Social justice and neoliberalism Social justice and neoliberalism Global perspectives Edited by Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning and Katie Willis Z E D B O OK S London & New York Social Justice and Neoliberalism: Global Perspectives was first published in 2008 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Editorial Copyright © Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning and Katie Willis 2008 Copyright in this collection © Zed Books 2008 The rights of Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning and Katie Willis to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Designed and typeset in Monotype Garamond by illuminati, www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Cover designed by Andrew Corbett Printed and bound in the EU by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, 10010, usa All rights reserved. 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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 84277 919 4 Hb isbn 978 1 84277 920 0 Pb Contents Figures and tables vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Social justice and neoliberalism 1 Katie Willis, Adrian Smith and Alison Stenning 1 Voices from the trueque: barter networks and resistance to neoliberalism in Argentina 16 Pete North 2 Confounding neoliberalism: priests, privatization and social justice in the Peruvian Andes 39 Elizabeth Olson 3 Travelling neoliberalism: Polish and Ghanaian migrant workers in London 61 Jon May, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Cathy McIlwaine and Jane Wills 4 Neoliberalization and its discontents: the experience of working poverty in Manchester 90 Vincent Pattison 5 Bargaining with the devil: neoliberalization, informal work and workers’ resistance in the clothing industry of Turkey 114 Ergül Ergün 6 Transitions to work and the making of neoliberal selves: growing up in (the former) East Germany 135 Kathrin Hörschelmann 7 The emergence of a working poor: labour markets, neoliberalization and diverse economies in post-socialist cities 164 Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek 8 Difference without dominance: social justice and the (neoliberal) economy in urban development 199 Colin Marx Conclusion: Neoliberalization, social justice and resistance 228 Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith and Katie Willis Contributors 243 Index 248 Figures and tables Figure 1.1 Map of Argentina’s barter networks 20 Figure 1. 2 Barter network meeting in Gualeguachu, Argentina 21 Figure 1. 3 Barter network vegetable market in Mendoza, Argentina 22 Figure 2.1 Map of Peru 44 Figure 2.2 Market held outside the Catholic Church during Easter celebrations in the Andes, Peru 52 Figure 2. 3 Encouraging voting among Sunday churchgoers in the Andes, Peru 53 Figure 3.1 A Polish woman cleans the foyer of one of London’s numerous corporate headquarters 74 Figure 3.2 A Ghanaian woman cleaning toilets at the London headquarters of a major international bank 79 Table 4.1 Worker security in Fordist and neoliberal labour markets 93 Table 4.2 Living wage levels calculated in various UK urban areas using the LCA budget standards methodology 97 Figure 4.1 Manchester and the study area wards: Ardwick and Baguley 99 Figure 4.2 Manchester: a juxtaposed cityscape of poverty and affluence 100 Figure 5.1 Map of Turkey 115 Figure 5.2 A typical peripheral neighbourhood of Istanbul, in which the researcher worked as a garment worker 120 Figure 5.3 Two clothing workshops in Istanbul, hidden in the ground and basement floor of a residential flat 121 Figure 6.1 Map of Germany 136 Table 6.1 Summary of focus groups in the Leipzig study 138 Figure 6.2 Regenerated turn-of-century housing in Leipzig’s South East 146 Figure 6.3 High-rise area in Leipzig West 147 Figure 6.4 Shopping street in the centre of Leipzig 151 Figure 7.1 Map of Nowa Huta, Kraków, Poland 166 Figure 7.2 Map of Petržalka, Bratislava, Slovakia 167 Figure 7. 3 Osiedle Przy Arce, one of Nowa Huta’s neighbourhoods 168 Figure 7.4 View of Petržalka from the old town quarter of Bratislava 169 Table 7.1 Average wages in Slovakia and Poland 171 Table 7. 2 Sectoral employment change, Bratislava and Kraków 174 Table 7. 3 Employment structure of households in Petržalka and Nowa Huta relative to ‘at risk’ of poverty levels 176 Figure 7. 5 Occupational profile of household members relative to relative poverty risk levels, Petržalka and Nowa Huta, 2005 177 Table 7.4 Average monthly income for households with different employment structures 178 Table 7.5 Gender and occupational structure in Nowa Huta and Petržalka 179 Figure 7.6 Arcelor Mittal in Nowa Huta 181 Table 7.6 Average proportion of income derived from various sources 183 Figure 8.1 Map of Durban showing the Ntuzuma district 201 Figure 8.2 Informal economic activities in Ntuzuma district 208 Acknowledgements This book arose out of a set of sessions held at the 2006 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in London. We are very grateful to all the presenters in these sessions, several of whom – for a variety of reasons – we were not able to include in this collection. We are also very grateful to our discussants at the conference, Wendy Larner from the University of Bristol and Roger Lee from Queen Mary, University of London. Both provided stimulating feedback and discussion of the range of issues examined through these conference sessions. We would like to acknowledge their intellectual generosity in joining us for the sessions. These sessions were sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society’s Economic Geography, Developing Areas and Post-Socialist Geogra- phies Research Groups, and we are very grateful for their intellectual and administrative support. Some of the original ideas for these conference sessions and this collection arose during collaborative research conducted by Alison Stenning and Adrian Smith through an Economic and Social Research Council funded research project on ‘Social exclusion, spaces of economic practice and post-socialism’ (RES-00023–0695). We are very grateful to the ESRC for funding this research. Ed Oliver in the Department of Geography, Queen Mary, Univer- sity of London provided his usual cartographic excellence and proved to be the fount of patience in responding to seemingly never-ending x Social justice and neoliberalism requests for amendments to the range of maps and figures included in this book. A version of Chapter 8 was previously published in Antipode 40(2), 2008. We are very grateful to Blackwell for allowing us to include a revised version of this publication in the collection. Finally, we would like to thank Tamsine O’Riordan at Zed Books for her editorial guidance and patience in seeing this project through to the end, and to Susannah Trefgarne, formerly of Zed, who responded so positively to our initial enquiries about this publishing project. introduction Social justice and neoliberalism Katie Willis, Adrian Smith and Alison Stenning Neoliberalism, understood as a set of ideas and practices centred on an increased role for the free market, flexibility in labour markets and a reconfiguration of state welfare activities, has become increas- ingly predominant across the world, particularly since the mid-1980s. The supposed ‘rolling-out’ of neoliberalism as a response to the perceived limitations of Keynesian or state socialist projects has led to the neoliberalization of ever-increasing aspects of life in the global North, global South and former ‘communist’ East (Watts 1994; Pickles and Smith 1998; Tickell and Peck 2003; Harvey 2005; Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005; England and Ward 2007). As Giroux (2004: xiii) has argued, ‘Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, and noncommodified values.’ The ascendency of neo- liberalization has brought with it important implications for social justice, as the ‘privatization of everything’ (Watts 1994) constructs a landscape of winners and losers and gives rise to a range of social justice movements contesting and coping with the neoliberal ‘revolution’. The contributors to this book consider these processes through in-depth studies in particular communities across the world, 2 Social justice and neoliberalism from South America, to southern Africa, to Europe. Social Justice and Neoliberalism seeks to ground neoliberalism in local struggles over everyday existence and the social reproduction of the lives of peoples and communities embroiled in the ever-widening reach of marketiza- tion. Such a grounded approach thus speaks to the call to recognize the embeddedness of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002) and the articulation of political-economic processes with everyday lives (Stenning 2005; Smith 2007). The book focuses on neoliberal processes and outcomes ‘from the margins’, both geographically (global South, former state socialist East and peripheral communities in the global North) and socially. By drawing on perspectives from peoples and places that are often not considered