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‘No such thing as society’? Neoliberalism and the social

John Clarke

Introduction

Neoliberalism, in its many variants, has involved a sustained attack on ideas, institutions and formations of the ‘social’, including those of traditional social welfare systems and more recent movements towards social reform. This disposition is pungently described by Wendy Brown (2018: 16) as ‘the neoliberal attack on the social, which includes an attack on equality, social belonging and mutual social obligation, and also an attack on the replacement of traditional morality and traditional hierarchies (including racial hierarchies) by social justice and social reform’.

But does this mean that neoliberalism is simply ‘anti-social’? As Brown indicates, there are certainly arguments for treating it as such, not least the impacts on health, wellbeing and longevity that have followed in the train of neoliberalism’s inequality-generating policies and practices in many places. The turn to ‘austerity’ that was the dominant response to the global financial crisis intensified such consequences (see, for example, Stuckler and Basu, 2013). Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that the view of neoliberalism as ‘anti-social’ risks reifying a particular conception of the social and misses critical ways in which neoliberalism not merely contests but has sought to reconstruct older conceptions and institutions of the social. Instead, we might take a more conjunctural view of the processes of neoliberalization, highlighting three questions in particular:

•What conceptions of ‘the social’ has neoliberalism promoted (rather than attacked)?

•What has happened to older conceptions of ‘the social’ (expressed in social welfare and wider notions of public-ness)?

•What are the ‘emergent’ possibilities through which people lay claim to the idea and sensibility of ‘the social’?

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of these questions.

In search of the social

Two orientations underpin the discussion. This chapter takes a view of the social that treats it as a shifting and contested field, composed of imaginings, representations and their institutionalizations rather than a fixed formation more or less associated with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare states (Huber and Stephens, 2001).

Such conceptions of the social tend to locate it in a long history of struggles (in the Global North) to mitigate, redress and reform the effects of capitalism that began with the workers’ movements of the late 19th century and culminated in the social democratic accomplishments of the period following the Second World War. Some (like Esping-Anderson, 1985, 1990) celebrated these social democratic accomplishments; others, such as Jacques Donzelot (1984, 1988), traced the de-politicizing effects of this ‘invention of the social’. But both views seem to over-identify the social with those welfarist formations.

In more general terms, the social appears as the conceptual and political poor relation of political economy. In both conventional and critical variants, the domain of the social is secondary, grasped as a phenomenon whose character derives from the big political forces and their dynamics. In contrast, other conceptual and political interventions from the margins (from multiple margins, indeed) have made efforts to make the significance and the recurrent contestation of the social both visible and productive, most notably feminists and feminist scholarship (of many varieties). This more dynamic conception of the social has at least three critical aspects. First, it means treating the social as the site of the (complex) relations and practices of social reproduction. Second, it demands thinking of the social as continually traversed by governmental strategies that seek to embed the devices and desires that will deliver the correct ordering of the population and its capacities (as Foucault knew, government in this sense is always seeking to make better people). Third, the social remains a contingent and contested field, rather than a set of fixed relationships and positions.

The study of welfare states came rather late to the discovery that welfare was contested by politics other than those of class, centring on challenges to the ways in which welfare citizenship was constructed and constrained through categoric distinctions built around gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, sexuality and disability (see, inter alia, Fiona Williams writing in Chapter 10; Lewis et al, 2000). In thinking about the social in these terms, we can draw on Catherine Hall’s comments in her study of metropole–colony relations across England and Jamaica, where she argues that the social is continuously engaged and reworked by projects and processes seeking to map, reorder and remake the social body:

Marking differences was a way of classifying, of categorising, of constructing boundaries for the body politic and the body social. Processes of differentiation, positioning men and women, colonisers and colonised, as if these divisions were natural, were constantly in the making, in conflicts of power … The mapping of difference, I suggest, the constant discursive work of creating, bringing into being, or reworking these hieratic categories, was always a matter of historical contingency. The map constantly shifted, the categories faltered, as different colonial sites came into the metropolitan focus, as conflicts of power produced new configurations in one place or another. (Hall, 2002:17, 20)

Although the temporal and spatial focus of this chapter is different, this view of a contingent and contested social provides a vital foundation for thinking about the shifting relationships between neoliberalism and the social.

