Cities After Neoliberalism? Neil Smith

... one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of quality.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia Neoliberalism has been a long, difficult and violent ride for millions if not billions of

people around the world. The financial crash that began unfolding publicly in 2007 marked the

end of neoliberalism in some sense, or so it has been suggested by many commentators, but it

also provoked a longer view for those concerned more with capitalism in toto than with its

specifically neoliberal variant. Unlike the so-called Asian economic crisis of 1997-1999, when

the operative metaphors raised the threat of “contagion,” ten years later the language was of

“toxic assets.” The shift from an epidemiological to an environmental metaphor may be

symptomatic of a broader political shift in ruling ideologies, but both metaphors also express a

certain denial of the gravity of the crises. In 1997, “contagion” expressed the fear that an

otherwise healthy body (European and North American capitalism) would be infected by

economic disease (Asia); ten years later, the new language expressed a parallel but less

spatialized fear that an otherwise healthy capitalism would be polluted by an aberrant toxicity.

When that pollution in fact occurred and capitalism itself became toxic on a global scale,

desperate financiers around the world exclaimed in astonishment: “but this is not how capitalism

is supposed to work!”

The role of cities and the fate of cities changed significantly during the neoliberal moment

of capitalism, which we can date more or less to the 1970s, and the purpose of the essays in this

volume is to explore, via several case studies, some dimensions of that change, the systemic

urban chaos it produced, and the expanded equally systemic chaos that isa gathering with the the

attenuation of neoliberalism. Each of the cities examined by these authors tells a very

particular story even if there are overriding themes. The papers were presented at a conference

at MACBA, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in November 2008, at a conference

entitled “After Neoliberalism: Cities and Systemic Chaos.” Although planned months before, it

occurred just as the depth of the global crash was becoming evident, headlining newspapers

around the world on a daily basis. Attention had not yet turned to the predicament of cities

beyond the telling fact that the immediate trigger (if not the ultimate cause) for the crisis lay in

urban housing markets, namely subprime loans in the United States. As the crash proceeds to

percolate into state budgets and download onto municipalities, the fate of cities is only just

beginning to come into focus. Before getting to the question of cities and a discussion of

contemporary urban change and process, however, it is important first to ensure that the

meaning of neoliberalism, its history, substance and predicament, are clear.

Neoliberalism: Dead but Dominant

It is undeniable that in many parts of the world since the 1970s, from Chile to London,

New York to Shanghai, right wing neoliberal initiatives dominated the ideological and political

struggles for hearts, minds and social power. There were exceptions, but in the last three

decades the left was broadly defeated, overwhelmed even when it came into power. The edifice

of neoliberalism had three central pillars: the lionization of free market economics as the only

legitimate currency of social interaction; the concommitant (if partial) deregulation of some state

functions and the withdrawal of the state from the Keynsian project of welfare provision and

support for social reproduction; and the sanctity of private property along with the expansive

privatization of social resources. All of this went along with a near cult status for profits, stocks,

individualism and finance capital – the “financialization of everyday life” (Martin 2002). It

also has to be emphasized that while neoliberalism certainly had its earlier self-avowed origins

among Austrian and American economists and decades later as US and UK foreign policy, it was

a truly global phenomenon. With few exceptions, the national leaders of Europe and Africa

alike, Asia and the Americas, came to embrace neoliberalism as a class strategy that cut entirely

across race; the leaders of Zimbabwe and Mexico, Chile and China all shared as much as the UK

or the US in the advancement of neoliberalism. Indeed it was Latin American political activists

in the 1970s who popularized “neoliberalism” as a critical epithet.

Since the onset of the economic crash, it is equally undeniable that the three tenets of

neoliberalism have been broadly abrogated. First, the subprime crash and resulting crisis in

housing markets around the world struck at the heart of neoliberalism’s private property regime

while severing the nexus between finance and property capital; activists in many cities have

taken over abandoned property while responsible state officials and even financial institutions

have refused to evict people. Second, while still cutting many services, some national and local

states have been forced to reinvest in housing, unemployment and other welfare payments.

