The last ten years has been framed by political austerity (Chapter 3; Featherstone, 2016), and austerian realism at the municipal scale (Davies and Blanco, 2017; Peck, 2017a). In response, the geography and planning literature has experienced a burgeoning of post-political interpretations of recent forms of contentious politics, and identified the foreclosure of anti- austerity politics at a variety of scales (Decreus et al., 2014; Haughton et al., 2016; Mouffe, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2011; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). Others have similarly taken inspiration from a focus on anti-politics (Clarke, 2012, 2015; Mair, 2013). Drawing upon the writings of Swyngedouw (2007, 2009, 2011, 2014), Rancière (2010) and Žižek (2002), such accounts perceive the contemporary ‘post-political’ condition as an elite strategy in which radical antagonism is replaced by a techno-managerial concern with establishing consensus, which is achieved through marginalising and excluding uninvited dissent from mainstream political debate. The implication is the denial of the possibilities for alternative socio-political interpretations, and the concretisation of neoliberal ideology by posing market-driven economic rationalities as the only legitimate societal arrangement (Swyngedouw, 2009). In turn, social movements become ‘accounted for’; their presence in civil society is heard but is ineffective, thereby reinforcing the credibility and supposed transparency of liberal democracy (Swyngedouw, 2014). The previous chapter illustrated how technologies of depoliticisation are integral to consensus-seeking strategies for austerian realism, and post-politics therefore casts many expressions of political activity as unproductive and unable to disrupt this consensus, which contributes to the continuation of ‘zombie neoliberalism’ (Peck, 2010). However, other geographers have sought to demonstrate that while the post-political can fruitfully expose elite depoliticisation strategies from above, it is “less adept at accounting for the actually existing forms of contestation” that have emerged to contest austerity from below (Nolan and Featherstone, 2015: 351; Featherstone, 2015). Indeed, various protest movements have testified to re-politicising the crisis in ways which expose the limits of this explanatory framework (Featherstone et al., 2015), where post-politicisation is a contingent and contextual process (rather than a condition) that is constantly being disrupted and reshaped at multiple scales (North et al., 2017; O’Callaghan et al., 2014). It has been argued that elite strategies of depoliticisation are not necessarily new (Nolan and Featherstone, 2015), and that post-political perspectives overstate the extent to which neoliberalism is all-encompassing and, conversely, underplay the role of social movements in challenging neoliberal ‘business as usual’ (North et
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138 politics capable of disrupting this impasse, and thereby discourages an engagement with the myriad grassroots challenges that may constitute the germ of an alternative to neoliberalism (Larner, 2014), thus contributing to a politically disempowering analysis which prefigures how movements will fail rather than how they can be built up (Beveridge and Koch, 2016). This has spurred calls for more sympathetic interpretations of bottom-up political activity which engage with those actually existing forms of contestation on their own, less prescriptive, terms (Featherstone et al., 2015; Hadjimichalis and Hudson, 2014; North et al., 2017).
This is a welcome intervention in a debate which has hitherto adopted a primarily capital- centric lens – for example, studying capital flows (Harvey, 2010) or the scales of fiscal disciplining (Peck, 2012) – to the marginalisation of ongoing forms of contention, which are lamented as ‘reactive’, ‘localised’ or ‘defensive’, and supposedly indicative of the political left’s failure to capture a counter-hegemonic moment (Dean, 2015; Worth, 2013; Panitch et
al., 2011; Winlow et al., 2015). Yet, responses to austerity have been underplayed or simply
ignored (Featherstone, 2015) while engagements with those actually existing forms of contestation have proved productive for assessing grassroots responses and alternatives to neoliberalisation (Arampatzi, 2017a; North and Huber, 2004), in ways which suggest that there are many challenges to austerity (see also Featherstone, 2015). These analyses are inspired by Foucauldian-infused perspectives which view resistance and domination as intertwined (Sharp
et al., 2000), such that neoliberal austerity takes place on contested terrain and is re-negotiated
through ongoing struggles, rather than imposed on irrevocably post-political landscapes (Featherstone et al., 2015). Moreover, since people experience austerity in a variety of ways (as consumers of local services, tenants, welfare claimants, taxpayers and more), emerging struggles will likely coalesce around a heterogeneity of political issues and identities, perhaps not always explicitly linked to austerity (Seymour, 2014). This necessitates engaging with those actually existing forms of contestation that are emerging, and consideration of how the crisis is being interpreted, addressed and contested in diverse ways (Featherstone, 2003, 2008). This must be allied with a closer inspection of the less overt, ‘heroic’ (North et al., 2017), or ‘successful’ (Zamponi, 2012) forms of contentious politics, particularly those that take place beyond the direct observation of power-holders (Scott, 1985, 1990; Theodossopoulos, 2014). This disrupts the binary between overt confrontation and complicit acquiescence to cuts, and emphasises movements’ agency to re-work the terms of austerity (Hall et al., 2013) and to develop their ‘power to’ produce different political imaginaries and expressions (Holloway, 2002) which, in turn, open up, rather than foreclose, the possibilities for alternatives (Bayırbağ
et al., 2017; Featherstone et al., 2015; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014).
