An Introduction to Austerity

Austerity is a method of fiscal management whereby policies are implemented to reduce the State deficit through a reduction of public expenditure and/or tax increases (Oxfam 2013; Knox 2017). Many countries have employed austerity tactics when they were struggling to repay loans (Blyth 2013; Dorling 2017). However, the subject has been a particular focal point in the United Kingdom for politicians and media representatives alike. For over a decade, it continued to be a pressing and polarising discussion where advocates of austerity contended it was a necessary measure to restore and maintain the economy. By contrast, critics believed that it would cause untold social harm whilst also failing to achieve its economic goals (Blyth 2013; Oxfam 2013; Allen 2018).

Indeed, austerity policies have been a defining feature of the UK Conservative Government since 2010 (Blyth 2013; Allen 2017). Following the 2008 financial crash, spending cuts were rolled out extensively across a majority of public sectors in the United Kingdom in an attempt to offset some of the economic damage caused by the ‘crash’ (Blyth 2013; Alcock 2014). Since then, disparity between the richest and poorest has increased exponentially (Pickett and Wilkinson 2010; Jones 2011; Dorling 2017) and people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder have suffered to such an extent that the United Nations (UN) have labelled it a breach of human rights agreements (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2016). Although austerity was not a solely British approach, this chapter focuses on its implementation in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, the chapter will evaluate whether or not austerity should be considered a crime by exploring its history, ideological underpinnings, the socio-economic impacts and the various forms of social harm caused.

Historical Context and the Rise of Neoliberalism

To contextualise austerity, the welfare State – which was a Keynesian concept introduced to the United Kingdom in the wake of World War Two – has to be considered (Rojek 2003; Alcock 2014; Umney 2018) as it was built on goals such as protecting ‘the most vulnerable populations, and […] [reducing] the most glaring inequalities’ in society (Wacquant 2009:5), whilst also aiming to stimulate economic growth through increased spending and labour market participation (Oxfam 2013; Alcock 2014; Klein 2014; Picketty 2014).

IN THE EARLY TANG AND DURING Wu Zhao’s Zhou dynasty, the empire was vast, encompassing a range of climates, from the great central river valleys, the Yellow and the Yangzi, to the taiga, steppe, and desert along the northern borders, to rugged, sky-piercing mountains in the west and southwest, to the swamps and jungles of the distant southland. Concomitant to this panoramic range of environs, there was staggering biodiversity. There were, as environmental historian Robert Marks frames it, “numerous ecological niches where people could, and did, exploit the environment to sustain and reproduce themselves and their cultures.” Environment, to a degree, conditioned and dictated terms for human settlement; people, over time, altered the environment and sculpted the landscape. Edward Schafer remarks, “Even before Tang times, the ancient pines of the mountains of Shandong had been reduced to carbon, and now the busy brushes of the vast Tang bureaucracy were rapidly bringing baldness to the Taihang Mountains between Shanxi and Hebei.” The larger picture of the tension between environment and development was, according to Mark Elvin, “one of Han Chinese expansion up to natural limits—coasts, steppes, deserts, mountains, and jungles.”

Like virtually every premodern culture, in medieval China, the interaction between man and nature contains a built-in paradox: on a religious and spiritual plane, mountains and rivers were objects of veneration; on a utilitarian level, they afforded transportation and offered sources of food, resources, medicine, and irrigation. An eighth-century Tang scholar–official echoed one of the classics: “Mountains, swamps, forests, and salt are the treasures of the nation.” In the Tang, notions of the conservation and preservation of nature connected to Buddhism and Daoism sometimes influenced human behaviors. Tombs and temples were protected from hunting and harvest.

Ongoing warfare with steppe peoples (and the occasional occupation of the North by different groups of these peoples) prompted sustained instability in the Yellow River Valley during the centuries of division that followed the demise of the Han dynasty. In simplest terms, as Robert Marks frames it, “antagonism between nomadic pastoralists and agriculturalists” led to the deforestation and depopulation of the North and progressive colonization of the South.

