Nick Bernards
@BernardsNick
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Assoc Prof @warwickGSD . Author: A critical history of poverty finance (); Fictions of financialization, out Dec 2024 (). Views mine
Coventry, UK
Joined August 2018
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Publication date is still a way off, but looks like my book is up for pre-order!
It's an extended critique of financialization narratives, and effort to rethink the place of finance in global capitalism, by way of renewed engagement with Marxist debates.
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You may have heard (possibly because I won’t shut up about it…) that I have a new book out.
For anyone curious about what’s in it, a thread:
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Marxism is a lot more useful if you keep in mind 1) that ‘use value’ and ‘productive’ labour are not inherently *good* things because neither is a moral category and neither implies social desirability and 2) ‘working class’ is a relation to capital not a subset of occupations.
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Thoroughly enjoyed this one, especially the chapter on monetary politics and Marx. It reconstructs the place of money and finance in Marx’s writing in a really concrete, historicised way.
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New article!
In
@GlobalizationsJ
, I reflect on the persistent failure of the ‘private turn’ in development finance to actually mobilise capital on the scale intended, and what this says about the place and power of finance in the world economy.
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It’s out!
Today is publication day for A Critical History of Poverty Finance, w/
@PlutoPress
! It’s open access!
I trace the long history of failed financial solutions to poverty.
Buy a hard copy here:
Open Access link (PDF):
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My vice chancellor has just written, in an all staff email, that it is unfair to students for UCU to be balloting again 'after all the trials of Covid, and with the fear and horror of Ukraine'.
Just a sickeningly opportunistic way to talk about mass death. I am disgusted.
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The IPCC report is bringing out a deluge of 'we need to take action urgently to limit climate breakdown' arguments. They're not wrong, exactly, but the idea that govts have 'dithered' or have simply lacked the 'will' to do anything about the climate crisis isn't helpful. 1/
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The IMF listens (for ten minutes, then time for coffee)
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Book proofs! Very excited to have this out later this year.
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This is an appreciation tweet for this little book. Just an absolutely invaluable blueprint for thinking about Marx’s writing on money and finance, especially joining up all three volumes of Capital. Truly don’t know what people did without it.
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The thing about this HSBC guy is that he’s basically right — he’s describing a structural problem for market-led climate solutions: the time horizons of climate risks are longer than the time horizons of investment returns.
Finance *can’t* stop climate breakdown.
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I struggle with ‘degrowth’.
‘GDP Growth’ is undoubtedly a deeply flawed measure of well-being. But that also makes ‘degrowth’ a really slippery litmus test for ecological repair.
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This from
@adam_tooze
is as good as everyone says it is.
‘Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous financial risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages?’
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If you were in any doubt about what’s happening here, the official Twitter of the Israeli PM’s office explicitly casting Palestinians in opposition to ‘humanity’ in the same 24 hours as an air strike on a hospital-turned-refugee-shelter ought to be pretty clarifying.
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By the way my own hot take on this is that asset-owning petty rentiers whose material interests are aligned with the stock market and whose political alignments are primarily dictated by white supremacy are neither materially nor politically ‘working class’ in any meaningful way.
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The ‘peer review crisis’ is a labour crisis.
The pool of permanently employed academics (for whom, doing peer reviews *is* a job responsibility) is being eaten away through casualization, and peer review is one of few things we have any leeway to drop from spiralling workloads.
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Universities have been explicit for months they were going to try to invoke force majeure to mitigate a MAB. Mine was telling us in November about the emergency rules they planned to invoke. So on one level the current mess isn’t a surprise. But I can’t get over two things:
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One of the things that the QUB expulsion from UCEA underscores is that what we call national ‘bargaining’ on pay in UKHE is, in effect, an employers’ cartel systematically suppressing wage growth.
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New article!
I wrote a critique of the Multidimensional Poverty Index for
@DevandChg
’s upcoming forum issue, on why a meaningful politics of poverty should start from relations of exploitation.
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I'm back on the digital picket for the next two weeks, in solidarity with UCU colleagues out on strike. This is a union-themed account until 1 April.
I've also declined an invitation to fill in as external examiner in Politics at Oxford Brookes, and sent in my reballot.
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More book news: It has a cover!
And a release date, provisionally, in December.
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My book, A Critical History of Poverty Finance, is up for pre-order!
It'll ship in August. It's available in paperback straight away.
