The crisis of inequality and the crisis of equality

From the Equality poster series, with Wendy Murray, see https://www.busymakingposters.com/equality

It was an honour to be asked to respond to Steve Dovers' Patrick Troy Memorial Lecture on the subject of urban inequality for the State of Australasian Cities conference this year. For the record, here's the long version of my response, minus the swearing (!!) ... which tried to talk through the relationship between research which investigates the persistence of inequality, and work which addresses what Rosanvallon has called the 'crisis of equality'.

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The picture of growing wealth inequality that Steve has painted for us in his powerful talk is certainly grim! And more could have been said about other inequalities that intersect with wealth inequalities – not the least gendered inequalities (so stark in the impacts of COVID on lost income and employment, for instance), and racialized inequality (certainly a feature of the housing market and public space policing during COVID here in Sydney).

I want to use my time to say something about the relationship between this crisis of inequality and what we might call a crisis of equality, and suggest that our work has to attend to both of those related but distinct crises.

There’s a sense of frustration along with indignation in Steve’s talk. It’s ‘hard to say something new’ about inequality when it’s all been said already. There’s a sense that inequality seems to persist in the face of widespread knowledge about its extent of inequality, and in the face of oft-repeated proposals for reform that struggle to get traction despite mountains of evidence that supports them.

That frustration is a thing! Pierre Rosanvallon made a similar point a few years ago in a book called Society of Equals. That book tried to grapple with that fact that “inequalities have never before been so widely discussed while so little was being done to reduce them” (2)

Pointing out inequality, he says, loses its power in part because there is now a widespread acceptance of inequalities as natural or inevitable. It’s not so much that folks deny the inequality, they deny any injustice in that inequality

Inequality is explained as a result of just deserts and moral failure of the poor, or of the incapacity for autonomy of the colonised and the racialized and the differently abled, or of the inexorable logic of some process (globalisation, neoliberalisation, etc) over which we have no power, and which it’s just not realistic to challenge.

So for Rosanvallon, it’s not just that we’ve got a crisis of inequality, it’s that “we face a crisis of equality.” What’s at the heart of that crisis? “The word has somehow become detached from experience, so that it no longer clearly indicates battles that must be fought or goals that need to be achieved” (7-8).

Hence, our job is not only to catalogue inequalities, he argues “there is no more urgent task than that of restoring the idea of equality to its former glory” (8).

Importantly, the ‘restoring’ the idea equality is not just a ‘looking back’ to the meanings of equality that were established in history. No, “we must also go further and rethink the whole idea of equality itself”. How do we do that?

We have for inspiration and guidance the incredible work of feminist, queer, and anti-racist scholars who have been rethinking the very meaning of equality, paying particular attention to how equality has to change in the context of diversity as well as inequalities of wealth.

What’s attractive to me about the way folks like Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and others have approached this task is that they tackle the rethinking of equality (and by extension the crisis of equality) by reconnecting it to experience of everyday life and civil society movements – addressing that detachment from experience that Rosanvallon discerns.

What’s all this got to do with cities? As messed up and unequal as our cities are, there are people living and enacting new forms of equality in the course of their everyday lives and organising, if we care to look. And the reason to look is precisely to get out of our self-referential discussions about how bad things are. 

In our recent book Everyday Equalities, Ruth Fincher, Helga Leitner, Valerie Preston and I went looking for the forms of equality that are being enacted in urban everyday life. In our case, we were focused on enactments of equality that address racist inequality in super-diverse, settler colonial cities. We asked how people enacted forms of equality that were not sustained by homogeneity, but by what we call ‘being together in difference as equals’. 

We wrote about enactments of equality in stories of migrants making homes in suburbs of Melbourne, supermarket workers forging solidarities across their differences in Toronto, commuters and operators sharing train carriages and buses in Sydney contesting racist harassment and violence through spontaneous and structured interventions, and in anti-racist activism and cultures forged in Los Angeles worker centres.

There’s plenty of potential objections to this kind of work which seeks to implement this ‘method of equality’ as a response to the crisis of equality, and it raises as many questions as it answers.

First, and most obviously: how does all that everyday stuff address the big structural inequalities, of the kind that Steve laid out in his talk? Isn’t this all just hopelessly romantic and utopian in the face of on-going oppression? Well, of course, everyday enactments of equality have to be amplified, power won’t just melt away in their wake. So yes, there’s the challenge of building coalitions, institutions, programs on the back of those experiences, for sure!  

But I guess my worry is that if all we do is document the inequality, if we write off the stuff that people are doing in their everyday lifes to build solidarities and equalities even in the face of those inequalities, we’re not addressing the crisis of equality. These enactments and experiences of equality in everyday life are foundational for building the kind of movement that will have the power, as well as the ideas, to turn things around. At very least, some comradely collaboration across these two projects of documenting inequality and enactments of equality would be nice! 

A second objection or question, and a theme that I know a bunch of great people have worked hard to make a big part of our conference over the next few days [shout out to Libby Porter, Lara Daley, Michelle Thompson-Fawcett, Michele Lobo, Jamal Nabulsi who have organised the sessions on reckoning with settler colonial cities]: what does it mean to talk about equality and justice on stolen land? First Nations struggles for land rights, for self-determination, for treaties and sovereignty, for reparations certainly challenge received ideas of equality and justice. 

I've been reading Johanna Perheentup’s history of Redfern Aboriginal activism in 1970s, which she says “challenged common understandings about equal treatment as equal means by aiming for equal outcomes … as part of its project of Aboriginal self-determination” (172). That movement inaugurated a battle over the meaning of equality in Australian urban and social/economic policy. Some in that movement saw Aboriginal self-determination as a pathway to equality, part of its rethinking for our times and spaces. Others see self-determination and decolonisation as a challenge to the very centering of the signifier of equality in a politics of justice.

A third objection or question, and also one which plenty of folks are talking about at the conference, is a question about the relationship between the project of equality and ecological limits (shout out here to Wendy Steele, Donna Houston, Jean Hillier, Diana MacCallum, Jason Byrne whose book on quiet climate activisms is being launched at the conference). The challenge here is how we might put these together in practice, not just theory! Promisingly, proposals for Green New Deals or Real Deals like one I’m involved in via the Sydney Policy Lab recognise that the failure to centre equality alongside ecology in environmental politics is often what has held it back, stopped it finding the kind of broad support required for transformation. They push back on the idea that addressing climate change is too urgent to worry about inequality.

So yes, the method of equality generates a bunch of questions and objections, and isn’t a silver bullet or magic answer to the issues Steve identified. But I’m encouraging us all to take the reconstruction of equality as seriously as we take the collection of evidence about inequality. We do this by paying attention to equality’s enactments in everyday urban life, thinking about those enactments and what they are teaching us about equality. And our research relationships with the people who practice them might just form the basis for the kinds of coalitions that Steve urges us to make, which will make such a difference to translating everyday equality into transformative institutionalised interventions.