I arrived in Shanghai in July 2019 to deliver a series of lectures in the Sino-British Summer School of Philosophy, a venerable annual event that began in the 1980s and is organized jointly by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK. In 2019 the Summer School was held in the East China Normal University and its topic was Environmental Philosophy. I had agreed to participate on the understanding that my lectures would present strands of thinking about ecological civilization that I had been developing in a series of papers over many years. I was keen to try these ideas out with a group of Chinese students before condensing them into book form. Those lectures, duly written up, enlarged and updated, are the ones I offer here.

The stint at the Summer School was not my first trip to China. I had visited many times over the previous 15 years, attending conferences and workshops in environmental ethics as well as studying the traditional Daoist arts of taiji and neidan (internal alchemy) with various teachers on mountains and in temples. I seemed to have some ‘business’ in China. Invitations, often from unrelated parties, tended to arrive out of the blue. Overseas travel generally is not my forte; I have neither the constitution for it nor the keen professionalism that thrusts academics onto the international conference circuit – or at least did so until the Covid pandemic changed all that. I actually have no desire to leave Australia, or even the precincts of my own little stone mountain in my home state of Victoria. Like a good Daoist, I relish my seclusion. But China kept tugging at me, in a way that so touched my heart that I could not help but answer its call, though this forced me back into the punishing scenarios of vast airports and transport hubs – into states of alienation from all that I hold dear.

There is no mystical denouement to this story. My three weeks spent walking from the staff hotel to our classrooms on the modern, spacious campus of the East China Normal University did not change my life, any more than my earlier, more picturesque sojourns in the Wudang and Emei Mountains or my pilgrimage to the utterly numinous Queen of all Chinese mountains, Tai Shan, had done.

COURT AND COUNTRY—COMPRISED OF STORIES AND anecdotes that Zhang Zhuo saw, heard, and collected over the tortuous course of his half-century career—is usually classified as “brush notes” (biji 筆記) or “small stories” (xiaoshuo 小說). Zhang’s work includes a number of “accounts of anomalies” (zhiguai 志怪) and “miscellaneous records” (zalu 雜錄). Antonino Forte remarks that such “tales of little importance” (as he renders xiaoshuo) were “somewhat looked down upon by professional historians” who considered them “irrelevant or unworthy of inclusion in an official history.” Of Court and Country, Song chronicler Hong Mai offers the following contemptuous assessment: “All of the events that he has recorded are scattered fragments and trifling remnants. Moreover, in most cases he has taken creative liberties.” Furthermore, as the Introduction has shown, Zhang’s text is problematic and manifestly corrupt. So what, then, is the value of these translations, these shards of thought, these bits and pieces of a mercurial chronicler’s peculiar collection of fragments and anecdotes?

First off, these translations are made of bits and pieces of information that Zhang Zhuo gleaned and gathered. They are accounts of events that a man living in late seventh and early eighth century China heard or personally witnessed. Standard histories of the Tang dynasty (the two Tang histories and the Comprehensive Mirror) are all written after a lapse of two or three centuries following Wu Zhao’s death; Court and Country features vignettes compiled by a widely traveled and opinionated man who served in her court and was acquainted with a large cast of characters inhabiting her era.

Second, Court and Country amplifies not only our understanding of social and cultural history, but our grasp of the routine machinations of the court and bureaucracy. Anecdotes and “small stories,” as Xiaofei Tian frames them, “disrupt the flow of the grand historical narrative and expose the real workaday lives ‘behind’ such narratives.” Ellen Cong Zhang contends that unofficial sources of miscellaneous notes—works akin to Zhang Zhuo’s—from the Song dynasty have “proven invaluable to our understanding of many aspects of Song political, social, and cultural history.”

Introduction

Womanhood has been widely discussed across disciplines and eras; however, an analysis of womanhood from an African writer’s perspective is quite hard to come by due to the traditional African perception of women as belonging to a lower social class than males. While there have been times when women held positions that were considered barred only to them, women are still relegated in many African cultural settings to an inferior class status. This part of the book explores how Emmanuel Babatunde, the author of the memoir (Kelebogile—I Am Grateful: An African Journey through Celibate Priesthood to Married Life) being analyzed in this chapter, broadly embarks on documenting the lives and travails of women dominated by both isolated and collective acts of male chauvinism in African societies. It highlights key moments where each of these women, including the memoirist’s wife and mother, challenged these traditions and attempted to shift the dominant understanding of womanhood in African societies.