The second condition for the discussion that follows centres on the challenge of thinking about neoliberalism conjuncturally, rather than as an epochal formation. This implies exploring the accumulating forces, tensions, contradictions and antagonisms that are condensed together into making a specific historical moment. In particular, it requires attention to the political and cultural formations that exist alongside the dominant tendency, the place occupied by neoliberalism for the past 30 years. In approaching this challenge, it is useful to return to Raymond Williams’ distinction between ‘epochal’ and ‘authentic historical’ analysis:

In what I have called epochal analysis, a cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is connected with the future as well as the past. In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelationships between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific effective dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. (Williams, 1977: 121)

Williams argues that the temptations, and risks, of ‘epochal analysis’ involve treating the epochal dominant as a ‘static type’ abstracted from the ‘real cultural processes’ that are its conditions. Instead, he points to the importance of crafting an ‘authentic historical analysis’ that is attentive to the internal dynamic relations of specific moments:

We have certainly to speak of the ‘dominant’ and the ‘effective’, and in these senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with further differentiation of each, of the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’, which in any real historical process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the ‘dominant’. (Williams, 1977: 121–2)

This chapter will certainly speak of the dominant – neoliberalism – and its shifting shapes and strategies, not least those that have arisen as neoliberalizing processes find new ways of dealing with its residual and emergent others. That will be the focus of the next section of the chapter. The following two sections consider the residual and the emergent more directly in their own terms.

Neoliberalism: from anti-social to remaking the social

Neoliberalism has certainly had an anti-social disposition, visible in several dynamics. There is a core commitment to the individualization of society, treating it as a multitude of self-seeking individuals engaging only in market or market-like transactions (embodying the conventional homo economicus of neoclassical economic theory). This individualization works through multiple imaginary figures, inviting/inciting subjects to see themselves as producers and consumers, as entrepreneurs and investors, as life planners and budget managers. This individualization is simultaneously an economization of the social, refusing to recognize forms of social relationship and interaction beyond the transactional. But these two dynamics are interwoven with a third, familialization. Indeed, it could be argued that the critical attention to neoliberalism’s individualization has tended to obscure this other dynamic, in which neoliberal processes tend towards what might be called possessive–competitive familialism. For example, in the United Kingdom, the recurring political–cultural incitement of people to be ‘hard working’ and ‘responsible’ was aimed less at individuals and more at families (invoking a nation of ‘hard working, responsible families’). This emphasis was foreshadowed by Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation that ‘there is no such thing as society’ which concluded that ‘there are only individual men and women and their families’. This individual–familial nexus provided a foundation for the anti-social policy logics of neoliberalism, in particular the dismantling or reform of collective or public institutionalizations of the social: public services, collective housing provision, the varieties of welfare state, and so on. It is also argued elsewhere (Clarke, 2007), that it is worth considering different sets of processes that have been in play in neoliberalism’s ‘subordination of the social’. These have included its subjugation to brutal market logics, its privatization and domestication (locating the social in the realm of the familial household), its spatial and scalar ‘narrowing’ as a residual setting and its valorization (treating it as the source of potential value, whether through processes of marketization or privatization of public resources or through its role as a setting for the creation and discovery of subjects of value, people who can be monetized in different ways, such as loan systems).

