INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey had a lifelong fascination with the social and environmental lives of places, lived space, the dimension of multiplicity and radical simultaneity, and the political possibilities of thinking space-time relationally and dynamically. This brought her into close collaboration with British Cultural Studies and its theories of the conjuncture. Drawing particularly on economic geography, the New Left, Althusserian Marxism, British Cultural Studies, the feminism of Luce Irigaray (among others) and later post-Heideggerian anti-essentialist theories, her work was important in inflecting these perspectives with a deep and abiding commitment to the “mattering” of space.

In this chapter, I focus on Doreen’s contributions to these crucial progressive movements in contemporary British Cultural Studies. In conjunction with her colleagues at the Open University, her writings on critical feminist geographies of place, space, environment, gender and geography have come to define the practices and goals of a conjunctural analysis for the Left, and have challenged taken-for-granted explanations of regional decline, peripheralization and inequality, the privileging of high-tech fantasies, the reworking of development logics around neoliberal economics and the domination of financialization logics and interests in framing London (and wider British) futures.

PLACE, SPACE AND POLITICS

From her position at the heart of economic geography, and throughout her academic, professional and wider social life, Doreen Massey was a key contributor and interlocutor in British Marxism, the New Left, feminism, British Cultural Studies and a series of major institutions they influenced. Like others influenced by critical readings of Marxism and postwar continental philosophy, Doreen was committed to challenging the hegemony of a temporal understanding of radical politics in favour of what she variously referred to as a relational understanding of place, dynamic concepts of space-time, non-binary concept of nature, and non-functionalist epistemologies of causality (Massey 1973, 1978, 2000b). If time was the dimension of sequences of actions and experience, space was the dimension of radical simultaneity and multiplicity. As she argued repeatedly with Ernesto Laclau, understanding change purely in temporal terms elided the complex interweaving of space and time that drove the actual content of concrete events (Massey 1995c; Mouffe 2013).

INTRODUCTION

Technology forges ahead at a rapid pace, whether we like it or not. Criminals recognize this inevitability and use technological improvements to advance their craft, committing crimes from half a world away in real time. Meticulous criminals also use technological advancements to distance themselves from their illegal activities and profits through use of virtual banking and electronic money transfer systems, which allow criminals to buy, sell and exchange goods without any physical interaction. Although such services use digital logs that serve to identify the sender’s and a receiver’s digital identities, criminals possess the means to obfuscate their digital identity by simply faking their Internet Protocol address or by using another individual’s account, essentially making their activities untraceable.

New virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, add yet another layer of anonymity by allowing users to transfer value without the collection of any personally identifi able information (PII). Regulations currently do not affect such virtual currencies owing to a lack of foresight by the regulatory authority, creating a legal grey area. Thus, criminals can continue to capitalize on technological innovation to bolster their illegal activities. ML is one particular criminal craft that stands to benefit from technological advancement.

This chapter analyses the effects of Bitcoin and analogous virtual currencies on AML enforcement. We start off with a brief primer on virtual currencies. We continue with a Bitcoin primer, which differentiates Bitcoin technology from traditional currencies and competing virtual currencies. Afterwards, an analysis of whether Bitcoin is legal to use or trade in the United States, using domestic and international adoption of Bitcoin for guidance, follows. Next, we discuss whether current US AML regulatory schemes encompass the entirety of Bitcoin use. Finally, this chapter offers suggestions for a regulatory scheme encompassing Bitcoin and analogous virtual currency technologies.

CURRENCIES

Virtual currencies

A virtual currency acts like a currency in some respects but is not directly akin to a real currency. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) defines real currency as coin or paper money that circulates, is designated as legal tender and is customarily used and accepted as a medium of exchange in the issuing country.

A ruthless critique

Degrowth is a ruthless critique of the dogma of economic growth – a new keyword: a “pig on the tracks” of “a one-way future consisting only of growth” (Le Guin 1982).

