After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto

225 Pages·2015·2.261 MB·English

by  Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin

After Neoliberalism:
THE KILBURN MANIFESTO
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After Neoliberalism:
THE KILBURN MANIFESTO
Edited by Stuart Hall,
Doreen Massey & Michael Rustin
A SOUNDINGS COLLECTION
London Lawrence & Wishart 2015
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Lawrence and Wishart Limited
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Typesetting: e-type
Cover design: Andrew Corbett
© Soundings 2015
Individual articles © author
Th e authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Design and
Patents Act, 1998 to be identifi ed as the authors of this work.
All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study,
research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 9781 910448 106
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Published by Soundings
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Contents
Preface 7
Framing statement 9
After neoliberalism: analysing the present
Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin
1 Vocabularies of the economy 24
Doreen Massey
2 A relational society 37
Michael Rustin
3 Common-sense neoliberalism 52
Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea
4 After neoliberalism: the need for a gender revolution 69
Beatrix Campbell
5 A growing discontent: class and generation under
neoliberalism 85
Ben Little
6 States of imagination 99
Janet Newman and John Clarke
7 Whose economy? Reframing the debate 116
Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin
8 Rethinking the neoliberal world order 136
Michael Rustin and Doreen Massey
9 Energy beyond neoliberalism 156
Platform
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10 Race, migration and neoliberalism 176
Sally Davison and George Shire
11 Displacing neoliberalism 191
Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin
Notes on contributors 222
Preface
The project of the Kilburn Manifesto grew out of work by
Soundings writers to understand the state of political play in light
of the fi nancial crisis of 2007-8. Th e editorial board decided that the
most productive way of thinking about these issues was through
Gramsci’s idea of conjunctural analysis, and instituted a series of
seminars and articles to help address the nature of such a project.
(Some of these articles were subsequently brought together in an
ebook, Th e Neoliberal Crisis, which is now being published in print by
L&W, as a companion to this volume.)
In 2013 we – along with our fellow founding editor of Soundings,
Stuart Hall – decided to develop this work further and to bring
together, in instalments, an online Manifesto. Th e idea was to form
an analysis of the political context that was both unifying and
systemic, but was also respectful to the particularities of the issues
and areas of society to be discussed; we also wanted to involve
diff erent voices and perspectives in discussing them. In 2013 we
published the Framing Statement for the Manifesto, which we
decided to call the Kilburn Manifesto, as all three editors lived in this
area. Following that, eleven further instalments of the Manifesto
were published with free online access, in order to make the ideas and
the ensuing debate as accessible as possible. Various versions of the
instalments were also made available in other formats, including in
Soundings journal, on Open Democracy and on Th e Guardian’s
Comment is Free. By popular request, the full versions of all these
instalments are now collected together here in one print volume.
Each chapter of this book is partly the product of the specifi c moment
of its writing, slightly diff erent for each piece written over the past
two years. To emphasise this developmental process over time, we
have retained the original temporal markers in the chapters.
Newspaper headlines, breaking news items and so on remain the
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8 after neoliberalism
same, to reinforce the diff erent contexts within which the debate
around the manifesto unfolded.
As readers will know, Stuart Hall died in February 2014, but he
was contributing to the development of the Manifesto, and to its
writing, until quite soon before his death. Th is project could not have
taken place without his initial commitment, and without his contribu-
tion to the ideas which are developed in these texts.
Th roughout the two years of this project, the Kilburn Manifesto
has always been a collective and collaborative endeavour. After the
publication of each instalment we held a public seminar in the Marx
Memorial Library, and the discussion always continued afterwards in
the lively space of the upstairs room at the pub around the corner. We
found these discussions enormously helpful and engaging – and it’s
worth pointing out that the liveliness and openness of the manifesto
debate has taken place in the kind of public, common spaces (the
library, the pub, the web) that are currently so threatened by
neoliberalism.
Our thanks go to all the people who were respondents to the instal-
ments at the seminars: Mevan Babakar, Anna Coote, Hilary Cottam,
Emma Dowling, Jane Foot, Deborah Grayson, Ewa Jasiewicz, Samuel
Kirwan, Shiv Malik, James Meadway, Pragna Patel, Justin Rosenberg,
Polly Trenow, Guy Shrubsole, Andrew Simms, David Wearing and
Alison Winch – for giving us your time and providing such thought-
provoking responses.
Our thanks also go to all the contributors, to members of the edito-
rial board of Soundings, and especially to Sally Davison, Lynda Dyson,
Katharine Harris and Becky Luff in the Lawrence & Wishart offi ce.
Th anks also to Jo Littler for all of her work on the seminars, particu-
larly her excellent chairing. Finally, we would also like to thank the
many people who came to and contributed to the meetings and semi-
nars which accompanied this project, and the Marx Memor ial Library
for providing our venue.
Doreen Massey & Michael Rustin
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framing statement
After neoliberalism:
analysing the present
Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin
With the banking crisis and the credit crunch of 2007-8, and
their economic repercussions around the globe, the system of
neoliberalism, or global free-market capitalism, that has come to dom-
inate the world in the three decades since 1980, has imploded. As the
scale of toxic debt became evident, credit and inter-bank lending dried
up, spending slowed, output declined and unemployment rose. Th e
system’s vastly infl ated fi nancial sectors, which speculate in assets
largely unrelated to the real economy of goods and services, precipi-
tated an economic crisis whose catastrophic consequences are still
unfolding.
We believe that mainstream political debate simply does not recog-
nise the depth of this crisis, nor the consequent need for radical
rethinking. Th e economic model that has underpinned the social and
political settlement of the last three decades is unravelling, but the
broader political and social consensus apparently remains in place. We
therefore off er this analysis as a contribution to the debate, in the hope
that it will help people on the left think more about how we can shift
the parameters of the debate, from one concerning small palliative and
restorative measures, to one which opens the way for moving towards
a new political era and new understandings of what constitutes the
good society.1
For three decades, the neoliberal system has been generating vast
profi ts for multi-nationals, investment institutions and venture capi-
talists, and huge accumulations of wealth for the new global super-rich,
while grossly increasing the gap between rich and poor and deepening
inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between
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