Steffen Böhm

Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets

Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon markets have emerged as the main politico-economic tools in global efforts to address climate change. Newell and Paterson (2010) have recently claimed that the embrace of carbon markets by financial and political elites constitutes a possible first step towards the transformation of current modes of capitalist organization into a new form of greener, more sustainable ‘climate capitalism.’ In this paper, we argue that the institutionalization of carbon markets does not, in fact, represent a move towards the radical transformation of capitalism, but is better understood as the most recent expression of ongoing trends of ecological commodification and expropriation, driving familiar processes of uneven and crisis-prone development. In this paper, we review four critical Marxist concepts: metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2011a), uneven development and accumulation through dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2006), and sub-imperialism (Marini, 1972, 1977), developing a framework for a Marxist analysis of carbon markets. Our analysis shows that carbon markets form part of a longer historical development of global capitalism and its relation to nature. Carbon markets, we argue, serve as creative new modes of accumulation, but are unlikely to transform capitalist dynamics in ways that might foster a more sustainable global economy. Our analysis also elucidates, in particular, the role that carbon markets play in exacerbating uneven development within the Global South, as elites in emerging economies leverage carbon market financing to pursue new strategies of sub-imperial expansion.

Anti-leaders(hip) in Social Movement Organizations: : The case of autonomous grassroots groups

Through the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, the idea of horizontal, leaderless organization has come to the attention of the mass media. In this article we explore radical, participative-democratic alternatives to leadership through an empirical study of four Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Whilst there has been some writing on leadership within SMOs, it has mirrored the ‘mainstream’ assumption that leadership is the product of individual leaders possessing certain traits, styles and/or behaviours. In contrast, critical leadership studies (CLS) recognize that leadership is a relational, socially constructed phenomenon rather than the result of a stable set of leadership attributes that inhere in ‘the leaders’. We utilize this framing to analyse how leadership is understood and performed in anarchist SMOs by examining how actors manage meaning and define reality without compromising the ideological commitments of their organizations. Furthermore, we also pay attention to the organizational practices and processes developed to: (a) prohibit individuals from permanently assuming a leadership role; (b) distribute leadership skills and roles; and (c) encourage other actors to participate and take-up these roles in the future. We conclude by suggesting that just because an organization is leaderless, it does not necessarily mean that it is also leadershipless.

Just doing it: enjoying commodity fetishism with Lacan

Despite prolonged resistance campaigns against what are regarded as unethical production practices of companies such as Nike, people around the world still seem to be happy to spend a lot of money buying expensive consumer products. Why is this so? In this article we discuss this question through the lens of the concept of fetishism. By discussing texts by Freud and Marx, amongst others, we first explore the genealogy of the concept of fetishism. We then develop a Lacanian reading to understand how processes of fetishization dominate today’s capitalist society, producing a modern subject that constantly desires to consume more in order to constitute itself. We argue—with Lacan—that at the heart of this process of the constitution of the subject through consumption is enjoyment or, what Lacan calls, jouissance. Capitalism—as any other socio-economic regime—can thus be understood as a system of enjoyment.

The New ‘Hidden Abode’: Reflections on Value and Labour in the New Economy

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPTs fine-grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in todays economy.

No Measure for Culture? Value in the New Economy

This paper explores articulations of the value of investment in culture and the arts through a critical discourse analysis of policy documents, reports and academic commentary since 1997. It argues that in this period, discourses around the value of culture have moved from a focus on the direct economic contributions of the culture industries to their indirect economic benefits. These indirect benefits are discussed here under three main headings: creativity and innovation, employability, and social inclusion. These are in turn analysed in terms of three forms of capital: human, social and cultural. The paper concludes with an analysis of this discursive shift through the lens of autonomist Marxist concerns with the labour of social reproduction. It is our argument that, in contemporary policy discourses on culture and the arts, the government in the UK is increasingly concerned with the use of culture to form the social in the image of capital. As such, we must turn our attention beyond the walls of the factory in order to understand the contemporary capitalist production of value and resistance to it.

“The people” and resistance against international business

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to analyse the organisation of the Bolivian “water war” in Cochabamba that saw a social movement resist international business and the privatisation of public goods. The implications for the study of resistance in management and organisation studies will be evaluated.Design/methodology/approach – Laclaus discourse theory is used to analyse the organisation of resistance and the establishment of a new discourse of “the people”. A range of primary and secondary data are drawn upon.Findings – The study shows how the resistance movement was successfully organised in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Through various “horizontal” and “vertical” methods of organising, the Coordinadora, the overarching resistance organisation, was able to unite formerly disparate discourses into a single demand. This establishment of a united front was a key element in the formation of the discourse of “the people”, which successfully challenged neo‐liberal privatisation and management discourses put ...