These arguments focus fundamentally on neoliberalism’s dominant character but certainly do not exhaust its repertoire of strategies for governing the social. To explore these involves opening up the political–cultural dynamics of neoliberalism to greater scrutiny, not least its interaction with alternative conceptions of the social. Such interactions emerge more visibly when we consider ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ rather than treating it as an abstracted general position. At this point we have to consider the ways in which neoliberal policies have found ways of cohabiting with other political and cultural processes and ways of imagining the social. Neoliberalism has proved remarkably adaptable (Peck, 2010) and this includes accommodations with different types of political regimes and forms of political culture. Neoliberalization has been conducted through dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, forms of liberal democracy and, of course, through a variety of international organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeking to make the world safe, and profitable, for capital during the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ era with the ‘stabilize, liberalize and privatize’ mantra (Williamson, 2008). Similarly, it has been enacted through conservative, neo-conservative, liberal, authoritarian and social democratic political programmes. This tends to confirm the hegemonic status of neoliberalism, but looked at from the other side, that dominance has been accomplished by learning to adapt, co-opt, incorporate and ventriloquize these many others. As Williams argued, the relationship between the dominant and the emergent is a critical issue for conjunctural analysis, and one exemplary focus for this dynamic has been questions of equality: of gender, ‘race’ and sexuality, especially (see inter alia Duggan, 2003; Lamble, 2013; Ludwig, 2016). Different neoliberalisms have found it possible to accommodate and incorporate social, political and cultural movements generated around equality by rendering them ‘individual’ matters (of choice, especially) and by folding them into what Harzig, Juteau and Schmitt (2003) call the ‘master narrative’ of diversity (but see also Cooper, 2004). Meanwhile, other neoliberalisms have been equally comfortable with political regimes of a more conservative, reactionary or restorationist character that have refused such diversity politics as undermining ‘the social fabric’ and ‘social order’.

More generally, the social constitutes a field that governing processes, including neoliberal ones, continually strive to occupy, dominate and direct. Governing processes are always directed towards finding ways of ordering the population (differentiating, hierarchizing, sorting, improving and more) and aim to institutionalize strategies that have the objective of making the people who they should be. Neoliberalism features here as a project or process committed to transforming the social, working through strategies of economization, individualization and familialization that aim to create (or ‘release’ in the naturalizing imagery of neoliberalism’s advocates) the array of responsible, dynamic and entrepreneurial selves; and, in reverse, to discipline and punish those who fail their new obligations. But alongside this, neoliberalization processes find ways of accommodating other versions of the social, especially those that can be folded into an individualizing narrative of choice, empowerment and liberation. It equally finds it possible to accommodate familial, patriarchal, heteronormative and repressive conceptions of the social and how it should best be ordered. Neoliberalism has proved able to cohabit with (and borrow from) a very wide range of social imaginaries, shape-shifting and acquiring new voicings as it borrows and bends from them.

The institutionalization of neoliberal rule in ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ has involved extensive political and governmental work: finding partners, building alliances, making compromises (both material and discursive) that seek to co-opt, absorb and incorporate other possibilities. The social is central to this understanding of the pragmatics of neoliberalism, since it is the terrain on which people live their everyday lives, find points of attachment, investment and identification (as well as distinction, detachment and refusal). Without underestimating neoliberalism’s destructive, ruthless and authoritarian capacities, it matters to understand how it seeks to enrol and engage people in specific places. As Ludwig argues:

neoliberalism also needs to be investigated as political project that engages people, deploys their hopes and promises them a good life, more freedom, wealth or personal fulfilment. Sexual politics need to be investigated as technologies of power that help to organize acceptance and consensus within neoliberalism. (Ludwig, 2016: 426)

In the process, new mappings of the social are elaborated through political and governmental projects and processes. The neoliberal remaking of the social has extended well beyond its articulation with the economic, producing new assemblages of people, positions and practices. Such changes have necessitated the remaking of ways of life, the elaboration of sets of distinctions and relationships within a population and between populations (in neoliberal’s globalizing effects). It has required the inculcation of habits and practices appropriate to dominant conceptions of a ‘modern people’ who need to step forward to take their place in a global world.

However, this poses some difficult political and analytical challenges for thinking about neoliberalism and its others. It suggests that we should be wary of thinking of policies, strategies and conceptions of the social as ‘essentially’ neoliberal, attending instead to the complex political work of borrowing and blending, incorporation and ventriloquism that goes on as neoliberal processes seek to find means of ruling that enrol populations into the desired ways of thinking and being. It may be that the processes of being co-opted or incorporated into neoliberal political and governmental projects strips the alternative or radical possibilities from these alternative conceptions of the social. For example, Andrea Muehlebach’s (2012) remarkable exploration of the rise of ‘the moral neoliberal’ in Italy points to the paradoxical, and apparently contradictory, strands of thought and feeling that underpinned the growth of voluntary care work in Italy, strands that included Catholic and socialist lineages. Muehlebach argues that the apparent opposition between such orientations and seemingly rational, market-centred neoliberalism conceals a larger unity. This larger view, she argues, ‘allows us to grasp neoliberalism as a form that contains practices and forces that appear as oppositional yet get folded into a single order’ (Muehlebach, 2012: 8). Her exploration of the connections between neoliberal rationality and other-oriented sentiments allows her:

