The boom and collapse of the land and property market in the early 1970s in Great Britain revealed a lack of knowledge and understanding of the present nature of private landownership by capital. The reaction of ‘the left’ (including that of the present author) to the events of that period was confused. One possible interpretation was to write off the political battle […] as just one more victory for industrial capital, in this case against the moribund remains of something called ‘landed property’. This latter, it was vaguely suspected, quite possibly still had feudal connections but was now virtually extinct, and certainly posed no major difficulties for capital. The problem with this interpretation – apart from incorrect assumptions of association between aristocracy, landownership and feudalism – was that it failed to answer the question of what role private landownership now plays in the British social formation. The assumption in fact appeared to be that landownership now played no structural role. But events themselves belied that view. […] The existing pattern of private landownership clearly was having contradictory repercussions on the wider processes of accumulation and of the reproduction of social relations. A common alternative view recognized the existence of such structural contradictions but attributed them to something variously entitled ‘the property sector’ and ‘landed capital’. The difficulty of this interpretation was that the definition and nature of this landed interest, and consequently of its specific economic and political effects, were left unanalysed.

The research from which this paper stems was concerned to analyse both the present nature of private landownership by capital in Great Britain, and also the effects of such private landownership on a social formation dominated by capitalism. This paper will indicate some of the results of that enquiry and will also make some points on the interpretation of struggles over, and changes in, the form of landownership in such a social formation. […] [It contains] a brief outline and analysis […] of the present forms of landownership by private capital in Great Britain, and of their relative importance. An overall theme stresses […] [the significance of structural social relations and] the empirical study of such relations in concrete social formations […].

Let me begin, briefly, with two observations which provoke geographical reflection: the first concerns governments in the UK and USA (and lots more besides) who tell us that ‘globalisation’ is inevitable. (They really mean globalisation in its current form – which is to say ‘neoliberal’.) They tell us it is the only possible future. And if you point to Nicaragua, Mali and Mozambique, which do not yet seem to be part of this future, they will tell you that such countries are just ‘behind’ and that eventually they will follow along the path which we have led. Perhaps my favourite example of this came in 1998 when Bill Clinton delivered himself of the reflection that we can no more resist the current forces of globalisation than we can resist the force of gravity. We might note in passing that this comes from a man who spends his life flying about in aeroplanes and thus quite effectively resisting the force of gravity! But, more seriously, of course globalisation is not a force of nature. It is a product of society – a political and economic project which requires the mighty efforts of the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund, United States of America, multi-national corporations, World Bank, etc., to push it forward. The aim of Clinton’s statement is to persuade us that there is no alternative. This is not a description of the world as it is, so much as an image in which the world is being made. Now, many criticisms can be made of this formulation, but I want to focus on one thing – that within Clinton’s statement is a kind of sleight of hand in terms of how we think about space and time.

When we ask about Mozambique and the answer is that that country is just ‘backward’, what is really at issue is a denial of Mozambique’s difference from us – or at least a reduction of that difference merely to the fact that Mozambique is ‘behind’ us in development. Co-existing difference is reduced to place in the historical queue. Effectively this is turning geography into history – space into time.

If there is a place overflowing with history it is Italy. I do not mean simply a country with a long past – there are many other nations that share that distinction. Rather, history in Italy permeates and shapes the present and is living still in its cities, in its churches, palaces, banks; in its squares that host markets, religious celebrations, political gatherings, social and leisure activities; in its care for the landscape, both natural and artistic. A monastery vacated by friars can be turned into a hospital, then into a prison, then into a university building (as in Bologna), with a tireless effort to reinterpret monuments rather than discard them.

The relationship between economic activity and communities at a local and regional level is perhaps one of Italy’s most distinct and established characteristics. It has found many interpreters, such as the celebrated entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and the economist Giacomo Becattini. Olivetti was as much a “civil” entrepreneur, a thinker and a promoter of culture, as he was a businessman. In his 1945 book, L’ordine politico delle Comunità (The Political Order of Communities) he argued that the entrepreneur’s role was to trigger the wider economic, social and cultural development of the region and community where its factory was located. He established the movement Community to promote these ideas and was even elected to parliament as a representative of that movement. Although his early death at the age of 59 did not allow him to consolidate either his company or his movement, the “humanistic” management that he exemplified is still alive today and has inspired many other entrepreneurs, who want to keep faith with this genius loci. Indeed, his legacy was recognized by Unesco in 2018, with Ivrea (Piedmont) – Olivetti’s city – becoming Italy’s latest world heritage site.

