strengthen the welfare system despite reform and budget cuts, but it falls short in its assumption that welfare advice can be done by anyone at any time.  

Advice centers thus need volunteers to fill certain gaps in their work capacity, but at the same time struggle with the knowledge that volunteers often cannot fill these gaps with the same level of professionalism as paid advisers. Volunteers often turn to paid advisers for both practical and emotional support. Advisers might have to jump in or even take over appointments from volunteers who are unable to help their clients sufficiently. The manager of one of the advice centers expressed her concern regarding the center’s reliance on volunteers, stating it worried her that ‘this type of work is done by volunteers. Such overly complicated issues like almost all benefit cases rely on volunteers’. She worried for the clients, who might not get the right help if volunteers tried to solve client’s cases on their own, but was equally worried about volunteers and whether they were able to cope. Furthermore, often having to rely on assistance from paid advisers, the use of volunteers within advice centers often leads to an increase in workload for paid advisers. This leads to a paradoxical situation, where advisers must rely on volunteers for the survival of the advice center, but at the same time experience an increase in their workload as many volunteers need guidance and training.

This paradox is further complicated by the fact that relying on volunteers always comes with certain levels of insecurity as volunteers are not bound to contracts and employment conditions like paid advisers are. The turnover of volunteers was high at all the advice centers I visited, with volunteers staying anywhere between weeks and months, but rarely longer than a year. Additionally, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, volunteers often had a wide range of skills and abilities, meaning not every volunteer could handle the same tasks and paid advisers spent a lot of time figuring out what volunteer would cover which task.

For permanent staff and management, relying on volunteers is thus necessary for the survival of the advice center, but never easy. And it can at times be burdensome. Volunteers cannot fulfill certain roles and end up sitting around and doing nothing, while at the same time there is never enough staff to do everything that needs doing. As a result, staff end up having to spend more time helping volunteers then they might gain form their presence. This situation forces paid advisers to engage in ‘volunteer management’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). Volunteer management involves the dividing of tasks among volunteers according to their skills and abilities, keeping track of who will be present on what day and making sure volunteers are spread out evenly across the week, checking in with volunteers to make sure they can cope with the demand and emotional labor of their work, and assisting volunteers in their work whenever necessary.

In addition, volunteer management also impacts the relationship between volunteers and advisers. Dividing tasks among volunteers often resulted in an unequal distribution of tasks, where more highly educated or experienced volunteers would be given many and more complex tasks, whereas other volunteers struggled to get any tasks at all. During a volunteer meeting at one of the advice centers, volunteers had the chance to raise any questions or issues they had. One volunteer mentioned an incident where she had been asked to see a client, but she did not feel comfortable taking on the tasks as she felt unqualified to deal with the complexity of the client’s case. Another volunteer had offered to step in, but the adviser assigning the task would not listen. ‘I was essentially told to just get on with it’, the volunteer said, adding that it had made her feel very uncomfortable and hesitant to ask the adviser for any tasks in the future. Volunteers who were given more complex tasks mentioned that they often felt they were not prepared for the difficulties of these cases, and struggled to deal with them emotionally and practically. On the other hand, volunteers who struggled to stay busy, mentioned that they were bored, could not develop their skills, and felt they could not help as much as they had wanted to. The paradox of volunteers being both a blessing and a burden resulted in difficulties for paid advisers and volunteers and affected their relationship. However, despite having tensions in the workplace, where advisers sometimes feel volunteers just add to their workload and volunteers feel left to their own devices, these tensions did not seem to translate into frustration with one another. Volunteers were always acutely aware of the workload that paid advisers had to carry and understood that they simply lacked time to train volunteers. Furthermore, whilst being aware that as volunteers they sometimes added to this workload, volunteers said they felt respected and accepted by their paid colleagues. Advisers were always grateful and positive about the volunteers, highly aware of the advice center’s dependence on their work: ‘We would be closing our doors without them’, one adviser said. Similarly, the manager of the advice center stated: ‘Volunteers have played more and more of a key role, they are at the front of our service’.

However, the paradox of the volunteer as a blessing and a burden remains, and many advisers felt frustrated with their working conditions. Rather than resulting in frustration towards volunteers, this frustration was predominantly aimed at the government, and there was a strong sentiment that the government had failed the voluntary sector while at the same time having offloaded its responsibility onto citizens under the banner of active citizenship. The key issue advisers pointed to was almost always funding. As one adviser stated:

If they want this [advice work] to be free, they need to provide the proper funding […] Look at us, advisers can’t help you properly because they are busy with five other cases, volunteers are taking on responsibilities they shouldn’t be, and we are all overworked. And it’s the government that is to blame.

These tensions between advisers and volunteers are therefore more than workplace quarrels; they are political. They reflect the everyday reality on the frontlines of a policy agenda of budget cuts and ‘citizen activation’. The responsibilisation of voluntary work is therefore problematic not just in the heaviness of the responsibilities that volunteers have to carry and its effect on their relationship with advisers, it also lays bare the problematic nature of a policy agenda that aims to offload government responsibilities onto the voluntary sector and citizens, without providing them with the necessary financial assistance and substantive support. The experiences of paid advisers and volunteers tell a clear story: advice services – among many other social services in the UK – are in crisis, but as important as volunteers are, it should not be their role to rescue these services. However, the outcry for change is still predominantly focused on those they are trying to help: they protest and advocate for the rights of welfare claimants, and in the process forget to advocate for their own rights. Individual voluntary commitment can be a blessing, but the overall use of voluntarism as a solution to budget cuts and welfare reform is a burden.

Janne Heederik is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University and a member of a ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. Based on ethnographic research in Manchester, UK, her research explores welfare, poverty, and brokerage in contemporary Britain.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coule, T., & Bennett, E. (2018). State-Voluntary Relations in Contemporary Welfare Systems: New Politics or Voluntary Action as Usual? Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 47(4), 139–158.

Evans, S. (2017). A Reflection On Case Study One: The Barriers to Accessing Advice. In S. Kirwan (Ed.), Advising in Austerity: Reflections on Challenging Times for Advice Agencies (pp. 23–27). Bristol: Policy Press.

Forbess, A., & James, D. (2014). Acts of Assistance: Navigating the Interstices of the British State with the Help of Non-profit Legal Advisers. Social Analysis, 58(3), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2014.580306

Schinkel, W., & Van Houdt, F. (2010). The Double Helix of Cultural Assimilationism and Neo-liberalism: Citizenship in Contemporary Governmentality. British Journal of Sociology, 61(4), 696–715. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01337.x

Verhoeven, I., & Tonkens, E. (2013). Talking Active Citizenship: Framing Welfare State Reform in England and the Netherlands. Social Policy and Society, 12(3), 415–426. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746413000158

Verhoeven, I., & Van Bochove, M. (2018). Moving away, toward, and against: How front-line workers cope with substitution by volunteers in Dutch care and welfare services. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 47(4), 783–801. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279418000119

Cite as: Heederik, Janne. 2020. “The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden.” FocaalBlog, 2 October. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/10/02/janne-heederik-the-voluntarisation-of-welfare-in-manchester-a-blessing-and-a-burden/

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