Third, the state has waded into various economies, effectively nationalizing banks and some of

the largest indutrial corporations in several countries where the ideology of neoliberalism was

sacrosanct. In the the United States, where the crash began, several banks have been effectively

nationalized as were two of the largest car companies. At one point, the US government, under

its stimulus and bailout plans, owned 79.9% of General Motors, once the world’s largest

capitalist corporation ; by June 2009 only 10% of General Motors was privately owned.

Meanwhile, with its “Buy American” stipulations, protectionism began to reflower in the US and

elsewhere. However effective or otherwise, stimulus plans from the UK to China to the US,

involved varying degrees of Keynesian-style investment in infrastructure and social support.

Undeniably, the ideology of neoliberalism has lost its power. In practice too,

neoliberalism seems to have lost all momentum. Just as neoconservatism lost its ideological

power after the Iraq War increasingly failed, neoliberalism today is also generating no new ideas.

This was not a sudden development but happened over at least a decade. At least five factors

contributed to this loss of political momentum. First, the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1999

exposed the failure of neoliberalism on its own economic terms, convincing several high profile

adherents from Joseph Steiglitz to Jeffrey Sachs to launch withering critiques and mea culpas.

Second, the emergence of political opposition especially in Latin America, mounted a significant

challenge to a set of economic ideas and practices that were foisted on the continent beginning in

the 1970s. Third, and importantly, the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early

2000s – from Vancouver to Genoa, Seattle to Cancun – also exposed the brutality and hypocrisy

of neoliberalism; while it soon fragmented, that movement deserves considerable credit for

translating the indictment of neoliberalism into an open challenge. Fourth, the Iraq War led by

the US and Britain, which only confused the war on terrorism with the neoliberal political and

economic agenda, was a drastic diplomatic mistake even in the Bush administration’s own

terms, not to mention the gross incompetence with which it was pursued. By the first years of

the 21st century, then, an already stagnating neoliberalism was, at best, filling in the social and

geographical interstices of a project that had stalled. The economic collapse that came in 2008

with the subprime crisis, and the resulting global economic meltdown, was only the final and

fifth nail in the neoliberal coffin. Although an easing of the stock market decline in spring 2009

encouraged some US economists and commentators to predict an attenuation of the crisis,

others looking more globally at the drop in industrial production and global trade detect an even

steeper decline than in in 1929 which initiated the Great Depression (Eichengreen and O’Roorke

2009). As ever, of course the depth and extent of economic decline is highly uneven across the

globe.

Neoliberal ideology may now be fatally wounded, but we should not be so hasty declaring

the end of neoliberalism per se. Only if we accept the ideological self-representation of

neoliberalism, namely that it represented a withdrawal of the state from the private economy and

a return to purely free markets and private ownership, would it make sense to announce the end

of neoliberlaism in anything but ideological terms. A stateless neoliberalism was its own myth.

In reality, of course, the state at various national, local and global scales worked assiduously

through corporate deregulation, military expenditure, housing policy, corporate tax policy, urban

development, social repression, global “development” policies, and the expansion of its own

entrepreneurialism to advance the neoliberal project. Many of the institutions and regulations of

that era remain powerfully in place with very little coherent alternative in sight. Thus it may

make more sense to borrow the felicitous phrase of Jürgen Habermas, which he applied in the

1980s to the fate of modernism, and to conclude that neoliberalism is “dead but dominant”

(Habermas 1985; Smith 2008). Neoliberalism is in a state of atrophy for sure, but its economic

and military power nonetheless endures. It has left behind, and continues to produce, a trail of

human destruction, whether in the world’s shanties and favellas, upon the environment, or among

people otherwise dispossessed by virtue of class, gender, race, indigineity, nationality.

Urban Revolution – Global City

Globalization and neoliberalism were formulated as twin worlds after the 1970s but they

were not identical twins. Whereas neoliberalism represented a broad political, social and

economic strategy – a class grab for social power in the broadest sense – globalization comprised

a somewhat narrower economic-geographical component of the neoliberal project.

