Editorial

We start the issue with the two most recent instalments from the Kilburn Manifesto. Beatrix Campbell writes on the ways in which patriarchy is entangled with neoliberalism, while Ben Little writes on the ways in which generational politics is articulated to its project. As Beatrix pointed out at a recent Soundings seminar, both pieces are attempts to map neoliberalism - to show how it operates in all its complexities and linkages - in order the better to understand and contest it.

Kirsten Forkert explores the culture of neoliberalism as it seeks to shape a new common sense about debt and hard work - debt morality. Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea’s manifesto instalment looked at ways in which notions of fairness are contested, and Kirsten develops this to show that debt is integral to such understandings. For some, fairness means that social rights - benefits or services - should be seen social debts; and social debtors must therefore live their lives according to the precepts of the harshest austerity. If hard workers are suffering under austerity, how much more must non-workers suffer? Kirsten traces ways in which notions of belonging and therefore worthiness have been culturally defined in relation to outsiderdom and unworthiness since at least the 1970s, when Policing the Crisis showed how race was deployed as a means of signifying outsider status. This cultural work is continuing as the category of the undeserving poor is constantly enlarged.

Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn explore how selfishness is of ever more frequent circulation within the political lexicon, including being increasingly validated as a virtue. As they argue, thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand actively worked to popularise individualism and self-interest (the latter being the acceptable face of selfishness); and Rand in particular shared with Margaret Thatcher the ability to ‘infuse laissez-faire economics with deeply moral convictions centred on the importance of individual character’ (indeed, as they point out, it was Ayn Rand who first wrote that ‘there is no such entity as “society”’). For thinkers such as these, it is indeed unfair that hard workers should be legally required to support the subsistence and well-being of their fellows. Anita and Heather have been working in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s keywords in order to discover how meanings such as these are shaped within popular culture to achieve specific political ends.

The participants in our roundtable discussion reflect on working lives, especially those of the young. As Ben argues in his manifesto contribution, it is no longer only the working-class young who are living precariously - middle-class young people too are vulnerable in a world that is pulling up the drawbridge to all outsiders, including new entrants; while Beatrix argues that welfare states are crucial for women’s equality, and that the withdrawal of provision is making the lives of working mothers unbearable. Both these points are borne out in this discussion, where the problems of internship (working for nothing) and the general precarity of so many working lives, as well as the lack of social child care provision and the undervaluing of care work, are brought into relief - but the participants also reject the harshness and drudgery of many people’s experience of work. And they also discuss new ways of resisting in the workplace, and of making alliances, while their creative ideas for protest point to the interesting things that can happen when committed theory meets practice.

Elsewhere in this issue Ove Sernhede discusses the ways in which Swedish outsiders - who, as in France, live in the suburbs - are finding new ways to challenge segregation and assert their right to belong; Steve Iliffe and Richard Bourne look at the challenges facing an incoming Labour government needing to rescue the health service - and put forward useful ideas on how to do so. One way, as they argue, is by making relationships more central to the workings of the NHS - something that Hilary Cottam has been arguing for some time now. Hilary writes in response to Michael Rustin’s manifesto chapter on a relational society, and gives more examples of ways of working that place human relationships at their centre; and she also...