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