Globalization was not an entirely new phenomenon as proponents have largely argued –

capitalism has always been a global project – but by the same token a certain marxist critique

suggesting that globalization brought nothing new is also short-sighted. It represented a new

variant of capitalism, eroding the economic borders established by the national state system such

that by the late 1990s it was increasingly difficult to identify coherent national economies,

separate the one from the other. This was obviously imbricated with the larger neoliberal

project of privatization and deregulation (at least concerning capital), but it also brought a level

of global labour migration which had few precedents. This in no way suggests a simple end of

the nation state; rather in political and cultural terms, the opposite may well occur.

Nonetheless, it does suggest that the relationship of cities to national states and to global cultural

and political economies changed dramatically.

In 1970 Henri Lefebvre surmised that urbanization had come to supplant industrialization

as a world-historical moment in the production of space (Lefebvre 1970; 1974). He elaborated

on this idea somewhat, but as ever he was elliptical about what this meant, but it may be that

Lefebvre sensed something that is only now becoming more apparent. He began his book,

Urban Revolution, with the following hypothesis: “Society has been completely urbanized”

(Lefebvre 2003: 1). This was of course Lefebvre’s hallmark dialectical hyperbole – only by

2005, according to the United Nations, did the world’s population pass to majority urban – but it

served Lefebvre’s point of focusing on what he called the urban “revolution.” Writing in 1970,

he could not have missed the profundity of the revolutionary events of 1968 – indeed he was

centrally involved in them – and yet curiously his discussion of urban revolution has little to do

with that contemporary revolt focusing instead on longer term histories. The “urban

problematic,” as Lefebvre put it, would be the story of the future, and he anticipated the rise of

what he called “world cities”.

What does the language of world or global cities connote? What was the pre-global city,

and what makes the city especially global now? The largely unspoken point is that cities in the

earlier history of capitalism were first and foremost creatures of national economies.

Notwithstanding the intense international links that obviously connected cities, they operated as

simultaneously loci of production and reproduction for national capitalisms. Indeed, it was an

axiom of urban theory in the postwar period, from Lefebvre to Harvey , Castells to feminist

theory, that whatever else their functions, the rationale for the capitalist city was identified

primarily as the locus of social reproduction vis-a-vis national economies. With the dismantling

of many national states’ support for social reproduction policies and programs, neoliberalism

largely broke this definitive nexus; more accurately globalization led to the forging of a new

relationship between cities and the global economy which to some extent bypasses the national

state. No longer defined as the labour reservoirs for national economies, urban regions are

increasingly production platforms for the global economy (Smith 2002). Shanghai and Saõ

Paulo, Mumbai and Mexico City are increasingly the models for the urban future, displacing

New York, London or even Tokyo.

The point here is not that the cities of Europe and North America or Japan are somehow

obsolescent, nor that they are exempt from the restructured relationships among global, national

and urban scales. Certainly they too are transforming into production regions for the global

economy while retaining many of their social reproductive and myriad other functions, but they

no longer represent the leading edge of urban change. Perhaps the most visible sign of this shift

is the proliferation of large industrial zones, special economic zones and export zones, invariably

adjacent to or incorporated within ports and airports to facilitate transportation. Whereas only a

few dozen such zones existed in several countries in the 1970s, today there are several thousand

according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), and they are generally much larger.

The largest of these special zones have emerged in Asia , from China to Dubai, but they are now

found across the world. An estimated 30 million Chinese workers alone were employed in such

zones prior to the economic crash.

The emergence of the trade and industrial zones in consort with globalization exemplifies

another aspect of Lefebvre’s argument about urbanization and the urban problematic. They

represent one thread of what we might call “city building.” The construction of the

infrastructure and facilities for such zones is itself a huge investment of billions of dollars of

productive capital. More generally, the remaking of urban built environments – infrastructural

or residential, recreational or environmental redevelopment, have all come to play a more central

role in the global economy. As the contribution to this volume by Eva García Pérez, Patricia

Molina Costa and Emmanuel Rodríguez López, on behalf of Observatorio Metropolitano,

exemplifies, the remaking of Madrid as a global city has involved many massive city building

projects that link not only to global construction and development firms (themselves a relatively

new phenomenon) but on the consumption side to global tourism. The increasingly orchestrated

gentrification of poorer barrios in the central city is as elsewhere part of this process..

