Zur Geographie der Abstiegsgesellschaft

Departing from a discussion of two books that were popular in the German academic left and beyond in 2016, Oliver Nachtwey’s “Die Abstiegsgesellschaft” [“Society of Downward Mobility”] and Didier Eribon’s “Returning to Reims”, both touching on the topic of how changes in class structure are related to the rise of parties of the extreme right in Germany and France respectively, the paper argues that we need to pay more attention to uneven geographic development within and between cities and regions. Following Lefebvre, Harvey and Massey, it insists that it is in everyday life that subjectification and the constitution of classes and other social groups occur, and that the multiple ways in which everyday life is structured and differentiated spatially can play a crucial role in how global political-economic processes are perceived and translated into political positions. It urges radicals who want to understand the ascent of the extreme right to have a closer look at the systematic geography of the society of downward mobility.