The crisis of capitalism in interwar Glasgow and its realistic representation

Antipode, 2009

Abstract: While many have recognized since the 1970s the strong relationship between culture and urban renewal, particularly as cities began to use cultural amenities to change their images and lure potential investors, little has been written about how and why cultural assets may be valued investments in their own right. There is at least one notable exception, in the work of David Harvey, and this approach takes as its starting point the importance of the monopoly aspects of culture, particularly for rents, competition and fixed capital. In part, I bring Harvey's theoretical insights on the political economy of culture to bear on the case of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, and particularly its nomination as the European City of Culture, with particular attention paid to how the economics of culture is related to local politics.

Scottish Labour History Vol.57, 2022

Urban History, 2003

The Scottish Historical Review, 2007

1980

Urban History, 2003

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2008

The debate on neoliberalism and the city has only just begun. Conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues remain to be explored: our understanding of 'market rule', its strategic and ideological foundations, its institutional manifestations, its contradictions and variegated local consequences remain seriously incomplete. Whilst these challenges arguably obtain at all spatial scales, cities, and city regions represent key spatial arenas in which they may be confronted as the urbanisation of neoliberalism proceeds.

Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, 2018

Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes by situating them within wider concerns over social reproduction and rent; concerns which have often been obscured historically by the theoretical separation of productive and reproductive spheres. Manuel Castells (1983) typifies a certain reading of the Rent Strikes within the Marxist tradition, designating housing and social reproductive struggles as a secondary contradiction behind the primary contradiction of workplace struggle. With this analytical framework, the ongoing relevance of women-led direct action by tenants in the Rent Strikes has often been relegated behind a ‘forward march of labour’ that has since lost its way in the factory desert. Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.

1988

From the emergence of the 'modern' Socialist movement in the 1880s through to the First World War, the majority of socialists in Britain regarded the achievement of particular reforms and the ultimate goal of Socialism itself, as being realisable only through the ballot box. The subject of this thesis is how that movement, i.e. for independent labour representation, was conducted and with what success in Glasgow prior to the First World War. The whole basis of this electoral strategy, however, is called into question by the sex and class biases inherent in the franchise system, as defined by the Reform Acts 14 not lie in its circulation figures but as an indicator of dissatisfaction with Liberalism and the search, however cautious, for an alternative. Within the columns of the Voice were embodied elements of radical liberalism, land leagueism and labourism, and viewed from the perspective of Maxwell and Glasier's later trajectories, it can be regarded as representing a halfway house between Liberalism and Socialism. The intention behind the Voice of the People was to challenge the Liberal Party supremacy and to act as a tribune for the working class whose interests, it argued, could never be represented by even, "the most Liberal daily newspaper".19 Alongside of the "magnificent increase" in national wealth, which had doubled since 1852, "chronic pauperism" had scarcely diminished.20 Such problems as Labour faced (the terms "Labour", "the people", "the main body of the people", "the working class", were all used interchangeably) demanded "radical treatment", and the key was for Labour to increase its representation in the corridors of power.21 According to the Voice the, "so-called representation of the people in Parliament is one of the greatest shams which delude the people of this country." Labour had only two representatives in the House of Commons, as against the representatives of, "the Fighting Interests", "the Law and Liquor interests", and:22 the Aristocratic and Moneyed interests ... represented in overwhelming numbers with a House of Peers wholly composed of landlords to back them." Yet, it was Labour which, "produces wealth and profit for all and bears the whole social fabric on its broad patient back."23 This acceptance of the labour theory of value and a desire to see the international solidarity of labour did not, however, lead to an acceptance of the class struggle. The Voice equated, "antagonisms between class and class" with that between "nation and nation"