Is London fucking the world?
Jul. 4th, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusNightwaves on Monday began with an interesting talk with Professor Doreen Massey about her new book, World City, which casts a critical eye on the place that London has become.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 03:58 pm (UTC)"China doesn't do this. It invests in African countries as they are, for both states' mutual and immediate advantage. No strings, but ties."
Couldnt you argue that the west is already doing that by taking work to developing countries? ie. sweatshops etc. And what about the poorest areas of Africa that dont necessarily have the anything to offer the west or arent in the position to offer anything? the whole point of some of those strings is to make sure aid gets to the most vulnerable.
You also avoided my question regarding your own personal consumption habits. Can we still enjoy all our capitalist riches on an individual level and still help tackle economic inequality worldwide?
"Massey also says that, rather than seeing developing nations as "behind" and "catching up", we should see our own everyday activities as producing inequality continuously."
But they are behind though. They dont have access to necessities like we do and in that sense, they are behind us because thats the "goal for humanity". That's what Massey would like to see change right?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 04:28 pm (UTC)Well, off the net you could look at books like:
The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
by T.R. Reid
Penguin, 305 pp., $25.95
The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream
by Jeremy Rifkin
Tarcher/Penguin, 434 pp., $25.95
Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Random House, 286 pp. $24.95
On the net you could read Tony Judt's review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17726) of these in the NYRB, or my discussion (http://imomus.livejournal.com/212647.html) of the 032c magazine issue (sorry, I know you hate the mag!) of the distinctiveness of Europe.
Political differences between the EU and US are discussed here (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20254), and for a more sober and pessimistic view you might want to check out a pdf called
Economic Institutions and Policies in the US and the EU: Convergence or Divergence? (http://ies.berkeley.edu/calendar/files/Berkeley-Vienna%20Papers%2005/EC-JPF%20Berkeley%20paper_conference%20version.pdf) which concludes:
"The EU is likely to behave increasingly as the champion of rules in international economic relations, and this may lead to enduring divergence with the US. Labour markets, redistribution and social insurance, pensions, and the provision of public services in education and health care are key areas in which virtually no convergence [between the EU and US] can be observed, and which have not (not yet, at least) been affected by European integration. Consumer protection is another area in which differences are apparent, probably because collective preferences (vis-à-vis environmental or sanitary risks) have not converged. Here lies the true specificity of the European model. But this should not lead [us] to speak of a persistence of diversity in the models of capitalism."
For these writers, then, these are different flavours of the same system.
I can't really go through all your other points now, but suffice to say that I'm much more interested when "hypocrisy" arguments are restated as "dialectics" arguments -- and that in itself is a difference in style between Anglo-Saxon and European thinking!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 04:49 pm (UTC)I don't hate 032c! I hate the price tag. I'm not an OMG INTANATIONAL SUPASTAR like you, I'm just a lowly student; £9 is too much.
Danke for the info.
"I'm much more interested when "hypocrisy" arguments are restated as "dialectics" arguments..."
*COUGH*cop-out*COUGH*
YOU CANT BE A COMMUNIST AND OWN AN iPHONE, MOMUS!!11!! ;o)