This article examines the Venezuelan government's efforts to establish a "communal state" through the eyes of working-class chavista activists in the city of Valencia. It argues that the attempt to incorporate grassroots community organisations into a state-managed model of popular democracy produces a series of "utopian disjunctures" for the actors involved. These disjunctures, the article contends, stem from conflicting political temporalities within the chavista project, as long-term aspirations of radical democracy clash with more short-term demands to obtain state resources and consolidate the government's power. The case highlights the tensions generated by efforts to reconcile radical democratic experiments with left-nationalist electoral politics.
This article uses the lens of moral economies to examine the everyday experience of eviction, precarious housing and grassroots activism in contemporary London. Situated within a context of ongoing austerity measures, it explores how divergent, conflicting and overlapping moral economies of housing emerge both within the state and at its margins, as local authorities struggle to reconcile contradictory obligations to both uphold property relations and offer a duty of care to tenants. The article shows how being precariously housed is experienced as a series of disorientating advice and support encounters in which the right to state assistance is contested by low-income tenants, state housing officers and community activists. It contends that these encounters are surface-level expressions of a deeper underlying struggle over the political and moral status of housing, in which the unresolved tension between housing as a home and housing as a commodity shapes contested visions of economic justice.
This article explores how utopian visions are articulated by chavista activists in Venezuela through the practice of "revolutionary self-making". Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the city of Valencia between 2008 and 2012, it aims to demonstrate how close attention to the formation of new moral and spiritual selves is an integral part of the way that chavistas enact and experience political protagonism. In doing so, the article seeks to provide a ground level view of utopian visions as they are manifested discursively and practically in everyday life.
One of the hallmarks of the austerity agenda in the UK has been the discursive prevalence of both scarcity and individual responsibility as justifications for drastic cuts to public services. In the context of London's housing crisis, cuts to welfare for low‐income tenants have resulted in an alarming rise in evictions and homelessness within a wider context of displacement and gentrification in the city. This article explores how embryonic resistance to these processes, as well as to deeper histories of dispossession, is undertaken by housing activists through a set of ethical practices that promote collectivized care and mutual support among those faced with housing precarity. Although these emergent networks are fragile, it argues that a nascent housing movement in London offers some compelling glimpses of a more hopeful politics that may lie just beneath the surface of the present moment.
This article aims to open up a new discussion about the political potential of the renter to urban social movements by providing a ground-level view of renter activism in contemporary London. Drawing on participant observation conducted as an activist-researcher between 2015 and 2017, I offer an ethnographic social history of Digs, a private renters’ action and support group based in the east London borough of Hackney. Examining the political and organisational evolution of Digs over a six year period, I explore the group’s struggles to cultivate a coherent collective identity for renters, its innovative approaches to mutual support and relational organising, and the difficulties its participants encountered in maintaining participation in a highly intransigent political climate. I argue that although Digs was a relatively small and largely localised group, its members nonetheless cultivated a vital set of knowledge-practices that provided a conceptual and material framework for a citywide renters’ union in London. The case of Digs demonstrates that urban social movements are more likely to evolve effectively when they create the institutional capacity to retain key activists and pass knowledge on.
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