Hegemonies are not totalities! Repoliticising poverty as a site of resistance

As part of a continuing occasional series from writers who have been influenced and inspired by Doreen Massey, particularly within political geography, Victoria Lawson, drawing on her work with Sarah Elwood on relational poverty, discusses how Doreen's work has helped her to think through ideas about repoliticising poverty.¹

Doreen Massey inspired me because of her work as a public intellectual, and because she opened space for me, and many others in economic geography, by raising feminist questions. In 2004 she visited my university in Seattle and spent a week with our department at the University of Washington. I was in awe despite her warmth. I remember that, when driving her to dinner after a very long day, I proceeded to get us lost, and drove her twenty miles out of the way up the wrong side of Lake Washington! She was so gracious - she just patiently described the book she was writing while I flailed - that book was For Space.

Ten years later, in 2014, Doreen came to the American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference to discuss the Kilburn Manifesto. The room felt like a political meeting within the constrained space of an academic conference. It was packed, people on the floor, standing in the doorways, all in rapt attention. She ended her talk that night by remarking that the current project of government is one in which 'we must not be allowed to know that there are alternatives - we must not know that hegemonies are not totalities'. This is the starting point for my thoughts here on contesting dominant ideas about poverty.

Doreen constantly worked to crack open the hegemony of neoliberal market fundamentalism and to think through alternatives; and she also presented us with the crucial challenge of how to build political solidarities in the present conjuncture. In this brief article I want to sketch out some of the ways we are taking up this challenge in trying to think politically about poverty - in effect to repoliticise it.

Repoliticising poverty

I begin with the importance of conjunctural analysis for thinking about the links between shifts in capital accumulation and its labour politics, and the associated cultural productions that drive wedges between working people.² This gives us a better context through which to understand the way in which poverty figures in current debates.

Doreen and her colleagues argued that the left must grapple with the complexity of the current conjuncture as a whole (beyond economism): we must refuse popular framings of an ideological crisis that is seen as separate from changes in the economy - particularly, for the purposes of our discussion here, the deepening of poverty. This separation is precisely what anti-immigrant and racist politics have sought to achieve in the US - pretty successfully.

Historical forms of class solidarities have not made an effective challenge to neoliberal austerity and racial capitalist violence in the US. This is partly because the ability of trade unions to defend living standards has been under sustained attack since the 2008 financial crisis: union-busting has been reinvigorated through 'right to work' legislation at the state level, and public sector unions have been heavily targeted. And, beyond trade unionism, class itself is thoroughly depoliticised in the US, where most people identify as middle-class despite extreme, widespread poverty and inequality.

This undermining and decline of traditional forms of solidarity has gone alongside a version of identity politics that is designed to foster divisions. Difference has been deployed to powerful political effect to divide low-income people from each other. Trump's promise (now initiated) to build the Wall is part of his project to construct political common ground between white working-class people and right-wing wealthy elites - cemented around national security, white identity and neoliberal narratives of economic 'fairness'. The neoliberals (right-wing politicians, Fox News, talk radio and all the rest) have successfully mobilised a discourse in which immigrants and people of colour have been made responsible for the impoverishment of working white men because they have 'stolen' their jobs and overwhelmed the...