Finally, it is important to consider how social movements generate political agency and the capacity to mobilise, since the presence of grievances alone is insufficient (Tarrow, 1998).
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139 Scholars of social movement theory (SMT) have variously posited that collective action occurs when either resources (McCarthy and Zald, 1977) or political opportunities (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1985; McAdam, 1982) are present, yet it is necessary to understand how movement frames are constructed, contested and reworked ‘in action’ (Snow and Benford, 1988; Tarrow, 1988). Geographers have also sought to affirm the importance of a variety of spatialities in shaping political activity (Davies, 2012; Jessop et al. 2008; Leitner et al., 2008; Nicholls et
al., 2013), where concepts such as place, space, scale and networks are not mere backdrops,
but themselves formative of political struggle (Featherstone, 2003, 2005). Indeed, research has shown how austerity has been contested through particular geographies of crisis where, alongside elite mobilisations of place-based discourses (Chapter 5), the nation, for example, has been harnessed as a significant scale to articulate exclusionary forms of opposition (Featherstone, 2015; Ince et al., 2015; Knight, 2013; Theodossopoulos, 2014), although grassroots struggles over austerity have simultaneously been generative of new political identities and solidarities (Arampatzi, 2017a; Featherstone, 2015). Engaging with bottom-up struggles on their own terms can therefore provide a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which differently placed struggles are conducted, and how places and political identities relate to austerity urbanism. This responds to Martin’s (2003, 2013) call to engage with the actual socio-spatial relations that movement participants practice, rather than those spatialities that the analyst observes or seeks to privilege (see also Jessop et al., 2008). Hence, building on arguments made in Chapters 2 and 5, this chapter promotes place as a key mobilising discourse for local anti-austerity politics, where place-based political imaginaries are understood as emerging from the networks between, and legacies of, different struggles, rather than being the product of territorially bounded identities (Davies and Featherstone, 2013). This chapter therefore shows how critically engaging with the diverse geographies of actually existing anti-austerity contestation opens up fruitful avenues for thinking through the practices of, and possibilities and limits for, anti-austerity resistance. The more-than-cuts approach is further defined, thus opening up an analysis which reads anti-austerity politics in Liverpool as messy, situated and contextual. As outlined in Chapter 3, a more-than-cuts approach attends to actually existing forms of contestation from the bottom-up, and examines the possibilities and limits of anti-austerity politics as they are actually practiced. This entails more sympathetic and sensitive interpretations of political activity which result from bottom-up engagement with the anti-austerity movement in the city, observing it on its own terms. The approach argues that such readings can produce more genuinely politically productive outcomes than blanket theories such as post-politics might imply. Observing local political activity in this way also opens up avenues for understanding the myriad ways in which people understand, and might oppose, austerity through a heterogeneity of political or social issues (discussed in 6.3). While
Chapter Six: The Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Anti-Austerity Contestation’
140 a more-than-cuts approach has considered how LCC can simultaneously reject and embrace austerity politics as both a threat to its very existence and as a radical opportunity to reconfigure itself, this framework will now turn to consider how local grassroots groups and organisations at once reject austerity yet, concurrently, seize the conjuncture as a moment to craft new political identities and solidarities in ways which can be productive towards envisaging alternatives to the current socio-political order.
Specific to this chapter, the more-than-cuts approach shows how conceptions of austerity and proposed alternatives depend upon highly localised interpretations, but which are intertwined with broader relational political imaginaries. This is practiced across a self-identified ‘coalition’ or assemblage of anti-austerity forces gathered primarily at the city level, but which seek to challenge austerity politics as operating across a series of temporal and spatial scales. The further contribution of more-than-cuts is to therefore assess the dynamics through which struggles over local service closures – such as libraries – may become universalised into wider demands for social change, situated within local, national and even global contexts. Finally, the more-than-cuts framework is productive for arriving at more sensitive interpretations of Liverpudlian resistance in the extent to which activists can be considered to have reconfigured political and spatial imaginaries. Given that grassroots resistance struggled to attain popular legitimacy during the research period, less engaged methodologies may tend to emphasise the unproductive nature of such anti-austerity politics. Rather, the more-than-cuts approach allows us to ‘get at’ ostensibly unproductive expressions of political activity in ways which can better conceive of the complexity of these social relations, and can in turn suggest alternative ways of reading the political landscape.