1 Young People’s Marginalisation: Unsettling What Agency and Structure Mean After Neo-Liberalism

Abstract

In the days, months and years after many of the major institutions of globalised and financialised capitalism near froze, then went into meltdown in the later part of 2007 and the early part of 2008, and began to wreak havoc in spaces that, at first glance, had little direct relation to the worlds of US-based sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, Collateralised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, billion dollar profits and multi-million dollar bonuses, powerful, vested interests mobilised to reconfigure, to reimagine, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as being a crisis of sovereign debt, as signalling a need for massive reductions in state spending, as creating an urgent need for austerity. As I have argued elsewhere (Kelly 2013, 2016), the work done by conservative governments, the International Monetary Fund, troikas, think tanks, conservative commentators and media outlets has been largely successful in many of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/European Union (OECD/EU) economies in framing responses to the downstream effects of the GFC as being principally about State debt levels. In this discourse, those that depend most on State-provided services, payments and programmes have been the ones to carry the greatest burden as severe austerity measures are implemented to protect sovereign debt ratings, or to bail out banks and financial institutions.