to grasp neoliberalism as a complex of opposites that can contain what appear as oppositional practices, ethics and emotions … Neoliberalism thus appears not simply as malleable, but a process that may allow for the simultaneity and mutual dependency of forms and practices that scholars think of in oppositional terms. Neoliberalism is a force that can contain its negation – the vision of a decommodified, disinterested life and of a moral community of human relationality and solidarity that stands opposed to alienation. (Muehlebach, 2012: 25)

This is a significant argument about the shape-shifting and multi-vocal dynamic of neoliberalism, but it leaves us with two questions. First, is there an outside or a beyond to neoliberalism: something, somewhere, some orientation that is not neoliberal or has not (yet) been neoliberalized? Second, do those elements that are incorporated in neoliberalism necessarily remain neoliberal? Might they, in some place, at some time, be dis-incorporated or rearticulated to an alternative political project?

Abstractly, this matters: it seems wrong to treat incorporation as a one-way and one-time political process. In contrast, articulation, and the possibilities of dis-articulation and rearticulation seem a more fluid and dynamic way of thinking about such processes of ideological/discursive or cultural work. With this in mind, we now turn back to questions of what Williams called ‘the residual’, and its relations to the dominant.

Tracing the residual

When Williams writes about the residual, he is not treating it as simply as a historical left-over. Rather he is pointing to the significance of persistence. Here his understanding of the residual can be used to think about the persistence of ideas of the social, the public and social welfare (and their diverse institutionalizations). Williams argues that:

The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social and cultural institution or formation. (Williams, 1977: 122)

In this light, it can be argued that forms of collective social provision remain the focus of deep social and cultural attachments, not least because they speak to experiences, problems and desires that cannot be effectively addressed within the terms of the dominant. So, to what extent have older conceptions of the social persisted in the face of neoliberalism’s anti-social and re-socializing tendencies? The persistence of many of the problems and experiences that collective welfare provision was supposed to address – poverty, unemployment, ill-health, education and so on – serve to keep older images of the social alive, even if in subordinate ways. The intensification of those ‘social problems’ under neoliberal rule has constantly been accompanied by demands for more and better welfare, even as welfare states have been dismantled and restructured.

Indeed, the persistence of those experiences (as structural features of the social organization of capitalism) has sustained the ‘residual’ imaginary of social welfare and wellbeing. In its turn, this persistence of residual identifications, attachments and desires has supported the persistence of aspects of state welfare, public services and other forms of collective support and provision. As some versions of path-dependency theory argued, such attachments formed a critical feature of the ‘resilience’ of welfare states. For example, Paul Pierson argued that a variety of factors, but especially those located in popular politics, coalesced to make radical revision, or abolition, of welfare states unlikely:

There are strong grounds for scepticism about the prospect for any radical revision of the welfare state in most countries. Almost nowhere have politicians been able to assemble and sustain majority coalitions for a far-reaching contraction of social policy … The reasons have already been outlined. The broad scale of public support, the intensity of preferences among programme recipients, the extent to which a variety of actors (including employers) have adapted to the existing contours of the social market economy, and the institutional arrangements which favour defenders of the status quo make a frontal assault on the welfare state politically suicidal in most countries. (Pierson, 2001: 416)

