Download Symposium: The Kilburn Manifesto: after neoliberalism?

Environment and Planning A 2014, volume 46, pages 2033 – 2049
doi:10.1068/akilburn
Symposium: The Kilburn Manifesto: after
neoliberalism?
Jamie Peck (Ed.)
Doreen Massey
Katherine Gibson
Victoria Lawson
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From left to right: Victoria Lawson, Katherine Gibson, and Doreen Massey
(photograph: Becky Prendergast, Association of American Geographers).
Introduction
Jamie Peck
The Kilburn Manifesto: After Neoliberalism? is a collaborative project—and as much
a political intervention as a publishing initiative—which has been organized through
the journal Soundings by Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin, and the late Stuart Hall. The
Manifesto was the focus for an Environment and Planning A forum, convened at the Tampa
meeting of the Association of American Geographers in April 2014, at which Doreen Massey
described the project, its motivations and aspirations, and its relevance for the current
political conjuncture. Katherine Gibson and Victoria Lawson were invited to join the panel
as discussants, and to participate in what proved to be an engaging and expansive discussion,
before a packed audience. Doreen, Katherine, and Victoria have generously shared their
notes from the panel, which we are pleased to publish here as a record of this remarkable
event.
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The Kilburn Manifesto: after Neoliberalism?
Doreen Massey, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA,
England; e-mail: [email protected]
The Kilburn Manifesto is a project initiated by Stuart Hall, myself, and Michael Rustin.
It emerged out of our regular conversations around the journal Soundings, which we had
founded in 1995 and in which we continued to be members of the Editorial Board.(1) The aim
of the Manifesto, as with the journal, is to intervene in political debate in the UK. We’d been
editing Soundings for nearly twenty years, but something around this moment (it was circa
2009–2010) called for a different kind of intervention.
It was not just that the political Right was using the crisis to reinforce neoliberalism
(which we all knew), but that, while there had been this massive economic crisis, there was
no ideological or political crisis. There were no major political fractures, no serious unsettling
of neoliberal ideological hegemony, no significant ruptures in popular discourse. Of course
there were conflicts, but on the whole political debate had been corralled back into the frame
of the old assumptions. And our aim was (is) to focus on that; to ask why that was so; what
enabled that to be possible; and to contribute to changing those terms of debate.
Now, if you think—as we do—of social formations in terms of different instances
(ideological, political, economic, social, cultural, …), with their distinct modalities and
temporalities, articulated together and each providing the conditions of existence for the
others, then if you want to challenge the prevailing hegemony (to change the relations of
power, and the balance of social forces) you need a crisis in a number of these instances at
the same time (what has been called, for instance by Althusser, ‘a condensation’). It is such a
condensation that can produce a moment of political possibility.
So, in 2010 Soundings started a project of conjunctural analysis, to try to get to grips
with the situation in these terms.(2) And then in 2013 the three of us launched the Kilburn
Manifesto.
The Manifesto begins with a framing statement, called “After neoliberalism?”, which sets
out the longer history and wider geography within which to understand this particular moment
in the United Kingdom. This is followed by a series of Instalments, appearing approximately
every month, which tackle particular themes in more detail. This is not an academic project;
it is addressed to a fairly wide public. The launch meeting was oversubscribed, and a video
is available on the website. It has been followed by invited presentations around the country,
to grassroots activists, trades unionists, and academics. After each Instalment is put up online
we hold a small evening seminar (about fifty people) at the Marx Memorial Library and
some of the Instalments have appeared in shortened form in The Guardian newspaper or
(1)
The Kilburn Manifesto can be found at:
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto/html
All the contributions can also be found in issues of the journal itself (Soundings: A Journal of Politics
and Culture), beginning with issue 53 Spring 2013 with the framing statement by the three of us, and
continuing in subsequent issues.
(2)
See the eBook The Neoliberal Crisis, 2012, edited by J Rutherford and S Davison. It can be found,
free of charge, at:
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/NeoliberalCrisis/html
It contains the following articles from Soundings: “What crisis is this?” by John Clarke, and
“Reflections on the present” by Michael Rustin, both in issue 43; “Interpreting the crisis” by Stuart
Hall and Doreen Massey, issue 44; “The political struggle ahead” by Doreen Massey, issue 45; “The
neoliberal revolution” by Stuart Hall, and “Ideology and economics in the present moment” by Doreen
Massey, both in issue 48.
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on its website. This, then, is the kind of intervention that we felt, in that bit of our identities
that is ‘an intellectual’, we might constructively do.(3)
Before going further, let me make three additional general points about the nature of this
project.
The first point is essentially geographical. This is a project in and about the UK, which
means that there is a real question of specificity. The empirical analysis and political con­
clusions are likely to be different elsewhere. What’s more, the UK is also as a political arena
quite small, with a Labour Party in endless but never quite terminal crisis, and the journal
Soundings has a recognised voice within the Left. So this kind of intervention seemed
worthwhile to attempt.
There is also the question of the specificity of concepts—how generalisable can they be
to other contexts? And how can we relate the ‘abstract’ concepts to the particular reality we
are trying to analyse? We do not talk about this in the Manifesto but we did during the process
of its production. I want to mention it here because of Stuart. As you will know, Stuart died
on the 10th of February and it is impossible for me to convey the sense of loss. I know in this
talk I shall continue to talk of him, and of ‘us’, in the present tense. The three of us were in
Stuart’s front room one afternoon wrestling with how to think about ‘class’. In spite of the
importance of capitalist production for a period in the UK—the period that in its earlier days
was the soil from which the ideas for Capital first grew—over the longer history elites based
in finance and in land and property have been the bedrock of the British class system. As you
will see when you read the Manifesto, particularly the Instalment on the Economy, a specific
articulation of financial and landed capital is at the core of the current moment.