Becattini was the most coherent theorist of territory as the unit of inspiration for economic activity with a unique and non-replicable identity. His view of the market economy was as follows:

INTRODUCTION

Recent years have been tough for the trade unions. Headline after headline has proclaimed their imminent demise, their irrelevance to changing occupational and industrial structures and to supposedly transformed ideologies. They have come under political onslaught. Given all of this, they have survived remarkably well.

The emerging evidence of a stabilisation in their position, at least in numerical terms, itself says something about the causes of the problems. Trade union membership has not declined because of some autonomous ideological shift away from unionism, or more generally away from collectivism and towards individualism (Gallie, 1987). On the contrary, there is some evidence that those who remain in trade unions today are more consciously trade unionist than previously. Given the political climate, being a trade union member is possibly more of a political statement than it was when, in the then major sectors of the economy, taking up trade union membership was almost a reflex action.

The bulk of the recent decline in trade union membership has resulted from a straightforward loss of jobs, a process concentrated in the more unionised sectors, and from people going out of union membership when moving jobs to sectors where unions have been less successful in gaining an organisational foothold (Gallie, 1987). These two processes are associated mainly with the massive recession in the early eighties and with very long term structural changes in the economy, particularly changes in the labour process and in the occupational structure of the workforce. To these problems can be added an extraordinarily hostile government bent on attack. With hindsight, the first factor (the recession) seems to have been the cause of all the headlines, but it will probably be the other two phenomena (the long-term ‘structural changes’ and the political onslaught) which ultimately will be seen to have posed the bigger challenges. We shall look at these in the sections which follow.

Table 7.1 shows the clear shift from growth to decline in total membership of all unions between the 1970s and 1980s. This has not been reversed. But the real collapse took place in the recession years between 1980 and 1983, which fits at aggregate level with Gallie’s findings.

‘Seattle’ managed to establish ‘globalisation’ as an important, and contestable, issue on the political agenda. That debate must be kept going, but has to avoid being fossilised into static oppositions that are difficult to get out of and which finally anyway lead nowhere.

The question of globalisation should not be posed as one of local versus global ‘Local’ may be good or bad, depending on your politics. The peasant farmers in India, being invaded by multinational companies armed with genetically modified products and bits of paper claiming patent rights over plants and seeds, are ‘local’, fighting to defend ‘local rights’. But then so are the proponents of Fortress Europe, or those in California who vote for propositions banning ‘illegal’ Latin Americans from access to public services. The arguments against ‘global’ multinational capital’s ability to roam the world, playing one group off against another, are certainly appealing. But then so are the arguments for more cultural exchange between countries and peoples. ‘Going global’ can be attractive or pernicious.

There has been a tendency on the left to treat the ‘global’ level with a degree of suspicion, partly because there is a feeling that nothing can be done about it. But this acquiesces to the dominant rhetoric – that globalisation is inevitable and we just have to work out the best ways of adapting to it. But globalisation we see at present is not inevitable, it is a project.

One example of the duplicity of this rhetoric of inevitability concerns the nation state. We are constantly being told that individual countries are powerless in the face of multinational capital, and it would be foolish to deny the changes in the relationship between capital and nation states. But many governments (and most particularly those of the USA and the UK) are active participants in the promotion of the current form of globalisation. It was the governments, not the companies, that signed up to the Uruguay round of world trade negotiations. Who gathered inside the splendid halls in Seattle for the World Trade Organisation meeting? Who began the process of nations giving away foreign-exchange control? (Margaret Thatcher, the supposed great defender of our sovereignty, as it happens.) We must not cede the global level of politics to the right.

INTRODUCTION

In 2014, Doreen Massey discussed the Kilburn Manifesto at the American Association of Geographers Meeting. “The Kilburn” is a project she co-organized with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin that is at once powerful public scholarship and potent political intervention. The room felt like a political meeting – packed with people sitting on the floor and standing in the doorways, all in rapt attention. She ended by noting that the current project of government is one in which “we must not be allowed to know that there are alternatives – we must not know that hegemonies are not totalities” (Massey 2014, authors’ emphasis). She argued that in the face of widely circulating ideology scripting the current neoliberal conjuncture of financialized and globalized capitalism as natural, inevitable and ideal, the Left must narrate it instead as a complex economic, philosophical, moral and political crisis. That night, as in countless other interventions throughout her career, Doreen insisted that cracking open hegemonies is urgent political work that requires new modes of thought, action, and solidarities (see also Hall & Massey 2010).

