W.'s sceptical about the new office block in Piccadilly Gardens. My God, it's so boring!, he says. Look at it! One Piccadilly Gardens was originally intended to be built in Birmingham, we read in our guide book. Its cladding was changed to reflect the brick-built Mancunion warehouse buildings. We look along the oblong block. It's a poor imitation, we agree.
The Bank of New York – that's what occupies it now, One Piccadilly Gardens. Manchester's become a city of immaterial labour, W. says. It was a city of material labour, of the import and working of cotton, of the oil trade, of engineering, but now it's a node of the network, one of many trading floors in the unified global capital market. Manchester is noplace, anyplace. Manchester is anywhere-at-all. And it's true, you can hardly tell where you are, we agree. The same shops, the same high street – of course! The same sterility …
The city centre is run privately, we read in our guidebook. Cityco, as it's called, is focused on the production of revenue and the promotion of commerce. The public space of wandering, of the happening of nothing in particular is now a private space of enforced consumption. No loitering (but there's nowhere to wander). No sitting down (but there are no benches on which to sit down).
The city is a business! There's money to be made! And so uniformed private security guards keep out non-consumers. So the homeless are kept out of the centre. The Big Issue sellers are kept out of the new imperium. Because public space, which has become private space, has to to be kept clean and safe for consumption. It has to secure the ease of transport and access. The marketing and branding of the centre is all. The creation of memorable experiences for the consumer. And so the CCTV watches everything. And so private security guards police everyone.
It's the end of the world!, W. says. Or really, it's the beginning of a new one. This is the world of the end of the world, says W. This is non-world after the world has ended.
Ah, what happened? What did they do to old Manchester? This was the home of old Labour. It was home of municipal socialism. And then what happened? Deindustrialisation, of course. Which meant deunionisation. Which meant the destruction of the labour movement. Which meant the demolition of every leftist hope and dream …
The Tories sold off the housing stock quickly, to make sure it was irreversible. They broke the miners, the steel workers, the shipbuilders. They destroyed the car industry. They opened the markets to foreign competition and foreign investment. Production became transnational, spreading across the world, plugging into and plugging out of this or that territory …
The financial sector was deregulated. New financial markets appeared with new kinds of futures trading. The financialisation of everything, that's what it's led to, W. says. The monetarisation of everything.
'Economics are the method', said Thatcher, 'but the object is to change the soul'. They changed the soul, says W. They changed our souls, and what did we become? Flexible workers, one man or woman entrepreneurs selling their labour to Capital, selling all of themselves. And consumer-enterpreneurs, for whom commodities have been diversified and differentiated. Enterpreneur-consumers looking to buy their souls from Capital …
This is the new Manchester, the rebranded Manchester! This is a Knowledge Capital Manchester, the Manchester of the multinationals, of diversified conglomerates. The Manchester of Cityco. This is the repopulated city centre, full of knowledge workers, which is to say, knowing-nothing-about-fuck-all–workers. This is the home of creative industries, which is to say the-opposite-of-creative industries, W. says. The city is a shopping centre which is to say the-buying-and-selling-of-shit centre.
But wasn't Manchester always about free enterprise? Wasn't it, in the nineteenth century, the pre-eminent city of free trade? That's when they built the great warehouses, and extended the Royal Exchange. That's when Manchester was the leading financial centre outside London – when there were Manchester banks and Manchester newspapers, and the Manchester man, the merchant-entrepreneur, buying and selling shares in Cottonpolis. Ah, but that was before the completion of globalisation. That was before the end of history.
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