And yet the scale of such urban restructuring and city building in Europe and North

America is dwarfed by what has transpired elsewhere. On the one hand we can think of the

unprecedented scale of reconstruction around the 2008 Beijing Olympics in which an estimated

million people were displaced, and we can think too of the ongoing reconstruction of Shanghai

for the 2010 World Expo (see the account by Andrew Ross in this volume) or the Mumbai

redevelopment of the dock lands and mill lands. Again, the amalgam of international

development capital, gentrification and tourism is central. On the other hand it is no accident

that the global economic crash following 2007 was triggered by a subprime mortgage crisis in the

United States itself. In this it was quite different from the Depression of the 1930s which began

as a purely financial crash. The crash this time round exposed the unprecedented extent to

which city building has become integrated into the sphere of financial capital, and vice versa.

None of these developments is entirely new of course: industrial zones predated the 1970s and

property capital has always been linked to finance capital. What is new today is the

intensification and consequent density of these connections and their coming together in a larger

project of city building anticipated by Lefebvre’s “urban problematic.”

Systemic Urban Crisis

There is a long history of rural to urban migration, a process as old as cities themselves,

but when the United Nations announced that in 2005 the world’s population would for the first

time be more than 50% urban, it seemed that an important threshold was crossed. Mass

migration into cities accompanied earlier rounds of urban growth and development, to be sure,

but the scale of such shifts and the consequent explosion of urban populations in Asia, South

America and increasingly Africa, and the consequent explosion of city building, has in the last

two or three decades been unprecedented. In many places urban to rural migration accounts for

the majority of this urban growth, and this is intimately tied to the new role of urban regions in

globalization (see the chapter by Raquel Rolnik in this volume). Perhaps the most direct

confirmation of this new situation came at the beginning of 2009 in China. Under the effect of

the crashing global economy, the Chinese economy, which had been growing at a rate of almost

10% annually in recent years, contracted to an estimated rate of only 6.5%. While that would

be an enviable rate in almost any other economy – the US economy was then declining at about

the same rate – the contraction caused massive disruption in China and a reported 20 million

urban workers were summarily evicted from the cities and sent home to the villages from which

they had come in recent years.

Various dimensions of recent urban migration and consequent urban transformation mark

it out as novel today. In the first place, an increasing percentage of such migration streams are

now occurring across, rather than within, national borders. This is not unprecedented and the

migrations of earlier centuries from Europe to the Americas are a case in point, but what is new

today is, again, the scale of this phenomenon and its extent: Central Americans and West

Africans moving to Europe, South Asians and Filipinos moving to the Gulf, East and South-east

Asians moving in greater or smaller numbers to cities throughout much of the world, East

Europeans moving to Western Europe, massive often forced migrations within Central

SubSaharan Africa or out of Iraq, and so forth. This level of global movement has been

facilitated in significant part not just by the availability of computer and communication

technology since the 1980s, allowing easier contact with family, friends, potential workers and

business collaborators at home and around the world, but specifically by the deregulation of

currency transfers across national boundaries since the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, most

countries put severe limits on the availability and export of foreign currency to and by individuals

(businesses were significantly exempted): in the case of Britain, for example, an individual

travelling abroad faced limits of just several hundred pounds per year in foreign currency until

the late 1970s, and any currency converted was studiously recorded in one’s passport. Today, by

contrast, currency deregulation has opened up an entire new global economy of home-bound

remittances by migrant and immigrant workers that would have been impossible three decades

earlier. Every immigrant neighbourhood in cities around the world has its Western Union

offices or comparable shopfront international money transfer businesses.

The second dimension of change concerns the fate of informal settlements and the

informal sector in cities more broadly. Not surprisingly perhaps, these changes are often

contradictory. While there were clearly precursors, the wide academic recognition of an

informal sector in the social economies of cities only came in the 1970s and 1980s, much of the

work coming initially from Latin America, and while the connections between informal and

formal economy were quickly noted (see for example McGee 1976), nonetheless it was the

difference between these sectors that dominated research. And reasonably so. The rise to

prominence of the informal sector was predicated on the burgeoning “formal” sector

industrialization of many postwar Third World economies, as they were called at the time (see

Roy and AlSayyad 2004), and the contrast seemed especially sharp.