We take up this charge in relation to poverty. Poverty is a central site of politics, resistance and struggle over “common sense” that shapes how members of a society relate to each other. We respond to Doreen and her co-authors’ call in the Kilburn Manifesto to repoliticize poverty, and turn to Hall and Massey’s (2010) conjunctural analysis as one avenue towards doing so. Conjunctural analysis traces the social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are held together in particular space-times and makes visible the techniques by which these contradictions are rendered invisible, unremarkable and off limits for intervention. We argue that persistent poverty is one such contradiction that must be repoliticized because its very persistence challenges economistic narratives of “progress” and “fairness”. Repoliticizing poverty stands to crack open the hegemony of neoliberal market fundamentalism, imagine alternatives and build new political solidarities.

In this chapter, we repoliticize poverty. This involves two moves: first, we trace “thinkable politics” that stabilize the political-economic and sociocultural processes of impoverishment.

INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey’s early and ongoing dedication to understanding the inherent interconnection of the “social” and the “economic” in the production of space, place and scale made her an economic geographer ahead of her time. Her interests and commitments were heterodox and wide-ranging; she refused to be confined by sub disciplinary conventions that still channel economic, labour, urban and feminist geographers along particular topical, conceptual and theoretical lines, and she was deeply engaged with the ongoing work of probing foundational assumptions (what Castree (2004), at once critical and celebratory, called critical human geography’s “shibboleths”). Her formative work on spatial divisions of labour; her insistence on the relational nature of place, space and identity; her concept of “power-geometries”; and her elaboration of the notion of geographical imaginations ranged across thematic concerns. These concerns included economic (“industrial”) restructuring, urbanization and the world city, the concept of space in social theory and political philosophy, and neoliberalism and conjunctural politics. Her work is also grounded, unafraid to speak to regional- and national-level processes, globalizing trends and “the urban” from a localist standpoint, whether in London, Manchester, a Cambridge science park, or on a train to Keswick in England’s Lake District.

Given this breadth, it is perhaps unsurprising that economic and labour geographers (myself included!) – most notably in the last decade or so, after building on the insights in Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984b) – often acknowledge, but seldom fully engage, Massey’s work. In this chapter I want to explore how Massey’s articulation of geographical imaginations relates to her concept of power-geometries, and the utility of these ideas for exploring the pension divestment movement (that is, the movement to pressure pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry because of the need to combat climate change). I examine a subset of arguments for and against divestment grounded in legal debates about fiduciary duty, and explore how Massey’s approach can be used to highlight the dynamics of institutional power that these debates reveal – and the political strategies for interrogating and reshaping those dynamics.

This book is a celebration of Doreen Massey’s life of political action and geographical thinking. For her, of course, it was not just that these two aspects informed each other but that they were inseparable, neither able to exist without the other. Politics without geography was impossible, but it was equally impossible to conceive of geography without politics.

The notion of dialogues that frames the book is fundamental to this chapter. The last time I saw Doreen Massey, we had begun (yet another) discussion about contemporary political possibilities, one which we never had the chance to complete. As a result, Doreen is still present in my head – always arguing, and somehow still winning all the arguments. In other words, it feels as if am in a continuing dialogue with her and her ways of thinking.

In what follows, I want to engage with the sadly absent yet still present Doreen in the context of a debate about the UK’s political geography. Doreen Massey consistently highlighted the significance of uneven development for the UK’s economic geographies, for the grounded specificities of its social relations (of gender, race and class) and for the dominant practices of British politics. She approached these issues from a number of different angles over the years, but my focus is on just one aspect of her writing – namely the position of London and the London city-region within the increasingly uneasy political and economic settlement constituted by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Allen & Massey 1988; Allen et al. 1998; Amin et al. 2003; Massey 2007). Doreen never directly engaged with the political geography of Brexit – the UK’s vote to leave the European Union – because the vote took place some months after her death. But it would have come as no surprise to her. Her work on uneven development, and the role of London in particular, was highly prescient, indeed almost prophetic. In the context of that vote I draw on that work to reflect on some of the geographies of the vote and their implications.

INTRODUCTION

The current approach to tackling money laundering assumes that:

• • all money launderers are the same, in the sense that all money launderers are criminals, and all criminals are money launderers; and

• • all countries are the same, in the sense that, because crime is destructive, and because ML damages established industries, all countries are incentivized to tackle crime and ML.

In practice, however, we see very different types of launderer, in the sense that the money launderers in Deutsche Bank and those in IS have very different functions, motivations, dependence, sunk costs and vulnerabilities. In the same vein, we see very different responses to ML at the national level, in the sense that, whereas Germany invests in tackling ML, the Seychelles once actively encouraged ML, and publicly invited criminals to invest their illgotten gains there with the promise of immunity from prosecution.

