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,