The African Negative Perception of the Witch

In many African societies, the strict adherence to culture and traditional ways of doing things can specifically rub women unfavorably, indicating the need for such change.

The book, Kelebogile, perfectly captures the age-old tradition of relegating African women to a lesser social status. The title of the book takes the name of the author’s wife, a Batswana woman he met during his academic sojourn to the United States. Kelebogile starts with a discussion about the prevalent conception of gender in the typical African communities yet to tap into the influence of European tenets and civilizations. Born to a Yoruba family, Babatunde focuses on the social status of the woman in the Yoruba cultural setting, such as the difference between the gendered use of the pejorative term “witch” in contrast to its more positive gender counterpart “wizard.”

Like many other African cultures, the male-dominated Yoruba culture takes pride in validating the existence of covert women associations that operate in the extraterrestrial world, and these women are referred to as witches. Despite this denigration, the witch role is one of the earliest known roles in which women held a superior status to other women in traditional African societies relative to men.

This chapter is divided into four parts: In the first, I examine the making of elite transnational communities in the context of both nineteenthcentury economic development and transatlantic mobility. By adopting Thorstein Veblen’s concept of the American leisure class and applying it to a transnational context, I argue that a transnational high society developed as wealthy American travelers began to keep company with the aristocratic and diplomatic echelons of Europe, whose lifestyles appeared to resemble their own. The second part goes further to examine the cultural dimensions of this elite social network by examining the cultural rituals of their social events. Here, I argue that elite transnational social events such as costume balls and dinners came to serve as both a stage for Franco-American crosscultural encounters and a cultural mechanism for elite coupling. The third part examines the ways in which American women saw their own place within these elite transnational social networks. Through an examination of assertions of common socioeconomic belonging, I argue that rather than American social or status anxieties driving these marriages, it was instead a sense of social confidence or a confident assertion of elite position among members of elite transnational communities that facilitated them. Finally, the fourth part examines how legal questions around marriage and citizenship affected the extent to which participants saw themselves as marrying across national lines. Here, I conclude that a relative absence of nineteenth-century legal barriers further facilitated not only elite high society’s transnational existence but also cross-border coupling.

Emerging Transnational Communities

The emergence of the pattern of Franco-American titled marriages in the second half of the ninetieth century coincided with two interconnected developments that facilitated both movement and encounter: First, technological developments of the Industrial Revolution made transoceanic steam travel between Europe and America safer, more comfortable, more rapid, and more frequent. The second was the development of what Thorstein Veblen calls the American leisure class. Identifying and associating with only those whose economic and social positions afforded them similar lifestyles, this leisure class was characterized by conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, increased leisure time, and travel for no other reason than to mark their prestige.

How Can We ‘Walk the Land’ in the Twenty-First Century? Pre-agrarian versus Post-agrarian Forms of Praxis

We have thus far considered the argument that in order to open ourselves up to the kind of holistic consciousness that divulges Law, we have not merely to devise new theories, such as animism or panpsychism, but adopt a different epistemic orientation – a strategic as opposed to a theoretic one. The strategic orientation arises out of specific forms of embodied, communicative and inter-conative practice, forms of practice indicated in Lecture 3 under the trope of ‘walking the land’.

Walking the land, as understood in the Kimberley context, is not of course merely a recreational or sporting exercise, like modern-day hiking, orienteering or mountaineering, nor is it of purely therapeutic significance, as perhaps are the various martial and temple arts of Daoism. Land-based recreations and Daoist arts may indeed call, at their best, for a wuwei approach to one’s environment, but walking the land, in the Kimberley sense, is closer to a form of praxis. I am using ‘praxis’ here in a basically Marxist sense to mean our core economic practices – the practices whereby particular societies, or groups within society, obtain their livelihood from their environment. (For Marx the concept of praxis was closely tied to that of production, where productive activity was understood by him as the kind of activity whereby we intentionally transform our environment to serve our own material purposes. Here however I shall define it in terms of provisioning: praxis consists in the forms of activity whereby we intentionally act on or with our environment to provide for ourselves.) In speaking of ‘walking the land’, I take Senior Lawmen such as Mowaljarlai and Roe to mean, in other words, that one is walking it with a view, at least in part, to one’s material sustenance, tending it that so it may in turn sustain oneself and one’s people.

