Rethinking Social Exclusion

The End of the Social?

Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849201087, 9781849201070
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'…classic Winlow and Hall – bleak, brilliant and unmatched in the art of rethinking crucial social issues. Enlightening, and rather scary.'
- Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London

'This superb book inhabits a unique theoretical space and demonstrates Winlow and Hall at their brilliant best as theorists of contemporary social exclusion.'
- Professor John Armitage, University of Southampton

'…making exemplary use of critical theory, this book represents a powerful, rallying response to Benjamin?s notion that "It is only for the sake of those without a hope that hope is given to us"'.
- Dr Paul A. Taylor, author of Zizek and the Media

'… an intellectual tour de force. Winlow and Hall, outriders of a radically different political economy for our era, have done it again. Their latest book is the critical criminology book of the decade, and the best account of capitalism since the 2008 crash… A devastating critical analysis of the effects of neo-liberalism.'
- Professor Steve Redhead, Charles Sturt University

?I had long regarded "social exclusion" to be another zombie-concept that retained no analytic or political purchase whatsoever. This book has changed my mind.?
- Professor Roger Burrows, Goldsmiths, University of London

In their quest to rethink the study of 'social exclusion', Winlow and Hall offer a startling analysis of social disintegration and the retreat into subjectivity. They claim that the reality of social exclusion is not simply displayed in ghettos and sink estates. It can also be discerned in exclusive gated housing developments, in the non-places of the shopping mall, in the deadening reality of low-level service work – and in the depressing uniformity of our political parties.

Simon Winlow is Professor of Criminology at the Social Futures Institute, Teesside University.

Steve Hall is Professor of Criminology at the Social Futures Institute, Teesside University.

1

Introduction:
Post–crash Social Exclusion

I muse upon my country’s ills

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the World’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

Herman Melville, ‘Misgivings’

Things cannot go on as they are…

We began writing this book in 2012, four years into the most severe financial crash in living memory. Our exposure to the profound human consequences of this event and its aftermath – via daily media coverage but also via our ongoing empirical work in areas of permanent recession in the north of England (Winlow, 2001; Winlow and Hall, 2006; Hall et al., 2008) – compelled us to reconsider the book’s structure and content. The fallout from liberal capitalism’s latest spectacular convulsion dragged the system itself from its background location in the analysis of social exclusion to centre stage. In many respects this book can be read as a preliminary theoretical analysis of liberal capitalism’s social consequences, based in England, but, to a large extent, generalisable throughout the West. The analysis is also embedded in a global process. The huge growth in surplus populations in global cities (see Davis, 2007), when understood in the context of imminent crises in water, food, energy, finance and the generation and distribution of money (Heinberg, 2011; Keen, 2011; Hall, 2012b) and the permanent inability of capitalism to absorb these populations into its networks of production, exchange and consumption, makes social exclusion one of the most pressing issues we face at this point in our history. A sophisticated and updated analysis of social exclusion is therefore essential, and, with this book, we hope to make a small contribution to this endeavour.

In ways we hope will become clear, excluded populations, the conditions in which they find themselves and their cultural expressions should not be considered external to or separate from the organising logic of global neoliberalism. The stark realities of life in the slums of Jakarta or Rio are as indicative of the reality of contemporary global capitalism as life in the boardrooms of Wall Street, and the same might be said of the virtual implosion of state governance in the Congo or Somalia. We also believe that the considerable harms of social and economic marginality in the West, when placed alongside the apparent inability of contemporary liberal capitalism to provide secure and civilised forms of employment for former working-class populations, represent a serious and enduring problem. Of course these harms tarnish Western liberal democracy’s preferred image of itself as inclusive, meritocratic, civilised and fair, but the accompanying accumulation of everyday miseries and dissatisfactions and the prevailing sense of lack will, as we shall see, have a profound political resonance as the twenty-first century unfolds.

By addressing the current nature and meaning of social exclusion and economic marginality we gain some insight into the future of civil society more generally. What becomes of ‘the social’ if growing numbers of people are cut adrift from its organising logic – its economic transactions, relations, customs, codes and cultural norms – and the tradition of political contestation about its future trajectory? To answer this question, we will occasionally wander off the well-trodden sociological and social policy paths to draw upon the resources of contemporary political theory, continental philosophy and theoretical psychoanalysis, and with these intellectual tools address the evolving nature of contemporary social life more generally. We will also investigate the current condition of the Symbolic Order (see glossary), that crucial network of meaning that makes the social world comprehensible and allows us to construct and maintain a viable system of elementary truths to which we must all subscribe, truths that make communication and politics possible.