Anyway, we were discussing how to think about this when Stuart reached into his immense
fund of reading and thought and knowledge and related our thoughts to Marx’s discussions on
method in the Grundrisse. I remember a feeling of exhilaration as the discussion deepened;
an exhilaration in this kind of serious political analysis, that searching movement between
the precise shape of the here and now and fundamental questions of conceptualisation and
epistemology. All of us are committed to this, but Stuart was particularly brilliant at it.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
The second point is that, as must already be evident, we do not subscribe to any form of
economic determinism. The economic is crucial (and indeed one unnecessary and unfortunate
effect of the triumph of the cultural within geography in recent years has been the lack of
serious attention within it to political economy). However, we do not think that the economic
simply determines other instances. Culture, and ideology, for instance, do not simply express
‘the logic’ of the economic. Each of these instances has its own dynamics and mechanisms,
and particular kinds of sites and relations, and they must be analysed in their own right.
They are ‘relatively autonomous’. What we need to analyse is the articulation together of
the different instances. How they work together, if they do; how they reinforce or undermine
each other. If we are to act politically we need to understand that articulation.
I should also say that we tend to conceptualise the economy itself in terms of class
and constellations of interests (the economy as a social phenomenon) rather than in terms
of capitalism as an unpeopled machine. So in a sense this is a very ‘social’ and political
approach, even though the economic is clearly crucial.
The third aspect of our position in the Manifesto that I need to highlight from the
beginning is that we do not go along with the argument that ‘horizontalism’ is the only way
(3)
That is to say that this is not our only political activity. Nor is this a ‘to do’ manual: that kind of
approach can only be addressed to a politically constituted ‘we’. Nonetheless, each of the Instalments,
and a final piece that will pull out emergent themes, will give hints in this direction. The whole series
should be completed by the end of 2014. The aim is to hold a conference in February 2015 and to
publish an edited book both online and in print format.
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of working or the only way of organising a society. We share, in other words, a commitment
to representative democracy (while recognising its current inadequacy) and to a form of
state (radically changed, and conceived of as an arena of struggle). In other words, there
is a recognition of the need for constituted as well as constituent power. Indeed, I would
argue that a major question is how we weave them together. The reasons for this position
are multifarious, and range from a rejection of the ontological assumptions of immanence,
through lessons long learned in the women’s movement, about the need to structure power
(in other words, to recognise its ubiquity and take it seriously), to recent history. On the last,
I see as dangerous the ease with which any group of people can come out on to the streets
and claim to constitute themselves as ‘the people’, even when there is a properly elected
government. This does not mean I never support such demonstrations. But we must recognise
they are not the exclusive preserve of the Left. Think of the middle-class cacerolazos against
Salvador Allende. And think today of the EU and US support for demonstrations in Kiev,
and in Venezuela. In regional elections in December last year Maduro’s government received
increased support, but the Right and the rich have refused to accept the results, and are aided
and abetted in this by the USA. At the moment it seems that it is the Right that is against
representative democracy.
So, in the Manifesto we do address questions of state policies, and we have an Instalment
on the state itself.
Organising concepts
Crucial to our thinking is the concept of a social settlement (aka conjuncture) to designate a
period in which the different instances are articulated together in a relatively stable formation.
Such a stable social settlement may be held together under a hegemony, a hegemonic
ideology: a glue of ideas, a common sense. The reason this is important is that it makes a
political difference to the analysis. A hegemonic ideology, or common sense, is a political
construction; it takes work to achieve it—ideological work, the formation of coalitions of
social groups, and so forth. It does not follow automatically from the shape of the economy.
What’s more, it has constantly to be maintained. And it is therefore always open to challenge
and contest.
So, in our usage, ‘neoliberalism’ is the name of the social settlement that triumphed in
the UK, and more widely, from the 1980s on after the foundering of the previous, social
democratic, settlement.(4) It was a triumph that was engineered. Under social democracy,
workers and others had in the UK gained too much, both economically and in terms of voice,
and the whole point of what we have come to call ‘neoliberalism’ was the reassertion of
elite power. One immediate political implication of this reading is that we cannot simply go
back to that form of social democracy—it had reached its limits; redistribution could only be
allowed to go so far.
The triumph of neoliberalism was also, as we know, a highly spatially articulated story.
Within the UK the crucial battle took place in London in the 1980s between a Left trying to
imagine and invent a different way out, and Mrs Thatcher’s City of financial deregulation.
Anyway, ‘neoliberalism’ here is about more than economics. It’s also about the slow
building of a new common sense—a hegemonic ideology—in this case of market relations,
of competitive individualism, of private gain and the denigration of the notion of ‘public’.
A new social settlement. In the UK (and parts of Europe, perhaps rather differently from in
the USA) this new common sense is radically different from the previous commitments to
Keynesianism, a welfare state, redistribution, and so forth. And it is a new common sense that
(4)
I am aware that the term ‘neoliberalism’ tends to set off waves of disagreement. Indeed, we have
written a bit about this in the articles cited in note (2). Here we are using the term because it is in
popular political currency, and this is a political document.
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has altered our very senses of ourselves, invaded our imaginations, moulded our identities. It
is a common sense driven home by constant repetition, by the institution of new practices (it’s
not just about language) into which we are inveigled (forcing ‘choice’ upon us in the public
sector, for instance) and by a compliant media. It has taken political work to make this new
common sense hegemonic. By which we mean that its constituent ideas have become beyond
question, natural. They come to be assumptions we don’t even realise we’re making about
how the world works. And thereby, crucially, whole areas that should be up for democratic
debate are removed from political contest.
But common sense is not seamless, or total. It often brings together contradictory elements
that may provide points of intervention. It will not catch everything or everybody. Even in a
place as small as the UK it has a really uneven geography, its purchase on people’s lives and
imaginations being much weaker in the urban industrial north and west. So it is complex,
and politically crucial to understand. In the Manifesto, two Instalments are centrally devoted
to this (Vocabularies of the economy; Common-sense neoliberalism). With the triumph of
neoliberal common sense, political debate came to be confined within its terms; government
was/is reduced to administration within the framework of TINA [there is no alternative]. There
seemed to be no political outside; no political frontier. And I guess our driving contention is
that that is what we need to establish—a political frontier, a challenge to the whole terms of
current debate.