In this chapter, we enrich the overview of money launderers described in Chapter 1, first by introducing a new taxonomy of money launderers, which identifies vulnerabilities in the ML chain, and then by introducing a taxonomy of ML countries, which explains why some countries fight ML, whereas others ignore it. Both discussions help us to understand who runs the laundry, and, more importantly, both discussions show the limitations of the current regulatory approaches to tackling ML.

A TAXONOMY OF MONEY LAUNDERERS

Distinguishing between types of criminal

Money launderers are criminals. Therefore, the academic literature, as described in Chapter 1, tends to treat the “criminal” – who generates “criminal proceeds” – and the “launderer” – who converts the dirty dollars into clean ones – as one and the same individual. This, we suggest, is a gross oversimplifi cation, as there are a number of important types of launderer, each with their own vulnerabilities. So, who launders?

Standard criminals

Standard criminal launderers are rational, profit-motivated individuals who generate criminal proceeds, for example by running guns or by selling drugs, and then self-launder the illegal proceeds that they generate. Criminal launderers are the standard launderer described in the ML literature.

INTRODUCTION

Although known for her extensive work on labour, gender and the socio-economic production of place, Doreen Massey also engaged with the links between physical and human geography (Harrison et al. 2004) and the pursuit of common epistemological ground between these subdisciplines (Massey 1999g). In particular, she suggested that these subfields share important engagements with questions regarding how space, time and “space-time” are conceptualized, arguing that a historical perspective has been a crucial shared focal point for these seemingly disparate subdisciplines. Her vision for greater engagement between physical and human geography was not merely a plea for encouraging greater interdisciplinary cooperation; rather, she articulated it as a way for each to integrate some of the associated ontological and epistemological scaffolding of the other in order to begin to address larger societal questions and to develop a fuller understanding of the social and physical production of space. She further encouraged physical geographers, in particular, to shed some of their “physics envy” and embrace some of the broader theoretical and normative approaches in the social sciences. In many ways, Massey anticipated and inspired contemporary efforts to rethink and transcend the human–physical divide (e.g., Lane 2014; Lave et al. 2014; Ashmore 2015). Using our ongoing work on river restoration in New England, we take up Massey’s challenge to integrate physical and human geography. Our analysis of dam removals reveals the benefits of a geographically holistic approach, taking into account contestations over interpretations of history, scientific expertise, knowledge production, identity and micropolitics (Fox et al. 2016). The result is a more robust understanding of the relationship between river restoration and the production of place.

River restoration is a big business; within the United States (US), it is a $1 billion per year enterprise (Bernhardt et al. 2005) with many scientists claiming that the practice is rapidly outpacing the science of river restoration (Wohl et al. 2015). River restoration is an all-encompassing term that includes bank stabilization, fish ladders, flow modification, channel design, land acquisition, riparian/wetland management and dam removal – approaches that vary in price and engineering/geomorphic design and intensity.

[…]

POWER-GEOMETRIES IN ACTION

In itself, the term power-geometry does not imply any specific form (any specific geometry). It is a concept through which to analyse the world, in order perhaps to highlight inequalities, or deficiencies in democracy. It is in this mode an instrument of potential critique. It may also, however, be an instrument through which to imagine, and maybe to begin to build, more equal and democratic societies. This point was brought strongly home to me in the spring and summer of 2007 when I received an invitation to visit Venezuela to participate in the processes of change underway as part of the Bolivarian project of building a socialism of the twenty-first century. After a resounding election victory in December 2006 this project, led by Hugo Chávez, had moved in a more explicitly socialist direction (its own characterisation) and in this context five motors had been set out to carry the revolution forward. The fourth of these motors is to build a new power-geometry (la nueva geometría del poder). Here, then, a geographical concept is being put to positive political use. Indeed, as will be seen, part of what lay behind the proposal was an impressive recognition of the existence and significance, within Venezuela, of highly unequal, and thus undemocratic, power-geometries.

In its particular form of the fourth motor, the new power-geometry referred to the need to reorganise the geopolitics of Venezuela, the geopolitical organisation of its territory. Importantly, however, this was recognised to refer both to the formal geography of its democracy and to the form of the power-relations that it entailed. Schematically, it is possible to spell out these aspects separately. Thus, on the more purely geographical side, the intent is to distribute «power» and participation more evenly – to give more voice to the vast regions of the south of the country, that stretch away from the towns and populated areas of the coast towards the headwaters of the Amazon; to give more voice to smaller communities; and to give more voice to indigenous communities. On the other side, there was recognition of the need also to address the nature of the power within these power-geometries.