Jamie Gough

Neoliberalism and Socialisation in the Contemporary City: Opposites, Complements and Instabilities

This paper explores some dialectics of neoliberalism and socialisation in contemporary urbanism. The significance of socialisation—nonmarket cooperation between social actors—in both production and reproduction has tended to increase in the long term. Socialisation does not always take politically progressive forms, yet it always has a problematic relation with private property and class discipline. Socialisation of diverse forms grew during the long boom, but this exacerbated the classic crisis tendencies of capitalism and resulted in increasing politicisation. Neoliberalism offered a resolution of these tensions by imposing unmediated value relations and class discipline, fragmenting labour and capital and fostering depoliticisation. However, this has led to manifest inefficiencies and failure adequately to reproduce the wage relation. Many longstanding forms of socialisation have therefore been retained, if in modified forms. Moreover, substantially new forms of urban socialisation have developed in cities. This paper examines the role of business organisations, industrial clusters, top–down mobilisation of community and attempts at “joined–up” urban governance. It is argued that these fill gaps in socialisation left by neoliberalism. Their neoliberal context has largely prevented their politicisation, in particular heading off any socialist potential. Indeed, the new forms of urban socialisation have internalised neoliberal social relations and often deepened social divisions. Thus, paradoxically, they can achieve the essential aims of neoliberalism better than “pure” neoliberalism itself. Nevertheless, these forms of socialisation are often weakened by neoliberalism. Contemporary urban class relations and forms of regulation thus reflect both opposition and mutual construction between neoliberal strategies and forms of socialisation. The paper ends by briefly contrasting this theorisation with associationalist and regulationist approaches.

Spaces of social exclusion

deeper analysis of its causes, examining a range of policy options, and giving a significant role to space, place, and scale. It concentrates on Britain and aims to overturn the recent policy consensus that social and cultural processes exclude certain abnormal individuals from mainstream society and thereby produce poverty. Instead, it argues that capitalist and other oppressive social relations necessarily produce poverty—the inability to participate in normal social interactions and failure to reach minimum consumption norms necessary for social participation. The book has three parts. The first part argues that state strategy toward poverty has swung between coercion and incorporation and has always mixed the two. It identifies some strong continuities and traces them to the contradictory needs of capital. Turning to territories and scale in poverty management, it argues that the classification of some areas as deviant and poor elides people and place and justifies superficial environmentally determinist explanations of exclusion. This section also reviews the extent of poverty in contemporary Britain, noting that whatever measure of poverty is used, poverty remains a horrendous problem. It outlines the main social groups who suffer from poverty and explains how race, gender, and sexuality both cause poverty and worsen the experience of it. The second part focuses on three main causes of social exclusion: the economy and labor market, the state, and the sphere of social reproduction, particularly housing. It argues that all three have been worsened by the long crisis in capitalist profitability since the 1970s. The results have been falls in real wages and job security, the intensification of work, and the rise of informal and illegal work. The state has become more exclusionary with the adoption of neoliberal reforms, and these reforms have generated unevenness in poverty and produced “postcode lotteries” in access to services. The adoption of welfare-to-work strategies has forced the poor into any available work and thereby reduced conditions at the bottom of the labor market. Taxation has become less progressive and has been shifted from corporations to labor. These reforms have produced the growing spatial segregation of poor groups in low-quality housing. The authors argue that increasing commodification and the growth of women’s paid employment have led to a certain degree of social fragmentation and the decline of neighborhood support. They suggest that increasing property crime is a logical reaction among the poor to commodity culture and that it receives especially harsh treatment from the state. The third part critiques consensus poverty policies, and it insists that engagement in the market cannot be a solution because markets fail the poor. Targeted area-based interventions are too small. Decentralized public services and community initiatives do not have enough distance from the market to be socially inclusive, and new forms of partnership governance only continue class biases. Finally, the book reviews four main types of political philosophy: neoliberalism, conservative interventionism, associationalism, and socialism, and, as one may expect, the authors are not keen on the first three. Neoliberalism neglects the need for the socialization of production and reproduction and leads employers and the state to abandon poor neighborhoods. The policies of Major and Blair are argued to represent a form that devalues unpaid caring work. These weak welfare policies of this interventionism have been undermined by the neoliberal economy. They have failed to improve the distribution of income, and services remain poor and class divided. Conservative Spaces of Social Exclusion