It is perhaps here worth emphasising a couple of points. This common sense was not just
an effect of the economic; but nor was it only a result of political effort. It also intersected
with movements within culture that were propitious. Clamours for individual choice, for
instance, were deep within the movements of the sixties. They have now been hijacked (that’s
not what we meant!) and reworked. And the characteristics of the, now dominant, finance
sector—its supposed lightness and mobility—chime too with movements within culture, and
help account for the extraordinary success of the current structure of feeling.(5) And this in
turn provides one of the conditions of existence of the form of economy we are now enduring.
So it must be addressed in its own right.
However, and to return to a point made earlier, this emphasis in no way licences studies
of ‘the cultural’ that float free of the economic, and that fail to deepen the analysis of the
construction of a social settlement. The mission of ‘cultural studies’ in its early days was
precisely this: always to link the particular study/incident/moment to the wider formation
of imagination and ideas; to engage with the very construction of hegemonic discourses
and of public consent. The book Policing the Crisis was one of the founding documents of
cultural studies. Stuart was one of the authors, as was John Clarke, another contributor to
the Kilburn Manifesto. And it did just this. It has just been republished, and is well worth a
read.(6) It stands as a severe critique of some of the cultural work going on at the moment.
Likewise, we all nod our heads when it’s said that ‘another world is possible’ (sadly now
repeated so often that it stands in danger of losing all import). Yes, another world is possible.
So there needs to be serious work to understand how that fact—in the face of the catastrophe
we are living through—is so systematically obliterated. And the sequence of Instalments of
the Kilburn Manifesto, incrementally, try to do a bit of that.
As to the ‘content’ of this currently hegemonic common sense, you will find much in
the Manifesto, but I think it is primarily organised around ‘financialisation’. By this term
we mean a whole gamut of interlocking things. There is the financialisation of the finance
sector itself, away from the relationship with production as ‘finance capital’ towards dealing
(5)
See Massey, “Ideology and economics …”, in note (2).
Hall S, Crichter C, Jefferson J, Clarke J, Roberts B, 2013 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State
and Law’n’Order 2nd edition (Macmillan, London)
(6)
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in entirely monetary products. There is the increasing involvement of the production sector
itself in financial trading. (The UK economy is founded to an extraordinary degree on
trading in already-existing assets, rather than on production—ie, on value extraction and its
consequences in regressive redistribution, rather than value creation.) Our material lives have
also been penetrated by financialisation—the need to buy private pensions, or take on debt
to buy homes or education. And so too, therefore, have our imaginative lives: homes become
‘properties’; we are enjoined to conceive of ourselves always as consumers (the generality
of the commercial transaction erasing the richer specificity of particular social relations). We
are encouraged to produce ourselves as choosing, financially calculating, subjects. The idea
of getting something for nothing (celebrity culture; a rise in house prices) is both accepted
and applauded. Materially and imaginatively we can be drawn into it all.
And there are many who love this new way of being, and not just the very rich. (We must
understand its attractions and its purchase if we are to engage with it.) There are also many
who are resigned to it (who really believe there is no alternative; who are dispirited by the
feeling that there’s nothing you can do). But there is also a widespread, deep, not very clearly
articulated, hatred of the current dispensation. It is a hatred that can, certainly, find its form
in left-wing rejection; but it can equally well provoke a digging-in on the conservative Right.
We need a politics that helps to articulate these feelings in a progressive direction. We need a
politics that goes beyond logic alone to engage the passions. We need an alliance against this
financialisation of our society our lives and our selves.(7)
A pause for spatiotemporal reflection
It has to be acknowledged that all three of us, the initiators of this project, are getting
on a bit (though this is not true of the wider group). We have discovered, however, that
there is at least one advantage to this: we are old enough to remember that things used to
be different. This has nothing to do with nostalgia—as I’ve said, we cannot go back; the
previous settlement ran its course, and was defeated. But it does make it possible to imagine
that things could be different again. That possibility of real change is something that seems
sometimes to have been lost amongst generations that have known only this. Perhaps that
is one reason why the cry ‘another world is possible’ can on occasions seem so deracinated.
This is important, and it relates to the spatiotemporal structure of our imaginations; indeed
of hegemonic common senses.
Certainly the sense of temporality has changed. In the period of social democracy in
Europe we had a sense of progress: wages and workers’ rights increased; women, black
people, and others made small but worthwhile advances; there were liberation struggles in
the Global South. Indeed, as we have argued, this was one reason the settlement came under
attack. But that feeling of making advances pervaded our common sense. Somewhere in our
sense of ourselves and of our times there was a belief that things would get better and that we
would be part of making them better. There was a notion of historical change.
Of course, there were many problems with this. It was often incremental (‘within the
system’); it cohabited with Grand Narratives of inexorability that clashed with the urge
to act; and those narratives often convened all the different histories in the world into one
story and thus one future. There was only one version of ‘better’. It was the abolition of the
multiplicities of space by the production of a single history.(8)
(7)
A Green New Deal: Joined-up Policies to Solve the Triple Crunch of the Credit Crisis, Climate
Change and High Oil Prices (New Economics Foundation, London) First report 2008. This also
argues for an alliance against finance.
(8)
Massey D, 2005 For Space (Sage, London)
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But that spatiotemporal structuring of our common sense had its positives too. And one
thing that has come home to me in the course of this long project is how completely that
sentiment—that structure of feeling—that hope—has been obliterated. It is over.