Welfare states (in their different guises) have proven unevenly resistant to unlocking under neoliberal rule. This has been visible both in the persistence of a range of social/public institutions (for example, the NHS in the UK) and the forms of care and support that they provide. There are two important qualifications to the ‘resilience’ story. The first is that the period following the financial crisis of 2007–08 has had contradictory effects on such social provision. On the one hand, ‘austerity’ politics and policies have extensively undermined public spending on social provision, even as austerity increased the need for public support of different kinds (see, for example, Cooper and Whyte, 2017; Evans and McBride, 2017; McBride and Evans, 2017). The years of austerity and a retreat of the state have hampered national and global responses to the pandemic according to the UN (UNCTAD, 2020), which warns of a ‘lost decade’ if national governments choose to adopt austerity as their response to the severe global economic crisis now unfolding. At the same time, however, the multiple effects of ‘austerity’ appear to have undermined neoliberal rationality, generating (in the UK at least) a growing level of public support for some forms of welfare provision. Secondly, the assemblages that we call welfare states have been extensively modified, reworked and given new responsibilities for ensuring neoliberalized populations. Three particular directions in which the welfare state has been reorganized to make it more compatible with the perceived needs of capital in neoliberal times are the drive towards ‘workfare’, the contractualization of citizenship, and the subsidizing of capital. But we should also take account of the revitalization of nationalism and nativism in the remaking of welfare policies: for example, in the Orbán government’s mix of anti-immigration and familialist policies that attempt to secure Hungary against its Others: to make Hungary a place where ‘people benefit from being Hungarians’.¹

Popular experiences and expectations have been cast in multiple cultural registers, with talk of rights, entitlements, justice, fairness, security, care and more. Such discourses have been subjected to a long process of reworking that has combined both curtailment and renegotiation (in different places). In the UK, for example, the attack on welfare involved combining a demonization of the poor, the ‘rebalancing’ of rights and responsibilities expressed in the idea of citizenship, and a recrafting of the meaning of ‘fairness’, a much trumpeted ‘British value’ that was reworked to mean ‘fairness for all who earn it’ in the dominant ‘moral economy of austerity’ (Clarke, 2014). Despite such attempts to actively residualize the residual (treating its imagery as ‘old thinking’ or ‘out of time’), such conceptions of the social persist and indeed, from time to time, are brought to bear explicitly, increasingly coming to bear on the obligations that governments owe their citizens in turbulent times, even allowing for the equally persistent tensions about who might count as ‘their’ citizens. For example, Sharma, writing about Dalit women in India, argues that they mobilized a complex, heteroglossic variety of conceptions of rights, entitlements and justice in enacting themselves as citizens:

They positioned themselves as knowledgeable and deserving citizens, who had been short-changed by a corrupt local administration and who deserved government resources as their right; this was a direct challenge to official caricatures of their identities as unaware, irresponsible, and immoral. Furthermore, they used standard bureaucratic mechanisms, On the other hand, however, they used the older idiom of ‘mai-baap’ and the parental duty it invoked, to hold officials accountable. ‘Mai-baap’ referenced a different time and moral universe where just rulers, like good parents, were ethically bound to care for their wards. (Sharma, 2011: 974)

However, as Sharma notes, such bases for claims making are open to denial by state officials as being out of time and inappropriate. Residual formations are always vulnerable to such attempts at closure.

Emergent possibilities of the social

In contrast, new imaginings and practices of solidarity, security and collective welfare have continued to emerge as responses to the neoliberal subordination, degradation and impoverishment of the social. These emergent concerns have been articulated in diverse local, national and transnational movements: mobilizations and forms of association that operate in angular and discordant relationships with the dominant tendency.

Williams locates the emergent in a view that ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created’ while warning that ‘it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture … and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it’ (Williams, 1977: 123). Neoliberalism’s recurring failures, and the contradictions, dislocations and antagonisms that they generate, have been a fertile terrain for re-imaginings of the social. In particular, the exhaustion of neoliberal strategies around the social and the public realm (for example, contracting out, marketization and so on) has become increasingly visible. In the UK, the collapse of contracting corporations such as Carillion, the failures of semi-privatized public service providers (for example, educational trusts or the probation service) and the mishaps of contracted out services (notably, the practice of disability assessment) have all contributed to this sense of exhaustion. The experience of ‘austerity’ policy and practice, most particularly the devolution of fiscal stress, has intensified the sense of a degraded public realm, most visible in the ‘hollowing out’ of cities and towns where municipal authorities increasingly lack the capacity to respond to such tendencies (see, for example, Peck 2012; Phinney, 2018).

