These are a couple of random thoughts that have been buzzing around my head. Part of this is the idea to maybe finish the Event Horizon trilogy – Event Horizon is the pre-event attempt to set a mood, On The Road is an analysis of how things turned out and this new piece tries to look at how we live after the event. This is tied up with the role of social centres, but tackles wider themes. Maybe we could aim to get it out for the consulta?
Anyway, the thing that started me off was Vernon God Little’s refrain of “what kind of fucken life is this?” In the book it’s almost wholly negative, but we can split this up two ways: 1) What sort of life do we want? 2) How do we live this life? They’re intimately related of course: how do we live this life in terms of survival and how do we live it in terms of the life we desire? Or to recycle a recent book, how can we take those worlds we glimpsed at Gleneagles and generalise them so that they make sense in the rest of our lives?
In the run-up to big events (like Gleneagles) there’s a real rush of energy, a coming-together. Obviously that’s all gone after the event, and too often we see recrimination and a general coming-apart. But it’s not simply how we cope with the come-down. It’s more how we do live this life and still retain all that stuff we’ve gained at the Hori-Zone for example? After the high point of Autonomia in Italy, thousands turned to drugs or cracked up, not just because of State repression but because the forms of life they had been living were no longer sustainable. The (expansive) experiments seemed to have broken down irrevocably. More, the collective body had been decomposed, so attempts to live this life reverted to the level of the individual where contradictions were, for many, too intense to handle.
This sounds like I’m suggesting a survival guide, and I guess I am, but by survival I don’t mean settling for less than life. Life and living now seem to be at the heart of political struggle. We’re constantly creating multiple forms of life, zooming off in different trajectories, in the same way that we don’t each produce a single subjectivity, but collectively produce and re-produce multiple ones, often in conflict with each other.
Something else I’ve been thinking about is the entreprenurial spirit. Before you reach for your guns, hear me out. What set me off was the final programme in the Lefties series which looked at the rise and fall of News on Sunday, a spectacularly failed attempt to have a ‘far left’ national Sunday tabloid (with a lot of the drive coming from ex-Big Flame members). They raised over £6m and one of them commented that they smashed the idea that the Left had to be poverty-stricken – they proved they were the real entrepreneurs. Obviously it’s a very loaded term but it’d be great to reclaim it. We produce wealth; and there’s nothing more ‘entreprenuerial’ than starting a band with your mates. The problem is that we find it hard to sustain this without it being expressed as money, channelled into capital’s circuits. Again we can learn from Italy and the explosion of small businesses after the collapse of Autonomia: http://www.generation-online.org/c/cmassentrepreneurship.htm
Of course this brings in the whole issue of ‘compromise’, and the lines we can and can’t cross. We keep stumbling across these issues at the CommonPlace in Leeds. Can we have rented social centres? Can we allow money-making events? We frown on ‘profit-making’ entreprises, but making money for charities is apparently OK (including charities who have paid workers?), as is making money to pay our landlord. What about CCTV on door? The balance of ‘political’ vs ‘social’ events?
And all that brings us back round to how we live this life. Look, I didn’t promise this post would offer any way out…
Some even more random comments. All this resonates with numerous other stuff. Negri, for example, in his conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle (published as Negri on Negri) reflects on his life, his years in prison, inexile and wonders “what is a life?”
A constant theme running through George Jackson’s Soledad Brother is how can one live with dignity even in the most adverse circumstances? And this means struggle. Not because struggle is somehow noble or worthy, but because not to struggle means to accept inhumanity and indignity: the only way to be(come) human in such circumstances is to struggle.
Or as Assata Shakur sings on Asian Dub Foundation’s “Committed to Life” (on Community Music), we’re reluctant warriors, we do it because we’re committed to life:
I’ll be honest with you:
I hate war in all it’s forms-
Physical, psychological, spiritual… emotional… environmental
I hate war…
And i hate having to struggle – i honestly do
Because i wish i had been into a world where it was
Unnecessary.
This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a
Struggler
Has been forced on me by oppression.
Otherwise i would be a sculptor, or a gardener,
Carpenter – you know, i would be free to be so much more…
I guess part of me or a part of who i am, a part of what i do
Is being a warrior – a reluctant warrior, a reluctant struggler
But… i do it because i’m committed to life
We can’t avoid it, we can’t run away from it
Because to do that is to be… cowardice-
To do that is to be subservient… to devils, subservient to
Evil and so that the only way to live on this planet
With any human dignity at the moment is to struggle.
Dignity is a class concept! — John Holloway’s argument in “Dignity’s Revolt” (in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico).
But this also relates to “lifestyle” politics, “ethical” consumption, “fair” trade, etc.: drivent by people’s desire to live without fucking over people over.
These are questions which we’re faced with daily. How do I go to work and yet remain human? How can I bring up my children so that they can become human yet stay out of prison? How do we interact with our friends, lovers, colleagues, neighbours…? How can we live a life?
Seems questions of “morality” and “ethics” always been preserve of liberalism/bourgeois thought. If we’re attempting to reclaim the notion of entrepreneurship, perhaps we need to reclaim ethics too, notion of a collective, communist ethics.
hey gang,
Any chance of a copy of On The Road? I think I have PDFed but I’m not sure. Did one of you send it to me? Can one of you send it to me (again?) please?
Thanks,
Nate
ps- I think I’m going to be in the UK for the conference in Leicester in May.
Regarding the way out…
The Communist Jesus Club
As the twenty-first century unfolds, humanity appears to profoundly get
on our nerves. Despite the significant achievements of the past two
centuries, Western societies are nevertheless bent upon crippling and
bombing their way to enrichment. Increasingly, progress is equated with
the blind acceptance of a cold rationalism based solely on the logic of
commodity society. Across the world, new forms of prejudice and
irrationalism gain credence in the face of this totalizing ideology.
The Communist Jesus Club invites all those who are concerned about these
retrograde developments to collaborate in formulating a positive
alternative. We seek to reclaim the questioning and creative elements of
the Enlightenment, religions ancient and modern, and communism. We are
dedicated to the idea that human beings can make
their own history.
The Communist Jesus Club is being initiated by Frank Bruno, Josie and
the Pussycats, Shaquile O’Neill, Bill Oddie, Dylan Thomas, James
Council, the IRA, Omad Djalili and Freddie Starr. Our objective over the
next few months is to gain agreement on a series of basic human
principles, and to draw
up a manifesto for our times. Debates will occur in our heads and in the
pub.
As a starting point, we offer the following elastic and critical
positions:
1. We are committed to the pursuit of the City of Gold.
2. We support experimentation in all its forms – scientific, social
and personal.
3. We support the development of the human potential, individual
self-determination, and the human community.
4. We uphold a human-centred perspective. You might think position 3
makes this clear. So be it.
5. We uphold a universalist orientation to some of the problems facing
the world, while not disputing the fact of uneven development.
6. We seek to critically build upon our heritage, to use and abuse all
traditions that contain the seeds of human community.
Those who are interested in becoming involved should carry their own
cross.
thecommunistjesusclub@gmail.com