Degrowth is, first, a critique of the ecological consequences of economic growth. The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we transform and damage the environment. There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down. We should extract, produce and consume less, and we should do it all differently. Growth economies collapse without growth. To prosper without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living.

Second, economic growth is no longer desirable. The costs of growth exceed its benefits. Growth is no longer “economic”. Growth is a recent phenomenon of industrial capitalism. Economists first measured it in the 1930s, and its pursuit became universal only from the 1950s. Civilizations before industrialization flourished without growth and without caring about growth.

Third, growth has always been based on exploitation. Without a surplus, there is no investment and no growth. To have a surplus, capitalists or governments must exploit someone, somewhere. If they paid this someone the real value of her work, then they would not have a surplus and there would be no growth. First there were the slaves, and the natives of the colonies. Then there were the commoners, and the workers in the factories; and there were always the women at home. Growth cannot reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation.

Degrowth is not only a hypothesis, or trajectory. Those who use the term signify something bigger, a vision or imaginary of an alternative world (Latouche 2009; D’Alisa et al. 2014a). Degrowth is an opening of the imagination to futures other than a “one-way future consisting only of growth” (Le Guin 1982).

This vision is utopian since there is not yet a place where it has taken its full form. Seeds of it have existed, though, and do exist in collectives that organize their lives differently. And there are concrete ideas about how the vision can expand and become real. Degrowth can therefore be thought of as a new imaginary: a new set of ideas and fantasies that will institute and effect change of the material world.

This chapter outlines key elements of the degrowth vision. It then presents policies and grassroots actions that concretize this vision, before discussing the politics of its realization. The socio-political difficulties of a voluntary degrowth transition are recognized. This does not weaken the veracity of the diagnosis of chapter 4. Growth will not become more sustainable or less catastrophic just because degrowth is politically difficult.

A degrowth vision

After a chapter full of data and graphs, indulge me here while I imagine an economy after degrowth. There is a point both in thinking pragmatically within the contours of the immediately possible and in thinking idealistically in order to open up horizons and possibilities.

Using the word economy here is misleading because the degrowth imaginary decentres the economic and re-embeds it within the social and the political. Human activity and work in a degrowth imaginary are centred around care for other humans, sentient beings and their (our) habitats, and they serve the “unproductive” expenditures through which we make meaning (D’Alisa et al. 2014b,c). This constitutes a re-institution (and re-imagination) of the economy, re-embedding it within society.

Think of the ancient Greeks or Egyptians. For them, the economy was not a separate sphere. Production served politics, religious ceremonies and art; it did not dictate what happens in all spheres of life.

On 14 June 2017, a fire took hold of Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey highrise in the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington, London. At times approximating the temperature of an incinerator, the building smouldered for days afterwards. The tower comprised 129 flats, most of which were social housing managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO). The official death toll of 71 residents remains hotly disputed by many witnesses and community members. But even this number still makes the event Britain’s deadliest structural fire since the beginning of the twentieth century. So appallingly inept and callous was the local government response to the fire and its aftermath that within five days the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), one of the richest local councils in the country, had been side-lined at the highest level of government in favour of a “gold command”, which then coordinated the response.

The intensity and spread of the fire, seemingly starting in one fourth floor flat, is widely attributed to the flammability of the cladding that was attached to the exterior of the building as part of an insulation upgrade between 2015 and 2016. An original contractor had been dropped by the Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) in favour of a cheaper competitor. Building experts warned in 2014 that the material scheduled for Grenfell Tower had to be used in tandem with non-combustible cladding (Prescod & Renwick 2017). Nonetheless, a cladding that featured superior fire resistance was ruled out due to cost, and a sub-standard type fitted instead. Ultimately, RBKC’s building control team certified that work complied with “relevant provisions” (Prescod & Renwick 2017).