The combined globalization and neoliberalization of economies since the 1980s has

changed this however. On the one hand, the variously partial or more complete dismantling of

import duties and other forms of national economic and trade protection, enforced by the IMF,

World Trade Organization, multi-state trade agreements and various other global and national

state institutions, has transformed the informal sector as many small entrepreneurs have struggled

to “formalize” their activities. Often with the material or tacit support of specific municipal,

national or global bodies or Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – state subsidies, small

loan programs, microcredit schemes, infrastructure provision, and other programs, often leavened

by the corruption of an increasingly privatized economy – this has led to a much more trenchant

blurring of the boundary between formal and informal sectors (see for example Hasan 2004).

To take one obvious example, if a woman or group of women are working in a village on the

outskirts of Hanoi making garments at home or in factory huts and sending them regularly and

directly to a major multinational supplier in the city, who then sells the garments to Walmart, are

these workers operating in the formal or informal sector? To take a second example, housing, it

is not unusual to find a structured and class divided housing market in previously informal

settlements such that something resembling modest gentrification can now be recognized in

various settlements.

And yet the opposite is also occurring, if anything on a far more massive scale. The

same neoliberalization and globalization strategies and policies have also exposed informal

sector activities in many cities to the harsh winds of global competition from lower-wage and

otherwise preferable production locations. Many living on the edge of the informal sector have

been expelled from it, their ability to make a living increasingly squeezed. Access to work, to

materials for building or for commodity production, access to increasingly privatized water

(where it is not pirated), to childcare, to privatized health and education services, to physical

protection, to transport – access to all of the necessities of daily living have been increasingly

squeezed for millions of people under the neoliberal regime. At the same time, the very

informal settlements in which they live, increasingly dense sprawls on the edges of large

metropolises, have robbed people of much of the open albeit marginal land that might have been

commandeered for informal agriculture.

All of these shifts and many others are systemic insofar as they are inherent to the

transformation of the global social and political economy. They are less a top-down result of

global change than an integral contributor to that restructuring at multiple geographical scales.

The result is dramatically captured in Mike Davis’s (2006) Planet of Slums which builds on the

UN announcement of a majority urban world with an estimate that perhaps a billion people

around the world now find themselves living in shanties. Accumulating a breadth of data, he

builds sometimes in excruciating detail a portrait of the explosion of place-based urban poverty

across the world. A sense of impending doom and planetary unsustainabilty pervades this

story.

Whereas the largest concentration of planetary slums can be found in Asia, South and

Central America, and Africa, the contribution to this volume by Observatorio Metropolitano

makes clear that consonant with the globalization of labour, the explosion of urban form involves

the expansion of already existing poverty and the parallel expansion of barrios in Europe too and,

we might add, North America (see also Observatorio Metropolitano 2007). There have always

been informal sectors and barrios in the so-called core, but these are now increasingly embedded

in the social and physical fabric. The picture that emerges is of a far more dichotomous city

than even that which prompted discussions of the dual city in the 1980s. Not only are the

gentrified quarters of the central city and the various enclaves and developments rich with capital

and business investment contrasted with burgeoning shanties and barrios. This existing

economic geographic duality of the contemporary city has been intensified, but it has also been

rigidified by the political infusion of a new security regime. Gated cities, enclaves and

compounds for the wealthy together with burgeoning private security and secure transportation

are the norm for more and more wealthy urbanites; enhanced police patrolling of public space,

surveillance, containment and the militarization of policing where it was not previously

militarized are the new norms for many of the poor. These are obviously the geographical signs

of a trenchant social reality, namely that levels of inequality between the rich and poor have

expanded dramatically in the last two or three decades. This is true not only in South America

and the United States, where rates of inequality were already high in the 1970s, but even more so

for India and more so yet for states like China and Russia which relinquished a nominal

socialism for neoliberal capitalism.

