From Out of Apathy to the post-political: The spatial politics of austerity, the geographies of politicisation and the trajectories of the Scottish left(s)

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative approach to some of the temporalising logics and imaginaries which have dominated debates around the post-political and post-democracy. It does this through engaging with the writings of figures associated with the ‘First New Left’ notably Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson between 1956 and 1962. I argue that their essays in texts such as Out of Apathy bear some striking similarities with the claims of literatures relating to post-politics and post-democracy. Their work I argue repays substantive engagement; however, because through its attentiveness to emergent practices and geographies of antagonism, it offers a more generative and politically strategic resolution to some of the common discontents of consensus and marketisation of politics that has characterised work on post-politics. The paper develops these arguments through a discussion of how the uneven geographies of politicisation and trajectories of the Scottish left(s) in different parts of the post-war period have shaped and impacted on the spatial politics of austerity in significant ways.

Introduction: Anti-politics, austerity and spaces of politicisation

“…Anti-politics has, like related terms, such as post-democracy, post-politics, depoliticization (see Beveridge, 2017; Buller et al., 2018 for interlinkages between the concepts), entered debates in multiple languages, becoming a key concept to examine – most typically – political disenchantment and mistrust of politicians, for instance in post-Second World War Britain (see Clarke et al., 2018). Indeed, as Featherstone argues here, through an engagement with the early New Left, questions of disengagement with politics have important histories, despite often being constructed as a new phenomenon and recent debates (Featherstone, 2021).…”

“…Engagement with contestation and agency is also central to the discussion of the political trajectories of the Scottish left in Featherstone's contribution here (Featherstone, 2020b). He locates contemporary opposition to austerity in Scotland in relation to the histories through which deindustrialisation has been negotiated.…”

“…Finally, a further sign of hope and possibility is the concerted fightback against the relations between forms of right wing authoritarianism and deeply entrenched racism. These movements are also challenging and bringing into contestation the structuring logics of coloniality which continue to exert pressure and set limits on forms of the political in different contexts (see Featherstone, 2020b). The impact of powerful forms of resistance politics, such as the transnational wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, poses significant challenges to the broader continued racialised colonial framings of the political.…”

Agonistic politics in post‐crisis landscapes: Comparative insights from Athens and Madrid

“…Beyond articulating a critique of representation in “moments of the political,” as in the urban uprisings of 2011 and the Spanish and Greek Indignados, these forms of democratic politics further deployed localised and networked forms of struggle and solidarity in urban neighbourhoods (Arampatzi, 2017b; García‐Lamarca, 2017), which did not necessarily operate within delineated state spaces or institutional politics. In this respect, democratic politics became generative of diverse spatialities and modalities, being locally articulated while engaging in forms of translocal solidarities, problematising the spatial imaginary of the state and the very process of political subjectification constructed around “the sovereign people.” Moreover, these everyday ordinary practices involved tensions and contradictions implicated in the construction of political subjectivities that escape a temporally fragmented view of the political as a “moment” and call for a rethinking of their spatially situated experiences and trajectories (Featherstone, 2021). Such conceptual gesture entails that temporality, as an active dimension of democratic politics, holds a form of agency within constructions of spatial politics.…”

Afterword: They say the Centre cannot hold: Austerity, crisis, and the rise of anti-politics

“…Beverigde and Koch (2019) show how spatial practices entrenched in urban everyday challenge local state apparatus and privatization policies; Habermehl (2021) shows us how situated autogestion politics emerge during austerity in Buenos Aires, allowing everyday antagonist practices to settle in; Förtner et al. (2021) point to the revival of the politicization of the urban-rural divide which, as the future, is not what it used to be; Featherstone (2019) discusses the entanglement of the spatial forms of austerity and the geographical imaginations of resistance, pointing to the relevance of the struggles of nations against multi-national states within the framework of an uneven geographical deployment of austerity; Dönmez (2021) point to how austerity became authoritarian within the “borderlands” of Europe, rendering visible the core contradictions between capitalism and the liberal state and leading to a situated cycle of radical struggles; Karaliotas (2021) takes us through the squares’ movement in Greece as form/moment of the political to emerge, aiming to represent a multitude that constitutes the nation against crippling austerity imposed by transnational institutions. Taken together, these analysis provide an analytical path for reading anti-systemic conflict as it is being remade through spatial-geographical categories: North versus South in the European Debt crisis; situated spaces of everyday antagonism; urban versus rural (the far-right rise); urban politicized sociability against the local state; “austeritarian” governance deployed in the borderlands of liberal Europe; deindustrialized regions against service/financialized metropoles (Brexit); squares versus parliaments and/or transnational institutions (Greece, Portugal or the Spanish 15 M).…”