TOC/description at the link:
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Just so we’re clear, if anyone not participating in the MAB has taken on extra marking, they’ve been doing something that participating staff have very specifically asked them *not* to do…
Academics not participating in the UK’s marking boycott have had to put aside their research to ensure papers are marked in time for students to graduate, the vice-chancellor who chairs the employer body has claimed, writes Tom Williams
@TWilliamsTHE
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My article on the curious presence in absence of finance in financialized development is now in an issue of
@globalizations
!
Since I haven't done this yet, a short thread on what it's about... 1/
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Look the Price is Wrong seems brilliant but some of us still haven’t managed to properly read the last Brett Christophers book… which is less than a year old.
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I'm writing a new book!
Just signed a contract with
@PlutoPress
for Fictions of Financialization. It's a critique of financialization debates, and an effort, via Marxist debates, to chart out a more productive way of thinking about finance capital.
Coming (knock on wood) 2024.
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So substantive climate 'action' won't happen without political change. It needs mass mobilizing, not just for 'action' in general -- because, again, we've *had* lots of 'action' -- but for democratic control over economic organization globally. End rant/
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New article!
In
@DevandChg
, I ask why colonial financial hierarchies outlasted formal colonial rule in British W. Africa. Drawing on Marxian debates, I argue the answer is about the entanglement of (post)colonial states with global monetary circuits.
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But the response to the MAB is above all a sign that the managerial governance model in U.K. universities is totally broken and actively harmful to the sector as a whole.
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The most exhausting part of this whole thing is contemplating how many more rounds of pension cuts university managers will try to push through before I reach retirement age in the 2050s.
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Since we’re talking about Paul Collier again, worth reiterating that at least one whole section of the IMF’s Berg Report (the blueprint for structural adjustment in Africa) was directly based on his work in Kenya in the 1970s.
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The whole point is that people are compelled to participate in socially and ecologically destructive forms of production in order to secure their own survival.
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It’s unquestionably proving true that MAB is one of the options we have to cause real material damage to universities, clearly our collective mistake was thinking the people running them might… recognise and try to prevent that instead of gleefully pouring gas on the fire.
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I don’t expect much from these people, but I did naively expect that much. Clearly part of the problem is that university managers are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their own actions and have come to have union bashing identified as maybe their core job.
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Haven’t read the last three books that have turned up yet, but glad this one is joining the pile. Very much looking forward to reading, eventually…
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For one thing, it's not really true that no one has taken action -- it's that the actions taken thus far, which have mostly centered on using market instruments to fund and organize climate adaptation and mitigation, have failed. Badly. 2/
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I suppose it isn’t surprising, but this is an extremely disappointing response from
@UKRI_News
. Absolutely, shamefully cowardly, and will only hurt universities and research in the U.K.
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New article!
I link 'financial inclusion' to a longer history of efforts to grapple with the social and ecological contradictions of colonial capitalism with financial tools, drawing on Marx's notes on 'secondary exploitation'. Just out in Geoforum!
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Recently decided I was going to say yes to more requests to review books, mainly in hopes of managing to… actually read things.
This has so far proved to be a very good decision. I’ve just started reading this, which is absolutely brilliant.
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Talking about 'inaction' moralizes and personalizes structural constraint. It invites the misplaced idea that if only decision-makers understood the urgency of the situation they'd resolve it. And it glosses the uneven distribution of costs implicit in different 'actions'. 12/
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Just gonna add to this that my take-home pay during my (Canadian) PhD was also higher than during my first year as a lecturer in the U.K.
The salary of a PhD student in many European countries is now higher than the typical starting salary of a UK lecturer, with a postdoc in Europe often surpassing a UK lecturer salary. Meanwhile, some top UK depts now require a published monograph for entry-level positions (1/2)
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I’m on strike again today. I still want the other half of my pension back, and I still want my pay to keep pace with the cost of living.
But most of all I want a university that hires enough staff on secure contracts so that all of us can do our jobs well.
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New article!
I write about microinsurance and 'anticipatory marketization' -- trying to build market infrastructures in hopes of conjuring markets, despite the persistent disinterest of either potential clients or investors.
Just published open access in
@economyandspace
!
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Green capitalism and green imperialism might offset some of the absolute worst impacts of climate breakdown, but only by exacerbating social and ecological contradictions. 6/
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This is a really excellent article from Martin Arboleda and Thomas Purcell on the circuits of capital, property regimes, rentierization, and global food systems:
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Just published in
@antipodeonline
!
I show how the fintech 'miracle' in Kenya mirrors colonial geographies, linking the long-run uneven development of financial infrastructures to the political economy of land, property, and state.
Open access here:
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University managers’ issue with pensions has never been the cost, per se, so much as what their liabilities for our DB pensions do to their ability to access credit.