Many community members, leaders and activists have criticized the proposed terms of the public inquiry into Grenfell Tower, which focuses on the immediate causes of the fire, the responsibilities of the local authority, and the local and national response. They argue that the wider context of gentrification must frame any investigation. Taking this prompt, I want to connect Grenfell to the racialization of the undeserving poor that I have presented in this book.

INTRODUCTION

Since at least the Elizabethan era, poor laws marked a formal distinction between those deserving of relief – the lame, impotent, old or blind – and those who were able-bodied yet idle or vagrant and undeserving. To the deserving poor, relief was provided in the form of money, food or clothing. The undeserving were often sent temporarily to houses of correction. The poor laws were inherently patriarchal in their assumptions and applications. The fate of women and children was by and large determined by the character of their husband/father. Implemented locally, at parish level, the poor laws were secularized instruments of religious charity, framed by moral commandments. By the late eighteenth century, poor laws had become indispensable to the maintenance of political order in Britain’s fast-evolving “commercial society”.

Customary tenures in England had long guaranteed use and access rights to land while defining reciprocal (albeit uneven) obligations between lord and subject. From the later 1600s, however, a variety of means were utilized by large landowners to force peasants to sell their customary tenures in order to consolidate land holdings into private property. These “enclosures” cut personal ties to local parishes and led to a growth of “masterless men” who threatened the political order of the rural idyll. Enclosure facilitated the “marketization” of agriculture, which can be understood for our purposes as a shift from moral obligations regarding the provision of subsistence to a far less personal and amoral mechanism of supply and demand. Concerns over “masterless men” led many to ask whether poor laws could check the apparent disintegration of rural order. Regardless, in 1773 parliament passed an Enclosure Act by which common lands would ostensibly be better cultivated, “improved” and regulated. However, by this point in time the political problem posed by England’s rural poor was already being apprehended in more expansive terms, referencing African enslavement and the plantation economies of the Americas.

In the first part of this chapter I explore late eighteenth-century claims as to the distinctive political heritage of England, said to be characterized as a tradition of orderly independence.

In 1885 influential jurist Albert Venn Dicey (1889: 38) defined Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty as “the right to make or unmake any law whatever”. For Dicey, the strength of this sovereignty was such that no person or group could “override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”. Parliament’s sovereignty was ill-disposed towards the sentiments of the “people” entering the halls of Westminster in an unmediated fashion. Rather, the people’s representatives had to exercise independent reason in deliberation and decision making. For right or wrong, parliamentary sovereignty has always demanded representative rather than direct democracy. Except that when, in June 2016, the British public voted by 51.9 per cent to leave the EU, influential politicians and pundits claimed that the non-binding referendum result was a direct, unmediated expression of the “popular will”. The government, they argued, was bound to legislate on this will.

In the months following the referendum, it became routine for politicians and pundits to claim that the will of “the people” was paramount, even over parliamentary sovereignty. In the first Conservative Party conference following the referendum, Theresa May (2016b) commanded her government to “respect what the people told us on the 23rd of June – and take Britain out of the European Union”. When, in November, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled that parliament had to legislate on Brexit, the Daily Mail newspaper accused the judiciary of being “enemies of the people” (Phipps 2016). The justice secretary, Liz Truss, was noticeably slow to defend the judges. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) warned that a 100,000 strong “people’s army” might march on the Supreme Court to ensure that the popular will was enacted (Payton 2016).

But who is morally worthy to count as “the people”? Pouring scorn on the European Parliament just days after the referendum, Farage (2016) argued that Brexit was the will of the “little people”.

Planet earth is our lifeboat. And yet earth is becoming a planet of the shipwrecked. Those with power loot the earth and seas, leaving the looted to drown without lifeboats. Islands of preposterous wealth are created in the midst of rising seas of destitution, golf courses in a planet of slums. Extreme poverty and inequality, climate and ecosystem disasters, the erosion of politics and democracy – we are heading towards a bleak future. As French political scientist Paul Ariès puts it: “degrowth or barbarianism”? Either we find a way to stop those who are plundering earth and share the limited planet that we have, or we will enter a new Dark Age of humanity.