The pre-agrarian praxis of First Nations peoples such as Aboriginal Australians has often in the past been described as foraging or hunter-gathering, but this fails to convey the great variety of pre-agrarian societies around the world (Graeber and Windrow 2021). Traditional Australians were proactive in taking care of their country.

What are the greatest advances for global workers’ rights over the last ten to fifteen years? I would include, at or near the top of the list, the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 189, affirming the rights of domestic workers (Fish 2017), India’s national law codifying the rights of street vendors (Saha 2016), and the Rana Plaza Accord designed to protect the safety of garment workers in Bangladesh (Bair et al. 2020).

What is striking about these advances is that they all involve defence of the rights of informal workers, those not reached by standard employment laws. In this chapter, I argue that this is not coincidental: strengthening the rights of informal workers, especially by empowering these workers through self-organisation, is the most important frontier for improving labour standards today. Informal workers, long viewed as peripheral to the economy and incapable of taking collective action, have demonstrated that they can strategize, mobilise and win. They were never truly simply atomised objects, but after being viewed ghat way for decades, they have increasingly stepped forward as collective subjects, generating important lessons for formal workers and for the ways we organise work more generally.

The chapter proceeds in four sections. Firstly, I more thoroughly introduce the concept of informal work, including contrasting it with the related notion of precarious work, and discuss how the concept of informality has evolved over the past five decades. Secondly, I pose the question of ‘what’s new’ about informal employment and why informal worker organising has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. Thirdly, I explore central patterns in informal worker organising. Finally, I close with conclusions examining broader implications for our conceptions and commitments regarding work.

Informal Work: The Evolution of a Concept

Informal work is employment that is legal in itself, but that is not regulated by employment laws and/or not linked to standard social insurance systems. In Zatz’s (2008) words, this work falls ‘beyond the reach or grasp’ of standard labour protections: ‘beyond the reach’ when laws or institutions simply do not cover the category of workers; ‘beyond the grasp’ when the law theoretically covers these workers, but is not effectively implemented.

In the last chapter of Part One, I proposed for consideration the extent to which cultural othering could be successfully analyzed as an emotional process. In this chapter, I apply this inquiry to the changing contexts of the twentieth century and the subsequent pattern of Franco-American marriages during the world wars. Here, I argue that despite increasingly seeing their own identities through national lenses and despite changing cultural relationships between France and the United States, notions of perceived difference remained the driving force of transnational coupling during the world wars.

This chapter is divided into four parts. The first part begins by contextualizing the broader temporal comparison of nineteenth-century elite marriages and twentieth-century wartime marriages by examining some of the broader global changes brought on by the world wars. These changes shifted the context in which a wartime encounter took place by producing conditions in which marriage participants not only came from the working and middle classes but self-described through more national frameworks. In this setting, notions of difference were therefore further heightened. The remainder of the chapter examines more extensively the extent to which encounter and othering could be considered an emotional process in the context of war. By examining the accounts of marriage participants as well as national news publications, I show not only how notions of difference were marked but also how these perceived differences provoked certain emotional responses. Even though mutual attraction developed among both French and American marriage participants, the processes of othering for each took very different forms and are examined separately. In the second section, I trace the othering of French women by American soldiers and argue that rather than the elite, high cultural forms of the nineteenth century, cultural fascination of the French (or what was perceived as French culture) during the World War I became laced with notions of romance, sex, and pleasure. These conceptions were subsequently transcribed onto French women and the notions of their perceived difference, thereby creating the contradictory construct of war as an opportunity for romance. The third and final section examines the ways in which fear, uncertainty, and the longing for stability under German invasion and occupation during World War II were contrasted with the overwhelming excitement and euphoria of liberation.