From that angle, it makes sense to pay ~£10m/year to keep alive a justification for slashing those liabilities.
📢📢USS ‘deficit’ - now negligible even by USS’s own fruity-loops calculation - will collectively cost Employers
📢📢£570 million a year in deficit payments from 1 April 2022
ALL INSTITUTIONS BREAKDOWN HERE
@USSbriefs
#ViceChancers
#NoGoodWill
#VoteYES
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Actually going through with them is going to bring a lot of headaches for universities. This is embarrassing, it’s doing damage to the reputation of U.K. universities, it’s also an administrative nightmare: students are *going* to appeal their awards.
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Our SI is out!
@soederberg1
and I edited a collection of articles in Geoforum on relative surplus populations in global capitalism.
Our introduction, a critical assessment of recent debates about surplus populations, is here, articles in the thread.
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As lots of people have noted, this looks like a really important piece.
Missing from a lot of the discussion of its implications, though, is that this makes really clear the way that the privatisation of pensions has amplified the structural power of fossil fuels.
Tackling climate change requires closing many oil and gas fields. Who owns these stranded assets? In
@NatureClimate
we trace $1.4 trillion in losses at the field to their ultimate owners and show that mainly private persons in rich countries stand to lose.
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And here's the point: Doing otherwise would require a drastic transformation of property rights, democratic control over finance, reparations for the centuries of colonial extractivism that have shaped the uneven vulnerability to climate breakdown... 9/
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This is a great read -- it underlines really clearly how profoundly flawed the logic of biodiversity offsets in particular (and offsets of all kinds, really) is. Some stray thoughts:
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I find it baffling that some people seem to think about union membership like a gym membership or a magazine subscription that you cancel if it’s not working for you and not like… the only organisation that represents you in bargaining with your employer
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This is a great article on AI as a fetish, and one of the better uses of arguments about ‘fictitious’ capital I’ve seen recently.
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Vanguard CEO reiterating that they’re not going to stop investing in fossil fuels until there’s a concrete risk of assets being stranded.
There is no market solution here. Stopping fossil fuel investment requires a radically different financial sector than the one we’ve got.
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I wrote an essay for
@phenomenalworld
.
It pulls some historical vignettes from my new book to talk about the politics of the ‘finance gap’ and the futility of trying to solve climate and development problems by mobilising private finance.
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The book is open access, if you’d like to read the free PDF, it’s here:
Or if you don’t want to read off a screen, you can buy a hard copy here:
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The impossibility of a capitalist ‘green energy’ transition, in a sentence. The more ‘affordable’ solar and wind energy get relative to fossil fuels, the less of them will be produced.
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This thing where big chunks of Development Econ ignore structural racism and colonial legacies is not an accident and itself the product of specific political circumstances.
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New article, in
@envplanc
!
w/
@MalcolmCV
&
@DaiviRTaylor
, we look at the recent push from global firms towards using blockchain to resolve labour and ecological abuses in supply chains. We show how they make existing problems w/ private governance worse.
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The new
@PlutoPress
catalogue is out, as usual they have a lot of brilliant-looking things coming out.
It’s doubly exciting for me this time, though, because my new book is in it!
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Just published in
@NPEjournal
!
I trace the history of agricultural credit projects at the World Bank 1960-1990, arguing this helps us to place the structural adjustment era in a long run of failure-prone efforts at marketization and commercialization.
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Equally, the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation are uneven. Without substantially changing the extractivist relations through which battery materials are produced, for instance, electrification will have grim impacts on peripheral land and people. 5/
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New article!
Introducing our (imminent) Geoforum SI on surplus populations in global capitalism,
@soederberg1
& I take stock of the revival of interest in Ch.25 of Capital, arguing we’d do well to revisit Marx to draw out a more dynamic research agenda.
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None of which will come about without more directly confronting capital than governments have been able to do in the last century. To reduce this to 'will' or to 'inaction' is, at best, politically naive. 10/
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My recent article in
@NPEjournal
is now Open Access!
I show how debates about ag. credit at the World Bank were central to the rise of neoliberalism, emerging out of failure and experimentation within longer-run projects of ag. commercialization.
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Together with some of my department colleagues, we’ve just written to senior management
@warwickuni
outlining our concerns about in-person teaching this fall. 1/3
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For what it's worth, it's a weird post-Thatcher-Britain thing that strikes aren't indefinite by default...
It undercuts us if we're saying 'accept our demands or we'll... catch up on priority stuff next Tuesday' and not 'we're out until you make an offer we can accept.'