Everything you wanted to know about organization theory... but were afraid to ask Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek has produced a plethora of books over the past 15 years (at the rate of over one a year), many of which are all curiously alike, as he recycles compulsively a limited number of key themes. Yet, one never feels any sense of sterile repetition. In revisiting a topic, he often sheds new light on it, and so continues the conversation he seems to be having with himself. Žižek is not much interested in establishing a rational, sensible dialogue with his readers. Instead, he is a firm believer in clear-cut positions. His writing is invariably crisp, provocative, and devoid of any coyness. One of Žižek’s favourite one-liners is (paraphrasing Freud): ‘Why are you saying that you’re only giving a modest opinion when what you are giving is only a modest opinion’. Žižek doesn’t ‘do’ modesty. Žižek is also unconventional with the choice of philosophies he reads. Although all of his work goes through Lacanian concepts, he is not simply someone who fetishizes post-war French thought (as so many organization theorists do today). Instead, he uncompromisingly connects Lacanian categories to German idealist philosophy – the latter hardly being overly popular in organization theory. But the real uniqueness in Žižek’s writing lies in the fact that he effortlessly blends together ‘the ‘highest’ theory (Hegel, Lacan) and unrestrained enjoyment in the ‘lowest’ popular culture’ (Žižek, 2002a: 3), whilst casually (some would argue naively) moving from the psychoanalytic to the political and back again. Some might say: he’s all over the place. At first glance he seems to write for the browser: ‘They came up with the idea to do a CD-ROM, because I write in the same manner: click here, go there, use this fragment, that story or scene’ (Žižek, 2002b: 43). And indeed, the typical Žižekian unit of discourse is a wittily titled (eg, ‘the non-analysable Slovene’; ‘let the emperor have his clothes’) passage of between 5 and 15 pages, containing a dazzling cataract of demonstrations and examples from popular culture, for which a particular idea often seems a mere pretext. Wave upon wave of

Becoming Global (Un)Civil Society: Counter-Hegemonic Struggle and the Indymedia Network

In this article we ask how ‘civil society’ actors and organizations can become constructed and treated as ‘uncivil society’. We contest the notion that ‘uncivil’ necessarily equates with the dark qualities of violence and organized criminality. Instead, we take a Gramscian perspective in suggesting that what becomes ‘uncivil’ is any practice and organization that substantially contests the structuring enclosures of hegemonic order, of which civil society is a necessary part. To trace this, we consider ways in which a global grass-roots media network called Indymedia has established and maintained itself as a counter-hegemonic media-producing organization. In this case, a conscious positioning and self-identification as counter-hegemonic has been accompanied by the framing and sometimes violent policing of nodes and practices of this network as ‘uncivil’ by cooperating state authorities. This is in the absence of association of this network with organized violence or crime. We intend our reflections to contribute to a deepening theorization of the terms ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ as they are becoming used in social movement and globalization studies. En este artículo preguntamos cómo pueden los actores de la ‘sociedad civil’ y las organizaciones llegar a configurarse y ser tratados como ‘sociedad incivil’. Nosotros refutamos la noción de que lo ‘incivil’ necesariamente equivale a las características oscuras de violencia y criminalidad organizada. En cambio, tomamos una perspectiva de Gramscian, sugiriendo que lo que se vuelve ‘incivil’ es cualquier práctica y organización que refuta sustancialmente los confinamientos estructurados del orden hegemónico, del cual la sociedad civil es una parte necesaria. Para rastrear esto, nosotros consideramos las formas en que una red de medios de base popular llamada Indymedia se ha establecido y mantenido a sí misma como una organización contrahegemónica de producción de medios. En este caso, un posicionamiento consciente y de autoidentificación como contrahegemónica, ha sido acompañado por la configuración y a veces por vigilancia violenta de nodos y prácticas de esta red como ‘incivil’ al cooperar con las autoridades estatales. Esto es en ausencia de una asociación de esta red con la violencia o la delincuencia. Nosotros pretendemos que nuestras reflexiones contribuyan a profundizar la teorización de los términos ‘civil’ e ‘incivil’ en la medida en que se están usando en los estudios sobre movimientos sociales y globalización. 在本文中我们设问“公民社会”的行为者和组织如何被建构并被视作一个“非公民社会”。本文对“非公民”必然等同于暴力和有组织犯罪的黑暗性质这一概念提出质疑。本文取而代之采用一种葛兰西式的分析，即认为造成“非公民”的是本质上挑战霸权秩序（公民社会是其必要部分）的任何行动或组织。为了求证，我们考察一家叫“独立媒体”的全球草根媒体网络确立并维护其作为一个反霸权媒体生产组织的方式。其中，伴随着一种反霸权的刻意定位和自我认同的，是与之合作的国家当局形塑甚至有时狂暴地管束这一网络的节点和实践，视其为“非公民”。这表明该网络和有组织暴力或犯罪之间缺乏关联。本文意在当“公民的”及“非公民的”概念被用于社会运动和全球化研究时，使我们的反思在能有助于加深这两个术语的理论化。

A práxis da resistência e a hegemonia da organização

Este texto tem dois objetivos: o primeiro e prosseguir em um esforco coletivo de enfrentamento dos procedimentos de exclusao que marcam o campo dos estudos organizacionais. Ao tomar como tema de pesquisa os movimentos sociais, assumimos os riscos de ‘rechaco’ e ‘isolamento’, constantemente rememorados pelo ‘silencio da razao’. O segundo proposito e contribuir para tornar visivel parte da multiplicidade de mundos organizacionais negada pela hegemonia da organizacao. O termo hegemonia se refere, aqui, a um alinhamento do discurso politico que produz um significado social especifico: a definicao de organizacao a partir de um enfoque sistemico estrutural como objeto formalizado. Para que possamos nos envolver nessa tarefa, precisamos nos expor a outras possibilidades: tanto aquelas ja presentes em nosso campo disciplinar e que adotam uma abordagem processual do organizar, quanto por fertilizacao a partir do engajamento com outros campos disciplinares. Nesse sentido, fazemos uma breve revisao teorica sobre o tema da resistencia no que se refere a apropriacao do conhecimento, e registramos algumas producoes feitas por academicos ativistas ou por ativistas sem insercao na academia, ambos construindo conhecimento na sua praxis de intelectuais orgânicos.

Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of free labour, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.