Instead what we have (and, to repeat, I speak of the UK—though Fredric Jameson and
Wendy Brown speak of similar shifts in the US too) is a world, and an imagination of a world,
that is constant change, flow, mobility. Change has become the new stasis; there is no change
to this constant change. But it is small change, trivial, within the system. Fashion, technology,
a new gadget. New, new, new; but nothing really new at all. And so the very notion of change
becomes traduced, and we arrive at the point of what has been called the eradication of
the possibility of thinking a radically different future. Big time, historical time, becomes
unthinkable. Many people have written about this.
I think a similar thing has been happening in relation to spatiality. To put the argument
in very condensed form, I would say this. In For Space I wrote about space as the dimension
of multiplicity; of contemporaneous heterogeneity. In that sense it is the dimension of the
possibility of the simultaneous existence of more than one thing—of alternatives. One way
of seeing that is in terms of choice. And this neoliberal age is indeed the age of choice;
choice of cars, holidays, doctors … we are indeed forced to choose; it is our obligatory identity.
And yet, when it comes to multiplicities that matter—like what kind of society we live in,
what kind of future we want to build—we are told, implacably, that there is no alternative; no
choice. No multiplicity.
So we live now in a hegemonic common sense in which both temporality and spatiality
are reduced to the trivial. There is change but no change, choice but no choice. And this in
turn inculcates an inability to think beyond the horizon of the present arrangements. That’s
what we’re on about in the politics of the Kilburn Manifesto.
But, on a rather different note, it has also made me return to thoughts in For Space in
order to think about the distinction between multiplicities that don’t matter and multiplicities
that do. And that in turn links into a host of other things that I have been thinking about. There
is the politics in Latin America and its assertion of multipolarity in opposition to the global
hegemony of the USA (in a conference of Debates y Combates in Buenos Aires I wrestled
with the question of how different does a political trajectory have to be to warrant the claim
of multipolarity).(9) And it made me also want to return to old, but ongoing, debates with
Ernesto Laclau.(10) I mention all this because it is a nice way of making a point that I’m
always going on about—that theoretical and conceptual work can be propelled by political
questions and engagement.
Class and beyond
Anyway, let us return to the main story. As I said, class is central to our analysis and to the
present moment. In the UK the astonishingly pervasive rule of a monied and propertied elite
evokes the Belle Epoque of more than a century ago. ‘Below’ that there is a much more
disparate set of social groups. Trades unions are still by far the biggest social movement in spite
of being much reduced. But the sites of potential antagonism have multiplied away from the
point of production, to pensions, housing, education, consumer issues. And there is a persistent
demonisation of the working class. The poor, in particular, are not only materially disadvantaged
but actively despised and divided (especially so in the case of the white working class).
(9)
“Los significados de la multiplicidad”, Modernidades múltiples en un mundo multipolar, Debates
y Combates, Secretaria de la Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 11–12
October 2012.
(10)
See Massey D, 1992, “Politics and space/time” New Left Review, number 196, November–
December, pp 65–84. Ernesto Laclau, who was also an editor of Debates y Combates, and who initiated
the conference in Buenos Aires, died in April, just after the AAG at which this paper was presented.
He was for me over many decades a very valued interlocutor and friend. It has been a tough spring.
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But in the time I have here I want briefly to turn to other social divisions that have
their own sites of operation and modes of oppression. Once again, in the Manifesto we
have wanted to insist on their relative autonomy. They are neither simply caused by nor
subordinate to class struggle and capitalism; they are articulated with it. In the end, in our
necessarily limited number of Instalments, we have focused on three such lines of division:
those around feminism, generation, and race/ethnicity. The neoliberal settlement has entangled
with each of these, and entailed their reconfiguration, but in each case in a different way. I am
not going to speak here about our discussions on race and ethnicity because they have been
particularly disrupted by the illness and death of Stuart. However, an Instalment is on its way.
The inclusion of an Instalment on ‘generation’ might seem surprising—indeed, in a way
it surprised us. But it was clear that a postulated division between the young (unemployed,
having difficulties finding housing) and the old (portrayed as rich and pensioned-off) was
becoming a significant axis of political debate. This was new; and it is in part manufactured,
in order to divert attention from class divides. But it would not have had any political
purchase if it had been entirely untrue. Like many a diversionary political narrative it reaches
in, and touches on, a felt reality. That is why it could take hold. Even explicitly progressive
movements were called in evidence: “all over Europe young people are rising up” and so forth.
So there is an Instalment in the Manifesto that takes up this question (A growing discontent:
class and generation under neoliberalism). Its argument is to reset the division, away from
‘young people are exploited by the old’ towards understanding the younger generation as
the (often vulnerable) experimental social field for the entrenchment in yet more acute
form of hegemonic neoliberalism. This does not simply ‘turn it all back into class’, for it
acknowledges the presence of intergenerational inequality (though highly variegated—there
are rich young and poor old), but interprets it in terms of the dynamic of the hegemonic social
settlement. At the same time, in consequence, it realigns the frontier of political struggle.
Likewise, the Instalment After neoliberalism: the need for a gender revolution argues
that there is a new articulation between neoliberalism and patriarchy. This goes way beyond
debates about whether or not things are getting better on the equality front (though the piece
is very bleak; in the matter of gender equality, it is argued, the argument that we have reached
the end of that social democratic narrative of improvement is brutally confirmed). Rather,
there has developed a neoliberal neopatriarchy, with particular characteristics around violence
and exploitative sexuality (as well as continuing economic and domestic exploitation), and in
new and dismal shapes around the world where capitalism is futuristically dynamic. In this
understanding neoliberalism and patriarchy are not ‘logically’, necessarily, associated; rather,
they feed off each other in their conjunctural intersection. However, one thing that emerges
is that if we analyse that intersection then it may well be that battles against patriarchy
and against neoliberalism may converge at certain points; and even that a strong feminist
movement could make neoliberalism vulnerable.
These last ideas came up particularly in the lively seminar that accompanied this Instalment.