The Construction of Mainstream Local Economic Initiatives: Mobility, Socialization, and Class Relations

The mainstream of local economic initiatives in Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States embodies mild intervention in production, attention to welfare, and collaborative class relations. Thus, in the midst of national neoliberalism, there is a return to the pragmatic, interventionist politics of the postwar built on class consensus at the local level. In this paper we seek to explain the paradox in terms of the contradictory upities of capital mobility and socialization, of disciplinary class relations and cooperation, of money and productive capital, and their contemporary spatial forms. The spatial ambit of mainstream local economic initiatives is important in mediating these contradictions. Localism has been vital in constructing their cooperative class relations.

The Genesis and Tensions of the English Regional Development Agencies: Class Relations and Scale

This paper argues that the origin of the recently-founded Regional Development Agencies in England should be theorised in terms of the class relations and tensions of economic regulation in Britain and the use of scale and re-scaling to manage those tensions. The paper considers the class logic of neoliberalism, which has been particularly strongly developed in Britain due to its longstanding liberal settlement, and the problems of socialisation of production which neoliberalism has produced. The class tensions and problems of socialisation which first created, and then led to the decline of, centrally-redistributive regional policy are discussed. Analogous processes at the EU level are examined. A key precursor of the RDAs, local economic initiatives, is examined, and the spatial-class relations underlying them discussed. These arguments are then the basis for understanding the partial rescaling of regulation in England downwards from the nation state and upwards from the local level, and also the shift from centrallyto locally-controlled regional policy. This analysis of origins of the RDAs then suggests a number of tensions in the project which will shape its future trajectory; due to these tensions the class relations of the new regional economic governance remain open.

The Emergence of an Idea

Successful urban regeneration on both sides of the Atlantic has been led by people pulling themselves and their communities up by their own bootstraps, not outsiders telling them what to do. As the experience of cities like Glasgow and Sheffield demonstrates, it requires local leaders with a wider vision of the community than their individual, sectional roles within it, and a community in which all sections are prepared to submerge their differences and work towards common goals (Financial Times editorial, 13 June 1991).

Book review reply: A reply to Angus Cameron

Chapters 1 and 2 are a history of dominant (spatial) ideas about poverty, and policies following from those ideas. Chapter 3 discusses recent, diverse definitions, and associated measures, of ‘poverty’ and ‘social exclusion’. Chapters 8 to 11 discuss theorizations of social exclusion associated with different political viewpoints than our own: the current British consensus, neoliberalism, xenophobic populism, Conservative interventionism, and associationalism. We give the best possible account of these theorizations in their own terms before critiquing them.

The Future of the Consensus

We now turn to the future of consensus local economic policy. This has become increasingly dominant in Britain over the past ten years: will this dominance continue? We first analyse, in greater depth than we have done so far, the promise of this strategy and the basis of its growth. This enables us to examine the problems and tensions of the consensus which will condition its future.

The International Economy and the Future of Local Economic Policy

We have stressed the importance of international trade and capital flows for local initiatives. In this final chapter we consider three key international issues: the possible Europeanisation and Japanisation of the British economy, and the relation of local initiatives to world economic stagnation. We finish the book by considering the political future of local economic policy.

How Can Markets be Freed

We have seen that the Conservatives’ local economic initiatives have been relatively weak: they tolerated, and over time shifted towards, consensus policies (pp. 72–5). This is a result of a fundamental tension in strategies to revive capitalism: on the one hand they have to increase the mobility of capital and the freedom of markets, while on the other they have to organise the socialisation of production (pp. 122–3). The freeing of markets and the circulation of capital sought by the Right are not ensured merely by removing barriers; they depend on profitable and efficient production, which requires the social organisation of production addressed by the Centre. This dilemma has often surfaced in debates between the Conservative government and its business supporters; it means that neo-liberalism is constantly vulnerable to pressure from the Centre. In this chapter we show how this contradiction will shape the future of the Right’s strategy.

Are There Local Economies

There are three popular views of current trends in ‘localness’. In the first, national economies, and large parts of the international economy, are becoming increasingly homogeneous. Production is dominated by the transnationals and consumption by mass-produced world products. Ever-improving communications are rendering production footloose. Skills, culture, technologies and methods of work are becoming equalised — a McDonalds’ world.