Class, Agency and Resistance in the Old Industrial City

Abstract

Recent left academic work on the consequences of economic restructuring and local labour market change in old industrial cities has been important in emphasising the role of local context and contingency in the shaping of labour market outcomes. However, in such accounts agency is often limited to capital and state actors, albeit working across scales from the local upwards. There is little sense of agency for individuals and communities in the midst of economic restructuring. Instead, they are usually treated as passive victims of deeper underlying processes. In this paper, our purpose is to highlight the autonomy and agency of workers, people and communities in old industrial cities. Rather than starting from the perspective of capital, our starting point is to emphasise how those experiencing economic change forge strategies and practices for “getting by”. This leads us to call for a re‐theorisation of labour agency, drawing upon the Autonomous Marxist tradition and the more recent work of Cindi Katz, in order to offer fresh insight into the agency of labour and the prospect for recovering a class politics based upon lived experience over reified abstractions.

Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in global production networks

“…In a more promising shift of focus, labour geographers have begun to engage with conceptually more disaggregated concepts of agency, building on Katz's breakdown of agency into acts of resilience, reworking and resistance (Katz, 2004;Cumbers et al, 2010;Coe and Jodhus-Lier, 2010). Katz's aim is precisely to tease apart the many responses to uneven capitalist development and to 'diffuse, if not burst, the romance with "resistance" …' (Katz, 2004: 241).…”

“…This scholarship also considers new approaches to the study of labour employed within GPNs, and particularly in the context of neo-liberal labour market restructuring (see e.g. Cumbers et al, 2010). Here, we will not review the labour geography literature in extenso, but draw on some themes and concepts that we find particularly helpful for the ways in which we propose to conceptualise labour, and the study of labour, in the context of a successful South Indian garment manufacturing and export cluster.…”

Urban power and political agency: Reflections on a study of local economic development in Johannesburg and Leeds

“…At a time when neither states nor proletarians are leading emancipatory social change, many urban scholars seek agency in the purported autonomy of local action (Cumbers, Helms, & Swanson, 2010). Levebvre (1971) is an important influence, for his repudiation of structuralism and avowal of emancipatory potential in the everyday.…”

Agency by exit: Swedish nurses and the “Not below 24,000” movement

“…Operationalizing Katz's (2004) categorisation and terminology to the local context and applying them in a study of labour agency and economic restructuring in the old industrial city of Glasgow, Cumbers et al (2010) focus on creative practices of individuals and households in communities disconnected from the labour market. They attributed all three categories of response -coping, reworking and resistance -to lack of work and poor living conditions.…”