1 - Doreen Massey: For Political Praxis, Relationality and Contingency

Summary

Introduction

On 3 April 2021, thousands marched from Speaker's Corner to Parliament Square in London to protest the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The bill extends British police powers to shut down protests and introduces legislation to change ‘trespass’ from a civil to a criminal offence – an attack on the rights of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma communities (Kirkby, 2021). After a year of seemingly perpetual lockdowns in pandemic Britain, the march felt uncanny but euphoric. Here we all were in masks, together again, fleetingly. At the Square, we gathered to listen to the speakers, one of whom was former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I had last heard Corbyn speak in Parliament Square in June 2016, when the Parliamentary Labour Party was attempting to oust him. Ten thousand people turned out for Corbyn amid the coup that day, when there was a collective sense, suddenly, that integrity did matter. Doreen Massey knew about this, too. In her last editorial in 2015, Massey observed the emergence of a ‘new common sense’ on the back of Corbynism; ‘seeds are being sown’, she wrote. ‘There is somehow a feeling of possibility’ (2016a: 5). Connecting Corbyn's rise to anti-capitalist movements in Latin America, Greece and Spain, Massey saw left energy as a ‘magma erupting beneath the carapace of neoliberalism in place after place’ (2016a: 12). Yet she cautioned: ‘[If] the party returns to the comfort zone of pale imitation of the Tories … the Labour Party may well face extinction as any kind of progressive force. We must do everything we can to keep this initiative growing’ (2016a: 12– 13).

It is fitting that Massey's final published words were angled on collective responsibility for the future – although her faith in the ‘progressive force’ of an historically imperialist party should be critiqued. Still, it is fitting that someone with so much intellectual influence on economic geography and beyond was driven, right to the end of her life, by praxis: by an unwavering understanding of her place in the world as a political subject. Massey famously argued, after Althusser, that there is ‘no point of departure’, no pre-given subject (1995: 351) – and yet this political subjectivity of Massey's is the ideal point of departure for what follows in this chapter.