Promises of the political: insurgent cities in a post-political environment

In the preface to his latest book Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment Erik Swyngedouw informs the reader: “The manuscript of this book was completed during a time of major upheaval” (xiii). In the ten years following the Global Financial Crisis, this upheaval has been manifest as people have taken to the streets and occupied public space with fearless resolve, even in the face of violent authoritarian backlash; voters have exercised their power in elections and referendum to defy the political class’ common sense and polling data; and, hopes for a renewed Leftist turn, rearticulating connections between grassroots mobilization and institutional insurgency, struggle against an emboldened xenophobic, racist, climate-crisis denying Right. Perhaps the only certainty in this otherwise profoundly ambivalent political moment is that the third-way compromise of “center ground” politics no longer holds popular legitimacy. Where the center does endure, notably in Canada with Trudeau and France with Macron, the vital signs are not promising. Indeed, Macron’s République has been in the spotlight throughout the convening of this review symposium. As the authors read and responded to Promises of the Political, every week since late November 2018 tens of thousands have taken to the streets in Paris or blocked roads and roundabouts across the “peripheries”. In a striking reflection of the themes and tensions animating Swyngedouw’s new book, the leaderless and unaffiliated “Gilet-Jaunes” uprisings began with ordinary people – those whose lives have been made increasingly precarious for decades – refusing to accept a new “eco” fuel tax. Whilst it was presented as an environmental necessity, this tax was deeply regressive; it coincided with a tax cut for the super-rich and, absent a programme of investment in public transportation, augured a green transition at the expense of people’s ability to get to work, drop their children off at school, and do the shopping.Without over romanticizing a revolt that has included xenophobic and homophobic elements, the rage of the Gilet Jaunes is animated bymore than “the misery of having to get up to drive to work to get paid to pay bills to pay taxes to scrape into the next month” (Bristow, 2018: np). In refusing to accept an ecological transition designed by technocratic patricians and paid for by the precariat, they have inaugurated what Swyngedouw would recognize as a process of repoliticisation; a process in which “fundamentally political questions [are asked about] who gains from and who pays for, who benefits from and who suffers (and in what ways) from particular processes of metabolic circulatory change” (Erik Swyngedouw, 2018: 89). Published on the eve of these events, Promises of the Political is a timely intervention that speaks directly to the unfolding political and ecological crises of our time. Yet, for all of its urgent contemporary relevance, this is not a book that has been conceived of and assembled in haste or on a whim. Rather, Promises of the Political represents the culmination of a tenyear project consistently pursued and developed by the author – with and against a growing number of interlocuters, including those convened as part of this review symposium – to