In Chapter 3, I approached the significance of conjunctural analysis by exploring some of the accounts that have been offered for ‘Brexit’. Across the many accounts, I focused on three themes in particular – populism, neoliberalism and the ‘left behind’ – because they exemplify two concerns that have preoccupied me since the Brexit vote. First, they tend to frame events and their causes epochally (in Raymond Williams’ terms), treating the event as part of an era or period dominated by one condition – populism or neoliberalism. Second, they tend towards a singular view of explanation, relegating other dynamics or forces to subordinate or marginal roles. In contrast, I have been developing the view that conjunctural analysis requires ways of thinking contingently and thinking complexly. Conjunctures are formed through contingent – and contested – arrangements of times, places, people, possibilities and powers. There is, as I tried to show in Chapter 2, always more than one dynamic in play – and it is the complexity of their entanglements that both forms the conjuncture and creates its unstable trajectory.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have been devoted to thinking about the UK as a complex social formation that contains heterogeneous social forces. That idea has its origins in a distinction within Marxism between modes of production (made up of the forces and relations of production) and social formations, understood as the more concrete arrangements in which multiple modes of production are combined with their other elements – such as politics, ideology and (in some versions) processes of social reproduction. These are not just the ‘superstructures’ (in the old base versus superstructure distinction) but form the necessary conditions of existence for production (and the extraction of surplus value) to take place. But it will be clear that I want to make the idea of ‘social formation’ do rather more work than that.

My view of the social as a field of complex and shifting relationships is central to this. Such relationships are structured by divisions, hierarchies, forms of domination and subordination that certainly include class divisions (and sub-divisions) but extend well beyond those.