One other aspect of this systemic crisis deserves consideration. In the last decade or

more, climate change has become the dominant environmental issue around the world. It is

impossible to parse out any clear distinction between natural and social causes, if for no other

reason than that such a neat conceptual distinction cannot map effectively onto empirical reality.

Yet the reality of that warning is surely undeniable and the latest estimates of this crisis are

alarming. According to a report prepared by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan’s think

tank, the Global Humanitarian Forum, climate change may already be responsible for 300,000

deaths per year, a figure expected to rise to 500,000 by 2030. The monetary costs amount to an

estimated $125 billion a year and may rise more than fourfold over the next two decades (Vidal

2009). Whether deserved or not, the tone of the public discussion over climate change is

apocalyptic, the more so as action to avert the consequences seems weak or non-existent. In his

contribution to this volume, Mike Davis joins the fray, challenging even pessimistic scientific

estimates as overly optimistic and providing a picture of the planetary chaos that he feels may

well already be inevitable. He points out that the vast majority of victims are predictably those

most vulnerable, meaning they will come from the “developing world” (the Annan think tank

estimates 99% of resulting deaths and 90% of economic losses ). Davis concludes with a more

upbeat conclusion that concerted and organized social action can solve the problem

If the problem is to be attacked, it is important to ask critical questions about why the

issue of climate change has developed such global political traction. For example, the global

malaria epidemic already claims an estimated 1 million lives per year, many of them children and

also predominantly in the developing countries, but it has generated only a fraction of the

concern, at least in the global north, and none of the apocalyptic verbiage. Or there are the

millions who die each year in the world’s cities, effectively from poverty. Further, in light of the

sharp critiques that marxists, feminists, historians of science and others developed of

“bourgeois science” between the 1960s and 1980s, why is there such silence on the left

concerning not just the details of the relevant climate science, but concerning the larger issue of

scientists’ self interest in the consequent flood of funding they have received and concerning too

the larger social context of science in these neoliberal (fading or otherwise) times? None of this

is meant to deny the reality of climate warming, even less to support evident corporate self

interest in its denial. Rather, with a view to dealing with the crisis, these questions attempt to

clarify real from chimerical strategies for action.

From Crisis to Chaos and Back Again

In varied ways and with quite different cities as their raw material, the essays in this

volume would not seem, at first sight, to give strong hope that the systemic urban crises

fomented during the neoliberal moment of capitalism is likely to abate. Quite the opposite. In

the present context the prospect is that an atrophic neoliberalism – dead but dominant – will heap

chaos on top of crisis. In many places of course, that has already happened, and the language of

the neoliberal era already betrays this. The language of “failed states,” for example is usually

uttered in unison with that of civil and political chaos; from Iraq to Somalia to Pakistan the states

themselves – more accurately their populations – are made to bear responsibility for

disarticulations and exclusions from global capital that are themselves in part constitutive of the

chaos.

It has to be emphasized, however, and this comes through in the essays here, that

whatever the commonalities and relationships connecting cities across the globe, they will

experience the pending chaos in radically uneven ways. Madrid is not Shanghai and Lagos is

not Los Angeles. Different cities exemplify different mixes of neoliberalism and its aftermath,

different contradictory combinations of opulence for some and deepening poverty for everyone

else, and the gathering chaos will be no different. How the chaos unfolds in specific urban

areas, and to what extent, will have a lot to do with the difference between existing social,

political and economic institutions and relations in different cities; it will also depend on how

different cities respond not just to developments in their own regions but to national and global

events; it will depend too on the power that cities have and on the economic and political power

they can garner from national and global institutions. It is especially important politically to

understand the unevenness of this prospective chaos. The case of piracy off the coast of Somalia

gives an excellent example why. In Europe and North America and for others in the cockpit of

global capitalism, the media and political classes treated the surge of piracy in early 2009 as pure,

uncivilized barbarism reminiscent of the film, “Pirates of the Caribbean.” It was such an

aberration that it seemed to ratify Somalia’s status as a “failed state.” Largely unrevealed were

the history and context within which piracy arose. In fact, for several years, container ships had

been travelling largely from Europe, particularly France, and dumping toxic nuclear waste in the

sea off the Somalian shore. The killing of the ocean quickly decimated the marginal livelihoods

of many local fishermen who eventually retaliated by taking over the ships and holding them for

ransom. (The only pirate so far captured by the United States is indeed a teenage fisherman.)