Just, by way of finishing, to give you a flavour … there was a lot of discussion about the
articulation of feminist and class struggles, lots of young women talking of particular forms
of oppression now, and a very interesting contribution from a director of Southall Black
Sisters arguing, certainly in relation to the UK, that current religious revivals are not, as
sometimes argued, a rival to a neoliberalism that can be figured as a product of ‘the West’, but
rather are symbiotic with, and supportive of, neoliberalism especially in its intersection with
dominant masculinities.(11) So we had ethnicity, generation, class, and gender all in play, and
a fine discussion, sometimes combative, of the nature of their many intersections. We retired
(11)
Southall Black Sisters have waged a long battle against patriarchal structures within many
ethnic‑minority ‘communities’.
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to our usual upstairs rooms in the pub round the corner intellectually invigorated even if still
rather politically challenged.
To conclude
As I have emphasised, the great thing about ‘hegemonies’ is that they are not totalities. They
are not the closed space of an immanentist ontology. The attempt to establish hegemony is to
make things seem like a closed space with no outside.
This is why ‘they’ go to such lengths to stamp out evocations or demonstrations that the
space is not closed. ‘Occupy’ was tiny but it had to be extinguished. Hence too the grotesque
misrepresentation and active undermining of everything from Syriza in Greece to progressive
experiments in Latin America. We must not be allowed to know that there may indeed be
alternatives. Which is why it is so important that we crack open that closed space of there is
no alternative to open up a political frontier and change the terms of debate.
Acknowledgements. I should like to take this opportunity to thank Eric Sheppard, Trevor Barnes, and
Jamie Peck along with Environment and Planning A for organising this gathering, and Katherine
Gibson and Vicky Lawson for being discussants at the session.
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Discussant comments
Katherine Gibson, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney,
Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia; e-mail: [email protected]
I would like to thank Eric, Jamie, and Trevor very much for this invitation to come to Tampa
and participate in this event. And I would like to thank Doreen, Stuart Hall, and Michael
Rustin, and all the other authors of the Kilburn Manifesto for their provocative intervention
into the politics of our times. It’s a real honour to be asked to act as a discussant of this
document and Doreen’s lecture … . Indeed, it’s an honour in a number of different ways.
First, it gives me the opportunity to acknowledge with deep sadness the passing of Stuart
Hall, an inspirational figure whose intellectual and political insights have shaped generations
of cultural and social scholars. It is wonderful to think of Stuart, engaged—right up to the
end of his life—in bringing his analytical and empathetic powers to bear on the political
challenges we face today.
Second, I welcome the opportunity to honour Doreen’s path-breaking contributions to
geographic thought and her role in making geography one of the most intellectually exciting
and creative disciplinary spaces over the last thirty-five years. It comes as somewhat of
a surprise to be talking of this number of decades, as it seems only yesterday that I read
Doreen’s 1979 essay “In what sense a regional problem?” (1) and was blown away by its
piercing criticisms and excited by what new avenues for thinking it opened up. On the other
hand, when I think of the workshop that Julie Graham and I, as Clark graduate students,
helped to organize in Luxemburg in 1980, to which Doreen came, along with some twenty
or so transatlantic scholars interested in theorizing uneven regional development—what was
then called “the internationalization of capital”—it does seem that a hellava lot has happened
in these intervening years.
What’s notable is that here we are, still, exploring various kinds of understanding of our
word in order to change it—to bring more humane, less environmentally destructive, ways of
living together into being. I am honoured, then, in a third sense to be part of a community
of committed scholars with a rich history who see their ongoing research as making active
contributions to social transformation.
And so, to The Kilburn Manifesto—a series of essays motivated by the question After
Neoliberalism? This evolving document is the product of a truly collective endeavour. It
has an explicitly political form of address, as indicated by the Manifesto designation. The
alliterative resonance with the Communist Manifesto establishes connection—tongue in
cheek? or serious? I’m not exactly sure. But certainly the resonance between these two
documents goes way beyond alliteration. In both Manifestos much of the text reveals, in
powerful prose, the problematic and unjust lineaments of economic and state power and how
the emergence (in  the earlier Manifesto) of capitalism, and (in the latter one) its transformation,
is creating the conditions for and heightened need for a new political movement. As the
Kilburn Manifesto writers note, quoting Gramsci, “politics is always educative” and in both
Manifestos there is an authoritative, instructional tone.
In the Kilburn Manifesto the key analytical concepts deployed to reveal the ‘problem’
are hegemony, social settlement, conjuncture, and common sense. And the master signifier
around which all these terms circulate is neoliberal (free-market) capitalism. We have
●●a neoliberal social settlement that has replaced that of social democratic welfare state
social settlement;
●●the colonization of common sense by neoliberal tenets of freedom, choice, self-interest,
and naturalness of the market.
●●We have a conjunctural financial crisis of capitalism,
(1)
Massey D, 1979, “In what sense a regional problem?” Regional Studies 13 233–243
Discussant comments
2043
●●but a reinforcement of neoliberal hegemony.
●●There are tectonic shifts of economic power to China and the East and massive
redistribution of wealth to the 1%.
The scenario is bleak indeed and the outline of what confronts us is daunting, if not paralyzing.
Yet in the face of such an analysis, the Kilburners offer their thoughts about ways forward.
They are not calling for a new communist party (unlike scholars and public intellectuals such
as US-based Jodi Dean who has a similarly forceful analysis of the current conjuncture), but
they do lay out some strategies for what is to be done.
Bea Campbell, in her essay on “the need for a gender revolution” which is perhaps the
bleakest offering in the collection, draws on the familiar lines from Leonard Cohen’s song
Anthem for inspiration:
There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in
Janet Newman and John Clarke in their essay “States of imagination” turn to Raymond
Williams for guidance in remaking the state—taking up his tip to call on the “residual and
emergent cultural forms that always co-exist with the currently dominant”: that is, on the
“residual attachments to collectivity and solidarity.” (2)
For Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea in their essay on “Common sense neo-liberalism”, it is
Gramsci who directs them towards what he called the “good sense” (for example, a sense of
unfairness or injustice) that sits in contradictory relation to the socially conservative common
sense. It is this good sense that can be worked with to produce change.