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Carbon trading, for one thing, was a big global initiative to reduce emissions, especially in forms like the CDM and ETS -- it didn't work because it was disastrously ill-conceived, but it didn't lack 'ambition'. 4/
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There is no colonial occupation that’s ever ended without violence (*especially* in a settler colony), and no real anticolonial movement that hasn’t contained contradictions or factions with bad politics.
Neither is a good reason to stop calling for Palestinian liberation.
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Was reminded today that Samir Amin had one of the sharpest contemporary critiques of the NIEO — as an expression of the contradictions inherent in capitalist development strategies in peripheral states.
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New blog! For
@ROAPEjournal
on global capitalism and cobalt.
It's a response to 'new cold war' narratives (e.g. in NYT) about China's role in cobalt mining in the DRC, which I argue misdiagnose the problems and let capitalism/imperialism off the hook.
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New article!
This is an odd case I’ve been following for a few years: How the London Metal Exchange briefly and reluctantly played labour regulator, and what this says about processes of financialization.
Thrilled this is out in
@EconSocJournal
!
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Or, it's the mitigation and adaptation strategies that have gotten buy in and support from capital that have been disastrously inadequate. 3/
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1) Force majeure rules are a kind of nuclear option. They might offset the MAB, but at a high cost *to universities*.
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Neoliberal approaches to development are generally premised (explicitly or implicitly) on a denial of colonial legacies.
One example is the 'financial repression' thesis -- a big part of the basis for financial liberalization, and also the genealogy of 'financial inclusion'. 1/
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The extent of precarity in UK universities is an abject shame.
And the number of casualized workers is only half the story -- the form of precarious work (zero-hours contracts, third party employment brokers) is worse than in most places too.
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Likewise, the general thrust of adaptation strategies so far has often been to ask the poorest and most vulnerable people to take responsibility for managing their own risks, often through adopting new technologies and new financial instruments. 7/
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States under capitalism depend materially on the continued circulation and accumulation of capital -- among other things, on a really basic level, to fund their own activity. And there's been no shortage of concerted action by capital to shape, limit, and steer state action. 11/
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Now in the latest issue of
@DevandChg
:
I write about post/colonial states as capitalist states entangled with circulations of money, and why that makes colonial financial hierarchies difficult to displace.
(Open access)
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Very worrying how aggressively support for Palestinian liberation, 'support for Hamas', and 'anti-semitism' are being folded together in some quarters.
Particularly given how important that elision of 'Palestine' and 'Hamas' is in enabling the current total assault on Gaza.
Foreign students, academics and workers who commit anti-Semitic acts or praise Hamas face being expelled from Britain under plans being drawn up by the Home Office
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New article!
In
@CompChange
, James Chamberlain and I trace the contradictions of insurance-based responses to climate risks by looking at the African Risk Capacity. We show how ARC has been shaped and limited by relations of financial subordination.
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This isn't new -- it's a longstanding feature of colonial and postcolonial responses to developmental crises. Colonized subjects were often encouraged to respond to unpredictable rainfall and other ecological hazards through 'thrift' and judicious use of credit. 8/
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IPE's vanishing Marxists, a thread.
@clift_ben
et al. just published this cool study on citation networks in IPE in
@RIPEJournal
.
I've been thinking about this finding that Marxist work has largely slipped out of core IPE journals since 2010 👇
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But if we’re having a debate on the terrain of ‘growth/degrowth’ and not ‘abolishing capitalist value relations’, then I wonder if a) we’re skimming the surface and not really getting at the roots of capitalist ecological destruction,
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It’s very unclear at my institution whether the university executive board has followed the university’s own rules — never mind the CMA’s — in putting FM in place. Communications to students have been a mix of misleading and demonstrably untrue…
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My article in Geoforum, drawing on Marx’s concept of ‘latent’ surplus populations to examine the colonial histories of financial responses to ecological hazards in Senegal, is free to access at this link until December:
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I’m not convinced local negotiations at QUB were helpful for us either, but this is definitely further evidence that UCEA’s function is specifically to *prevent* meaningful negotiations on pay and conditions…
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This is worth reading on the recently concluded 'Debt for nature' swap in Gabon.
The obvious problems: It provided functionally almost no debt relief -- swapping all of 4% of Gabon's outstanding debts for new bonds, at higher-than-anticipated interest.
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The introduction to
@DaiviRTaylor
,
@MalcolmCV
and my theme issue of
@envplanc
on the politics of the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance is out!
Whole issue should be out very soon.
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2) On that last point, it’s staggering how sloppy universities have been in invoking and following their own force majeure rules.
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