Despite this, there has been a significant move towards the ‘remunicipalization’ of public services, most notably the provision of water (see, for example, Pigeon et al, 2012). At stake in such processes are not only the economic, political and legal processes of shifting ownership and control of resources, but also a mix of older and emergent imaginings of what water is and how it might be controlled and managed. In an article exploring Italy’s anti-water privatization struggles, Muehlebach sets up some of the critical questions at stake in conflicts over forms of ownership and control of this resource:

This paper explores water as a commons (or what Italians call bene comune) through the rise and fall of Italy’s antiwater privatization movement. I suggest that the power of this movement lay in its insistence that water could only be governed as a commons if it simultaneously also included the recuperation of the democratic process as collective social and practical activity as well. I show that this process of recuperation gave life both to effective forms of mass political action as well as a new round of dispossession on the part of the Italian state. This article thus expands on a point made by a long line of theorists on Marx’s concept of ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ accumulation by arguing that Italians were not only dispossessed of their right to publicly own water but of their capacity to effective democratic action as such. (Muehlebach, 2018: 343; see also Bakker, 2007)

These debates reflect a growing interest in ideas and practices of commoning. Commoning identifies practices of governing natural resources for collective use and is interwoven with a political imaginary of how social life might, and should, be organized. Linebaugh has made the case for the value of treating ‘the commons’ as an active process:

To speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst – the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity, rather than as a noun, a substantive. (Linebaugh, 2007: 279)

Globally the interest in commoning has expanded, bringing together the exploration of existing practices of commoning, the creation of policies and procedures for ‘governing the commons’ and the elaboration of a politics of commoning as an anti-capitalist and anti-individualist ecological economics. This interest has also been developed through discussions about whether a ‘social commons’ can be imagined, such that issues of social protection, wellbeing and welfare can be rethought as communal resources and rights (see, inter alia, Barbagallo and Federici, 2012; Mestrum, 2015; Williams, 2015). Francine Mestrum has claimed that:

When welfare states or social protection are perceived as commons, after a defining and regulating process, they can contribute to collective and individual welfare, as emerging from collective and participatory action. The commons sustain our common being, our being together, our co-existence. They go beyond individual interests. (Mestrum, 2015: 6)

These emergent ways of thinking about – of imagining – the social, point to new possibilities of articulating the economic, the political and the social and give the question of social reproduction a much more central place in such imaginings. They speak to the interwoven crises – of production, of sociality, of the environment and of social reproduction – and precisely identify that interweaving as the fundamental condition of the present.

Finally, there are emergent politics and practices that seek to construct solidarities across national boundaries, many directed at supporting and sustaining migrants in the current world of global flows and intensified boundary work (Yuval-Davis et al, 2019). Versions of ‘sanctuary’ spaces, ‘welcome cultures’ and practices of support have recurrently appeared in the Global North as ‘national’ citizens try to find ways to refuse the demonization, exclusion and repression of migrants and to find ways of living and working in solidarity with them (see, for example, Bhimji, 2016; Cantat, 2016; Hamman and Karakayali, 2016; Rajaram, 2016; Tazzioli and Walters, 2019), Cantat examines forms and practices of solidarity, including that of ‘Mediterranean solidarity’, which articulates connections within and across the Mediterranean, repositioning ‘Europe’ in the process. She argues that:

The emergence of new political subjectivities that bring together refugees from a range of horizons and activists in solidarity with them challenges the geography of borders and separation promoted by the EU. For some of the participants, it is also integral to anti-capitalist struggles in the contemporary era: fighting processes of migrant illegalisation is seen as an indispensable aspect of worker solidarity under condition of global capitalism. This contests the binary conceptualisations of politics underpinning state power. Where migrants are spoken about as exterior to political communities in Europe, these joint struggles and their use of the narrative around Mediterranean identity in sites as far away as Germany insists on the interiority of a migrant presence and claims their possibility of and right to belonging. (Cantat, 2016: 28)