Of course, if we are to think seriously about social exclusion, we must first establish whether, amid neoliberalism’s destructive conflagration, the social is still there to be excluded from. Do we now, as some notable commentators have claimed, occupy a post-social world in which the structuring reality of public life and social institutions has been replaced by a milieu of atomised individuals struggling for finger-holds in fields of mere representation? If this is true, on what basis can individuals and groups be said to be ‘excluded’ from something that might not exist in the way we once understood it? This forces upon us a new context in which traditional questions, plus a few supplementary ones, need to be asked and a few preliminary answers provided. What is the power that drives this exclusion, and what is the status of the excluded in the eyes of this power? What might social exclusion mean for those categorised as ‘the excluded’, and what are the consequences of the exclusionary process for those who manage to remain connected to the social mainstream? In a more straightforward manner, what are the political, economic or social functions of exclusion? What do today’s forms of social exclusion tell us about culture, economy, politics, subjectivity (see glossary) and the ways in which we constitute collective life in the contemporary post-political period?

In many respects, these rather basic questions have become lost amid a growing assortment of empirical studies that endlessly describe the realities of marginality, and frenetic yet ineffective policy work that has scoured the landscape of ‘civil society’ to find ‘transformative solutions’ to the problem of exclusion, or at least ameliorate its most harmful effects. In our view, however, we need to rethink the problem of exclusion from its philosophical and theoretical roots and open the field up to the types of critical analysis that can advance our understanding of the key issues involved and the connection of social exclusion to other socioeconomic processes that are reshaping our world. As one might imagine, this deliberate attempt to remove ‘social exclusion’ from its current academic and political location (as a ‘problem’ to be managed through ‘policy’, its harms reduced wherever possible) and subject it to a renewed theoretical critique requires a broad yet deep analysis that explores fields of enquiry that are usually regarded as marginal at best. The root of this renewed critique is social change, individualism and the loosening of social bonds in the post-political twenty-first century, a period during which the engine of historical progress appears to have stalled and liberalism’s assumption of ceaseless, incremental, progressive economic and cultural evolution in relatively stable and benign social contexts was revealed as mere modernist myth-making. The act of admitting that this profound change has actually occurred allows anyone who does so to ask more revealing questions. What remains of the network of community obligations and interdependencies that defined modernity’s civic and sociocultural life? What does the transformed nature of the city tell us about emerging forms of envy, social anxiety, insecurity and hostility, sometimes manifested in crime and violence (see Hall et al., 2008)? How might the withdrawal of the moneyed classes from public spaces and civic institutions – a retreat into gated and guarded compounds in order to avoid upsetting encounters with the pathologised ‘real world’ (see Atkinson and Smith, 2012) – be connected to the social processes that ensure the exclusion of the poorest and their consignment to specific areas of the city? As we hope readers will quickly appreciate, social exclusion is not simply a ‘problem’, an aberration in an otherwise progressive socioeconomic system, an ailment whose micro-causes and effects can be easily identified, isolated and ‘fixed’ by a sympathetic and benevolent governmental elite. Rather, the problem of ‘social exclusion’ reflects a broader ‘problem of the social’ during a period characterised by the restoration of liberal capitalism and its marketisation of the social world in the almost total absence of a political, economic or ideological alternative (Badiou, 2009). In this context, the principal issue becomes this: are we looking at social exclusion or the exclusion of the social from the most important domains of our lives?

The ultimate social impact of twenty-first century forms of embedded underemployment, worklessness and social redundancy have yet to be fully revealed. So far, the portentous signs thrown up by enduring global economic turmoil suggest that there is no simple remedy that might enable global capitalism to incorporate the rapidly growing global population or reconnect marginal populations in Western liberal democracies to the social mainstream by reintroducing stable and reasonably remunerative forms of employment. Put bluntly, how will capitalism continue to define itself as the most inclusive and productive economic system when growing numbers of people find it increasingly difficult to find the waged labour that might allow them to meet basic material needs and participate in the social and cultural activities that signify inclusion? And, given the increasingly acknowledged structural inconsistencies and practical limitations of global neoliberalism (Krugman, 2008; Stiglitz, 2010; Roubini, 2011), is it really possible to regard capitalism itself as the elixir of growth and progress in developing countries? Can it really ‘civilise’ failed states, or recover apparently lawless areas of the developing world (Wiegratz, 2010, 2012; Currie, 2011)?