This orientation to the cracks, to the non-mainstream, the emergent, to different forms of
common sense, is very familiar to J K Gibson-Graham. We have made reading for difference
and “starting where we are with what we have at hand” two of the major planks of our
political imaginary (I dare not say political platform) …
So what I would like to is to pull out some of the resources and strategies that the
Kilburn Manifesto offers for proposing what might come After Neoliberalism. And I would
like to connect them to the parallel work that Julie and I, along with Jenny Cameron and
Stephen Healy have done in our latest book Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for
Transforming Our Communities (3) which has been likewise written for a popular audience
with the intention of stimulating debate about other possible worlds.
Doreen’s essay on “Vocabularies of the economy” argues for the need to pay attention to
how the economy is talked about, and to challenge the increasingly reduced economic subject
positions available to citizens. In the attempt to correct the misleading economic vocabulary
that tends to dominate and transform common sense, she proposes a renewed focus on the
question of “what is an economy for? And what do we want to provide?” One intriguing term
she introduces is that of ‘pre-distribution’—a concept that relocates fairness and equity at the
centre of the process of production organization, rather than seeing economic fairness being
attained after the fact, so to speak, via the redistributive mechanisms of state taxation and
disbursements.
Perhaps the term ‘pre-distribution’ is an attempt to broach the thorny issue of exploitation,
appropriation, and surplus distribution in a more 21st-century lingo? I see this issue of fairness
being actively negotiated in the workplace in a whole range of non-mainstream enterprise
forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives, social enterprises, and employee-owned corpora­
tions. And here the fairness is not only to those within the enterprise but also to those without,
in the wider society as well as the environment. The debates about different forms of value
accounting are one concrete site where a new vocabulary of economy is emerging.
(2)
In After Neoliberalism? chapter 7, page 18.
Gibson-Graham J K, Cameron J, Healy S, 2013 Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for
Transforming our Communities (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
(3)
2044
K Gibson
New vocabularies and technologies of accounting are also, of course, able to influence
notions of common sense. We have been inspired by Bruno Latour’s observation: that
neoliberal economic competences are sunk into common sense through the many practical
tools of bank accounts, property rights, cash register slips, and other plug-ins.(4) In Take Back
the Economy we have been concerned to reveal the ethical abilities that people have to, for
example, recognize injustice, care for each other and distant others, share resources, etc and
we have developed a set of new practical tools that might help these competences become
sunk into common sense. Our point here is that common sense is not only about language,
but about materialities, affects, and embodied practices, and the technologies that harness
and enable them.
Much is made in the Kilburn Manifesto of the negative associations with the term
‘taxation’. George Lakoff in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and
Frame the Debate (5) also talked about the reframing of tax as no longer an investment in a
society’s future or in societal care, but as an impost on the individual’s freedom to live well.
In Australia the term ‘tax’ was attached to ‘carbon’ and served well to sink public support for
a sensible pollution charge. Regretfully Lakoff’s advice about correctly framing the debate
was certainly not taken. Likewise in the US and UK there will need to be a lot of work done
to take back tax as ‘good sense’.
Yet clearly the purchase of the new common sense that ‘tax is bad’ is culturally grounded.
I have just come from living in Denmark for a month and was so struck by the different
‘feeling’ of living in a still relatively healthy social democracy (if also somewhat under attack).
The welcome pamphlet given to all newcomers in Aarhus where I was living contained a
statement to this effect: “Welcome to Denmark. Our social well-being and happiness is
based on a welfare system, good educational opportunities and trust in public authorities
and in each other” … This came with about twenty free tickets to all the cultural institutions
in the city! I was taken aback by how blatant was the appreciation of public goods and civic
mindedness. Clearly the good sense of taxation is much more a common sense in Denmark
than in Australia or Britain or here in the US. It is felt, even if unconsciously … and one feels
it as a visitor.
This observation highlights the place-specific relevance of the Kilburn Manifesto. It is
clearly a document that is aimed at influencing the UK Labour Party and other left-leaning
political movements in Britain. Yet it raises the possibility that much of its content might
have more general applicability around the world.
I would like to suggest that what might be taken from this Manifesto and used elsewhere
is the process of collective creativity associated with working with the cracks, the residual
attachments to collectivity and solidarity, and the forms of good sense that provide generative
flashpoints of hope. As geographers working all around the world doing empirical research
in places, with people and institutions, we are well placed to observe these glimmers of a
different world and help to strengthen them, make them ‘more real’, and work with policy
makers to create enabling environments for their growth.
In Asia and the Pacific where I have been working of late, as well as in northern Europe
where I have been lecturing about taking back the economy, I am overwhelmed by the thirst
for new ways of talking about the economy. Our iceberg image which simply represents
a diverse economy, has been readily adopted by practitioners in many different contexts
as a first step towards reframing what we mean by the economy and as a way of valuing
(4)
Latour B, 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford
University Press, New York), page 257.
(5)
Lakoff G, 2004 Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The
Essential Guide for Progressives (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT)
Discussant comments
2045
the economic transactions and practices that exist ‘under the water line’ that contribute to
surviving well and encountering others, including our earth, responsibly.
As the Kilburn Manifesto powerfully states, there is a need to marshal our analytical
skills and produce new vocabularies of the economy, new imaginations of the state, and a new
common sense. Doreen shows that critical cultural theorists and social scientists, particularly
geographers, are up to the task. The lasting message I get from the Kilburn Manifesto is this
(with apologies to Marx and Engels):
““Researchers of the world! Activate your assemblages—you have nothing to lose but your
future.”
