Space, Neo-liberalism and Contestation

1. Space, Neo-liberalism and Contestation David Featherstone University of Glasgow

2. Graeber: Global Justice Movement a Success? • The Washington consensus lies in ruins. So much so it’s hard no to remember what public discourse in this country was even like before Seattle. Rarely have the media and political classes been so completely unanimous about anything. That “free trade”, “free markets”, and no-holds-barred supercharged capitalism was the only possible direction for human history, the only possible solution for any problem was so completely assumed that anyone who cast doubt on the proposition was treated as literally insane. Global justice activists, when they first forced themselves into the attention of CNN or Newsweek, were immediately written off as reactionary lunatics. A year or two later, CNN and Newsweek were saying we’d won the argument. • (Graeber, 2007).

3. Neo-Liberalism and Common-Sense • Neo-liberalism has been seen as re-constituting the common-sense of the age (Peck and Tickell, 2002). • Importance of attending to Gramsci’s account of ‘common-sense’ as not a stable end point or consensus, but as characterized by instability and as a terrain of contestation. • Contesting the idea that neo-liberalism has successfully re-constituted common-sense is a pre-condition for opening political imaginaries in the current conjuncture.

4. Activism and the Political • Social movements, advocacy groups and NGOs are opening up a second tier of politics in civil society, and the new internationalists are building its supranational tier. Yet this expansion is not a mere arithmetic sum, for it also modifies what Rancière calls the partition of the sensible and therefore transforms the way the political field is coded; it creates a new condition of the sensible. • (Arditi, 2007: 145).

5. People’s Permanent Tribunal • This was very good at bringing diverse aspects of BP’s conduct in Colombia into contestation . • The event also brought together different activists with concern against BP. • This fed into a broader set of transnational organising practices through the PPT.

6. Tensions: Networks Formatted in Particular Ways • The political struggles of other places, including Scotland, were not connected to the politics/ political situation in Colombia as effectively as organisers sought to do. • The political outcomes were structured by a strong concern with human rights. This framing did important work but arguably shaped debates in quite narrow ways. • As a result broader aspects of environmental/ social relations such as climate change politics were slightly edged out of this set of political interventions.

7. Productive Forms of Contestation • ‘Plachimada’s struggle against the Coca Cola Company’ was and ‘is important in having raised serious issues about the role of transnational corporations and globalization in India. It is now firmly tied in the hearts and minds of many activists to the struggles against the Coca Cola Company in Colombia [...] or the victory against Bechtel in Cochamba, Bolivia’. Further ‘their struggle has been inspirational and played a significant role in generating opposition to The Coca Cola Company and PepsiCo in other rural communities in India’ (Aiyer, 2007: 652).

8. Tensions of Transnational Organising • Although the coalition looks very “representative”— that is, students of color and womyn are at the center of the coalition—the process through which the coalition was built over the period of a year has been a point of contention among some. I do believe that this campaign was initiated with the intention of synthesizing anti-racism and anti-globalization struggles, yet to some the outreach and coalition-building process seemed to put the racist aspects of Coke’s violations as more of an afterthought rather than at the center of the movement. • (Hardikar, 2006: n.p.)

9. Actually Existing Alternatives • Movements have generated translocal connections through their organising against neo-liberal globalisation. • Movements have combinded environmental concerns and issues of social justice are combined in innovative and significant ways. • This has generated new ways of articulating social and environmental relations. • Movements have intervened in shaping local resistances/ practices of localisation in internationalist and solidaristic ways.

10. Emerging Maps of Grievance in Relation to the Current Crisis • Emerging attempts to politicise the crisis, predominantly shaped by diverse activist groups through events like the G20 protests. • New parochialisms of some climate change politics. • Tensions of some of the nationalist imaginaries used to contest the crisis, eg Derek Simpson of Unite using terms such as ‘indigenous workers’ during the protests at Total’s Lindsey oil refineries. • Importance of shaping solidaristic opposition and alternatives.