Thus in Somalia, pirates came to be seen as “the new coastguards.”

As a whole, the prospect of broadening chaos in the world’s cities should not be written

off as an apocalyptic vision. Although it is not often given public voice, the fear of revolt in the

wake of the global economic crash is actually a deep-seated dread for the world’s ruling classes.

In a Canadian interview in 2009, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard apologist for the British Empire,

predicted that before the crisis was resolved, “There will be blood.” Before it is all finished, he

continued: “It will cause civil wars to break out,” and it “will topple governments [this has

already happened in Iceland and Latvia] ... and bring in governments that are extreme....”

(Quoted in Scoffield 2009). Civil unrest, domestic and otherwise, is also on the minds of the

CIA and Britain’s MI5 and on the minds too of the militaries of both countries. Accordingly,

the CIA added the global economic crisis to its list of top security threats.

Genuine as these fears are, it is difficult to anticipate, even more difficult to predict, the

forms that such chaos might take and where and when it will occur (on the imminent possibility

of social conflagration in Brazillian cities, see Rolnik in this volume). Here another question of

language becomes apparent. The rhetoric of “marginalization” and “exclusion” has recently

become fashionable as a means to lament the plight of those from whom any revolt or response

to officially mandated chaos might occur. In truth, however, this apparently sympathetic

language emanates from neoliberalism itself, whether from the writings of the World Bank or

that of NGOs. It paints the world as a dichotomy – those luckily in the center (economically not

geographically) and those not – and it flattens out any differences among those who are

“marginalized.” Yet the point of political organization is presumably to do the hard work that

constructs out of extraordinary difference a “we” that is powerful enough to create a different

kind of future.

Thus the declaration by Ferguson and the moves by the CIA and MI5 also point implicitly

to the fact that the future has become radically open in a way not true a decade earlier at the

zenith of neoliberal hegemony. While gathering systemic chaos seems inevitable the results of

that chaos are not. It could be a vicious chaos that brings no good or it could be a productive

chaos. It could be a chaos which brings heavy (or heavier) state repression or it could be a chaos

that throws up very real alternatives for social organization. The making of urban alternatives

is unlikely to come about quietly, nor will it be spontaneous or instantaneous for all that such

spontaneous uprisings are sure to happen. It will instead take work and organization. If we

date the onset of crisis to 2007, it has to be said however that the signs of a gathering opposition

are only yet sporadically present, and that the uprisings from Greece to Peru and France to rural

China while rhetorically linked are not organizationally linked, the World Social Forum in all its

uncertain future notwithstanding. It also has to be said that the building of such coordinated

opposition will in many places be challenged often violently by a state deployment of stringent

security ideologies that paints striking workers, migrants, ethnic groups, mothers, angry youths,

environmentalists, anti-war activists as “terrorist” threats. Even more seriously, new

apparatuses and technologies of severe repression developed and justified under the so-called war

on terror (where they weren’t already in evidence) are already in place and ready for deployment

against any social and political opposition. They are available, in other words, the exaggeration

of chaos to repress those struggling against the sources of that chaos in the first place.

The challenge now would seem to be this: how to understand clearly and to organize in

opposition to the impending chaos without at the same time playing into the security panic

which, in broadcasting multifold fear, acts as a powerful form of social control; and without at

the same time resorting to apocalypticism and thereby capitulating to that fear. Either lapse –

indulging the security panic or resorting to apocalypticism – would have the effect of

immobilizing any effective opposition either out of fear or hopelessness. Rather, since the urban

future is indeed radically open again, we could do a lot worse than take inspiration from Orwell,

to find ways, not just retrospectively but prospectively, of embracing hope as “more normal than

apathy or cynicism” and of breathing the “air of equality.”

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