I am not suggesting that these emergent conceptions of the social provide a coherent and integrative political programme (although they do overlap and intersect in some interesting ways). The point is to recognize that the dominant, that continually shapes shifting neoliberalization processes, continues to encounter alternatives that insist on its failings, its contradictions and its disasters, while indicating that other ways of organizing the social, other ways of living together, are possible. Such emergent alternatives are, of course, subject to different political cultural tactics aimed to neutralize, incorporate or merely dismiss them. They are denounced as unrealistic and utopian. They fail to promise the endless growth without which capitalism makes little sense. They are reduced to fantasies of a ‘social’ or ‘sharing’ economy, or the creation of ‘social enterprises’. But they persistently recur as other ways of thinking and imagining in the face of the multiplying catastrophes of actually existing neoliberalism.

Conclusion: ‘people want the social back’

In the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 in London – a disaster that appallingly embodied the neoliberal degradation of the social in many ways – one local Member of Parliament, David Lammy (Labour, Tottenham), said in an interview: ‘“I knew that appetite for the end of austerity existed in our cities … but the [2017] election proved it goes beyond that now. People want the social back. They are clear that you cannot contract everything out”’ (Adams, 2017). This was a fascinating evocation of the social, directly addressing the failures of neoliberal governance. But which social might this be? It is possible that Lammy’s evocation of the social draws on a rather complex mixture of residual and emergent elements. In his interview Lammy referred to an older public realm, invoking social provision and a civic culture of support: ‘“Even in the 70s and 80s when my mother picked up her pay packet every Friday from Tottenham town hall … there was a proper civic society, we had a civic glue. A lot of that has gone”’ (Adams, 2017). In Lammy’s view, councils like Kensington and Chelsea simply don’t know how to do ‘civic’ anymore.

‘They believe they are there for the upper middle class folk of Notting Hill, who rely on their bin collections, and want their roads fixed, and don’t want high-rise blocks looking like eyesores so they get them cladded. That’s about it for them in terms of public services.’ (Adams, 2017)

He describes the borough council as the epitome of ‘light-touch’ regulation, which puts every service out to competitive tender or outsources it, a tendency that has infected all local government since the 1980s. The result of this philosophy, he believes, was that when the crisis happened it was not only that the council failed to act, it was more that the habit of intervention was not in their make-up (Adams, 2017).

But as a black MP representing a North London constituency, Lammy must know that the public services and civic culture of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain were structured around a series of exclusions and subordinations that worked though intersections of ‘race’, class and gender, their ‘universalism’ more promised than realized. Therefore, at stake in getting the social ‘back’ is the challenge of rethinking it one more time, to address both the present failures of the neoliberal ‘neo-social’ (to borrow Fabian Kassl’s phrase, 2006) and the limitations and contradictions of the older social democratic/labourist version. What is at stake in conceptions of the social is too vital to be left to nostalgia, even as we seek to evoke residual conceptions of why the social was once valued, and why it continues to be the focus of emergent imaginaries. The social persists in posing challenges that simply cannot be answered within the terms of the neoliberal dominant.

Note

1https://thehungaryjournal.com/2019/02/10/orban-announces-major-family- protection-package/.

References

Adams, T. (2017) David Lammy Interview, The Guardian, 2 July, www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/02/david-lammy-mp-grenfell-tower-interview-blair-brown-black.

Bakker K. J. (2007) ‘The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter-globalization, Anti-privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South’, Antipode, 39(3): 430–55.

Barbagallo, C. and Federici, S. (2012) ‘Introduction: Care Work and the Commons’, The Commoner, 15: 1–21, www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/commoner_issue-15.pdf.

Bhimji, F. (2016) ‘Contesting the Dublin Regulation: Refugees and Migrant Claims to Personhood and Rights in Germany’, Intersections EEJSP, 2(4): 51–68.

Brown, W. (2018) ‘Where the Fires Are: Wendy Brown talks to Jo Littler’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 68: 14–25. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/s68_02brown_littler.pdf

Cantat, C. (2016) ‘Rethinking Mobilities: Solidarity and Migrant Struggles Beyond the Narrative of Crisis’, Intersections EEJSP, 2(4): 11–32.

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