Introduction

Understanding continuity and change is among the greatest challenges for social scientists, rooted in fundamental questions about power, structure and agency. The 2012 anniversary conference of the Policy & Politics journal reconsidered the challenge at a perplexing time. Despite a profound and enduring economic crisis, neoliberalism continues to dominate – even extend its hegemony (Crouch, 2011). For critical activists and scholars suffering under neoliberalism, and its durability in the face of economic crisis, only lends urgency to the question of how a different world might be possible.

This chapter explores an increasingly influential theory of change in contemporary policy and politics, that of everyday making (Bang, 2005; Gibson-Graham, 1996); Li and Marsh, 2008). Everyday making seeks to accomplish small-scale, gradual changes by constructing new ways of living and doing politics from the bottom-up. Advocates of everyday making are sceptical that change will ever occur at the systemic scale – the national, international or global levels. They are similarly sceptical about organised resistance to governments and corporations, preferring positive action to direct confrontation (Newman, 2012). However, this chapter argues that although change almost invariably originates in everyday life, strategies and struggles to transform the system remain indispensable. To support this position, it restates the Marxist perspective on capitalism as a fundamentally crisis-prone socioeconomic system. From a Marxist perspective, the challenge is to grasp the relationship between everyday life and systemic trends and struggles. In developing this argument, the chapter touches on each of the three themes of the anniversary conference: what has changed, what endures and how does our understanding of continuity and change inform future strategies for policy and action.

The chapter first discusses the eclectic literatures on everyday making, notably focus on the emancipatory potential in small acts, critique of Marxism and the performative power in networks (our capacity to create and exemplify new worlds by thinking, speaking, acting and associating differently). It then considers the contribution of Marxist analysis to grasping the relationship between everyday life and the system as a whole. Drawing on examples of cooperative enterprise and community organising, it argues that treating capitalism as a deeply crisis-prone system has significant implications.