In the chapters that follow, we will attempt to answer these questions and criticise the assumptions they reveal. We will look closely at the history of the capitalist project to represent a current reality in which the majority have been persuaded to stop seeking a genuine alternative or believing that such a thing is possible. We will analyse the fluctuations of volatile global markets and the serious outcomes of these fluctuations for everyday men and women, but we also hope to go a good deal further by asking, once again, why the marginalised do not rebel or self-organise in opposition. We are particularly keen to investigate the continued dominance, by means of the hegemony of consumerism, of capital over our everyday lives, cultures and institutions. To this end we will outline a theory of marginalised subjectivity that is markedly different from the dominant liberal concepts of the subject as the sovereign individual and the moral agent constituting its surrounding cultural norms and socioeconomic structures, or the ‘subject as pliable object’ constituted and normalised by external forces that are largely beyond its control or understanding.

Right-wing commentators are largely in agreement with the dominant neoclassical conception of a subject whose ‘bad choices’ and ‘anti-social values and norms’ ensure continued poverty and marginality. The liberal-left, often drawing upon symbolic interactionism and post-structuralism, counter this by claiming that the powerful demonise and stigmatise the economically excluded and label them with a broad range of negative characteristics. At its most extreme this becomes a process of ‘othering’, where the forbidding image of an uncivilised, feckless, dangerous and criminal other is projected upon the excluded subject, making its inclusion appear impossible. Whilst avoiding the right’s dogmatic voluntarism and moralism, however, we are also keen to move beyond the liberal-left’s equally doctrinaire notion that this symbolic ‘othering’ is the primary cause of social exclusion or indeed the issue that demands political attention.

Focusing primarily on social exclusion in Western liberal democracies, especially Britain and America, we will throughout this book attempt to identify the human costs of social exclusion. Whilst choice plays a role in individual responses – and even then we cannot understand choice without understanding the drives and desires that underpin it – we have no intention of portraying poverty and exclusion as the results of choices. There might be contexts in which choices are made, but, in the fourth year of a global economic downturn, we will not hesitate to offer measured doses of ‘economic determinism’ and ‘ideology critique’ when we address the roots of social inequality and exclusion. Poverty is not a lifestyle choice, and the cultures that develop in its shadow are rarely autonomous, rational and creative responses to immediate economic circumstances and cultural priorities that have been inherited from the past or imposed by neoliberalism’s current processes.

However, in the mainstream academic and policy-making fields, the dominant intellectual tradition currently informing the analysis of social exclusion in Britain is not the radical liberalism of the neoclassical right (see glossary) or the postmodernist left (see glossary), but a more considered Fabian social democratic (or social liberal) approach. Many working in this tradition emphasise the significant improvements that were made to the lives of everyday people in the post-war years before the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. During this period the state regulated business practice to a much greater extent, provided a comprehensive welfare system, taxed wealth, controlled capital flows, used fiscal stimulus to promote growth, maintained control over key national industries, significantly narrowed the gap between rich and poor, and attempted to ensure the continuation of full employment for work-aged populations. We concede that for the British working classes this period of prolonged social improvement represents something of a ‘golden age’ (Bauman, 2000) and that a return to the politics of that era would indeed represent a significant improvement to the life chances of everyday working and non-working people. We also concede that other significant social benefits would follow in the wake of the return of a genuine social democracy. But despite all this, we cannot fully endorse the social democratic approach, and the reasons for our departure from the social democratic orthodoxy will become clear as the book progresses.

We should note, of course, that in today’s dispiriting political climate, even to suggest that we should tax wealth to a greater degree, or that the state should make a commitment to full employment, is to invite popular derision. In the here and now, even the pragmatic Fabian social democrat is depicted as an unworldly idealist (Winlow, 2012a). Given the volatile and brutally competitive nature of global market activity tied to the unforgiving principles of comparative advantage and cost efficiency, and given capital’s arcane financial mechanisms and web of tax havens, is the return of genuine social democracy possible? We must note that the social democratic compromise was possible only during a period of unprecedented and sustained economic growth at a historically high rate (Cairncross and Cairncross, 1992; Harvey, 2010; Wolff, 2010). Such a rate of growth is now reaching its objective limit (Heinberg, 2011; Hall, 2012b), which means that, as it slows down, the growth-dependent Keynesian economic platform necessary for social democracy to succeed cannot be reconstructed. In this unprecedented situation of enforced economic downsizing, can the raw, destructive power of the profit motive really be harnessed and set to work pursuing positive social ends? Despite the near collapse of the banking system, can we picture our current batch of political leaders abandoning the rhetoric of the free market and their perverse attachment to ‘light-touch regulation’ to once again pursue a genuinely inclusive socioeconomic project? If the beast in capitalism’s cage can no longer be harnessed by a social democratic state, and there is no will amongst the establishment to do so, what are the implications for social exclusion?

