Generation Left after Corbynism

Abstract

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has allowed age to emerge as a dramatic new axis of political division. This article treats the political generation gap as, in part, a transformation in class composition. Most notably, starting with the political age divide makes recognition of a shift toward an asset-based economy hard to avoid. The economic crisis of 2008, and the British government responses to it, have provoked a contradiction between the two main avenues through which neoliberal subjectivities are trained. While neoliberal institutional reform and the styles of management that accompany it continue to train the young in line with theories of human capital, the specific nature of their entrainment in bonds of debt increasingly undermine the notions of meritocracy on which the human capital metaphor implicitly depends. This contradiction opens up possibilities for constructing more open conceptions of the future which can, in turn, be embedded within institutions yet to be created.

Strategies for a new municipalism: Public–common partnerships against the new enclosures

“…One of the major shortcomings of much propositional literature on the commons is that it ‘remains relatively fuzzy in its approach to the practical issues of constructing political and economic institutions and structures that might seriously challenge existing capitalist social relations’ (Cumbers, 2015: 62–63). This creates strategic blind spots in our thinking about ‘the institutional forms of ownership and governance that are most appropriate to a radical project of social transformation’ (Russell and Milburn, 2019: 2). Introduced initially in a schematic form and then later refined in relation to debates on autogestion and the right to the city (Russell and Milburn, 2018, 2019, 2021), PCPs were developed as one possible response to these broad concerns.…”

“…At their core, they are proposed as:a method for ‘taking back control’ of the infrastructures and resources that underpin our collective well-being – from food markets to water basins – while increasing our collective ability to fight for the wider changes in our society and economy that are so urgently needed. (Russell and Milburn, 2019: 3)…”

“…The net effect of the dual processes of privatisation and financialisation is that ‘land rents and land value gains’ have become ‘critical to rapidly growing levels of inequality, in terms of both income and wealth, during the neoliberal era’ (Christophers, 2019a: 53). This is most obviously manifest in the emergence of ‘generation rent’ (Byrne, 2020), where investment in property and the land it sits on has, through the extraction of rent and speculation on rising asset prices, contributed to a significant generational fissure (see Milburn, 2019). The capacity of the state to pursue major infrastructure projects necessary in the decarbonisation of the economy is vastly curtailed due to the concentration of private land ownership, and further compounded by the right of landowners to be compensated for speculative future planning permissions.…”

“…We rather need to look at how value is produced, captured and circulated, and how different institutional forms could contribute to the creation of different circuits of value. (Russell and Milburn, 2019: 11; emphasis in original)…”

“…Drawing on an ongoing process of participatory action research in two contrasting cases – Wards Corner in Haringey and Union Street in Plymouth – this article explores the potential for public–common partnerships (PCPs) to act as an alternative model of urban development rooted in the common ownership and stewardship of land. Building from our earlier theorisation of PCPs as ‘an alternative institutional design that moves us beyond the overly simplistic binary of market/state’ and that must necessarily ‘emerge as an overlapping patchwork of institutions that respond to the peculiarities of the asset concerned’ (Russell and Milburn, 2019: 13), in each case we have collaborated with community-led initiatives to develop place-based models of a PCP.…”