Okay, let us take a breath and take it easy. Even in the Dark Ages, the sun still shone. Life is always beautiful. Nature is bountiful if we care for it. Beauty costs nothing – a sunset, a night looking at the stars, a joke, a hug, a kiss, a poem or a few words of love. All it takes for a good life is sharing and enjoying the excess of what we produce.

In the parts of the world that I am writing from, we already produce enough – actually much more than enough. And yet we are stuck in a oneway future in which all we can think of is producing even more. There will never be enough until we share what there is. Sharing and enjoying a limited planet is what degrowth is all about. “Degrowth” marks a ruthless critique of the dogma of more – the dogma of economic growth. This book provides the skeleton for a theory of degrowth and then puts flesh on its bones, presenting the main claims, hypotheses, proposals and dreams of those of us who write about degrowth.

Research on degrowth explains how our societies became stuck on growth and suggests how we can become unstuck. I approach these questions through two interdisciplinary fields: ecological economics and political ecology. Ecological economics is an ecological critique of economics, applying the energetics of life to the study of the economy.

I do not need to tell you that degrowth is not part of mainstream discourse and that it has made no headway in market economics, for which questioning growth is anathema. Some ecological and political economists, though, have felt the need to engage with the degrowth (hypo)thesis, given its popularity within social and environmental movements. This chapter reviews the key debates that have taken place between critics or sceptics of degrowth and its advocates. Through these conversations I identify the weaker aspects of the theory of degrowth, as well as areas where more research would be most welcome.

Is degrowth necessary and is it feasible?

Green growth, a-growth and degrowth

For green growth advocates, degrowth is not only impossible, it is also unnecessary, since economic growth and technological progress can enable us both to have more stuff and to reduce resource use and carbon emissions. A few countries, mostly in Europe, have exhibited declining carbon emissions during the last two decades despite sustained growth (Aden 2016). Technological studies also project feasible scenarios for a world powered by renewable (Jakobson et al. 2010) or nuclear power. Expenditure on a largescale energy transition may stimulate growth and create new jobs, so green growth advocates claim.

I engaged with these arguments in chapter 4 but let me recap the main responses to these ideas here.

• 1. Once trade effects have been taken into account, fewer countries have experienced an absolute decoupling of emissions than is typically reported. In terms of resources, there are almost no cases of absolute decoupling (Wiedman et al. 2014).

• 2. What is possible in one country is not necessarily generalizable to all others. Switzerland can be a bank economy and Luxembourg a service economy, but the whole world cannot consist of Switzerlands and Luxembourgs.

• 3. Declining carbon emissions are often the result of one-off changes, such as the substitution of coal with natural gas. It is harder to sustain these rates of reduction in emissions once the substitution has been completed, especially if energy use grows.

• 4. Even though the substitution of fossil fuels by cleaner forms of energy cannot (and should not) be ruled out, these sources of energy also have an impact. With perpetual economic growth and growth in energy use, these impacts will grow too.

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter I argued that William Beveridge’s report on universal welfare had to be contextualized in relation to Baron Moyne’s report on colonial development. In this chapter, I contextualize the implementation of universal welfare in post war Britain vis-à-vis the racialized response to the arrival of Commonwealth labour. Up until this era, the deserving/undeserving distinction had a formalized nature, being embedded in various poor law provisions. With the 1948 National Assistance Act, the poor laws were formally rescinded. But the deserving/undeserving distinction was preserved through informalized “colour bars” that stretched across industry and beyond.

Those who contributed to this re-racialization of the deserving/undeserving distinction included Conservative and Labour politicians as well as trade unions. Their policies and rhetoric moulded the “white working class” into a viable constituency. This constituency defined itself not in the opposition between enfranchised English labour and its residuum, but rather in the opposition between deserving whites and undeserving Black and Asian Commonwealth immigrants. So, in this chapter I examine how organized labour was complicit in an elite exercise of political domination that sought to preserve the fraying integrity of empire even as British society took on postcolonial coordinates.