At the risk of antagonising some of our peers, we should perhaps also consider the possibility that many in the social democratic mainstream who issue their call for ‘real jobs’ and the return of a comprehensive welfare system are secretly aware that their demands can no longer be met. Perhaps the most striking gap in social democratic thinking about social exclusion is that, in seeking to reintroduce the ‘excluded’ back into the civic mainstream, they are arguing for the reintroduction of resource-poor workers back into the very system of relentless socio-symbolic competition that expelled them in the first place. Social democratic discourses of inclusion are always shot through with the idea that expanding opportunities is the way back to an inclusive society. Are they not essentially arguing that the poor be given another shot at ‘making it’ within the system as it currently exists, rather than arguing for a fundamental reappraisal of the conditions under which social and economic justice can actually take place? Our goal here is to side-step this debate about the reintroduction of ‘real jobs’ and the intellectual injunction that we up-skill the poor and equip them with the drive to compete. Instead, we want to ask searching questions about the drivers that lead to the expulsion or marginalisation of the poor, and, more fundamentally, whether inclusion is possible at all in a capitalist economy currently experiencing a permanent reduction in its growth-rate and a seismic shift in the balance of global economic power.

Rather than figuratively patching up the poor with neatly organised CVs, new qualifications and a taste for entrepreneurial accomplishment, and then sending them out once again to do battle in the unforgiving and precarious advanced capitalist labour market, it might be more productive to address the source of social conflict and competition. Rather than attempting to push the poor back into the mainstream and hoping against hope that this time they might fare a little better, we must return to the types of critical realist (see glossary) analysis that allow us to see the reality of our world in a new light.

Instead of offering the usual account of workless populations who simply need to be ‘included’ by being given better chances to improve their own lot, we will attempt to offer a critical account of marginalised subjectivity (see glossary) that is deeper and more firmly located in its historical and socioeconomic locations. We will encourage the reader to think through what the unopposed and uninterrupted march of capitalism further into the twenty-first century will mean for social life and subjectivity. If it is true that minimally-regulated advanced capitalism contains within its core the fundamental cultural values of competitive individualism, atomism and functional self-interest, and that it drives new forms of economic creativity and efficiency whilst arranging the constant dissolution of the ‘social’ and the ‘public’, what does this mean for those who inhabit marginalised and impoverished social spaces? As the reader will soon gather, our goal is to shift academic consideration of social exclusion away from the dry and domesticated world of social policy into the realm of political and theoretical analysis. We do this not to dismiss or disparage social policy as a discipline, but in the hope that, by bringing the deeper context into stark relief, social policy can renew itself by feeding on a separate discourse founded on a recognition of the form and true magnitude of the ‘policies’ required to do anything concrete about the problem of social exclusion.

Economic futures

The rapidly growing economic power of countries such as China, India and Brazil in recent years is closely related to the huge growth of household debt that allowed Western populations to continue purchasing the goods produced in these low-wage economies in those heady days before the global crash of 2008. A number of neoliberal commentators and economic forecasters have suggested that the rise of these new players can have a significant bearing on the revival of the global economy in the post-crash era. Some maintain that, as workers in these economies gradually become capable of accessing more consumer goods, this new economic activity can fuel a global return to growth more generally across all continents. For the moment this seems doubtful; the financial crisis has slowed growth, which is impacting badly on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies. They are still growing but at nowhere near the rate required to attain the level of development enjoyed by the West in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some liberal commentators believe that the Easternisation of the global economy will precipitate a general shift away from the greed, avarice and short-termism now infecting Western economic culture. On this vaguely ‘new age’ trajectory we will move towards a more inclusive and ecologically-sensitive Eastern business culture built upon decorum, honour and long-term socioeconomic relationships.

However, the incautiously optimistic suggestion that we can identify the shoots of a new benign capitalism growing in these developing countries should give us pause for thought. We should consider the possibility that these commentators are right, but for the wrong reasons (Žižek, 2008a). China’s economic ascent has not been aided by the democratic elections we in the West consider absolutely vital to the continuation of Western civilisation. It is now clear that capital can thrive in the absence of democracy, as it did during its early years in the West (see Losurdo, 2011; Hall, 2012a); in fact not only can it thrive, but in the current climate it can out-compete the liberal democratic West. In many ways, open elections and popular political attitudes can act as fetters restricting the onward march of capital. If we take this point further, is it too outlandishly pessimistic to consider a future W...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Post-crash Social Exclusion
• 2 Social Exclusion: The European Tradition
• 3 Social Exclusion: The US Tradition
• 4 Re-positioning Social Exclusion
• 5 Politics at the End of History
• 6 A Reserve Army of Labour?
• 7 A Reserve Army of Consumers?
• 8 Occupying Non-places
• 9 Excluded From What?
• 10 Conclusion
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Index