2046
V Lawson
Discussant comments
Victoria Lawson, Department of Geography, University of Washington, Smith Hall,
Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; e-mail: [email protected]
I would like to thank Eric, Jamie, and Trevor for inviting me to comment in this panel. It is
a great honor for me to be a part of this conversation. I think I speak on behalf of all of us
when I say a heartfelt thank you to Doreen, for her work on the Kilburn Manifesto and for
her powerful and provocative contributions throughout her career. I am also deeply grateful
to Stuart Hall for his incisive, eloquent, and enduring work. He is greatly missed by so many
of us.
The founding stimulus for the Manifesto is that economic expressions of ‘neoliberalism’
are undergoing crisis, but the social and political fields of grounded neoliberalism remain
robust. It is in this paradoxical context of capitalist transformation (crisis?) that the Kilburn
Manifesto lays out ideas for a progressive political project that transcends the limits of
conventional thinking about what is reasonable to do. Doreen Massey, Stuart Hall, and
Michael Rustin argue that this is no time for retreat! They suggest that now is the moment for
changing the terms of debate, for taking a longer view, and for taking a leap.
This leap involves moving away from palliative measures aimed at restoring welfare stateism and towards stimulating openings for “a new political era and new understandings of what
constitutes the good society”.(1) The work is explicitly political, defending principles of redis­
tribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation,
and the right to education and healthcare.
And the Kilburn Manifesto is a model of public scholarship and a model for engaged
research. The manifesto explicitly democratizes knowledge in the manner of its making
(through numerous meetings and collaborative discussions), by being published as an open
source book, and by engaging the media and social media. I admire their ethic of public and
political scholarship.
Reading the Kilburn Manifesto was extremely generative for me and led me to three
ideas for continuing the work:
●●thinking about the agency of middle-class actors in different places to disrupt, trouble,
and challenge neoliberal hegemonies;
●●collaboration towards the decolonization of neoliberal ideologies and practices,
●●care as politics—deconstructing the care/economy binary to find common grounds for
alliance politics.
Middle classes and hegemony?
For Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, in “After Neoliberalism: analyzing the
present” the current neoliberal social settlement is a bundle of assumptions that constitute
‘common sense’. The hegemonic status of neoliberal ideas as common sense obscures the
fact that they are theories and that these theoretical claims play a crucial role in “legitimizing
the restoration and re-invigoration of a regime of power, profit and privilege” (page 13).
In the UK and the Minority World more broadly, middle-class actors play a key role in
consolidating and consenting to hegemonic neoliberal agreements. However, I suggest there
is analytical and political value in paying more attention to complex of ideologies, material
interests, and social forces that construct the ‘Middle Class’(2) (hereafter MC) as a social and
political object. This links with arguments in the Kilburn Manifesto that suggest that class
interests and common sense discourses about ‘the poor’, ‘fairness’, and ‘good society’ are
far from monolithic. Class actors inhabit multiple positions and contradictory points of view
(1)
(2)
Hall S, Massey D, Rustin M, 2013 After Neoliberalism: analyzing the present page 8.
I use scare quotes to mark how middle class becomes a fixed object in politicized discourses.
Discussant comments
2047
and as such, peoples’ “interests are always open to conflicting ideological interpretations, and
their redefinition can have political effects” (Hall et al, page 16).
From Marx to John Kenneth Galbraith the ‘Middle Class’ is framed as a ‘contented
majority’ or an essentially conservative group. Michael Zweig and Slavoj Žižek suggest
that normative MC-ness obscures the major class fault lines in US society and that this
‘nonclass’ status of the MC is a crucial problem for inquiry.(3) I agree that a key problem to
be understood is how normative, aspirational MC-ness depoliticizes class and inequality in
the present neoliberal conjuncture in particular places.
Is there value in focusing on when and how MC-ness is politicized rather than normalized?
In countries such as the US, Argentina, and India the idea of ‘middle class’ as a coherent
political fiction reasserts the neoliberal subject (as entrepreneurial, self-reliant, hard-working,
respectable, and so on). The MC represents (and gives material form to) to the aspirational
project of modernity.
In the US the MC is a strategy of governance; an idealized object that depoliticizes
class by individualizing success and by normalizing MC White privilege and so making
it unremarkable. Further, MC actors normalize their relative privilege through distinction
from, disdain for, poverty and the racialized and criminalized poor. Cultural and political
imaginaries of poor people as disgusting, threatening, and criminal reinstate hegemonic ideas
about the MC as hard-working, successful, moral, and law-abiding.
However, MC is an unstable category (as reviews of my work are keen to point out!)
Being MC entails contradictory positions as worker, consumer, shareholder, carer, renter, or
homeowner, and so on. Indeed, the MC is incoherent as a social object—it is radically open,
complex, and heterogenous. And some MC actors do mobilize their privilege in service of
radical ideas.
This raises the question of how does MC-ness circulate as a political object and as a
strategy of governance in particular neoliberal conjunctures? Related to this, what sorts of
cross-class alliances and what sorts of mobilization of MC privilege are emerging in different
places?
Does the ‘cancellation of the future’ in the wake of the recession of 2008 and crossclass experiences of losing shelter (via foreclosure or lack of affordable housing), job
loss, or the crisis of public care create political common ground, new vocabularies, and/or
political alliances? When do ‘zones of comfort’ in capitalism become zones of encounter
and political alliance? (4)
Collaboration and decolonization of neoliberal ideologies and practices
The Kilburn Manifesto engages with the specificity of the UK neoliberal conjuncture in its
relations with globalized and financialized capitalism. This raises a crucial question about
how broadly concepts from the manifesto might resonate, and also learn from, elsewhere. This
also prompts me to think about the tremendous potential for collaborations across the globe
to decolonize our theoretical and political imaginations as a crucial practice for imagining a
‘good society’ in the Anglo world. This follows Doreen Massey’s argument about the value
of “Learning from Latin America”.(5)
What is the potential for collaborative learning along the lines of the Kilburn Manifesto
that teaches us about the global reach, creativity, and ‘alternativity’ (!) of Majority World
See, for example, Žižek S, 2000 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
(Verso, London) and Zweig M, 2000 America’s Working Class Majority: The Best-kept Secret (Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, NY).