In the first part of the chapter I examine political and socioeconomic responses to Black immigration in the postwar period. After 1948, the universal provision of welfare formed part of a national compact between state, business and labour. I argue that this compact was not simply national but racialized as such, and in a paradoxical way. Britain’s postwar economic recovery required labour to be sourced from the colonies. However, this requirement raised the spectre of an uncontrollable immigration of Black and Asian peoples to Britain. I then chart how academic responses to the growing issue of “race relations” drew upon existing social anthropological work. By these means, the threat of disorder mooted by Black migration from the rural to the urban in the colonies (an issue we encountered in the last chapter) informed the perception of Black migration from the colonies to Britain’s towns and cities.

INTRODUCTION

By distinguishing between good stock – the enfranchised, skilled worker – and bad stock – the urban residuum – the National Insurance Act of 1911 institutionalized the eugenicist distinction between deserving and undeserving stock. In this chapter I explore the further racialization of the deserving/undeserving distinction through debates over colonial development and national welfare from fin de siècle to the Second World War. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that a quintessentially “national” arrangement, Britain’s “welfare state”, was actually bound up in imperial determinants that racialized those deserving and undeserving of social security and welfare.

In the first part of the chapter, I discuss how the 1867 Reform Act prompted a re-narration of the English genus such that organized labour could be considered amongst its “little platoons”. I show how those who supported labour’s advance argued that the provincial and patriarchal roots of nineteenth-century friendly societies had provided labour cooperation with the spirit of self-help, that is, of orderly independence. I then turn to debates over poor law reform between the Charity Organization Society and the Fabians. At stake was the viability of transplanting labour’s cooperative spirit from its provincial wellsprings into an unforgiving urban environment, there to improve the character of the residuum. I demonstrate that central to these debates was the tension between the personalized nature of cooperative enterprise and the impersonalized nature of eugenicist interventions organized on a national scale.

In the second part of the chapter I turn to Britain’s colonies. There, labour’s cooperative spirit was looked upon with far greater suspicion. I detail how some Fabians initially turned towards the Caribbean and there identified the cooperative spirit in rural smallholdings outside of the plantation complex. These observations were then generalized into a policy for colonial development, which encouraged self-ownership via smallhold farming in opposition to the dependencies created by working on large plantations and in extractive industries. I chart how the latter model came to ultimately predominate in the interwar period.

It should go without saying that it is always a dangerous predictions game to label something a “classic” upon its first publication. This is a judgement for people to make in the future, once they have seen the lasting impact that the book has made. I say all this now because I want to escape the charge of being wise after the event when classic status is subsequently ascribed to Robbie Shilliam’s Race and the Undeserving Poor. Hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing, but its benefits are unnecessary to spot the potential legacies that this book might leave. They will, I am sure, be as clearly evident in other readers’ first encounter with Shilliam’s text as they were in mine.

The text itself rockets along at action-packed pace. This makes Race and the Undeserving Poor that academic rarity, because it has all the feel of a genuine page-turner. Yet the rush to find out what happens next only ever occupies part of the mind. The other part becomes increasingly fixated on unsettling questions that the reading experience throws up. The first one I kept coming back to as I made my way through the chapters was “why did I not know this before now?” The second elicited much more personal emotions. It felt as though I was being taken on a journey through my family’s past and that I was being prompted to join the dots where my family’s oral history draws a frustrating blank. That journey is from a racialized “other” to working-class “respectability” in what is now the archetypal Brexit county of small-town Lincolnshire. The second uncomfortable question accompanying my reading was therefore “why did I not know this about me before now?”

There might be a fairly straightforward answer to the first of these two questions. It is well documented that historians have generally been very slow to situate race at the heart of analyses of the British national past. It is as if a national society had formed – imperfectly and incompletely as all such processes necessarily are – that nevertheless asserts unproblematically an essential whiteness as its template.