Hadas Weiss

Volatile investments and unruly youth in a West Bank settlement

Building on fieldwork conducted in the West Bank settlement Beit-El, this article analyses the generational divide between first- and second-generation settlers in terms of their values and practices, against the backdrop of the new realities created by economic restructuring in Israel. It argues that the investments that settler parents made in their childrens education and upbringing in the West Bank have yielded unintended consequences, due to normalizing tendencies working through them. Youth are thereby pushed towards alternative paths to well-being manifested in self-interested pragmatism or in radicalization. From the standpoint of neoliberal forms of social reproduction, these seemingly contradictory trends are dialectical counterparts. The article thereby offers a template for making sense of youth values and practices, including fundamentalist ones, in the framework of neoliberal capitalism.

Capitalist normativity: Value and values

In this paper I locate values within a uniquely capitalist confrontation between freedom and nonagency. Freedom marks individual’s freedom to buy and sell work and commodities according to their own capacities and preferences. Nonagency marks their dependence on market exchange for the goods and services they need, and lack of control over their production. I call this confrontation between freedom and nonagency value, and I consider this the social relation that defines the capitalist mode of production. People partaking in this relation who nevertheless exert a measure of influence over their immediate surroundings often use their influence to try and reconcile their freedom with their nonagency. I argue here that values are their means of doing so, because values extend freedom to meet necessity on more morally palatable terms. Values are therefore most prevalent among middle classes and under welfare regimes, where the requisite influence is provided. In the absence of such influence, mediation between freedom and nonagency is no longer possible. Values then give way to different forms of normativity such as pragmatism, duty, or virtue, all of which are presently gaining ground.

Lifecycle Planning and Responsibility: Prospection and Retrospection in Germany

ABSTRACT Financialisation confronts households in the form of planning and risk management along standardised lifecycle stages like starting a family or preparing for retirement. The finance sector in Germany represents this as the exercise of responsibility. Yet German government institutions have long encouraged and rewarded a different kind of responsibly, manifested in prudent study, work and consumption habits. In this paper, I tease out from life histories of German retirees their nonchalance about planning, antipathy toward finance and strong sense of personal effort and investment. Contrasting them with the contingency and treacherousness of financial planning, I argue that financialisation is preceded by ideological work, which redefines responsibility according to its own needs and in so doing, obscures its stakes.