(4)
With thanks to Ananya Roy for posing this question of my work.
(5)
Massey D, 2012, “Learning from Latin America” Soundings 50
(3)
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V Lawson
responses to neoliberalism. Comparative learning can reveal the ways in which concepts,
technologies of governance, ideas about political possibilities circulate.
For example, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have put into practice
redistributive measures that are restoring value to nature, care, and connectedness among
people (including people who are landless, indigenous, and poor). Across the region there
are a range of social and political innovations such as redistributive social programs,
participatory budgeting, solidarity economies, worker-recovered factories, barter economies,
land occupations to recover dispossessed lands and plurinational challenges to the neoliberal
state. In Argentina the range of social and political innovations enacted after 2001 around the
solidarity economy, financial autonomy from international financial institutions and social
transfer payments have reactivated alliances across difference and have prompted young
people to be engaged in ways not seen for decades.
How do we think about the limits and potentials of what is done in a community, city,
or even a country? What is the relationship of grounded social and political innovations to a
globalized system of neoliberal capitalism? How do collaborations across places inform what
is possible in the US or UK? What broader lessons can we distill from the Kilburn Manifesto,
and from collaborative/comparative discussions about it, that might yield lessons for other
places—either in the UK, Argentina, or elsewhere?
Care as politics
I take seriously Bea Campbell’s dire account in “The need for a gender revolution” (6) of
the reaccommodation of patriarchy and capitalism under neoliberal austerity. Her account
underscores the importance of drawing on feminist care theory to imagine a ‘good society’.
We have a crisis of care in the US. This care crisis entails rapidly increasing demands
for elder care, child-care, and affordable health care occurring hand in glove with cuts in
education and social assistance for low-income people. Even as demands increase, welfare
and public care is defunded or privatized into the market economy or into households. This
crisis crosses social divides of class and race, citizenships, and across different forms of
families and households.
The crisis of care is so much more than an economic problem—it is also a problem
of emotion, obligation, and ethics. The care crisis touches us in multiple registers as we
struggle to provide care to children, parents, and friends. Our everyday struggles around care
denaturalize neoliberal claims of autonomous individuals, of the construction of persons as
first and foremost entrepreneurial selves and consumers and claims that the market is the
answer to all of society’s needs.
This is a crisis in common that reveals our interdependence and, in so doing, constitutes
an ‘outside’ to capitalism. A central paradox in capitalist societies and in contemporary
neoliberal settlements is, on the one hand, the absolute centrality of care to our lives and
societies while on the other, care is devalued or literally unpaid.
Capitalist societies have resolved this need for unvalued, unpaid care through various
forms of coercion: slavery, debt peonage, trafficking persons, gendered status obligation.(7)
But securing care through conditions of extreme exploitation opens up new avenues for
political alliances as we see in domestic workers movements and drives to unionize low‑wage
workers in the US.
This in-common crisis understood through a radical, feminist conception of care, provides
both language and sites for a politics of alliance.
(6)
Campbell B, 2014, “The need for a gender revolution” Soundings 56
See Nakano G E, 2010 Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA).
(7)
Discussant comments
2049
What I mean is that there is no capitalist/neoliberal economy without care. This claim
draws on Doreen’s essay “Vocabularies of the economy” in the Kilburn Manifesto (8) where
she argues that, while language produces a seemingly naturalized and coherent/separate
‘economy’, in actuality this is a political construction that we must contest. In sharp contrast
to the binary of economy/care, feminist care theory insists on the interconnectedness
of all elements of our world (including the more than human). Care offers an ontology of
connection, a language of ethics and of interconnected radical responsibility (as distinct from
individualized responsibility). Critical theories of care provide a basis for understanding our
connections and our common humanity. I do not intend to descend into romanticism; on the
contrary, I argue that we should view care as a site for politics.
The UK and US versions of neoliberalism advance a ‘common sense’ in which both care
and planetary health are supplements, outsides, or excesses to capitalist politics. Drawing on
Ranciere the supplement is those parts of the population that have no part.(9) Unpaid care is
that which cannot be seen and cannot be heard in neoliberal framings of the world. Ranicere
argues that politics resides in the supplement; in its ability to disrupt the ordered legitimacy
of economy and neoliberal political discourse. Regardless of how unassailable dominant
economism seems in neoliberal projects, there always exists a remainder, a supplement—that
which is made invisible, unheard, irrelevant.
Care is politics in this Rancierian sense—once care is fully visible as essential to the
community as a whole—it can disrupt the order and rationalities of capital.
For example, and I am going far out on a limb here in order to be suggestive, Judith
Butler invites us to think about how alliance politics in public spaces destroy the binary
distinctions of care/economy.(10) Writing about the eighteen days in Tahrir Square in 2011,
she argues that for bodies to remain in alliance in public spaces for days and weeks, they
must have shelter, food, toilets, and so on. They make publicly visible and undeniable the
reality that maintaining society requires care and interdependence. During those days, Butler
argues, the protesters enacted the very forms of sociality that they were striving to bring
into being. Their feminist politics of care enacted equality against hierarchy, stood against
masculinist power, stood for peace against militatized violence, and for sustainable lives
against austerity. Their enactment of a public sociality made visible ways of living that do
not privilege ‘the economy’ but, rather, see all the diverse tasks of making life as integral to
making political life.
Politicizing care entails alliance politics and feminist care ethics offers political language
and strategies for imagining and bringing into being a ‘good post-neoliberalism’.
(8)
Massey D, 2014, “Vocabularies of the economy” Soundings 53
Ranciere J, 2001, “Ten theses on politics” Theory and Event 5(3)
(10)
Butler J, 2011. “Bodies in alliance and the politics of the street”, European Institute for Progressive
Cultural Politic, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en
(9)